Frankenputer

Someone from Archives came to me recently with an interesting problem. They had received a collection with some born-digital material, and amongst that material were a number of 5.25″ floppy disks. Archives of course wanted to know if we had something that would read those disks.

You know how you never need something until you get rid of it? Well up until about a month and a half ago, we had something that would read those disks.

Over a year ago when the reference department personnel moved to new offices, they decided to surplus an old computer that had been stored in a closet for over a decade. We wrote up a surplus form and sent it through to Property Control, and then the computer went to sit in another closet for a year. Finally about a month and a half ago, Property Control came to collect the old computer and send it off to the computer graveyard, so we finally got rid of it.

And then Archives needed that drive.

Fortunately one of the IT units on campus still had a functioning drive that they loaned us, so I went to work. I found an old computer that we could use and connected the drive. In the end I wound up disconnecting the 3.5″ floppy drive, the DVD burner, and the Zip drive (yes – it was old enough that it had a Zip drive) to provide a connection on the motherboard for the older drive, but at last it was done.

The computer recognized the drive, but it identified it as a 3.5″ drive. Finally – after bullying the BIOS a bit – the computer agreed that it had a 5.25″ drive, but I wasn’t convinced that it was really convinced.

Oddly, although we no longer had any 5.25″ drives around the library, we did have some blank disks sitting around. Formatting took much longer than I remembered. So long, in fact, that I was pretty sure that something had gone wrong. Seriously – I’ve formatted terabyte hard drives in less time that it took to format that floppy. It finally worked though, and I was able to write and read data to/from the drive. We tested it today using some of the real data from Archives, and it looks like it’s going to work for them. I felt the urge to shout “It’s Alive” in my best horror movie mad scientist voice, but I restrained myself.

Until last week I had never seen a Windows XP computer with a 5.25″ floppy drive.

Given the time of year, somehow putting together a Frankenputer seems oddly appropriate. But now that I’ve done it, I’m wondering how far I can push it. Just how many old, odd, and outdated devices can I connect and get working on a Frankenputer?

Of course, the person from Archives did tell me today that they have another collection with some 8″ floppies . . .

It Won’t Print Again: The HP LaserJet P1102W Redux

Several months ago I wrote about how I solved a wireless printing problem with my HP LaserJet P1102W. One tiny little change to the settings made all the difference in the world.

Recently I returned home from vacation to find that – once again – it wouldn’t print. I started by taking a look at the list of devices connected to my home network. Sure enough, the P1102W was missing. This time though, I suspected that it didn’t have anything to do with the channel on the wireless access point. My hunch was that some other device had grabbed the printer’s IP address.

All of the devices on my home network are using dynamically assigned IP addresses rather than static addresses. (However, I may rethink that after this latest issue.) My theory was that the printer had been off for over a week, so its IP address hadn’t been active on the network. Perhaps when we returned, one of the other devices leased the printer’s address. When we returned from vacation, we brought with us two iPhones, two iPads, one iPod, and one laptop.

For this issue it turned out to be a fairly easy fix. I turned off WiFi on the iPads and phones, and sure enough the printer popped up on the network again. When I re-enabled WiFi on the other devices, they leased new addresses and everything was back to normal. That made me start thinking about how many devices we have on the home network, and once I totaled them up, I was a little surprised.

2 iPhones
2 iPads
1 iPod
3 laptops
1 desktop
1 Wii
1 X-box
1 DVD player

That’s twelve devices on the home network. I realized that we had a lot of gadgets sitting around, but it was interesting to see how many network connected devices we have.

Well . . . interesting until they all start talking to each other and take over the world.

Clear for iPhone

Last week a came across an announcement for a new product: Clear for iPhone. From the video it appears that Clear is essentially a to-do list, but it has a very clean, minimalist interface that makes very clever use of gesture-based navigation. It caught my interest immediately, and I’m looking forward to the release of this app.

It’s already getting some buzz around the ‘net:

Ars Technica

Cult of Mac

MobileBurn

TUAW

However, as much as I’d like to take this app for a test drive, something on the company’s website really took me off guard:

It’s that whole “like” on Facebook thing. I understand that Facebook is a cheap and easy way to get some advertising. It’s a good way to do some grass roots marketing. It’s also a good way to communicate with potential customers.

The thing I don’t get is why they want me to “like” it already. There’s really nothing to like except a product announcement and a promo video. The product itself isn’t actually available yet. I WANT to like their product, and I hope I do, but I find this request for “likes” a little premature – it’s akin to asking me if I like . . . well . . . pretty much anything before you’ve let me try it. How do I know?

From watching the video, the UI is going to be pretty cool. But let me at least try it before you ask me to like it.

Where did my tech support go?

