This year I got my first smartphone, the HTC Thunderbolt. Within a couple of weeks I was in love with the phone, but still had no real idea how to use it more fully.

Enter apps. I’m still somewhat hesitant to download a bunch of them but there are a few that I have downloaded and stuck with that I like a lot, for different reasons. I thought I’d share mine here and then see if y’all come up with some I should try. These are Android apps, so if you don’t have an Android you might not be able to use all of these, though I think some of them are universal.

1. TweetCaster. This is what I use to access Twitter on the smartphone, and I have to admit that I love it. I first tried using TweetDeck, which I have on my computer, but it just didn’t work the same. However, Tweetcaster allows for some of the same type of customization that TweetDeck does on the computer, and I loved it so much that it became my first apps purchase for the pro version.

2. Evernote. This was recommended by a local friend of mine and was one of the first apps I downloaded. It allows me to keep track of information by typing it into a program on my computer or on the smartphone and having things sync between them. On the computer I use it to keep lists such as groceries and medications, and on the phone I use it to save links I come across while on Twitter that I can view later in a larger space on the computer. It has many other uses as well.

3. SPD – it stands for Super Private Conversation. I downloaded this one because I kept getting repeat messages and sales calls from people I didn’t know. This allows you to block someone the first time and you never have to deal with them again. With new legislation that’s being passed we’re all going to be getting more sales calls, so I see this coming in handy as time goes by.

4. Shortyz. Hey, we all get to have some fun, right? In this case it’s a crossword puzzle app that downloads digital crosswords from some of the top periodicals in the country like the NY Times and USA Today, as well as a host of others. You get to program which ones you want and whether you want it to automatically download them or wait for you to ask.

5. Comic Strips. Y’all know I’m a big kid at heart. I also don’t subscribe to a daily newspaper anymore and rarely buy the Sunday paper. The only thing I cared about anyway was the comics pages. This app allows you to select from a lot of different comic strips and it downloads them automatically every day. You can view them when you’re ready, as it retains, at least as far as I’ve seen, up to 3 or 4 months worth of each.

That’s all I have. I have tried some others but all have fallen somewhat short, including, of all things, the Firefox app. But I expect I’ll keep trying some of the free ones as time goes by.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011-2012 Mitch Mitchell

If you’re like me, you probably like using the quick launch toolbar. If you’re still like me, you start having way too many things on that toolbar, to the extent that it’s starting to take up a bunch of real estate on your monitor. That part is irksome, but the other part is wonderful. Is there another way?

This program was found by our buddy Mitchell Allen of Morpho Designs and shared with me. The site is called Apathy Networks and program is called Quick Cliq. It’s called a “launcher” program, and what it allows you to do is add “shortcuts” (I’m assuming y’all know what shortcuts are) to a menu that you access by right-clicking your mouse, pulling down slightly, then releasing, and having everything you want in your newly created menu.

I had to try this out so I downloaded the program, which comes in a Zip file, and basically there’s only the program in there as well as a couple of small text files. You open the program and then follow the instructions, which initially might seem hard but actually it’s telling you exactly what to do.

When you get the initial menu it’s pretty much a blank slate. The way you add programs to your list, at least the easy way, is to drag shortcuts off your desktop or any of your program files into the menu and there you go.

You’ll see icons at the top which, if you hover over them, tells you what each one represents. The first icon you shouldn’t have to use. The second icon allows you to create a menu of files you’d like to open that aren’t programs, and I did that by adding certain files I open all the time like my password file, some coding files, and some other files for data I track. It doesn’t care what format they are, and in this case you’re pulling the actual files instead of looking for a shortcut for those files. The third icon adds separators, which can be kind of cool but aren’t necessary.

I’d skip the 4th icon, which brings you to the next two icons. Those allow you to move the programs up and down so you can put them where you want them to be. I put the files I use often at the top, even though when you open the menu you’re normally in the middle, because I tend to look up at first almost all the time.

What it’s allowed me to do is first kill all the rows I had before except for one, then set the entire toolbar to totally disappear until I decide I need it, like when I need to reboot or want to check to see what the time is. Otherwise all my programs open fully, my wallpaper can be shown in its full glory, and I have easy access to all my favorite programs all the time with just a click, drag and release. Very neat little program indeed; oh yeah, it’s free!
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

After years of fighting the demons of getting a video camera for my computer I finally got one in December. Then, after years of fighting it because I didn’t have a video camera, then months of thinking about it, I finally got Skype. Now that I’ve created an account I want to ask you, the masses, just what the heck I’m supposed to be doing with it.

