respublica

No volume, he said

We still haven't had our smart tv replaced which was broken by the movers, but having the Roku set up in the bedroom has been very handy. But I had to laugh at Dale's vague understanding of most tech things. He got rather addicted to watching a Netflix series on the history of ancient Rome while we were still at the seminary. Once we got the Roku going this week he was thrilled to go back to watching how horribly the Romans killed each other. That was my impression on the series anyway.

So last night he went up to the bedroom, pulled a chair in front of the tv and watched all this again. Each episode is 45 minutes long and I'd guess he watched two last night. I went up to see how he was doing and was surprised he was sitting so close to the screen and he said, "the sound is really low on this series for some reason, the only way I an hear it is to sit right next to it. He couldn't find the volume control on the actual tv. When he finally shut it down for the night I went up and looked at the Roku remote and sure enough, there was the volume up and down control on the side.

Too late for him, but there is always another day.

I conquered the Roku

I'm pretty pleased with how easily setting up a Roku player was. I didn't believe I'd have the smarts to do this. I was initially stymied by the fact that I couldn't find the remote to our bedroom tv and wasted at least half an hour going through some of the boxes in the basement we hadn't unpacked yet. And, the tv in question did not have an obvious turn-on button. But when I finally found it and got it on, it wasn't long before Roku set up screen came on. 

I did a lot of going up and down stairs to set up passwords and such on the laptop, but everything I did went immediately to the roku screen on the upstairs tv. I was daunted by the time it will take to get the stations we watch most. Roku screens are filled with all kinds of program icons and choices. It seems, and you may know, Frank, but each of the programs we want in there have to be activated by going to their websites. It takes time and I'm not at all sure where they end up.

But we have some of the news channels and HGTV. Also Netflix. Today I'll try to make sense of how these show up on the screen. And, whatever shows we have on our Spectrum account will go to the Roku tv. That's cool. But I have to spend time choosing and activating the on the computer or my iphone. 

Even better the Roku remote does everything from turning the tv on and off to letting me use my voice to control it.

Setting up a new wireless router isn't as easy as they say

Since we moved back to Collinsville, Dale has been unhappy with the internet connection he's been getting down in his basement office. Over at the seminary house I'd put in the Google wifi system which worked really well. There were three small white things, the name of which I've forgotten. One is hooked to the cable modem and that is your new wireless router. The others get plugged in various parts of the house and they extend the signal.

Over here in Collinsville I decided to get the latest Google Nest wifi unit. Supposedly it spreads the connection much farther in the house. It will also work with our previous extender units. I believe this, but so far I haven't been able to connect with it. It reads so easy. Plug one end of a power line into the router unit and the other into a wall socket. The other cord gets plugged into the unit and the cable modem. Your phone will tell you what to do. But, I never got a connection. I'd taken out the cable line from our previous Netgear router and modem, but the new system just didn't connect.

I'm going to play with more today and hope I was just going too fast.

Lamb at the door

Today being Sunday I placed a small sheep at our front door. We're all listening for our Shepherd's voice today and listening more intently than ever before. Praise God for promising to hear us. And, living in times like this we are thankful for the technology which allows us to be part of our churches' worship services online. In our case, Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Collinsville.

 

Hurray for UPS

I have nothing but good things to say about UPS. They have never failed us as opposed to FedEx which failed us big time more than once. As I related in this post yesterday Dale forgot his phone while heading for Phoenix. I was able to pack it in bubble wrap, put it in a small box wrapped tightly with heavy duty packing tape and then take it to UPS to overnight it.

I wasn't altogether sure it would get there overnight and be delivered by 10 or 10:30 this morning. But by gosh, he got his phone by 9:30 this morning. It is a huge relief. I did forget to put a charging cord in, but he can get one of those or borrow one. Such a relief.

The Meyer Minute

After getting Dale a new printer for his birthday and found it set up really easy, I got to thinking about all the past tech things we've used over the years. We were fairly early adapters to computers and the internet. We got a Windows computer back in the early 90's when he was at The Lutheran Hour. That was an amazing piece of equipment, at least to me. Before that computers used a DOS system with a black empty screen and a c prompt. I had no idea how that worked, but Windows opened up a new world to me. It also came with AOL, a place for email and games and message boards, ease of immediate communication.