With the incredible growth of the iOS app store, I’ve occasionally had a need for tech support for some of the apps I use. Increasingly though, I’m finding that the quality of tech support for some iOS apps falls between ineffective and non-existent. When you stop to think about it, this can be interesting, disconcerting, annoying, and understandable – take your pick.

 

Interesting – I find it interesting, because if people want to roll out a new software product, I’d think that they also want to provide support. Good products with good support usually translate into happy users. Happy users recommend the product to their friends, and that translates into even more happy users. So when companies have bad or no tech support, it sends the message that they want to make the initial sale, and they don’t care if it breaks after you buy it.

 

Disconcerting – It’s disconcerting as well, because when I find a product I really like, I tend to use it a lot. I want to know that the company is going to be able to take the product successfully through future OS upgrades. I’d also like to know that they’re still working on the thing. After all, if they’re just going to abandon the product (and ultimately me), I want to know that as well so I can find another product that does have some support.

 

Annoying – When you find a “good” or even “okay” product, it can take a little time to get it to do what you want, integrate it into your workflow, and find the little ways to get the most out of it. When you can’t figure something out or when something just plain doesn’t work, you want to be able to get an answer from someone.

 

Understandable – Finally, the lack of good tech support is understandable. A lot of apps are free. Many cost only 99 cents. If you’re not see much (or any) return on your work, there isn’t a lot of incentive to provide support beyond that of personal satisfaction and knowing that you’ve done a good job. Additionally, many apps are rolled out by individuals rather than companies. Often software development could be just a hobby or a sideline. With other responsibilities, perhaps tech support just isn’t one of them.

 

If my bad experience with tech support had just been a one-off, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to write about it, but increasingly I’m finding this to be the rule rather than the exception. I’ve found bad tech support on apps ranging from free to $15, from almost unknown developers to well-known companies with far greater resources.

 

As I said, the quality really varies. At worst, an e-mail to technical support just floats off into the ether never to be heard from again. The next step up comes from companies who helpfully provide an immediate auto reply but never actually follow up on the problem. Then there are those who actually reply, solicit a lot of technical details from you, and then do nothing with your feedback. There are developer who do painstaking testing, replicate the problem, but tell you that unfortunately there is nothing they can do about it. And then there are those who promise that it will be fixed in the next release.

 

And somewhere out there at the far end of the spectrum, there are those developers who see the problem and either help you fix it or roll out a timely update that addresses the issue.

 

Unfortunately, those developers are few and far between – at least in my experience. When I first started working with software, there was a lot more tech support. It wasn’t always good, but – given enough time – they usually got the problem solved. And at least they knew how to return a phone call or an e-mail message.

It Won’t Print!: Or, the HP LaserJet P1102w and Me

UPDATED 07/18/12

To cut to the chase: Try changing your wireless access point to Channel 11.

The follow-up post may also be of interest: It Won’t Print Again.

Keep reading for the original post.

I have a friend who used to work in another nearby department on campus. He used to call me up just for fun and say, “It won’t print.” That’s all. No “Hello.” No “How are you doing?” Just “It won’t print.” It was kind of a running joke because I used to tell him about a number of the really strange printing problems I tackled.

It’s strange that in this age of being able to do so many things completely electronically people still like to print. They still like things on paper. I’m no different. Some things I just really want on paper. If a company doesn’t send me an e-mail confirmation within about five minutes of an online order, I’ll print the confirmation page. I’ve tried electronic boarding passes before, and I’ve let the airline scan my phone. Somehow though, I feel better with a paper boarding pass. Why? Maybe I feel that I’m more likely to lose my phone than that magic piece of paper. Perhaps my phone battery might die. Or how about this one? Maybe my phone will crash. It has happened before. My paper boarding pass has never crashed. Oh, it might get a little wrinkled and smudged, but the airline has never had a problem scanning it.

Whatever. I still want to print things sometimes.

About a year ago I built a new computer. It didn’t have a parallel port, and the USB-to-parallel cable didn’t work, so I wound up abandoning my trusty old HP LaserJet 6P for a new LaserJet P1102w. As these things often do, it went swimmingly at first. I installed the driver, printed a test page, and all was well. The wireless printing was fine as well, so I installed the driver on another laptop or two. Over the past year, it got gradually worse. It reached the point where it wouldn’t print without a lot of coaxing. I ignored it thinking that I would get around to it someday. Someday finally came when some visiting relatives needed to print their boarding passes and it wouldn’t print ANYTHING – not a test page or even a page of mojibake.

I took a shortcut by printing from a USB connection before settling in to finally tackle the problem. I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of the troubleshooting, but anyone who has ever tried to solve a problem knows that there are a number of possible problems with just the printer and the computer. Add wireless printing into the mix and you introduce a number of other interesting variables.

