The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'm running Win10 Pro. I just got the latest 7TT update, and there was nary a peep from Microsoft Defender. I have no idea why your installation flagged it.

(MS delivers virus signature updates for Microsoft Defender as part of Windows Updates. The latest one happened today. If you have diddled Windows auto update settings, that might be an issue.)

FWIW 7TT just installed as Michael said it would, after a few days.

BR

[Deskisamess]

Hubby bought me an HP laptop a couple of weeks ago. I use an old version of MS Office for some ladies ministry stuff which installed and runs just fine. It runs Windows 10, which I'm ok with as our AIO runs that also.

I was unable to get the Brother laser printer working wirelessly, and seemed at an impass. Then I did some Googling.

Turns out a recent Windows update broke wireless printing for many users. I found threads and mentions of this all over the web. Brother had a mention on their support page as well, with directions for deleting the 2 updates that caused it. My HP had one of them.

Deleted that update, removed the printer, rebooted, reinstalled the printer, and joy! It works. Not a huge thing I know, but I need my tech stuff to work, and get very frustrated when it doesn't. Especially when it's not my fault.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

Hubby bought me an HP laptop a couple of weeks ago. I use an old version of MS Office for some ladies ministry stuff which installed and runs just fine. It runs Windows 10, which I'm ok with as our AIO runs that also.

I run Win10 Pro here, and have been generally happy with it.

I was unable to get the Brother laser printer working wirelessly, and seemed at an impasse. Then I did some Googling.

Turns out a recent Windows update broke wireless printing for many users. I found threads and mentions of this all over the web. Brother had a mention on their support page as well, with directions for deleting the 2 updates that caused it. My HP had one of them.

Deleted that update, removed the printer, rebooted, reinstalled the printer, and joy! It works. Not a huge thing I know, but I need my tech stuff to work, and get very frustrated when it doesn't. Especially when it's not my fault.

I managed to miss that. Printing didn't break here. What we have is an HP combo printer/copier/scanner. It replaced an HP inkjet we had had for years which finally failed. That one assumed a wired connection, and was, um, picky about printing. I would see print jobs hung up in the Windows spooler and have to reboot the clear the jam. They could not be removed from the spool by normal Windows methods. There was a primitive WiFi add-on option, but it proved unusable in our environment. (If memory serves, it required a dongle on the PC end.) My desktop had a CAT5 connection to the router the printer connected to. My SO's laptop connected via WiFi, but if she wanted to print, she had to connect a cable as well. We were trying to avoid that.

The current HP is WiFi only, and made life much simpler. My desktop didn't include WiFi, but I added a USB WiFi dongle (and one for Bluetooth). The desktop can see and print to the HP printer. So can the SO's laptop, and (courtesy of an HP app), the Android devices we use as PDAs. (They are technically smartphones, but we don't use them as phones. They are WiFi equipped PDAs with serviceable cameras, and exceptionally handy.)

I spent decades in IT, and printer support was always one of my biggest PITAs. It was bad enough with just Windows. When you added Unix and Linux servers to the mix of things to print from, it got worse. I wound up rewriting the scripts a predecessor had written to support *nix printing, to combine two scripts into one and use a table to define the printers and the options to be passed to them to get the desired results. Adding a printer was a line in the table.

But then, I'm old enough to remember the early MSDOS days, where the OS did one thing at a time, and you sent a job to print from word processor to the printer and sat back and twiddled your thumbs, because you didn't get the PC back till the print job was finished. MS resolved that with the PRINT command that installed as a resident extension to DOS and did a primitive from of time slicing to devote some CPU cycles to the print job in the background while you continued to work in the foreground. Fun, for suitable values of the term. I don't miss printer admin at all.
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Dennis

[Deskisamess]

Has the Windows print spooler ever worked seamlessly? I have learned over the years to not waste time trying to fix a munged up printer install. Removal and starting over was always the thing to do, especially with one of the HP inkjet we used to have.

This Brother laser has been fairly rock solid, except for the iDevices which can't always wake it up wirelessly. But addressing the printer via the browser usually took care of that.

This was weird because it installed correctly, and the laptop saw the printer correctly. It just wouldn't print, but there was no error message or anything. I'm just glad the fix was easy. I'm pretty happy with the HP Pavilion laptop. The keyboard is great, and it's pretty snappy.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

Has the Windows print spooler ever worked seamlessly? I have learned over the years to not waste time trying to fix a munged up printer install. Removal and starting over was always the thing to do, especially with one of the HP inkjet we used to have.