To date I’m connected to 5 people. I’ve only talked to three of them, but only two of them by video. I’m glad to have talked to the third person, our friend Vernessa because I wouldn’t have known that you could go totally audio without having to do the video thing. That was really important to me because, well, I tend to heat up in the evenings and sometimes during the day and I’ll sit at the computer without a shirt on. Sure, guys can get away with this, but I like to protect as many people as I can from seeing any of this uncovered; yeah, I know, TMI! lol

Anyway, I now have this Skype account; just what am I supposed to do with it? Before I loaded it I kept hearing from all these people who said they had Skype accounts and wondered if I had one so we could talk. Well, all those people seem to have disappeared. I thought it was the growing thing for business, to be able to talk to people and have them see you while interacting with each other; nope, none of that.

What gives? I assume there’s a bit of etiquette and being protective with this thing, but is there also apathy? Am I late to the game?

I mean, do I put my Skype address in my advertising? Do I list it on my websites, or here on this blog? I’ve never seen anyone else do that, but I’d have to admit that it wasn’t something I paid a lot of attention to in the past. And do you just up and call people if you find their number or do you send email first then wait for them to say “okay, hook me up”?

Frankly I’m stumped. Vernessa said she basically stays on most of the time, but Homegirl, truthfully, the only time I’ve ever seen you on when I’ve had the program open was the one time we talked. I’ve got it open as I write this a day before it’ll post and I don’t see anyone I know on. Then again, it’s only 5 people.

This kind of reminds me of the issues I’ve seen with the Hangout feature on G+. It works great, but only if you can find people to talk to. Supposedly you have to set it up way in advance to talk to people. That’s not such a big deal I suppose, and maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to work with Skype as well. I just don’t know.

So, for once, I’m asking questions. How do y’all use Skype? Are you using Skype? And what’s the protocol, if any, for getting the word out without inviting all the crazies to hook up with you?
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

You know, back in July when I wrote the post talking about testing Chrome & coming back to Firefox I thought that all discussions about chrome would probably be over. Little did I know that discussion would open up again via a conversation I had with someone on Twitter.

I don’t remember what exactly started the conversation, that at one point in the conversation the young man and I started talking about browsers and he said regarding Firefox “Maybe it’s for old people? My visitors use IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari. In that order.” When I commented on that, saying I had trouble believing it, he said “I manage 5 of my own, plus about two dozen for clients. Never seen anything but IE in first. You, sir, are an anomaly.”

First I have to address the “old” issue. I would doubt that age would have anything to do with what browser anybody decided to use except for possibly IE, and then only because it’s the default browser that comes with Windows. Whereas younger people might learn from their friends later on that there are better browsers, older participants might not hear that information, and thus will stick with what they know.

Old? Let’s look at old for a minute. I first got on the Internet December 1995. Back then, there weren’t a lot of choices when it came to browsers. The first one I remember using came with America Online, and everybody was using that because AOL was everywhere. Later I discovered IE, but learned that there were security issues with it. All the “cool kids” were using Netscape, and when I gave that a try I said “wow”. That was my browser of choice until it was bought by whomever (can’t remember right now but I’m sure it will come to me later) and Mozilla decided to go out on their own.

The first Firefox was wonderful. The only thing I lost in switching to it was the ability to code within the browser. But since I had another program for that I didn’t mind so much. The best thing about Firefox is always been customization. You can pretty much customize it to do whatever you want to do. For instance, I have a bunch of extensions that allow me to do things such as change what websites look like, change the functionality of my browser, give me information and immediately so that I don’t have to go elsewhere, and a host of other things I’d rather not get into right now. True, adding all those extensions will slow things down a bit, but since I added the extra RAM to my computer things have been running beautifully.

My friend believed that speed and clean browsing is more important than customization. I will agree with that to an extent. If my browser slow down the files I wanted to download I’d probably have a gripe. The browsers have nothing to do with that, IP’s do. If speed was the only thing my friend really cared about he wouldn’t be using Chrome at all, he would be using Opera, which even now is the fastest browser I’ve ever seen. Not only that but Chrome, which is a Google product, tracks pretty much everything you do online. Everybody knows it, but there is something about younger people who really don’t care that their tracks and really don’t care about their privacy as much as us “older” people, who had to deal with things such as the red scare, communism and all that other garbage that we’ve proven really was a flawed model.

