I spent part of the afternoon moving / re-plugging the very old desktop PC that serves as a “guest” machine, and which was lying around in pieces after I moved it off to appropriate its ex-location for my new standing desk.
It’s a very, very slow machine running XP (family/home edition). I have this project of making it run a lightweight Linux version sometime in the future, but not until I’m sure I can run the &$@#!*@#% printer/scanner from MY desktop PC.
After that was done I decided to finally try to connect to the (public directories of) the PCs in the house from the Mac. Of course, despite the fact that Ariadne could see both these machines (they showed up on the “shared” section of the Finder), none of them would respond to demands to connect / accept to show their (public! shared!) files.
So as usual I complained on Twitter, and Math directed me to this page to help me make it work. It worked for one machine (mine) and not the other – for now – which, considering I didn’t want to spend more than 10mn on it at the time, seems an okay result. Yay for Samba!
Then I got Mom on the phone, exhausted and frazzled from a very busy, difficult back-to-school period. She’s also having problems with her Mac; particularly with iCal, which crashes/freezes on her. She’s been a Mac user for… two years I think? I used to be / am still her PC-troubleshooting person (though I’ve never been the only one, my Dad and my uncle also fill that role.. I just played it more often because I used to live with her), but of course since she’s been using a Mac I was a lot less able to help her. Not completely useless, just less of an expert.
I just knew all this would change once I got a Mac. So I’ve just now talked her through creating another user account so she could try to run iCal from there to see if if the soft needs reinstalling or if her personal account (preferences) files are corrupted. Which seems to be the case. We didn’t take any action beyond this because she had to go do some more urgent work, but I’ve continued reading up online on the possible causes and fixes for her problem..
Which in a roundabout way led me to download and install the Mailplane app that I’ve heard Merlin Mann rave about. It’s an app that wraps around gmail – rather, it’s a special email client that works with gmail accounts.
Here’s the roundabout: I wanted to send Mom a screencap I made with Skitch of exactly WHERE the iCal preferences files are on her system (the webpages and forums we found where people discussed these issues indicated a path that isn’t the same now in our more recent OSes). I don’t like Mail. I’m using Safari to keep my gMail open, so far, but I’m not super pleased about that. I just hadn’t yet explored the various solutions at my disposal, but I remembered the Mailplane rec, and I remembered watching a demo clip yesterday on their site that covered exactly my present need for a drag&drop of a screencap into a mail.
Silly way to go about installing things, a bit, but I take impetus where I can find it.
I’m both excited about this app, and scared to love it so much that I need to pay for it later. Not that I don’t want to pay for software (I do), but I’m going to need to carefully budget these things. I have a lot on my wishlist in that area. :)
Comments are closed.