AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH. Fed Ex lost my laptop. Thankfully, the seller on ebay issued me a full refund for the laptop today.
I’m going to dumpster dive for refurbished units on Amazon. Heh.
Found an inexpensive refurbished laptop on Amazon. Dumpster dive successful. Hopefully it POSTs okay. Haha
Haven’t had any problems with Amazon. Once the 2 pack of toners came with one that leaked in the box and when Amazon asked me to rate the seller I mentioned that. The seller emailed back in one day and sent me another 2 pack free of charge. So instead of 1 from Staples for $119 I got 3 for $35… won’t need toner until 2030.
The refurbed Dell mini I got for about $100 was a deal. Might use the Win10 Pro license on my main desktop one day.
Listed my Brother inkjet for free on the town Buy&Sell. With a bunch of cartridges. Nobody wants it. It seems to be a certain mindset around here: why should I get something free when I can get a new one for $400? Why should I fix my laptop for $75 when I can get a new one for only $1500? Like my Dad used to joke - gotta get a new car, the ashtray’s full.
Yeah, exactly. I’m a technology enthusiast, and a happily retired person. I can’t afford to buy a new computer every time one of my units gets long in the tooth. All of the desktops/laptops on my home LAN I bought used. They all work really well and typically I get a good number of years out of them.
I have had the same experience with Amazon. A much better experience with receiving shipments and getting products replaced if defective. I was surprised at the general incompetence of Fed Ex. “Yeah, we lost your package and I dunno”
The only times I ever saw FedEx was with orders from Staples. Right to the door!
Everyone else won’t deliver to Box numbers, and won’t deliver to the door either. Gotta put your street address on address Line 1 and your Box # on Line 2 to get past the Artificial and Human unintelligence. Then they drop it at the Post Office!
Purolator comes to the door sometimes if the driver is the guy who used to deliver to my shop to say hi.
SO FRUSTRATING
So till stumbling at accessing my file server thru Linux… so I decided I’d try to add a shared folder on the Windows PC in the same room. Nope!
Is it just Linux? Nope! Could not see the shared folder on my Win 11 laptop, under Network it showed everything connected to the router, firesticks, printers. Truenas,etc. But NOT the Win10 desktop.
So then I looked and the WIn10 was the same. Under Network, everything BUT the Win11 laptop showed up.
Both have file sharing ON, both are Workgroup, the one folder is shared with read permission for everyone.
Hours of Googling and finding every mealy-mouthed off subject nonsense by MSoft ‘assitants’ wasted.
btw I am getting there with the Linux… found step by step but things errored out. Since the posts, it’s now Bookworm and uses systemctl not systemd, so I just have to RTFM to mount the folder.
But HTG it’s 2024, you should click the Network icon in whatever file explorer and not piss about apt-getting bloody samba and cifs first. Still not ready for Prime Time, and as I gather neither is Windoze
I have an older TV with only 2 HDMI ports which worked just fine when I wanted to hook up just my CityWest TV receiver and my Blu ray player. However I wanted to watch shows on my little Apple TV box which connects via HDMI as well. So I bought an inexpensive three port HDMI switch and jury -rigged it all together. This set-up has worked really well, I get decent resolution at about 1080p with the switch.
However, the Gods of Netflix have decided that my older Apple TV(which works just fine, thank you) will no longer be permitted to access Netflix after July 30th. Netflix says I can continue to watch shows on all of my other devices or I can buy a new Apple TV box.
A new Apple TV isn’t that costly (about $180), but, my older TV won’t be able to do 4K anyway. At some point I may buy a new whiz-bang TV. In the meantime I’ll watch Netflix on my desktops/laptops.
Firestick was $35 at Staples, worked fine but I dropped NetFlix.
The so-called SmartTV’s aren’t very. Can’t add apps to mine, couldn’t even add Prime… then it screwed up Netflix all the time, not connecting, stalling out, etc. Now I just use the stick, never the built in TV functions.
Thanks for the tip, herbie! After I remove my Apple TV later in July I’ll take a look at firesticks.
Did a bit of reading about the Firestick and I like what I see. It’ll run on older TVs. It just needs a spare HDMI port. I’ll be picking this up in July.
My daughter gave me hers when she got some new Telus thing. Plugged it into the 48" dumb TV in the bedroom.
GOD I HATE WINDOWS 11
Old lady across the street got an Epson inktank 2 weeks ago and tried everything to hook it up. Went there at 3, took her laptop home with me just after 7.
Her printer is now connected to her router. Appently does not have the Direct option on that model.
Laptop doesn’t see it. Took hours to remove all the Epson programs she downloaded and driver helper BSs… disabled 99% of the startups, still the slooowwwessttt Dell i5 I’ve ever seen.