That’s enough of the “old” talk. Let’s talk about the demographics of browser use when it comes to webpages. As you saw in his quote above, he stated that Chrome was the top browser being used by people who visited all of his websites. With the caveat being that there is no way I can determine the age of the people who visit all the websites that I have in the websites I manage, let me show you the numbers that I see for all of my websites based on Google Analytics; by the way, if you care, you can view this information under Visitors, then look at the bottom under “technical profile”:

Firefox 37.55%
Chrome 25.97%
Internet Explorer 17.94%
Safari 11.36%

Internet Explorer 32.48%
Firefox 28.57%
Chrome 18.86%
Safari 11.83%

Firefox 38.61%
Chrome 26.19%
Internet Explorer 22.92%
Safari 7.91%

Firefox 30.57%
Internet Explorer 26.57%
Safari 17.43%
Chrome 13.71%

Firefox 57.39%
Chrome 20.87%
Internet Explorer 7.83%
Safari 5.22%

Firefox 31.78%
Internet Explorer 31.01%
Chrome 26.36%
Safari 4.65%

Internet Explorer 57.81%
Firefox 19.20%
Chrome 10.93%
Safari 6.44%

Firefox 45.59%
Internet Explorer 27.94%
Safari 13.24%
Chrome 8.82%

Internet Explorer 51.25%
Firefox 23.75%
Safari 10.00%
Chrome 10.00%

Internet Explorer 40.00%
Firefox 32.31%
Safari 10.77%
Chrome 9.23%

Internet Explorer 79.13%
Firefox 9.88%
Chrome 5.62%
Safari 3.34%

Internet Explorer 36.86%
Chrome 19.49%
Safari 17.37%
Firefox 16.95%

Internet Explorer 53.95%
Firefox 21.31%
Safari 8.59%
Chrome 7.90%

Internet Explorer 32.04%
Firefox 30.10%
Safari 15.53%
Chrome 13.59%

Internet Explorer 40.32%
Firefox 29.03%
Chrome 14.52%
Safari 8.06%

Internet Explorer 54.21%
Firefox 17.37%
Safari 13.68%
Chrome 6.84%

Internet Explorer 64.66%
Firefox 18.10%
Chrome 7.76%
Safari 4.74%

There’s a couple other websites I manage, but I didn’t want to bring those clients into the mix. However, their numbers are pretty much the same as all the others I’ve shown you above. Since the only one where Chrome actually beats Firefox for my sites is my anti-smoking site, I can probably conclude that only sites that addicts visit tend to use Chrome more often than Firefox, but that would be pretty silly.

Anyway, those are my numbers. I don’t necessarily expect that everybody who has a website will end up with numbers like mine, but I wanted to paint kind of a broad brush because I guess the “old” thing was something I felt I needed to address. But it would be interesting to hear from some of the rest of you what your analytics look like when it comes to browsers that visit your sites, especially those of you who are younger than 35, since I believe my young friend is actually younger than that. Seeing as how in 1995 I was 36 years old, that means that I was older than he is now, which could mean that in his eyes I’ve always been old. But that’s okay because I’m feeling pretty old myself these days; good thing I’ve got that Vegas trip coming up.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Well, what a bummer this news way. Google announced last week that it was stopping work on Google Desktop and a host of other programs they’re normally working on. That depresses me because I loved Google Desktop, loading it many years ago and happy once again when the latest version came out for 64-bit.

Of course I saw this coming, but was still hopeful. Just like many other programs they put out that worked well with Firefox, I knew that as they pushed their own browser more that things they were working on with the Mozilla people was going to come to the end. And if they’d added Desktop as part of their Chrome browser, I might have at least used Chrome for that.

Their reasoning is that people can search for almost anything on their computers now through our operating systems. That’s not quite true. If there was a reference to a golf program in an email I’d send 2 years ago it’s not coming up on a Windows search, and I doubt it would come up on a mac search either. However, that part of the Desktop program seemed to shut down last July anyway, and I’ve been trying all sorts of things to get it to index newer mail, all without success. Search will find things in programs, but I still need something to help me find words within my email (I use Thunderbird).