No, but it's better now than it was.

Oddly, the problems I had with the old HP printer seemed to be on the HP software end. I've used and administered a lot of HP printers over the years. Generally, they've Just Worked, but the software on the Windows end that installed the printer driver and Windows control interface for that model just wasn't that good. What jammed the Windows print spooler seemed to be on the HP end. (And it was the HP software on the desktop that you used to try to cancel, pause, or restart print jobs. It communicated with the Windows spooler, and seemed to have problems doing so.)

The current machine is much better behaved.

This Brother laser has been fairly rock solid, except for the iDevices which can't always wake it up wirelessly. But addressing the printer via the browser usually took care of that.

At least you can wake it via the browser.

This was weird because it installed correctly, and the laptop saw the printer correctly. It just wouldn't print, but there was no error message or anything. I'm just glad the fix was easy. I'm pretty happy with the HP Pavilion laptop. The keyboard is great, and it's pretty snappy.

The current desktop is a recycled ex-corporate workstation. My former desktop suffered a failure, and Microcenter had the one I use now on sale for $275. It came with Win10 Pro pre-installed, a quad-core i5-4690 CPU at 3.5ghz with a turbo mode up to 3.9ghz, 16GB RAM, Intel HD 4600 graphics (more than adequate for my non-gaming usage), USB3, and a 256GB Lexar SSD. 16GB RAM is nice. The machine can be expanded to 32GB but I've had no need to think about doing it. If I see a quarter of current installed RAM used, it's unusual. But it means I can do things like install a 64 bit Windows RAMdisk driver with RAM to allocate to it. My Firefox cache is on a 256MB RAMdisk. (Firefox makes it easy to specify where it should put cache. Chrome is more complicated.)

No SATA HD was a bit bemusing, but ex-corporate explained it. In its prior life it was a corporate desktop that would connect across the network to storage that would appear as mapped drives. It didn't need local storage - just a fast system drive to hold OS and applications. But there was room to install a couple of SATA HDs from the previous machine, and I did so, as well as adding WiFi and Bluetooth via dongles.

The 240GB Crucial SSD I got for the earlier machine resides in a parts drawer till I get something else to use it in.

Keyboards are special pain points. You get accustomed to a particular keyboard and muscle memory is acquired. If you have to change to a different keyboard, productivity drops into the toilet because muscle memory is wrong. I prefer Logitech keyboards for that reason. I dislike using laptops precisely because I'm not comfortable with laptop keyboards (and I despise trackpads. If I have to use a laptop, a USB mouse is a necessity.)

Likely next addition for the desktop is a second monitor. I think I might be able to fit a second 21" monitor in the space where the computer desk is. I'm finding reason to participate in virtual conferencing where a second monitor will make like much easier. (I can participate with one. If I am called upon to monitor and control Zoom and Discord instances (likely), I really need a second.)
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Dennis

[Darqref]

To Err is human, to really foul it takes a computer.

and a refuting corollary - one of the biggest causes of bugs is a programmer with an idea.


1. We've been having some problems with theft from a shed in our yard, and the police suggest installing a camera. Did some research and a combined camera and floodlight from Ring seems appropriate. But....
a. I can't install the app on my current phone - its old and uses android 4.2, the app wants minimum of 5.0
b. I've been able to get the app installed on a win10 laptop, but trying to add the camera to the device list just calls up the instructions again. grr. Not everyone has a modern phone!

I think I'm going to need to upgrade my phone, but I've been happy with the current one, and I'm lazy....



2. On a different computer, at our family's vacation home, I got a used computer from our church. Didn't know it had originally been win8.1 and upgraded to win10. I ended up putting a newer solid state drive in it to re-install win10, and that did ok. Problem is, we just tried to install a new release of an old game, from Steam. Video card won't support DirectX12. grumble. need to find a better video card.

3. Just bought new headphones, a cordless noise-cancelling model. When turned on, the phones announce what devices they're connected to, by the computer label or phone label. Which is a bunch of strange letters that I apparently can't change to a more friendly label. I guess I'll eventually get used to it, but I still have to listen carefully to figure out if I'm still connected to the right device.

[Deskisamess]

Wouldn't running such an outdated version of Android be a security issue?

