My iPhone has been getting more and more difficult to set up as a hotspot. I ignored the advice on Apple to reset the network setting and went to ATT chat. Daniel walked me through several things, but I couldn’t do any of them without breaking the connection to my MacBook Air which was linked to AT&T via a hotspot.
I did follow his advice to reset network settings, and I am back to quick connection to the hotspot.
After I had things working my wife mentioned defragging, a term from our bad old days on mainframes. Periodically we would have to move pieces in memory around to have enough big pieces to do what needed to be done. We never thought of Powder Milk Biscuits to give us the strength to do what needs to be done.
With more and more storage on our devices, it is easy to forget about the problem of fragmentation of memory. As the pieces of memory get smaller, it takes longer to put together larger pieces. In "ancient" history, 64KB was a lot of memory. Now with 64GB we assume we will never run out of memory. Surprise!
Showing posts with label Mac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mac. Show all posts
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Friday, August 28, 2015
Clawing out of the Abyss
As of this writing, we are into week two without cellular access on our iPhones (See “Cutting the cord and falling into the abyss” in last week’s Reader).
I think the biggest thing I miss is reading the Duluth News Tribune, Star Tribune, and the New York Times at breakfast and lunch. To check email, statements, and other important and unimportant information, we have to go to the library or coffee shops. I’m drinking a lot more coffee than I normally do.
The easiest is to walk to Chester Creek Café at the corner. But we don’t want to take up a table when there are many lunch or dinner customers.
Perk Place is a quiet place, but for some reason I could not log on to their server. Another Mac user had been successful. I wonder if he was using a newer operating system. A staff member did get me signed on using the coffee shop account.
Once upon a time I would walk to Bixby’s and other shops at Mt. Royal, but every year the hill up Woodland Avenue seems to get steeper, especially with a backpack with a computer. And so I wimp out and drive.
The Mount Royal Library may or may not be crowded. When I went on Thursday it wasn’t, but it did take a bit of effort to log in. I was successful with my iPhone and iPad, but I never managed to click all the right buttons for my laptop.
A diversion at the library was looking for a follow-on book after viewing “The Young Victoria”. The movie had a lot of follow-on summary information. I wanted to know more about her reign and her successors. I used my iPhone to sign on to the catalog and select some books. Having the call numbers of the desired titles on my iPhone sure beat copying those numbers onto paper from the library computers.
Caribou at Mount Royal Market is spacious and quiet. It’s biggest drawback is that there are no power outlets at the tables.
And at the cabin we are completely disconnected from the web. At least, we can still use our phones.
So, I have to carefully plan all my work before hand. I am writing this at home and will go to one of the coffee shops to email it to the Reader. I have to write most of my email beforehand. I have to plan ahead what web sites to visit.
One of those plan-ahead sites was the Apple Support Community. While at a coffee shop I downloaded thirteen threads about excessive data usage. It’s nice to know that I am not alone with this problem. Some useful advice, some blaming the user, but no really clear cut advice.
I do know first hand that solving computer problems can be a long, arduous project. Relevant information comes in dribbles from the customer and lots of digging by programmers. I was the lead investigator of frequent crashes of a Univac 1108 in Sweden. Many of the memory dumps showed a particular program was active. I badgered to customer into giving me a copy of the program. I took the copy to another site and the program crashed because it was putting data outside of its assigned space. To make the story short, the problem was they were using an outdated library and that their computer had a memory protection failure. I think it took three months from the first alarm to final resolution. And those computers were a lot simpler than what we carry in our pockets now!
Once upon a time it was said that Mac owners never used a manual. I did look up a few things now and then, mostly just what keys did I need to push to get å, ä, é, î, ö, and other western European characters. The Mac’s were described as WIMPs: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pictures. Just about everything you needed to know was obvious from one of these.
Even then, many users came up with seemingly intractable problems. Apple’s answer was to encourage user groups. Unfortunately, often there was nobody at a meeting who had an answer. I remember somebody asking why they couldn’t make their “Whiz Bang” printer work on a Mac. The leader would ask if anybody had a solution and look around the room. Not a hand went up. This happened over and over again.