I was hooked. The problem came as years went by that technology zoomed faster than we could keep up and we tended to lose things. The new made the old obsolete. One example of this came to me this morning as I put Dale's Meyer Minute up onto his email list server, his blog and Facebook. He's been writing his Minute since sometime in the mid to late 90's. At some point in time I started putting them on floppy discs, the old hard cased 3 by 5 discs. Every computer had a slot for them.

But, as technology goes, the floppy discs and a way to use them, went away. Dale may have those years of minutes somewhere on a paper copy, but we aren't sure. I decided in 2011 it was time to put each day's Minute on a blog and so created a blog for him just for that. At least websites haven't gone away yet. We know we can find his for the past 9 years for now.

Here is the link to his blog which is entirely made up of his daily Meyer Minutes. Look at the archives section and you'll find them month by month by year. I'm so glad we did this.  For now.

As an added tech note, while going through a closet yesterday I came across a whole bunch of dvd movies. Problem is we no longer have a dvd player and our computers, while having a dvd/dc drive, are now more advanced and these no longer play. They're good movies, it's too bad we can't watch them anymore.

Signing in everywhere

I don't know about anyone else, but I am just weary of having to have myriad user names and passwords. It's to the point where just about anything we want to read or see online requires a user name and password. We have so many it's dizzying. This morning Dale needed to get a new app for his phone and ipad and itunes would not accept the password he's had forever. So I had to go to the Apple website and change it then write it down in 3 places so he has it in the future.

We both have lists of all user names and passwords for every thing and they take up 2 pages of single spaces lines. Granted some of these are very obsolete, pertaining to things we no longer use or own, but I dare not delete for fear some website will want them.

Ear buds

I am not normally a person who wears ear buds to listen to music or stories on my phone, ipad or computer. But occasionally I put them in when I want to listen to something or play a noisy game and not disturb The Dale. One thing that annoys me about them is how long the strings are. Why do ear bud cords have such long cords? They get tangled up and hang over everything.

First world problem, I know, but it makes no sense to me. I've thought about getting a set of wirelss, cordless ear buds, but the cost is too high for the little time I'd use them.

I have to confess

About a week ago I was bored on a Sunday afternoon and Dale was out of town. I was so bored I began watching QVC and their big weekend offer happened to be ipads. My ipad is old, I use it all the time, and it has lost most of its ability to do much any more. But I had no intention of replacing it, they cost way too much. I could buy 2 laptops for the cost of one ipad.

But! This QVC weekend pre-holiday sale was pretty amazing and I watched carefully to see if there would be a catch. The price was less than half of what you'd pay in any store or on the Apple site. Plus it would come with a keyboard (not necessary) ear buds, cover, stylus, voucher and a lot of memory.

I did it. I ordered it. For this price and all that comes with it, it was hard to pass up. I'd guess Apple will be coming out with some new type of ipad in the near future and this is why the price was so much lower than anything I've ever seen. But, hey, this will work great for me.

The one area QVC can't match places like Amazon is in the length of shipping time. It will end up taking between a week and ten days to get this ipad. Amazon would have had to me in a day. But for twice the price.

I'm low on storage

My iPad often brings up a message that I'm perilously close to using up all my alloted storage. I've had this iPad for some years and have no intention of spending anywhere from 400 to 800 dollars on a new one. What I've learned is that text messages take up an enormous amount of usable space on the iphone and ipad. By deleting them, a whole lot of space comes back. Also deleting all those emails and especially deleting for good the already deleted emails brings back even more space.

My concern with deleting texts is that many of them contain photos family members sent me and if I don't want to lose them for good, I have to take the time to get them off and onto a computer before deleting. This week I was so uninterested in going through all that that I just deleted. I figured if the family members sent them to me, they'd still have a copy.

Also, for some reason I've been paying 99 cents a month for extra icloud storage but I have never been able to figure out how to get anything into it. I have 44 Gigabytes available but no way to move anything into this.

But by deleting all kinds of texts and several years of emails I never knew were still on the ipad, I freed up over a gigabyte of extra space.