Networking

I've just gone wireless, and it's quite a relief. Since shortly after moving into my flat, I've had ten metres of Ethernet cable snaking through my hall in order to connect my Mac with the modem. It's always been so, but my old flat had a more centrally located phone socket, so the cable was shorter and not much in the way. Here, either I have my Mac in the kitchen, or its out with the masonry drill, or I get a wireless router. I got a wireless router.

When you enable Airport connections, you can see whatever networks are in your area. There's quite a lot round here. It makes me very aware of the verticality of living in a tenement. Maybe "Monkeymouse" is some of the people I see tapping at lit windows across the back green.

In the eight months or so that I lived with the Ethernet cable I've got used to stepping over it at several key points. It feels odd now that I don't have to. And I can shut the living room door now.

A week ahead

My digital radio confused me this morning by changing from BST to GMT a week early. I spent some time resetting other clocks and watches, and then tut-tutted over the fact that my Mac hadn't got it right. Except that it had, of course. Clocks in the UK change next week. Is it just me, or is this information not communicated as much as it used to be? Maybe we now just expect clocks to have the computational power to reset themselves.

It just works

My new Mac is spectacularly effective, in a particularly unspectacular way. I've connected most of the devices I own to it and found that they work, but up to today the old scanner lying in the corner of the room was reproaching me. It was always a nightmare to set up on Windows, as it never seemed to remember any settings from one session to the next, and usually overwrote drivers for something else. It also insisted on the use of various bits of crapware that you had to install.

On the Mac, I connect everything up, start Image Capture (seems like a good guess), and blow me if it doesn't tell me that I have an Epson Perfection 1250 there mate, and do I want a scan of that thing that's on it?

Quite good

I've just transferred my Thunderbird email from PC to Mac in about 10 minutes, thanks to some instructions from Mr Sunpig. It only took that long because I hesitated over how to make a copy of a folder (Command-C then Command-V, stupid!).

I was about to gloat about how wonderful Macs were, but Safari crashed just after typing the paragraph above. Still, no harm done.

Safari crashed again just after typing the last paragraph. I hope I'm not stuck in a loop: I want to go to bed now.