The human interface, the computing power, and the range of software has improved exponentially in the last 31 years (remember the 1984 Apple ad). We can do many tasks quickly and easily just by poking the screen or dragging a finger over it. But when things go wrong! Hoo boy!
I think I caused my problem with an inadvertent reset. My choices include going back to the last iCloud backup, but would that be done before the coffee shop closed? By reading the manual, I found that I can double-click the home button, swipe up on the screen, and then slide through all the open apps. I can close an app by sliding its image up. This doesn’t remove the app from my iPhone, it just stops it from doing any harm.
Once September rolls around, we’ll have the data part of our Consumer Cellular contract restored. I think the closing apps plan is my best alternative. I’ll start with only keeping the supposedly harmless apps open: Weather, Mail, Calendar, and a few other standards. Then I’ll have to wait until all the data is in for that six-hour period. If usage seems normal, I’ll keep a few more apps open. Either I’ll eventually find the run-away app or that the conditions are such that the app is now behaving.
Meanwhile, I’ll be drinking lots of coffee. I thought of having beer instead, but it will be just my luck to knock over the glass…
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/26/5837_clawing_out_of_the_abyss.
I think the biggest thing I miss is reading the Duluth News Tribune, Star Tribune, and the New York Times at breakfast and lunch. To check email, statements, and other important and unimportant information, we have to go to the library or coffee shops. I’m drinking a lot more coffee than I normally do.
The easiest is to walk to Chester Creek Café at the corner. But we don’t want to take up a table when there are many lunch or dinner customers.
Perk Place is a quiet place, but for some reason I could not log on to their server. Another Mac user had been successful. I wonder if he was using a newer operating system. A staff member did get me signed on using the coffee shop account.
Once upon a time I would walk to Bixby’s and other shops at Mt. Royal, but every year the hill up Woodland Avenue seems to get steeper, especially with a backpack with a computer. And so I wimp out and drive.
The Mount Royal Library may or may not be crowded. When I went on Thursday it wasn’t, but it did take a bit of effort to log in. I was successful with my iPhone and iPad, but I never managed to click all the right buttons for my laptop.
A diversion at the library was looking for a follow-on book after viewing “The Young Victoria”. The movie had a lot of follow-on summary information. I wanted to know more about her reign and her successors. I used my iPhone to sign on to the catalog and select some books. Having the call numbers of the desired titles on my iPhone sure beat copying those numbers onto paper from the library computers.
Caribou at Mount Royal Market is spacious and quiet. It’s biggest drawback is that there are no power outlets at the tables.
And at the cabin we are completely disconnected from the web. At least, we can still use our phones.
So, I have to carefully plan all my work before hand. I am writing this at home and will go to one of the coffee shops to email it to the Reader. I have to write most of my email beforehand. I have to plan ahead what web sites to visit.
One of those plan-ahead sites was the Apple Support Community. While at a coffee shop I downloaded thirteen threads about excessive data usage. It’s nice to know that I am not alone with this problem. Some useful advice, some blaming the user, but no really clear cut advice.
I do know first hand that solving computer problems can be a long, arduous project. Relevant information comes in dribbles from the customer and lots of digging by programmers. I was the lead investigator of frequent crashes of a Univac 1108 in Sweden. Many of the memory dumps showed a particular program was active. I badgered to customer into giving me a copy of the program. I took the copy to another site and the program crashed because it was putting data outside of its assigned space. To make the story short, the problem was they were using an outdated library and that their computer had a memory protection failure. I think it took three months from the first alarm to final resolution. And those computers were a lot simpler than what we carry in our pockets now!
Once upon a time it was said that Mac owners never used a manual. I did look up a few things now and then, mostly just what keys did I need to push to get å, ä, é, î, ö, and other western European characters. The Mac’s were described as WIMPs: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pictures. Just about everything you needed to know was obvious from one of these.
Even then, many users came up with seemingly intractable problems. Apple’s answer was to encourage user groups. Unfortunately, often there was nobody at a meeting who had an answer. I remember somebody asking why they couldn’t make their “Whiz Bang” printer work on a Mac. The leader would ask if anybody had a solution and look around the room. Not a hand went up. This happened over and over again.