I Googled. I poured over the HP forums. I removed the software and tried reinstalling it. I tried reconnecting to the wireless access point. I finally determined that the printer absolutely was not connecting to the AP. It wasn’t leasing an IP address, and its MAC address wasn’t showing up in the list of devices attached to the access point. Somewhere I finally came across a web posting where someone noted that the printer seemed to work best with the wireless access point was set to channel 11. I changed mine from channel 5 to 11, and I had the proverbial “Voila!” moment. Everything started working again across all devices. Printing was rock solid after reboots, after idle time, and after printer hibernation. I was back in business.

I’ve been doing computer support since the mid-nineties, so I remember exactly how we used to do our troubleshooting before there was such a wealth of technical support material online. Of course people were solving problems like this long before there was any online information, but it sure makes a difference! That experience notwithstanding, I still find myself occasionally asking, “How do we ever do this before the Internet?”

I guess I should also be asking, “How long until I can stop printing?”

Businesses – Embrace the Mobile

While on vacation recently, I tried to do business with two different companies from my iPhone. I was trying to add services that I wanted, and that would have translated into a little more revenue for them. Alas, it was not to be. For both products, I was able to successfully navigate all of their sign-up forms until I reached the very last “submit” button.

 

The. Very. Last. One.

 

As in  . . . the one that equals “buy”.

 

It just didn’t work. I tapped and tapped, but the phone couldn’t submit the content.

 

For one company this won’t be a big deal. I’ll have an opportunity to use their service again later. For the other company though, this represents a tiny little loss in profit. I needed their service while I was on vacation. Now that I’m home, I don’t need it anymore, and I haven’t been back to their website. All because the website didn’t support a mobile browser.

 

Now I understand that when you’re coming from a mobile browser, you shouldn’t necessarily expect the full website experience, and I didn’t. But if the website lets me make it most of the way through a purchase, I expect it to let me complete the purchase. Oh well. Maybe they just didn’t want my business since I was coming from a mobile platform. Funny thing though . . . the company has two mobile apps that I wanted to use after I subscribed to their service. Go figure.

Goodbye, Location-Based Gaming

I came across an interesting article at ReadWriteWeb today: 25% of American Adults Use Location-Based Services. I found it particularly interesting because earlier today I deleted my last three location-based gaming apps.

 

Now the article about ReadWriteWeb was talking about location-based services in general, but it made me think about my own experiences with location-based gaming. At the 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston, I heard a lot of people talking about location-based services and their possibilities for libraries. In particular, they talked about three location-based games: Foursquare, Gowalla, and MyTown. I downloaded the apps and tried them all while I was at ALA. I’ve played with all of them off and on over the past year and a half. I deleted them today. Earlier this year I also downloaded, played, and deleted another location-based game called Shadow Cities.

 

In thinking back over why I deleted these games, there were a variety of reasons. The Shadow Cities gameplay just didn’t appeal to me. For the other three, there just wasn’t any compelling incentive. Gathering mayorships, unlocking badges, and collecting rent are fine for the first week. After that, what’s left? Not much – for me anyway.

 

The incentive issue actually splits into several issues. First, although I know several people with smartphones , this type of gaming just doesn’t appeal to them. Since I couldn’t compete with my friends, that ruled out any possible “social” incentive for these games. Then there is the lack of mayoral awards in my area. They just aren’t there. When I’m in other cities, I occasionally see special incentives for checking in or being the mayor of a location. Where I live though, Foursquare just isn’t that big with businesses, so there are no incentives for checking in or becoming mayor. MyTown had its own problems. Basically you reach a level cap where you can’t buy any more properties, you can’t upgrade your properties any more, and the game is essentially over. Oh sure, you can keep buying and selling your business and collecting rent if you want to, but once you’re a gazillionaire, it doesn’t really matter any more does it? Interestingly, I see that Booyah just released MyTown 2. I think I’ll give that one a pass. I used Gowalla the least, but it was actually the most interesting of the three. Still, it failed to keep my interest.

 

There was one particularly noticeable disincentive to using these apps. All of them depend on using location services on my phone, and using location services burns battery life. I was surprised at how much a few check-ins would eat away at the battery when I traveled, but it did, and sometimes battery life is too precious a commodity to spend with a service that you don’t enjoy that much anyway.

 

Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, these location-based apps actually took away from the enjoyment of the places I visited. I found myself frequently checking in on all three apps. I wasn’t compulsively checking in, but the very act of checking in meant that I was spending a little more time on my phone and little less on enjoying my location.

 

So . . . I’m finished with location-based gaming for now. It was an interesting experiment. I’ll still use other location-based apps, but I’ve retired the games. I might still feel a little twinge each time I lose a mayorship, but I don’t think that will be enough to pul e out of retirement.