[BetterRed]

Running anything that's connected to the 'net has security/privacy issues

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

Wouldn't running such an outdated version of Android be a security issue?

It depends on what you do.

I have an assortment of Android devices, running Ermine, Jellybean, KitKat, Lollipop and Marshmallow. I don't lose sleep about security.

Granted, mine are all tablets, not phones. (Okay, one technically is a phone, but I don't use it as a phone. It's a WiFi equipped PDA with a serviceable camera.) Because they are tablets, they are not always connected to the net. They are generally connected via WiFi only to check email or check for app updates, and that normally happens from behind my router at home. The rest of the time they are used offline in local mode, dealing with locally stored data. An example is the Google Nexus 7 in my signature. Its purpose is to be an eBook viewer, with eBooks from a library managed by Calibre and placed on device through it.

And you are at the mercy of your device vendor about whether you get security updates. Some (especially "budget" devices) don't get them. Whatever came with your device is what you are stuck with. Your options are to get a newer device with more recent Android version, flash replacement third party firmware to your device, or live with what you have. And replacing the original firmware requires there to be replacement firmware, and an device where you can unlock the boot loader to do the replacement. Whether replacement firmware exists depends. If you device is a popular one, someone may have created it. If not...

Ultimately, you practice Safe Hex. Android is a Linux system under the hood. As such, it doesn't get viruses, because those essentially don't exist for Linux. It can get malware. So you do the same things you might do on a PC. Be aware of where you are and what you are doing. Don't visit chancy websites. Be careful about what you open in email. Only install software from known good sources. I see a lot of calls for assistance elsewhere about Android phone problems, and many of them have me biting my virtual tongue and not saying "That's what you get for being stupid" because the poster did something like install a cracked commercial product to avoid having to actually pay for it. The crack included malware along for the ride.

Ongoing releases of Android have become progressively more "secure", but that comes with its own trade offs. A lot of the security measures can be classed as "protect the user from their own stupidity, by not allowing them to do things they might find useful because they might be compromised if they do it wrong." As an example, the first thing I used to do with an Android device was to root it. A reason for that was to remove vendor bloatware I didn't want but was installed as system apps that could not be removed by ordinary methods. More recent Android versions have removed the vulnerabilities the "one click root" solutions used to get root on device, and the alternative is replacement firmware, if extant.

Ultimately, Android security is a special case of a broader concern. Devices are tools. It's on the user to learn to properly use the tools. If they don't, problems that occur because they were ignorant are their problems, and their responsibility. Deal with it.
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Dennis

[Deskisamess]

I am woefully ignorant of android and its workings. I used it for a time, and have had a few Fire tablets, and pretty much disliked it. We are an iDevice family. I need my stuff to work, and play well together.

My husband hated his Fire tablet so much he would never have another. After listening to him for a couple of months, I would never let him have another. We love Kindles, but not Fires.

My question was based mostly on that ignorance, and the Google search that told me how old Android 4 was.

[Darqref]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

My question was based mostly on that ignorance, and the Google search that told me how old Android 4 was.

Yeah, it's an old phone, and despite being a Samsung model, it never got a newer android release. And I've never done anything on it that even uses a password - no email or facebook, no bank, nuttin, so I haven't *needed* to upgrade.

But in all the years, it's never had a bad fall or scratched screen, still works for making calls and texts. But *now* I need to have a way to access the Ring camera, to maybe detect who's prowling our shed. (one time they unscrewed the hasp that was locked. When I prevented that, they used bolt cutters on the hasp (didn't touch the lock itself.) Finally decided to put a deadbolt lock in, as well as try for the camera, since even the local sheriff recommended that.)

A different hardware moan:
I have a recently purchased bluetooth speaker. it sounds good, once I figured out how to enable it to connect. But it turns itself off after just under 30 minutes, no matter what is being streamed. Just shuts off. It immediately reconnects after you turn the power back on, but has been reset to max volume. Middle of the zoom meeting, middle of the music I was playing another time, whatever. just won't keep working for more than 30 minutes.
Altech Lansing BabyBoomXL, for what it's worth.
None of the reviews *I* read mentioned anything like that!

[4691mls]

My (admittedly limited) understanding about Android is that even if your device doesn't receive Android system updates, you can still get updates for Google play and for many apps (at least as long as the newer versions work on your level of Android).

I guess how important this is depends on what you are doing with the device.