This comes on the heels of their announcement in July that they were shutting down Google Labs, which allowed people to go in and test things Google was working on, then report what they observed.

They’re also shutting down a company they purchased last year, Slide, which made games and social media apps. They gave no reason for this move except to say that all the employees of the company would be merged into Google and that the creator of the company was moving on to do some other things.

The questions are vast here. Is Google suddenly tightening their belts because they’re getting competitive pushes from other companies? Could it have something to do with G+ and all the machinations about it, including claims from some (like me) that it might be just the latest “dog” of social media? Could it be the lawsuit against they for patent violations that’s threatening their HTC line of smartphones? Or could it be that they realized their operations were getting a bit unwieldy and they want to sharpen focus on their main lines of business?

Don’t know, and I’m not sure I care. I knew nothing about Aardvark, and I never downloaded Google Pack. I will miss Desktop, and probably will kill it soon since email is my main thing. But they move on, I move on; it’s a fairly symbiotic relationship in that manner.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Y’all know I haven’t had my smartphone for a very long time, but I have learned about a couple of things here and there that are helpful, for whatever reason, to both the phone and my home PC. One of those programs is an app and program called Evernote.

Evernote is basically a connection between your computer and your smartphone. What it allows you do to is capture something on either end and by doing a sync having it show up on the other platform so you can use it. For instance, something I use it for because my short term memory is going (hey, I’m over 50!) is for a grocery list. I created what’s called a “note” that I titled “grocery list”. Then I just pop in what I need to remember to buy from the grocery store and, because I always have my phone on me, when I’m in the store and have totally forgotten why I’m there I can grab the phone, run the sync, and what I put in it at home will be there.

Something else you can do from the other end is take a picture and save it in a note and then run the sync when you get home. This means you can easily save images you took elsewhere to your computer for use elsewhere; I use them in some blogs posts here and there. Also, when I’m away from home something I tend to often do it come upon a website that I’d like to see again at home, most of the time blogs I want to comment on but don’t have time then and there. All I have to do is highlight the link, go to the phone’s menu and select save, and then pick the Evernote program and it creates a new note with that link.

You can also do all these things in reverse but there are some differences. No matter what you do, you can’t copy an image to your smartphone from Evernote. And sometimes if the link doesn’t come through as a link from your computer you can’t look that up either. At least I haven’t yet figured out how to copy and paste anything on the smartphone; if anyone has any ideas on that one please let me know.

You can create categories called “notebooks” so you can have multiple types of messages. You can also tag these things so if you’re unsure where they are you can search for them. I haven’t gotten to that point yet but if I ever become a power user I might. You’re allowed up to 2GB of data that you can have for free on Evernote; that’s not bad at all.

Oh yeah, but that tells you that the app and program are free; can’t beat that. It was recommended to me and now I’ll recommend it to you; enjoy!

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Last weekend I finally had it with Firefox. After one more crash because it was blowing up my resources I decided it was time to give up the ghost and I switched to Chrome.

I had two other alternatives, of course. I could have gone to Opera, which has always been pretty fast, but it just seems so sparse. True, one should probably only think about using a browser to browse the internet, but many of us are looking for certain things from our browsers to enhance the user experience, if you will. I also could have gone to IE8 but decided I just don’t want to go backwards, even though I’ve heard good things about IE9, which I haven’t loaded yet.

Anyway, Firefox had suddenly decided to go nuts on me. It was using some major league resources on my computer, once to the tune of 1.8GB; that’s a lot. It was regularly going over a gigabyte, and that was way too much. Then it started crashing all the time, asking me to send crash reports to Mozilla. Last Sunday it crashed the 7th time in one day and that was that.

So I made Chrome my default browser. I had been thinking about it anyway, but not without some reservation. It’s a Google product, as you know, and almost anything related to Google wants to track you. I wrote a post in 2010 telling people that if you use Google Toolbar it tracks your searches and then you start getting targeted advertising. I know they try to tell us it’s for our benefit but I just don’t feel the benefit if you know what I mean. At least you can turn it off for Google Desktop.

I used Chrome for about 4 days and started to feel that, though it had been running better than Firefox, it had issues as well. For instance, every once in awhile it just hangs for a little bit. I went to check the resources and found that it was using a gigabyte of memory as well; what the hey? It seemed to handle that much memory a little better than Firefox but not entirely; that was shocking.

