Mr. Fixit


I went back to broadband at home. Verizon DSL. Setup was easy, but my wireless hub must've had a bad card, so I bought a Airport Express. I also tried fixing a keyboard that my son had spilled something on. Ixnay on the ixfay.

With Verizon, the serviceman didn't even have to come in the door. They send out the DSL modem/router beforehand, and it has a setup disc with it. During setup, it used Internet Explorer for the browser, which I thought was rather anachronistic, since I think they require OS X 10.2 or higher.

It looks like Verizon blocks port 80 somehow. I was able to talk to my website using another port. It was the only port that didn't work immediately; SSH, FTP, AFP, all worked at their usual port numbers.

Airport Express is about the size of a bagel. It plugs right into the wall outlet, then I ran the CAT-5 from the DSL modem into it, and that was that. The iMac upstairs, the iMac downstairs, and my iBook all have wireless, but I still have Panther upstairs, and that one, even though it's always connected to the net, has this password thing going on: every time that it logs out, upon logging in again it needs to be reconnected to the wireless network. Strange.

The keyboard thing was interesting. I found a tiny screwdriver at Sears to open up the back, then inside it's all tiny phillips heads. About 12 zillion of them. But once I saw the inner plastic circuit board, I knew it was shot. The liquid had gotten inside it somehow.

Posted: Mon - July 18, 2005 at 09:05 AM      

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