The human interface, the computing power, and the range of software has improved exponentially in the last 31 years (remember the 1984 Apple ad). We can do many tasks quickly and easily just by poking the screen or dragging a finger over it. But when things go wrong! Hoo boy!
I think I caused my problem with an inadvertent reset. My choices include going back to the last iCloud backup, but would that be done before the coffee shop closed? By reading the manual, I found that I can double-click the home button, swipe up on the screen, and then slide through all the open apps. I can close an app by sliding its image up. This doesn’t remove the app from my iPhone, it just stops it from doing any harm.
Once September rolls around, we’ll have the data part of our Consumer Cellular contract restored. I think the closing apps plan is my best alternative. I’ll start with only keeping the supposedly harmless apps open: Weather, Mail, Calendar, and a few other standards. Then I’ll have to wait until all the data is in for that six-hour period. If usage seems normal, I’ll keep a few more apps open. Either I’ll eventually find the run-away app or that the conditions are such that the app is now behaving.
Meanwhile, I’ll be drinking lots of coffee. I thought of having beer instead, but it will be just my luck to knock over the glass…
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/26/5837_clawing_out_of_the_abyss.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Corporations - the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing
For at least three months, Apple has included Numbers and Pages (spreadsheet and document programs) in its free list of Apps in the App store. However, if one scrolls over the name of the App, “$19.99” appears. Has Apple decided that “free” means under $20? Several people have made remarks about this in the review sections for these apps. Is anybody in Apple reading these reviews?
The New York Times had a review of “Quip”, a document writing program for the Mac, iPad, and iTunes. If I search for “Quip” in the App Store, I can’t find it. If I search from iTunes, I find it. The iTunes page that shows Quip has a header “App Store > Productivity > Quip”. Looking through “All Productivity Apps” in the App Store, I do not find Quip among the Qs.
If Apple or any other large corporation cannot be bothered with fixing these little but obvious glitches, can we be sure that they will fix big glitches that cost us (and even other large corporations) hours of frustration?
Quip is nowhere near a complete document program, but it is good for two or more people to collaborate on a document. As I type on my laptop I can see the text showing on my wife’s desktop.
As for Pages and Numbers, I think I’ll wait a year or two or three for when I upgrade my devices and these programs are included.
The New York Times had a review of “Quip”, a document writing program for the Mac, iPad, and iTunes. If I search for “Quip” in the App Store, I can’t find it. If I search from iTunes, I find it. The iTunes page that shows Quip has a header “App Store > Productivity > Quip”. Looking through “All Productivity Apps” in the App Store, I do not find Quip among the Qs.
If Apple or any other large corporation cannot be bothered with fixing these little but obvious glitches, can we be sure that they will fix big glitches that cost us (and even other large corporations) hours of frustration?
Quip is nowhere near a complete document program, but it is good for two or more people to collaborate on a document. As I type on my laptop I can see the text showing on my wife’s desktop.
As for Pages and Numbers, I think I’ll wait a year or two or three for when I upgrade my devices and these programs are included.
Friday, July 25, 2008
iGrandma
Today is my wife's birthday. This week I was pondering making her a card or buying her a gift. For the latter I wondered about some digital photo gadget to carry photos in her purse. I thought it would be bulky and clumsy. I wound up doing neither for her. I bought a store card that expressed our relationship perfectly.
However, today in preparation for her first high-school reunion meeting, I started putting photos on my iPod touch. Migod! That's it! Hundreds of photos! Organized in folders! Show a trip! Show a grandchild! Show a particular event!
She says we can share my iPod. But will we?
However, today in preparation for her first high-school reunion meeting, I started putting photos on my iPod touch. Migod! That's it! Hundreds of photos! Organized in folders! Show a trip! Show a grandchild! Show a particular event!
She says we can share my iPod. But will we?
The rest of us have been left behind
I sent the following email to the store where I bought my MacBook Pro. I picked the computer up two weeks ago today and sent this email on July 14.
Well, I have the MacBook Pro up and running, almost. This has been the worst installation and migration since I worked on mainframes.I have worked through most of the problems, but there are still many little problems to go.
First, migration assistant crashed leaving many applications and other files unmoved. I forget if I repeated it, but not much moved.
