Mc tech: what works and what doesn’t
Posted on Dec 14th by William in William's IT strategy
Oh Lordy Lord. I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew technically. Time to do a “memo to self” to review what’s worked and what’s outstanding.
What’s worked:
- upgrading to Mc 10.5.4 from 10.4.11. It cost £90 but seems to have cured the Mc Mail nightmare
- and I’ve got the Mc apps working again after a scary moment
- the whole wiring up the house, broadband and wireless thing still works OK (cheers Andy!)
- syncing diary via Google calendar with Spanning Sync and via GooSync to Nokia still all works fine (more or less)
- the VMWare setup worked fine and the Fenetres de Petit-Morbide XP setup saved my bacon during Mc 10.4.11 madness
- Mum’s Ubuntu setup works fine
- the Asus EEEPC works fine
What’s outstanding
- yet to restore Nokia 3G modem app from aforementioned Mc nightmare. I suspect that will be a hassle (it was last time)
- cant make the Mc Time Capsule work, when it shd be dead easy (got confused between wireless networks, tried to do it over Ethernet, messed it up)
- the bloomin’ Eye TV only ever barely worked
- cant do a networked print from Apple; havent set up proper home network
- HP colour laser emitting noxious dust. That cant be good
- bloody Mc G5 crashed, power supply failure, hard disk crash with baby photos. They repaired it for £90 (because the capacitor/power supply problem is a known fault). Small annoyance is they neglected to keep the old hard drive for me which they had promised to do. Big annoyance is it doesnt even switch on. How fixed is that? So I’ve got to do the whole thing over again – take it in, argue the toss etc etc for a machine we barely use. Life’s too short…
- cant really recall how far I got setting up Mc .me, any of my CPanel stuff, a zillion and one logins, whatever. I embarked on this with no idea how complicated it would get.
This isnt an IT strategy; it’s firefighting.
Sounds like an IT strategy where I work
don’t do your first tiem machine backup over wireless if you can avoid it. It’ll be slow as you have to copy everything over hte wifi network while you’re probably trying to use it for other things. It does work over the wifi, it’s just really quite slow.
if you’ve got a firewire cable, try booting your G5 with the T key pressed and the firewire cable plugged into your macbook. Your G5 HD may then appear as another hard drive on yoru laptop and you can copy files.
But fix time machine first.
Hm. Sounds like you need PowerLine networking (Ethernet over your electrical wiring). We’ve been using it domestically for some years now, and you know what? It’s so ridiculously superior to wireless it makes me smile…
On the other hand you need a cable, of course, which is mildly annoying, depending on your working practices. I do use an eeeeeee PC round the house, and its wireless connectivity is (as you no doubt know) extremely good. But when I’m doing serious work I’m hardwired in…