More Technology Woes, With a Happy Ending

After nearly a month of computer and technology woes at Greenlee Gazette, Greenlee Graphics (my home business) and at my work-a-day job as well, you'd think I'd get to breathe a little sigh of relief, and get back to ordinary life, no more dabbling in "new" electronic doohickies and whatnot, right?

But I'm destined to always have to be upgrading and then problem solving, it would seem. The problem was straightforward: my 2007 flat-panel Toshiba HDTV/DVD combo player died. It's my office TV, and it gets a lot of use, not just because I'm at my computer too often, but because The Other Half is so often to bed so early, for work. I get stuck in my office frequently. But solving the problem isn't quite so easily solved as you would think.



It's beginning to look a bit like Mission Control in here! Now, to add another video card to the computer, and
run another cable to the TV, and. . . .

I wanted the DVD built in, because that's the way I've been doing things for my last two (yes, I've had two previous flat-panel TVs, can you believe time flies that fast?) set-ups, and was thinking small. I did the research, narrowed my search down to an RCA 24" model at Fry's. I should mention that I was replacing a 19" set that had an enormous bezel on it, so a 24" takes up about the same space. Anyway, the RCA was the best pick out of a small pool  of options, and it was $169.99 on Fry's website. So, I decided to go get one on Sunday.

Not recommended:
RCA LED24C45RQD 24"
Just trust me.

Surprise, surprise, they had plenty of them, but they were $219.99. Up $50 overnight! But it was really all they had to choose from, so I bought it. I assembled it, plugged it in, and. . .I was underwhelmed to say the least. The screen was clearly pixelated, especially up close, and the sound was atrocious. I mean, so bad that it was a real deal-breaker. I tried plugging in some USB speakers that came with my computer, and it was an improvement, but only barely. It had to go back, or I would have been very disappointed. Too bad I packed it up, and forgot the three screws to the base, and that The Other Half had to drive them to the store for me while I waited! Anyway. . .

Recommended:
Insignia NS-24E400NA14
Sure, just a store brand, but good!

After taking the RCA back to Fry's, I headed to Best Buy, a place that feels oddly out-of-time. I'm wondering how much time they have left, just a gut feeling. But they had a 24" HDTV/DVD combo, by their in-house brand, Insignia. It looked good. It sounded good. And it was $189.99. Cool, I'll take it! And then the salesman dude sold me the wrong set. And here I thought the $139.99 price was an unexpected Labor Day discount*. I'd already been rung up, and would have had to wait in line at customer service, and said to myself, screw it. I put it in the car, drove down to Sam's Club, and bought a Samsung Blu-Ray wifi player for $79.99.


Also a good buy: Samsung Blu-ray Player
BD-FM57C

Long story short (I know, too late), I'm now setup with blu-ray on a really nice 24" set in my office. Though I don't need Netflix or YouTube on my TV (I have a second monitor on my computer) in my office, I now can. The sound is good, the picture is great (Family Guy was alarmingly clear and bright), and the player is small enough that it's not a problem. The best part: I came in about $9 less than the crappy RCA cost me!

On to the next problem!

* As it turns out, it was a Labor Day sale, $40 off to be specific, so it was a good day indeed.
 

Back to Ohio: Annoyances with Sprint and my Samsung Galaxy S4 Phone

I'm back from my trip, but not back up to blogging strength. That will probably come on Monday night. Sorry. But I need to get down in writing sort of a nasty-gram to both Sprint and Samsung, about my Galaxy S4 4G LTE cell phone.

My trip back to Ohio was primarily to Sunbury, an exurb of Columbus, Ohio. I also made forays into Westerville, and very nearby Columbus, and to my sister's place in rural Delaware County. While some of these places could have been considered "in the boonies" in the early days of mobile phones--maybe even in 2004 when I first got a Sprint phone--they are certainly not now. And yet, with every phone update, and every technological advance, I get horrid service from Sprint out there.