Then I started missing some of my customization. For instance, I was able to modify the look of Firefox to what I was used to in the past; you can’t do that with Chrome. Also, certain plugins that make using a browser that I’ve come to like aren’t available on Chrome. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t figure out how to get anything onto Chrome whatsoever. Well, I did finally get one thing to work, but that was it.

Yup, I started missing Firefox, but I had to do something to help it stop crashing. I decided to take a look at all the plugins I was running, along with other things, to see what I really didn’t need anymore. I ended up disabling, then removing, a lot of things that I noticed didn’t even work anymore. Firefox 5 automatically disabled some thing it said it wasn’t compatible with, but I use both Stylish and Greasemonkey and it turns out some scripts with each of those weren’t working anymore either, and could have been causing a conflict.

The verdict is pretty good so far. The highest recorded memory since I made the changes is 525MB, which is easily more manageable. The browser hasn’t crashed since I started using it again and I’m happy about that as well. Maybe it’s finally going to behave; one can only hope, right?

But customization is really what puts Firefox ahead of every other browser, and in the end that’s really why it’s my favorite. That’s my story; what’s yours?

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Yesterday was a mess. It was so much of a mess that I needed to write this post so that no one else will go through what I did. Well, they will if they don’t read this post, but maybe I can help some. And yes, I’m talking about WordPress 3.2.

First, this one seemed to come pretty fast since I’m thinking it was only a few weeks ago that we upgraded to 3.1.4, and it was in May that we upgraded to 3.1.3. However, in reality it was a year ago that we moved to 3.0, and I remember that because I had to go through some gesticulations to get my blogs and websites up to PHP 5.0 so it would accept 3.0; ah, the things we remember.

Yesterday morning I saw the message about upgrading to 3.2, and I ignored it because I had other things to do. I figured that I would get to it later in the day, and I did after I’d written a few blog posts I decided to use the automatic upgrade thing that we all have, yet found that it only worked on two of my four blogs; what the hey?

Obviously I had to go research it, because I was getting this error message saying I had run out of memory. That didn’t make sense, but what did make sense is that the two blogs that wouldn’t automatically upgrade were using the same theme, though I’ve modified them so they don’t look the same. And the error message highlighted the same line, so I knew it had to be related to the theme.

What I found didn’t mention the theme, but it did say that anyone that was having the out of memory error message had to load 3.2 manually. That’s not so hard to do, and they always give the same instructions for doing it. However, most of the time I don’t follow the full instructions.

What I’ve always done is just download the new version, then load the software for both the wp-admin and wp-includes over what’s already there. That’s always worked in the past, and then for wp-content I specifically go in and load each new file instead of doing the same thing because that holds all your other stuff, such as pictures, plugins, etc. The entire thing took me 7 minutes total for both blogs; by the way, other than doing the automatic upgrade, any time you’re upgrading your WordPress software always disable your plugins and load them back when you’re done.

Anyway, when I went in to test things a lot of things wouldn’t work. I couldn’t respond to comments. I couldn’t do anything with my plugins. And the admin panel didn’t look right; not like the other two blogs.

This meant I actually had to go through the step by step process of deleting all the files from the two files I mentioned and reload it. With my FTP program, I can’t delete any folders that have files in them; the same thing probably happens to you. So, this process takes awhile, making sure I delete each file within a folder, then deleting these folders one by one and backing back out until I can eventually delete the main folders. I had to do that for both blogs, and reload everything.

At that point you’d think I was done, right? Not quite. One blog came back immediately, and I was a happy guy. The other blog, my business blog; nope. I couldn’t do anything with another new post I was writing. That is, I couldn’t add tags or a category, and I couldn’t post date anything; what the hey? And on that blog I also still couldn’t respond to comments; ugh.

I decided to go through the steps again of deleting everything then reloading the files. I ended up doing it 3 times; nothing. Then something hit me, and I opened another browser and tested things there. What do you know; it was working on another browser.

At this point it seemed that the trick was to empty the cache on the browser I always use, Firefox. I did that, went into the admin panel, and everything was working perfectly. Man, I wish I’d thought to do that up front because I might have had it right after all. Why it didn’t affect both blogs I don’t know, but everything is all right with the world once more.

Also, my research mentioned that there was some extra stuff in 3.2 which also needed more resources, which is why it might not have worked for everyone, but from this point on all other updates should work just fine. I guess we’ll see about that. Anyway, you’ve now been informed and updated and I hope if you have to go the manual route you’ll learn something from this post.