Second, I couldn’t get the MacBook Pro to access my DSL modem. This was my first call to Apple Care. After talking to two people for almost an hour, including wait times, I discovered that I had set it to allow access only the PowerBook G4!
Third, the installation of Leopard on the PowerBook crashed. Nothing would boot at all. Second call to Apple Care but immediate response!! After much discussion the agent suggested holding the option key (I think) while booting. Leopard is now on the PowerBook also.
Fourth, the installation of the Time Capsule did not go according to instructions. Third call to Apple Care and again immediate response. This agent was also the most patient of all. I’m glad I have a couple of Ethernet cables handy. All the new stuff has a minimum number of cables.
The Time Capsule is up and running on the MacBook Pro now. I’ll do the PowerBook another day. The first backup took about five hours; I started it just before going to bed and it was over half done when I got up two or three hours later. The Time Capsule is one hot machine. I put it on a wooden cutting board so the desk surface doesn’t get damaged. No char marks on the cutting board.
Fifth, when I synched my iPod to the MacBook Pro, iTunes deleted all my purchased music from the iPod because I was not authorized to play them on the MacBook Pro. Even after I authorized it, iTunes would not download the purchased music to the iPod. I sent email to iTunes support and got a pretty quick response. Unfortunately this agent deauthorized all my computers (I wanted only one deauthorized, a G3) and said I could download the particular lost music again without payment. I haven’t gotten back to her yet.
Sixth, I did use a Firewire cable to move all the files that Migration Assistant didn’t move. That went fairly fast, maybe a couple hours or less. Probably over 40GB of stuff. Thank goodness Apple provided the FireWire cable with the PowerBook G4. Of course, this copying doesn’t make many of the adjustments that Migration Assistant would have made.
Seventh, Excel 2008 doesn’t recognize Visual Basic macros, and I had a bunch. Now I have to spend time learning AppleScript, something I’ve made several attempts at learning. Online manuals are not as easy to use as paper manuals.
Eighth, ExpensePlus on my Palm Zire doesn’t like Excel 2008. Even when I follow the instructions for Leopard on the WalletWare site, HotSync still won’t upload my expense sheets from the Palm.
Ninth, because Migration Assistant crashed, I’ve had to reregister much of my third party software and not always successfully. This is a good argument for keeping old email. I have found some of the registration codes in three- and four-year email.
Tenth, I had a deadline for my Reader Weekly column. With all this frustration, I did not put together a column as coherent as I would have liked.
Eleventh, a piece of good news. For some reason the receipt for the PowerBook G4 is out on my desk. Everything on it was more expensive then except AppleCare which was the same price. The total was $3,355.10 and I got more stuff and more powerful stuff for $3,144.40.
Twelfth, all the other little glitches I forgot.
Maybe my problem is that I know too much about computers, and so I blithely charge ahead without reading the instructions carefully. But that would only explain some of the above problems (iTunes, web access, ...)
Thanks for your eyeballs and your friendly service. See you in three or four years when technolust overcomes me again:)
Friday, March 21, 2008
Technological irony
Apple placed one of its cute "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ads in today's online New York Times. The initial banner ad was "Vista - one of the biggest blunders in technology". Unfortunately, Safari 3.0.4 would not complete loading the page; it stuck on 88 items of 89. Safari 3.0.4 is included with Mac OS 10.4.11, the latest update to the OS prior to OS X Leopard. Firefox 2.0.0.12 did load the page successfully.
I used the "Report Bugs to Apple" feature of Safari to report this situation.
I used the "Report Bugs to Apple" feature of Safari to report this situation.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
"Mac Owners Are Snobs"?
This is the title of a TheStreet.com video.
My experience is that Mac owners may be snobs but that may be because PC owners have been bullies since they still coped with line-at-a-time commands on their plow horses. PC owners told newbies at user group meetings that they should get PCs, and then they would spend a good part of the meetings complaining about their problems.
My experience is that Mac owners may be snobs but that may be because PC owners have been bullies since they still coped with line-at-a-time commands on their plow horses. PC owners told newbies at user group meetings that they should get PCs, and then they would spend a good part of the meetings complaining about their problems.
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