But my experience this time with my new Galaxy S4 was the nadir. At my Mom's house, where I used to lapse to data roaming on say, my Samsung Rant non-smartphone, the S4 gave me a circle with a slash for voice calls, no service whatsoever. I had no 4G--which I don't even get in Las Vegas, so no surprise--and no 3G either. This is right outside Sunbury, a smallish but amply covered by Verizon town. The only way to make or receive a call, or even reliably send a text, was to go outside, and that managed just a microdot of a "bar" for voice calls.

Out at my sister's, an admittedly ruralish area (but very near civilization and still amply covered by Verizon), I had pretty much an identical issue. Onward into Westerville and Columbus, things weren't much better. I could get fairly reliable, but reliably slow 3G service. No 4G. Voice service was passable.

After prior visits to Ohio, I have complained to Sprint about poor service. The only responses I've received have been essentially form letters that didn't address the issue at hand. You'd think that in my one-to-two-times per year visits over almost a decade, there would be some improvement. Particularly since there have been not only technological improvements in that time, but the areas I'm talking about have gotten more populous and less remote. And--surprise, surprise--there is a Sprint store in Sunbury.

Now, onto my Samsung Galaxy S4 problems. 1) The phone gets semi-randomly hot with minor use, but not always. 2) The phone will sometimes register a voicemail, but no missed calls. Or a missed call, but the phone never rang. 3) Most annoyingly, the phone keeps reverting to the default ringer and notification sounds. I've had to reset them at least four times, twice on this visit alone. Turns out, the other phone on our account (that did not go to Ohio on this trip) has the same problem. I'm not happy.

In Case You Missed It: Cell Phone Turns 40

If there was a phone in one of these, they've obviously
 been around a while!

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito lamented that same-sex marriage as a concept is very new and ooga-booga scary because it is a new concept, younger than the internet and cell phones! Well, news flash to Mr. Alito, but the internet was born (with Al Gore's help, natch) in the late 1970s, and the cell phone has just turned forty.

I remember watching Charlie's Angels in 1976, and marveling that the Angels had phones in their cars. Of course they looked like the handsets to an old fashioned desk phone, coiled cord and all, and they were rooted to the cars. Kate Jackson may have had the only Ford Pinto with a car phone in it! But by the early eighties you started to see mobile phones pop up here and there, outside of television. My step dad had a "phone in a bag" some time in the late 80s or so. it basically resided in a duffel bag, and the whole works weighed as much as a bowling ball bag.

All of the phones I've owned. So far.

I still never had my own until early 1995. And it was kind of funny, because at the time I was still a skinny little dude, and they gave me an 80s-style Motorola Dyna-Tek brick phone. It was as large as a telephone lineman's handset, and looked ridiculous hanging off of my belt. They were so heavy and clunky, you always wanted to set them down. My boss did--on the hood of his car--and it went flying off on the freeway!

After that job went away, I didn't have a phone again for another seven or eight years. When we finally decided to enter the info age, we opted for early 2000s silver Samsung flip phones. This was 2004, so there really wasn't such a thing as "smart phones." There were PDA phones, like BlackBerry, but that just seemed like overkill. The flip phones had rudimentary cameras, and some limited apps, so it was a nice introduction. We replaced them two years later with (slightly) more advanced black flip phones. The cameras were (slightly) better, and already the design had changed pretty dramatically. But they were still dumb phones.

We dipped our toes into more advanced tech with the Samsung Rant, with a slider keyboard (for much easier texting), but we were already falling way behind the curve. This was 2008, and the iPhone's first models were already out, and its competitors were coming online. So, when our contracts were up, we went for actual smart phones. The first try lasted three weeks: a low-to-medium end Samsung Transform, a decision that turned out to be obviously a mistake. So, we replaced that with the Samsung Epic 4G, which was awesome. For a little while! Though it was a flagship, it was toward the end of its life cycle at the time, and was quickly surpassed by newer models. My phone got crushed though (oops), and after much back-and-forth, it was ultimately replaced with an HTC Evo 4G, equally old, no keyboard, and seemingly better.

