Tech minor victory thread

Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Got my new laptop. The best part about a new computer, once you scrub off all the bloatware they come with, is having a clean install. Some people really hate this, but I love it. Out with all the old.

 
DarkAudit

DarkAudit

It just hit me. With the lack of space after this pending move, why not use the Roku TV as my monitor for the main PC instead of trying to find space for the entire rig? DUH!! I'm already using it for the hackintosh in the living room, and 1080p is as high as I need/can afford.
 
DarkAudit

DarkAudit

The hotel is ditching the ISP providing guest internet and moving everything to one provider for the entire property. Speeds are expected to be significantly higher for guests. So instead of trying to finagle a way to connect my modem to Comcast, I can quit them and move all my accounts to my gmail address instead. Saving nearly $100/month. :D

It will be interesting what retention tries to do to keep me, even though I'll be in a location without a cable hookup or an option to add one. :p
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Sparhawk said:
Bought a new battery for my iPhone 6, changed it out, and everything is working great. I didn't break anything while trying to fix a bad battery issue.
Click to expand...
If Internet videos are any indication, changing those things means taking your life in your hands.
Well, if you're not careful, I guess.

--Patrick
 
DarkAudit

DarkAudit

Swapped out the old 1TB HDD in the desktop for the 2TB HDD that was in the hackintosh without having to reinstall Windows. Just had to copy everything over to the new one, do the manual labor to swap them, then change the drive letters to their new destinations after it was all buttoned back up. Only hiccup was not remembering to turn off the page file first.

Turns out the old drive is nearly 10 years old. The new one is barely a year old. :)
 
DarkAudit

DarkAudit

Networked printer wouldn't print from one particular location all of a sudden.

Rebooted PC. FAIL.

Rebooted printer. FAIL

Reconnected all USB and network cables on PC. FAIL.

Installed April Update. Um... SUCCESS?

It got weirder after that. Another networked printer in the guest business center that wasn't printing, and shouldn't have anything to do with what I did started working again as well. HUH?

I have no idea why just installing that update on one PC cleared up issues with multiple printers. Why did that work?
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Could be that computer was the one advertising the printer as a share over the network.

In related news, updated my FiL’s computer with the April update, now his printer doesn’t work. Gonna have to figure that out today.

—Patrick
 
Gared

Gared

Does anyone have a build number for the April update? I'd love to know if I already have that particular disease. I suspect that's the "serious update" that popped up on Aislynn's laptop yesterday that I've put off for 6 days.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I successfully figured out how to have my twitch stream show reruns of my youtube videos at the push of a button, so I can prevent stream snipers from watching me do admin stuff on the Empyrion server, and avoid revealing things like other players' base locations, etc!

Yaaay!

It doesn't sound like much, but it was an ordeal, and a nice fix for a problem I had.
 
Gared

Gared

I finally got my landline to work! Minor victory because the only way it works is if it's plugged directly into the modem and not the phone lines in the house - which leads me to believe that we have multiple phone systems upstairs as well. Who the hell did the cabling work in this house?!
 
jwhouk

jwhouk

Have you tried plugging the phone line from the modem into one of the wall phone jacks, and checking the other phone jacks in the house? I know that in my apartment that was how we got the phones to work.
 
Gared

Gared

jwhouk said:
Have you tried plugging the phone line from the modem into one of the wall phone jacks, and checking the other phone jacks in the house? I know that in my apartment that was how we got the phones to work.
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That's what we had been doing, apparently the jack in the living room either isn't connected to the jacks in the bedrooms and kitchen, or there's a fault somewhere. My guess is actually the latter - there are just too many gremlins, all of them related to wiring, for it to be a coincidence. We have:
  • phone jacks that don't connect to each other (or to anything, apparently),
  • a light switch that was supposed to be a three-way switch but was screwed up so that one switch will always be a master switch and the other a slave,
  • outlets where only the top half works (I actually suspect that the wires serving the bottom ones were used to power the baseboards, rather than being attached to light switches like they would be in modern homes),
  • a pellet stove that actually works off the thermostat, once per power-cycle,
  • flood lamps where normal bulbs would be expected (in hanging lamps and ceiling mounted light fixtures),
  • normal bulbs/CFLs where specialized bulbs would be expected (in canister lights set in the ceiling or in the range hood),
  • phone jacks outside (well, just the one, but still),
  • an electrical box outside by the pond - no idea if it's grounded or hooked up to anything,
  • a spare satellite dish on the roof, with no idea what it's hooked up to,
  • lights that are on three (or more!) switches next to a second light that's on its own switch(wtf?!),
  • lights that aren't on switches (just the pull cord),
  • a dryer vent that was cut into the base of the wall in such a way that it can't be connected and meet fire code if the laundry closet doors are installed,
  • coax cables that aren't attached to each other (including two in the same frelling living room!), which I'd bet would mean that the one that doesn't connect to Spectrum connects to the dish on the roof,
And I have a feeling I just figured out where at least the cable fault came from. This city just got cable internet access within the last decade, but the dish on the roof is at least an early 2000's dish (if not first-gen, late 90s'). There's only one cable jack that's actually attached to Spectrum's external connection, the rest are just connected to each other - and the dish on the roof. This is the fault of whichever contractor set this place up for cable internet. They created a new line, instead of just connecting the existing line (by splitting into it, at the very least). That would also explain why all of the other cables have been properly mounted, with plates and jacks, and this one is just a bare cable going through a rough hole drilled in the wall. I wonder if they were also sloppy enough to create a fault in all of my other electrical systems.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I'm finally getting my shit together vis a vis passwords, and getting set up on lastpass, so that all my passwords everywhere but there will now be 20 digit long alphasymbonumeric garbledygook. Feels good, man.

