Tech Resolutions

April 3, 2006

By Jason Fry

As 2006 arrived, I offered a quintet of New Year's resolutions1 intended to drain the technological swamp that is the Fry household, a place where all the technology vaguely worked -- there were no viruses or malware running around loose, firewalls were up, and PCs accessed the Internet reliably, yet MP3s didn't play through the stereo, the TiVo wasn't part of the wireless network, and that network was a rat's nest of wired and wireless, gear that worked and gear that didn't.

Three months in, how am I doing? Not bad for a busy parent of a three-year-old. But not as well as I could. Here's a rundown of the resolutions, and the progress made. Or yet to be made.

1. Networking: The problem here was more vague unhappiness than an immediate crisis -- the two desktop PCs (one wired, one wireless) could share files, but neither could see my work-supplied laptop (wireless). I was supporting two printers, with network printing just a pipe dream. And the wireless desktop PC was randomly dropping its Net connection, requiring frequent reboots.

This one went on the backburner when the dropped Net connections became a rarity again -- I wish I knew what changed, though I'm happy to remain ignorant so long as the problem doesn't recur. I still haven't been able to get the laptop and desktop PCs to see each other (with the crucial exception of iTunes, as explained below), but I've chalked that up to the laptop's VPN software not playing nice with the network. Ultimately, I decided it's not a big deal -- Gmail isn't a bad workaround for moving files around on the infrequent occasions I need to do that.

Besides, my one attempt to solve the laptop's networking problem was a disaster, albeit one with an unexpected silver lining. One night I dug into the laptop's connection settings and decided to try removing the machine from its domain so I could add it to my home workgroup. What could go wrong? Nothing -- unless you count the machine restarting, promptly locking me out and demanding that an administrator put things right.

Oops.

I brought the laptop into the office, shamefacedly told an IT guy what I'd done, and was grateful when he merely frowned instead of finding this stunt hilarious. His reward was listening to me babble about the details of my home network in a pointless effort to convince him that I wasn't the idiot I'd just conclusively demonstrated myself to be. After enduring all that, he carted my laptop off -- then kindly called to say the machine could use some other updates, which he'd be happy to make. When I got it back, it boasted a much more stable version of the VPN software and a program letting me use wireless hot spots on my employer's dime. Cool!

One of these weekends I'll tear into getting a printer on the network. But for now, I'm calling this one a victory, however little I deserved it.

2. The Stereo and the TV: The goal has always been to use the laptop (upstairs) to pick songs from a music library (downstairs) and play through a stereo (upstairs, but not near the laptop). It's been a goal for a long, long time -- long enough to become one of those bits of marital vaudeville honed to perfection over the years. (Click here2 to see how I tried and failed to solve it in 2002. Yes, 2002. For Pete's sake!) I thought Apple's Airport Express would solve the problem, but no: After I couldn't make the Express work as advertised, I wound up running Ethernet cable between it and the router, a long journey through walls and under carpet that left me no closer to success. My Airport Express had a green light (an indication it's a stable part of a network) but was stubbornly invisible to any computer in my house. Huh? Was my neighbor using it? Had it formed a robot network of its own with other skylarking Expresses? The mind boggled.

Enter several readers, led by Shaun James, whose step-by-step counsel gave me courage. His advice: do a default reset on the Airport Express, connect the Ethernet cable not to the router but to the PC with the admin software, and change some settings. You know the weird, I'm-reluctant-to-admit-this feeling when the first step of a technical process works easily and you instantly know the rest will fall into place? After the reset, the base station popped right up for configuration and I knew everything would work. (I upgraded the firmware while I was at it.)

It even kept working when I unplugged the Ethernet cable to get it out from under the carpet. Working wirelessly is what it's supposed to do, but that still counted as a minor miracle in my house. I thought grumpily about all the trouble it had been to get that cable through the walls and plugged it back into the PC anyway.

The setup works exactly how I'd envisioned it, finally. My wife was flabbergasted; my three-year-old son was incredulous that music could emerge from a stereo instead of a computer. Victory! (Thank you, Shaun.)

3. Unlocking TiVo: My kid doesn't understand3 why we have a smart TV (the one hooked up to TiVo) and a stupid TV (the one that isn't). That got me thinking that it would be fun to get a second TiVo and put them both on the wireless network so they can be programmed remotely and exchange shows.

Like a lot of plans, this one didn't survive contact with the enemy. The TiVo instructions for setting up a wireless network frightened me. TiVo pulled its lifetime subscription plan4 in favor of various pay-as-you-go schemes, which angered me. And since New Year's my wife and I have been investigating a possible expansion of our apartment, which would make a second TiVo an extravagance. (Eating and electricity may fall into the same category.) The kid will have to live a while longer with the occasional bout of traditional TV, because this one's off the list.

4. Cable, Meet Phone: Why on earth are we still paying around $80 a month for local and long-distance service? My inclination was to ditch the landline entirely and celebrate having brought two telecommunications companies incrementally closer to the demise they so richly deserve. But my wife said no. (We do have a cool phone number.) My next thought was to let our cable-TV provider take over the landline, which would cut our bill in half. Further exploration and conversations with readers suggested an even-better alternative: Vonage, which has a $15-a-month plan for more minutes than we'd likely use.

I now know what I want to do, but I've dithered, nervous about the fuss of it all and the wifely agitation if things don't go quite as planned, which with me involved seems likely. A friend assures me the setup is simple. Another promises that yes, my rotary phone will keep working. I keep dithering. But those two absurd phone bills are about to come back around, and perhaps that will spur action at long last. Hey, it's only April.

5. Organization and Good Habits: At New Year's most of the digital photos were scattered between random folders on one PC. More than a year's worth of music hadn't been backed up, leaving it vulnerable to an all-too-common hard-drive disaster. Movies of our kid's first years were stranded on camcorder tape. (Last week, with these bad habits nagging at me, I wrote about the data-storage dilemma5 lots of consumers face.)

I finally stopped grumbling, bought a new external drive, and backed up the digital music and photos. So they should be safe, or at least safer. I haven't tackled the movies yet -- they need to be transferred to DVD. And the photos, while backed up, remain disorganized. (Any suggestions for good photo-organizer software?) So consider this one partial credit.

Three months in, let's review: One problem solved, one half-solved, one seems to have solved itself acceptably, one plan abandoned and one procrastinated. Not too bad for three months' work. Hmm. With a little luck, I might need some July resolutions….