The future! Eenie, meenie, miney, moe!

mid-range Samsung Transform. It was good enough to spark our interest, but slow enough to be

But, ah, it's re-up time again. I'm eligible, and The Other Half will be soon. His phone had to be replaced with a used one, due to a nasty fall on the tile, but with another Epic. And lately, both of our replacement phones have been restarting themselves, and getting twitchy. So, we wait breathlessly (I do, anyway) to get our hands on the Samsung Galaxy S4 or the HTC One, to see which one we like. And all of this is so goofy when you consider how long we went without mobile phones. Funny thing though, those 11 days when my phone was out of commission were torture. And I don't even like to talk on the phone! Such first-world problems, eh?

[Excerpt]

Can you hear me now? Cellphone turns 40

Forty years ago, Martin Cooper, a VP at Motorola, made history by placing the very first cellphone call. Appropriately enough, he called his rival at AT&T's Bell Labs. . .

Read more at: NBC News

The Mac Experiment, Take III

This was too common a
sight on my G4.

Over the course of this blog, I've recounted my experiment with branching out from my known world as a PC guru and graphic artist, into the Apple Macintosh realm. I know this sounds counter to how most computer artists have done things, but there are a bunch of us out here who grew up with PCs rather than Macs, particularly in the sign, engraving and embroidery industries. So, in August of 2010, when it was time to replace our wheezing old laptop (which functioned as our mobile, spare computer) I decided it was time to dip a toe into the iUniverse.

My first Mac was a PowerBook G4, a 2005 model. Though a five-year-old PC is a rather common thing to find in offices and dens everywhere, I soon found out that Apple expects you to upgrade by then. They had abandoned support and upgrades for the computer by the time I got it. And small wonder, the PowerBook--even maxed out for memory--was unusably slow, and just got slower as it aged. In those early days though, I familiarized myself with Adobe CS3 graphics suite, and forced myself to take and make lessons for myself.

Screen on my old MBP wigging out.

In the waning days of 2011, I'd had enough. Though the G4 had been top-of-the-line when new, a bargain basement PC of the same vintage would have run circles around it. So, I sold it (along with our old portable PC and some unused software), and bought a newer MacBook Pro on eBay. The difference was immense, and I really dug the new MBP, even though it had some cosmetic flaws. I continued with lessons (now on Adobe CS5.5), and ended up using the thing a heck of a lot more on a daily basis, even though my "real" computer is still my desktop PC. But my happy world was about to be rocked. Yes, as luck would have it, my MBP was one of a series with a defective graphics card, which went on the fritz about 10 weeks after Apple stopped willingly fixing them!

The new(ish) MacBook Pro

Faced with a $550 repair of my now almost five-year-old MBP, I hit eBay again, and this time got a 2009 MacBook Pro. This one is a refurbished model, and it came with all of the goodies (this time Adobe CS6). I'm prepping and boxing up the dying older model, and selling it for parts this weekend. I'm typing this blog post on the new one, and I've got to say, I'm grinning while I do. Don't worry, the Cult of Mac hasn't got me yet. But this system looks and feels brand new (and let's face it, it is four years newer than my first one, even if it's 3.5 years old itself), and also feels like a substantial upgrade, even if it's the same line of computers.

So, this is my third used Macintosh in the space of less than two-and-one-half years. I can't be sure that this one won't croak on me too at some point. And in that regard, I have to say that the luster is off the Apple for me. Problem-free, my eye! But I'm feeling that I now have to step up my game. Even considering the cost that repairs would have run me, and the potential cash back I'll get for selling the broken one, this computer was pricey. I can rationalize it by comparing the cost to a new MacBook Pro (boy howdy), but I think I need to step up my lessons again. Fortunately, it also came with Parallels and Windows 7, letting me toggle between Mac and PC! So, I have very little excuse for not being able to get my work done on this beauty.

By the way, I did the math, and this is my eleventh computer, including a generic 486DX, Pentium I, Pentium II, Pentium 4, Pentium 4D, Core2Duo, i5 [all PCs]; a Celeron PC laptop; and the three Macs from this article. Presently, four of them are still in use! But one is on its way out the door. [08/01/13 update] I've added another computer (my 12th) to the mix, a Windows 8 computer with an AMD something-or-other chip. It's zippy, but confusing. My third Mac is still chugging, still doing well, still used every day. But potentially threatened by the odd desire for an iPad. I sold the Pentium 4 to my boss' company, and the 4D is now going out the door.