Where the hell did they put the Network Discovery settings in 11? MSoft sites as usal say Go HERE then Go THERE and click THIS and there is no THIS or even THERE in any help suggestion.
Gotta be firewall, can surf the Net but can’t even bring up or even ping the Telus router… can’t print out the printers settings to try pinging it- she’s got everything but paper!
Like FFS I’ve been mucking with my Pi for months, but that’s a problem between Debian and Truenas BSD… almost to be expected. Which upon install of any flavour instantly finds and sets up my Epson Inktank, the HP laser, the Brother and the Canon Selphy without me doing anything whatsoever.
- I blindly found that Network Discovery on my Win11 laptop just a couple days ago so it can now find a shared folder on my desktop with 10.
Awesome! I ordered a Firestick yesterday and I should get it in a day or two. I’ve got an open HDMI port. This is going to be good.
I deleted Windows 11 a while ago in favour of Debian. Not having Windows on my home LAN is wonderful. Everything works.
So my last reply started cuz I went over to help the handicapped lady across the street at 4 and dragged her laptop to my house at 7:30. iT’S A Dell i5 slower than the 2nd coming. Stuffed some crackers and cheese for my Sunday dinner and watched Vera on TV. She’s on the phone just before 10… on Canada Day… is it fixed yet… why not?
Why are freebie favours the absolute worst jerks with the most fubar computers. (but its a Dell… it’s a good computer)
NE way, noticed it was still connected to her router across the street… so I connected to her wifi with my computer nearest her house and I could not see the printer I hooked up nor pull up the router’s login page or even ping it. AHA… the router’s fubar’d too!
Connected to my wifi, and I could see all my printers and home computers and devices just fine.
No jumkware, Crystal disk says good, but it hadn’t had a Windows update since. Started the update around noon when I came back from Canada Day outing and it’s almost 25% complete - AT 7:45 PM!!!
BTW I tried connecting with LAN cable and that doesn’t work - must be shut off in BIOS. A complete idiot set up this PC and a moron bought it. Cuz ya know Dells are great computers, even the $400 ones…
Meant the Win11 not updated since 2022.
I’m wondering if Amazon PC re-sellers think that all of their customers are fricken brain-dead(rhetorical question)?
I ordered a new condition PC with 16 GB RAM, Windows 10, and a decent size SSD.
I received a PC where Windows 10 promptly locked up at a security screen (couldn’t log-in to M$), and the unit had 8 GB RAM. AAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH
Printed a return label and shipped it back today. I’ll get a refund to MasterCard at some point.
My Firestick should arrive tomorrow so at least I’ll have good TV.
Holy F… that machine was using 5.9 of 8 GB just idling on the Windows desktop. You had to scroll to see the list of things I disabled in startup and the old fool had bought Adobe and Creative Cloud trying to install Adobe Reader… that you don’t even need to read pdfs.
Had to shove the pin in on the Telus router and then you could ping it… her printer got installed automatically once I did that.
Windows Update was turned off, it finally stopped updating about 2 this afternoon. I heard the original community group even paid the Geek Squad to set everything up entirely wrong.
Got another swift one call this morning… she bought her 8 yr old son a ‘gaming computer’ and now it says there’s no hard drive…
herbie,
Thanks for the suggestion about the firestick. Up and running. Took a while to register with Amazon. Got so many remotes, they’re out of sync. Will sort it out. lol
I think the Firestick for $59 is a good cheap solution, compared to a new Apple TV ($180), or a new smart TV (hundreds of bucks).
My Smart Stupid TV will not respond to other remotes. The satellite remote won’t control the volume, the FireStick will do the TV volume and nothing else.
Discovered after I bought it it’s a special Sony model just for BestBuy to sell cheaper. No headpone or audio out, the plastic is stamped and marked with not cutout or hadware in place. It’'s connected to the Net but in 6 years has never found or installed a firmware update, the built in app store is the same as it was back then, including the streaming services no longer available.
BTW the lady across the street called to say thank you. She’s now done and printed her groups year end report.
About to haul 2 Macbooks to the Recycle Depot. Ran into the lady who dropped them off last summer about 2 weeks ago. She asked if I still had them, I reminded her they were both too smashed to fix or even retrieve the data from and she said she’d come get them cuz she needed the pictures off them. 2 weeks later, well if she won’t listen, she sure wont want to pay diddly squat so off to the dump they go.
Meantime it’s been so long since I set up a webserver from scratch I decided to try nginx out.
Set up a LEMP on an SSD for the Pi. A little different but a lot the same as Apache.
Copied over the hand bombed files from the BeyondHope domain I sold and it works great. Even found an old Netscape Communicator file from about 1999 with a map of BC, our area circled ans scrolling text saying “The people of the Northern Resource Extraction Zone welcome our Overlords from Vanc ouver… etc etc…”