riari

Today my monitor decided it didn't want to work. About 5pm. Which definitely doesn't give me much time to go looking for a new one. So off I go to Fry's. And after much consideration, I finally picked one. It wasn't the brand I've had for years (cause they were sold out of any of them apparently), but I picked an LG LED monitor this time. And a wide screen monitor cause apparently regular squarish ones are out.

So, as usual, I catch up to a certain technology when one of my items die. Hopefully nothing else tries to die soon cause while it was a not bad price ($200), on top of a new mattress, new glasses, and a recent eye doctor visit I feel that I'm costing enough money as is.

However! Dad's been looking at my old monitor and he thinks he might be able to get it up and going again. Which would be awesome as I have a tower without a monitor and its darn annoying to have to flip the video cable between the two.

Stealth UPS delivery!

I've been waiting for a package most of the day and I find it's been sitting on the porch for the last fourty minutes. I don't think he knocked or hit the doorbell. Oh well.

New video card yeah! Time to make sure it works. And yank the modem I put into this machine to use the nets. :)

At least the second computer is now patched up.

Interesting article of how Amsterdam has been wiring their populace for fiber.

The project is ongoing as comments on the article has mentioned. Only 40,000 of the 450,000 projected have been wired but the article is a really nice write up of how they did it without being too heavily technical.

Desperate cities beseech St. Google: bless us with thy fiber

Google announced that they were going to take some of their dark fiber and bring a community 1Gbps fiber connection. And this is the response. Multiple cities across the US are sending their proposals in to get Google to lay the fiber infrastructure for their city.

I have to say, the response is amazing but not surprising. Too many comments I have read where either they are: overpaying for a slow broadband, have no options, or have the choices of worse and more worse. And that's just a few. You have rural residents like me with one or two options of "broadband" and slowest, and you have city residents that are stuck on dial-up due to zoning. And then there are cities that try to lay fiber for their residents, and find themselves sued by the incumbent ISP. Some very rarely win. And then some states ban communities from even trying to build their own networks. (Btw, thanks a lot, Texas.)

But I will say that Google has definitely started something here and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Getting access to high speed internet is becoming a thing of frustration. Well not actually. It's the 26.4kb/s dial-up I'm currently on that is the thing of frustration. But the sheer lack of options is annoying.

Cable? DSL? Wired internet? Unavailable. And the area I live in may be huge and rural but the street I live on has quite a few people on it. It has a large neighborhood towards the back of the road.

Satellite? I'm sorry to say other than for TV, I have not heard anything good about it. Other than one defender of which after reading he got about 780kb/s down per day, yeah that's appealing. Better than dial-up in speeds but not great latency, service that is at least two times the expense. Sorry, I'm not interested. This would fall under absolute last resort. And even then? The price would make me hesitate.

Wireless ISPs are what I'm looking at the moment. I have a choice or two. Use a celluar wireless card, probably well known as an air card, or find a LoS WISP. I tried one before and the trees and lack of towers meant that they couldn't find a reliable signal.

Today I asked the same provider to come back out, as they've added more towers and equipment has probably gotten better. He did try to find a signal but the pole was kinda flexible and yet again trees were blocking the way. And the wind probably didn't help.

Great. Nature is defeating me.

But they're going to try another site survey again soon with a non-flexible pole. The guy was a recent hire and he didn't have all the equipment to try a higher attempt on him. But I'm hoping they could at least get me at a signal strength that is 1MB/s down or higher.

And I'm thinking a trip to Home Depot might be in the future. Need to get an extension ladder and a chainsaw. There's some tree branches over the house that needs to come down. (We haven't cleaned up the tree damage from Ike yet. Yeah, kinda slow here on that.)

Though I hope they go with what the guy was saying and put a tower up closer to here. Especially since he mentioned that there was no plans for the next ten years to develop the lines on my street. I bet that will change...but it could not. Cause I've been on dial-up for ten years.

