60+ year old thread.

And now it's snowing! Wild line of snow squalls working through. Should be over shortly.

 

Good morning fellow Porchatonians!! We had a line of snow squalls come through yesterday afternoon - it was a total snow whiteout here for about 10 minutes as the line passed through. Then the sun came out and melted 90% of it. 10F right now - never got out of the 20s with lots of wind yesterday so I opted not to work on the truck. I'll probably wait until tomorrow when temps are supposed to go into the 50s again.

Stay safe out there!!

 

What router did you purchase? I looked at DSL many years ago but I am located too far away from the Verizon Central Office for DSL to work properly. The forerunner of Comcast, in my area, offered cable TV then internet so I went with them. A few years later Verizon FIOS came into the neighborhood, I was tired of the constant service loss with Comcast, so I went with Verizon. I have only had two issues where I had to have Verizon come out and fix the problem, most of the time the automated repair system fixes the problem. I probably had less than 10 problems with Verizon FIOS services, and only two outages that lasted for more than 24 hours.

I had to set up an Apple repair visit for my son's iPhone, 11 ProMax. We visit the Apple store today with a 1:15 appointment. The battery is going bad, and he has Apple Care+. I read about how to test the problem and his battery will only hold an 84% charge. I also want to talk to them about iCloud and how to better understand the service when you have 2 devices sharing the same service. I also need help understanding the iCloud service and how to back up my son's phone to either the cloud or to his Apple laptop. I am an Android and PC guy not an Apple guy. My son is technology challenged with the phone and laptop, so he relies on me for help. Bad decision on his part.

Apple makes great products, but I do not like the way they are marketed and sold. Not enough flexibility with what you are allowed to do with the hardware and software once you have the product. I have a new Samsung phone on Pre-order but even Samsung has moved to embrace some of Apple's marketing with respect to sales. This will be my first phone, in quite some time, without a SD memory card slot. I did purchase a 512GB model with 12GB of ram. I move photos over to my PC every month from my phone. When I go on vacation, I have a Samsung storage drive that I move photos and movies to every day. So far, this system has worked out OK for me.

Everyone have a great day and a wonderful Presidents Day!

 

Good Morning Porch Pfolks! Not much to do today but Putz, and see how NASCARs fancy new generation does at the big track. Used up my dozen bags of mulch just out front (I think I put it on even thicker than normal). Fixed the wrapped flags, and had too much time on my hands. But my wifes friends Highlander had been sadly staring at me all the time. I didn't have a restore kit, but I did have cleaner and sealant, so I rubbed on those for about an hour. Darn dangerous as it was.







I heard one day last week was "random act of kindness day", so what the heck. Burgers were good, and she said people flashed their lights at her on the way home.

 

Good Afternoon.
0° on the ice this morning but,
God ,,,couldn’t ask for a nicer view and
Healthy enough to enjoy it..

 

Afternoon all:
Where's all the fish Mike?
Waiting for my fishing buddy to get back from Oneida Lake NY, yesterday had to be brutal on them, today not so bad.
Other guys reported whiteout conditions for a while and high winds yesterday, sounds like a fun time to be out ice fishing.

 

I back up my iPhone to my windows computer using the iTunes program and a USB connection to the PC. I would think it's basically the same process with an Apple laptop.

 

You can set your iPhone to automatically backup everything daily to the cloud.
Here’s what iCloud Backup includes

• App data
• Apple Watch backups1
• Device settings
• Home screen and app organisation
• iMessage, text (SMS) and MMS messages2
• Photos and videos on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch2
• Purchase history from Apple services, such as your music, films, TV programmes, apps and books3
• Ringtones
• Visual Voicemail password (requires the SIM card that was in use during backup)

 

Fish are right where I left them. 16” down under the ice. Had lot of bait stolen. No hookup..

 

Be careful what you say about Comcast -- someone I know just retired from there and was quite pleased with his years working for them! Just kidding, I learned long ago to let the "I hate Comcast" stuff roll right on past.

I decided to go with TP-Link. It's really aimed at small business and/or savvy home users, a direct competitor to Ubiquiti. My WiFi in parts of the house isn't the greatest, and I've been meaning to improve that part of the network; TP-Link stuff works in concert with other TP-Link stuff to accomplish that. Their ER605 router allows me to set up multiple WAN connections, link multiple WiFi access points together into one network, and even manage it all centrally. They're also big into PoE (Power over Ethernet) which means you can stick a camera or WiFi access point or whatever you want, wherever you want, and only run ethernet because the device gets its power from the ethernet cable itself. Pretty cool for that reason, plus it lets me do stuff like run the whole works off of a single battery backup. I spent all day getting the configs where I wanted them, now waiting for firmware upgrades to happen. Tomorrow we plug it in to the home network!

 

I live in a log cabin in the woods. I love it.
My DSL is sometimes as fast as 2.5.
I wish I could complain about cable.

 

Living in the back of beyond has some advantages, internet not being one of them.
I just did the speed test on my DSL, they must have done an upgrade as it was all the way up to 9.49!

 

Good morning fellow Porchatonians!!

Comcast services our "area", as in they service all the homes along the roads both north and south of us...but won't run cable down our portion of the road because we only have 6 homes on our section.....unless we pay them (as of a few years ago's quote) $50k. So, we sit at the 3.2 mile mark of a DSL line that achieves blazing download speeds that sometimes approach 1 mb and upload speeds of almost 500k. Can't even run a Ring Doorbell system with less than 1 mb of upload speed. If we had 2 businesses on our road we'd only have to cough up $15k to get the cable line run. Now it really doesn't impact me much but when I was trying to run the college from home during the pandemic and having ZOOM or Teams meetings several times a day, it was common for me to lose connectivity and get bounced off meetings. We rely on Direct TV for our TV and movies.

Such is life in the boonies.

 

Life in the boonies...We're so far out in the woods we have to have sunlight pumped in!
Any of y'all try Hughesnet (satellite)?
We may be trying it again. We had it 10 years ago and it was less than great but supposedly is improved now?

 

You guys living in the boonies might be able to get Starlink internet someday.
https://www.inmyarea.com/provider/starlink#starlink-availability

 

Good Morning Porch Peoples! I feel so guilty for living IN a small town with regular cable....

Trip into Austin for the Last RAV4 Toyota Care visit. Their computer says should be the 20K visit - sitting about 9500. Quick Lowe's stop on the way home, and let the wife have it back for a grocery pickup. She's letting the store do the shopping, and bring it to her car these days. It's pretty good if they "have" everything, and they give good "coupons" for these customers. And, the dog gets a ride. About every other week she's got to go in for something they didn't get (or get right). She likes it, so I guess it's a fair trade.

 

The issues I have with any satellite service is latency and weather impact. We lose our Direct TV in bad storms although their satellites are pretty low on the horizon. Starlink has lower orbit systems which would lessen latency...but weather remains an issue and they keep having issues getting started. They've been promising service to our area for a year and a half...and still nothing.

 

LOL... I won't pay for channel surfing. I get everything I need with an antenna and I put the money into fun, projects or travel. Cable??? Pfffft...

 

Actually was 'pre-signed up' for Starlink ($100 down payment) and it was supposed to be ready here over a year ago.
I've since requested and received my deposit back. It seems they are having a few problems which is understandable with new technology sometimes.
It also seems kind of expensive since you have an initial equipment cost of $500 and an additional $100 per month afterwards.
Also, not much of a guarantee that it'd even work right. Elon Musk does have a pretty good track record though!

 

my semi-suburban (used to be more rural) location we have Spectrum cable high speed internet, can stream movies etc. I would rather be in a cabin in the mountains near the New River though lol