A little bit of a hassle that the automatic password changing feature is stymied by all the sites I have 2FA turned on for :facepalm:
 
Eriol

Eriol

GasBandit said:
I'm finally getting my shit together vis a vis passwords, and getting set up on lastpass, so that all my passwords everywhere but there will now be 20 digit long alphasymbonumeric garbledygook. Feels good, man.

A little bit of a hassle that the automatic password changing feature is stymied by all the sites I have 2FA turned on for :facepalm:
Click to expand...
Don't. Just get KeePass and throw the file on Google Drive. Completely free, and no risk of "the company" being able to get at your credentials. And there's some good Android apps for it too (Keepass2Android is what I use).
 
Sparhawk

Sparhawk

Took the dive, ordered an iPhone Xs last night. Moving up from a 6. The camera tipped me over from just moving to the X.
 
Sparhawk

Sparhawk

Yeah, phone's been struggling with some tasks, and battery life has been dropping again. Went back and forth about the 8 and the X, but the camera difference (and only a small difference in price) tipped me over to the newest generation. I've actually never been this "up to date" ever with an iPhone.
 
Eriol

Eriol

A victory for simplicity for all: Wi-Fi now has version numbers, and Wi-Fi 6 comes out next year
In the past, Wi-Fi versions were identified by a letter or a pair of letters that referred to a wireless standard. The current version is 802.11ac, but before that, we had 802.11n, 802.11g, 802.11a, and 802.11b. It was not comprehensible, so the Wi-Fi Alliance -- the group that stewards the implementation of Wi-Fi -- is changing it. All of those convoluted codenames are being changed.

Now, instead of wondering whether "ac" is better than "n" or if the two versions even work together, you'll just look at the number. Wi-Fi 5 is higher than Wi-Fi 4, so obviously it's better. And since Wi-Fi networks have always worked together, it's somewhat clearer that Wi-Fi 5 devices should be able to connect with Wi-Fi 4 devices, too.

Now that the retroactive renaming is done, it's time for the future. If you've been closely following router developments over the past year (no judgments here), you'll know that the next generation of Wi-Fi is on the horizon, with the promise of faster speeds and better performance when handling a multitude of devices. It was supposed to be called 802.11ax, but now it'll go by a simpler name: Wi-Fi 6. The Wi-Fi Alliance says that it expects companies to adopt this numerical advertising in place of the classic lettered versions.
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(Summary shamelessly stolen from Slashdot)

To me: f'n finally. And I like how the article mentions that devices may display that too, which is nice.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

figmentPez said:
Is it still going to be guessing game about which devices support 5Ghz and which ones don't?
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Not really.
802.11b/g only support 2.4, 802.11n supports both, and 802.11ac (and presumably later) only support 5.
It's 802.11a that's all weird.

--Patrick
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
PatrThom said:
Not really.
802.11b/g only support 2.4, 802.11n supports both, and 802.11ac (and presumably later) only support 5.
It's 802.11a that's all weird.
Click to expand...
You might be misunderstanding my complaint. Some 802.11n devices only had 2.4Ghz, and it was a pain in the ass to figure out which laptops and phones that had 802.11n actually had 5Ghz antennas to support the faster version of n. (So it's n that's the weird one, to me.) I had not realized that ac required 5Ghz and my woes are already a thing of the past for the latest wireless standards. I clearly do not keep up with tech like I used to.
 
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