But once again I got to surprise someone with the speed I have. And by surprise I mean make them grimace. >_< Yeah nice that people think dial-up in this area is 54kb/s. When it's not. At all.

So the defective hard drive replacement arrived yesterday. And yay! Unlike it's cousin, it was detected and loaded up quickly. Awesome. Had to format it, of course, and get Windows to recognize the new drive. (Okay, its been years since I had a new hard drive. I had to call to find out how to get it recognized. Thanks lantyssa!)

But now I have an extra 640GBs of hard drive space to use. Yay!

My new computer is up and running. And its gorgeous.

It was hard to get running though. Friday night, lantyssa was putting the computer together for me (I helped a little bit). A lot of the technology has changed since I got the other computer so she helped me out a lot. :D Everything got put together, and we tried to start her up. And it whined about not having power to the video card. It was late by the time we were close to start up, and we kinda forgot about it.

But the hard drive wouldn't detect, and when it did, it was very slow about it. After two blue screen errors in Windows' setup, we left it for the night.

On Saturday morning, Dad was very kind in giving me some money to find a new hard drive. We hit Microcenter to look for a new hard drive under $60, and luckily there was a sale that I could use. So new hard drive in the tower, we started it up again. It was instantly detected the new hard drive and started Windows setup just fine.

Now its all loaded up and I'm just transferring the data from the old machine to the new one. Which will take a while, and it might not all fit since the new hard drive is smaller than the failed hard drive. But I'll send in an RMA for the failed one, and NewEgg should send me another one.

I'm on a borrowed video card right now, but it looks like I can order it in a week or so, so after that's in, and the failed hard drive replaced, my computer upgrade should be complete. Awesome.

For those with paid accounts, LiveJournal is offering a few free days for the DDoS attacks that happened on August 6th. You have to redeem them by September 10th.

And I thought to pass this along. An Etsy shop with baked goods. :D And its gluten-free, allergen-free, vegan, and parve pastries. Her statement at the top is: "I can bake for vegans, for GF/CF/EF/NF eaters, from Hershey to Pierre Herme."

Basically they're having a baby and this shop is for side cash. More info can be found here. But I thought I would pass this along since I know two people who can't have gluten. :D And don't worry about the "1 in stock" listing. She adds another as they sell cause of Etsy's listing fees. And feel free to talk to them! They've been very responsive in comments.

I'm tempted to order some brownies...when I get some money. :D

Also, I have updated my graphics drivers....finally. Yeah, I can be slow about it. Lets hope that this resolves the computer freezing up issue. Because it's not fun, and I don't think its heat related anymore. Well mostly. See, I took the case off Sunday evening after two freezes in case it was the heat. One of my power supply fans have died but the other one is still trucking. I had another computer freeze last night with the case off. And the video card fan is still running well. So, graphic driver update.

(And yes, I could be using freeze the wrong way. Also known as locked up. Basically, a restart is all I can do.)

Also see: defacto computer tech around the house.

Relatives want to add computer to network to use internets?

I'm magic!

ETA: Networking of a major kind: FCC Begins Working on National Broadband Plan I should be hopeful, but with the wording in this article - 2012? Maybe, if they haven't discussed to hell and back?

Maybe they should make everyone work on dialup (either 56Kbs or 26.4Kbs like I have) for like a week or three. Then they'll get moving on that faster.

I envy Australia right now.

Keyboards are disgusting!

It took me two hours to clean this one out. Opened up the back, though that was tough considering it had like 12 screws and was hard to pop open. That wasn't the dirty part though. After putting it back together, I took a screwdriver and started popping off the keys. And boy was that disgusting to see what was underneath.

( Tips and items needed for cleaning a keyboard )

Whew. It feels better now to type on it. Though I'm still missing hitting letters and the spacebar sometimes, I think I can start blaming my typing speed on that one. Or the keyboard still. Who knows. :>