It is frustrating that makers of Android devices generally don't seem to support system updates beyond about two or three years, apparently assuming that most people would want to upgrade to a newer phone after that time anyway (kind of goes along with the thread in the General forum about non-replaceable batteries.)

[cc_in_oh]

I have a new winner. I set up my new monitor this morning, replacing a Samsung SD300 24". I dug out the old box to pack the Samsung back up and store in the closet for emergencies. I unscrew and remove the flat base which leaves the vertical part of the stand still firmly attached to the monitor. There's no release catch and I don't want to damage it by pulling too hard on it. Fortunately (I thought) the box still contained the quick setup sheet, and that had a section for removing the stand. No words though, just a picture showing the monitor, a hand gripping the base, and another hand with some arrows around it. Totally meaningless to me. So I had to search for the manual PDF to find the caption:

While holding the stand neck with one hand, pound the other fisted hand down onto the top of the stand base in the direction of the arrow to detach the stand base.

After a couple of tries it worked, but makes me wonder where Samsung is finding their engineers, and whether anyone anywhere has ever figured that out just from the picture?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

…
After a couple of tries it worked, but makes me wonder where Samsung is finding their engineers, and whether anyone anywhere has ever figured that out just from the picture?

Maybe Samsung build Dell's monitors, when I had to repack one of their 32" 4K monitors I had to do similar. Heavy damn thing - not mine, unfortunately.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

My (admittedly limited) understanding about Android is that even if your device doesn't receive Android system updates, you can still get updates for Google play and for many apps (at least as long as the newer versions work on your level of Android).

Correct. You can still get app updates. For that matter, you can side-load them from sites other than Google Play Store, but you need to dig into Settings and toggle "Allow apps from unknown sources". Doing so is a security risk - you must trust the unknown source, and many aren't trustworthy. But those that are can be lifesavers. What if an update proves a problem, and you want to revert back to the last known working version? The Play Store only carries current versions. You have to hunt for a mirror site that preserves earlier ones.

You do still have the problem of whether a new app works on the version of Android you have. (The Play Store will tell you an app isn't compatible with the version of Android you run and won't let you download it.) But that's true for any computing device. New OS versions add new capabilities, and applications are written to use them. If your OS version is too old, a recent app may fail to run.

I guess how important this is depends on what you are doing with the device.

Yes. That's the case no matter what you use and what you do with it, and is applicable to PCs as well as mobile devices.

It is frustrating that makers of Android devices generally don't seem to support system updates beyond about two or three years, apparently assuming that most people would want to upgrade to a newer phone after that time anyway (kind of goes along with the thread in the General forum about non-replaceable batteries.)

In general, that's actually a decent assumption. Most folks do get new devices every few years. Higher end and more expensive devices that you might keep for a longer period may get Android OS updates. Lower end devices likely won't. (And devices get steadily more powerful. An older device may not be able to run a new Android release.)

I'm in a discussion elsewhere about 5G service, and one of the posters dislikes "planned obsolescence" and thinks of 5G as solely something to get people to buy new phones. That's not how it works. It's driven obsolescence, and the driver is what folks want to do with their devices.

These days, in developed nations, at least, decent broadband is considered a necessity, and there's no such thing as enough bandwidth. The driver for ever higher broadband speed is video, and that's true for phones as well as PCs. High end smartphones these days are fancy digital cameras that happen to also place and receive calls. The cameras have increasingly high megapixel ratings, and the files they create when you take pictures or videos are increasingly larger. Once you have taken them, then what? You want to upload them to a server where they will actually be stored, and delete the original from your device. You don't want to grow old and grey waiting for that to happen. Enter 5G.

And what uses a 5G connection doesn't have to be a phone. Where do you get broadband? Normally, you get it because a broadband provider has a cable running to you to deliver the broadband. What if you are out in the boonies with no cable because you are too far away to make running a cable to you practical? If you have 5G, you can get decent broadband via cellular service. What connects to 5G on your end may be a WiFi router, not a phone.

Researchers in Finland are working on the next step beyond 5G, and debating whether to call it 5G LTE or just call it 6G. It will use parts of the RF spectrum that haven't been practical to use in the past but can be now with newer technology. Effective broadband for the whole country is a Finnish national priority, and you aren't likely to see the conspiracy theories about 5G adoption you can find elsewhere.
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Dennis