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Wow, that was fast. It was only in April that I was giving my review of Firefox 4 and now Mozilla is already releasing the Firefox 5 browser. Is there a major problem with Firefox 4? As it turns out, no.

It turns out this is the plan by Mozilla and the way they’re going to be doing things from now on; at least until they get tired of doing it this way (that’s my prediction). Their expectation is to have a new release every 3 months to try to better keep up with quick and ever-changing web technologies. The fact that, in my opinion, Firefox 4 was much better than Firefox 3 (though one of my friends differs on that view) and now we’re switching to something else is slightly irksome, but it’s hard to gripe about someone that actually keeps improving on things that we’re not paying for, unlike my rant in January about many things being new and unimproved.

What’s new in this release? Other than a few cosmetic changes the only thing I’ve heard about is a few bug fixes. Frankly, that leaves me less than impressed, but it might turn out to be a big deal. This time around I haven’t heard anyone talking about reducing how Firefox hogs resources, and that’s a major difference in past browser updates. Also, I wish someone would work on updating the Adblock Plus add-on to better help us block things we don’t like such as popups and the like.

And, based on the speed that we’re now going to see, we can look forward to Firefox 6 and Firefox 7 coming out before the end of the year or possibly at the beginning of January; gush! This is the way things are going, so it’s probably a waste of time asking what your thoughts are about the speed of coming changes, but I’m going to do it anyway; how do you feel about all of this?

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Every week I’m getting some kind of alert that some software application needs to be updated. Most of the time it’s just Microsoft, but things such as Adobe whatever, Flash, Java and even a couple of other programs I’m running here and there will pop up saying I should upgrade, and I always do.

However, not everything will alert you to the fact that there’s an upgrade. It is in that vein that last week I tried to do something different.

After one more story about someone who had their wireless connection leeched by someone else who was downloading kiddie porn I decided it was probably time to close my connection. My neighbors aren’t all that close and in my area signals get degraded quickly, but my mind said let’s not take any chances.

I have a Linksys router and figured out how to get into the software settings so I could change things around. Then it alerted me that there was a firmware upgrade for the router. I checked it out, seemed like a good deal, downloaded the program, did the upgrade, and figured all was fine. What the upgrade was supposed to do was two things. The first was to protect some of the open ports better against intrusions, and the second was to boost the speed a little bit more. I certainly wouldn’t have a problem with either of those things, and my computer still worked great.

The problem came the first time I tried to sync my Palm to the computer. Because of stupid Vista I can no longer sync the Palm via a USB connection; it has to be wireless, unless I want to take the time to go out and buy a Bluetooth connector for the computer, and I don’t. And the problem wasn’t the protection I had put onto the computer against wireless intrusions without a password either, as my laptop still accessed things fine.

The problem was that suddenly the upgrade had changed from 40-bit and 80-bit technology to 64-bit and 128-bit technology, but the Palm, being older, could only handle the older bits. I couldn’t get it to work with the computer in any way, shape or fashion. Talk about disappointing!

I worked on it for hours, then decided to shut it down and try again the next day. Same thing, couldn’t get it working, although this time I kept sporadically trying things. Nope, wasn’t happening. Then on Twitter I happened to mention it and someone said to try to do the upgrade again. I did that; as a matter of fact, not only did I do that, but I went in and turned off the wireless protection as well.

I’m not sure why but after the 4th time of running that upgrade I was finally able to sync my Palm; came out of nowhere, as I just wasn’t expecting it. I was elated beyond belief. Unfortunately, I still can’t access the internet on the Palm, but it’s more important to me that I can sync my address and date books again.

In a way, it’s a problem I should have thought about ahead of time based on the reality that many people have been trying and failing to upgrade the Flash BIOS on their Dell laptops and have found themselves with laptops that no longer work. There’s supposedly a class action lawsuit out there somewhere against them because it’s been found that many of their motherboards, estimated at around 12 million or so, are faulty and thus helped to cause the crashes.

Of course I could just go out and buy a new router like the one above, the N-series, and maybe that would help, and I may do that some day; just not now.

Either way, it does point out that whenever you’re thinking about upgrading your technology you might need to think about your older tech to see if it might cause you problems you don’t want to deal with.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell