Three upgrades today!
We got a new cable modem a couple of days ago that can keep up with the supposedly faster speeds that the latest service gives us. I finally got around to installing it. Annoyingly, it refuses to go until you install a smartphone app on a phone (anywhere in the world, as far as I can tell) and use that to tell the cable provider the MAC address of the cable modem you're enabling. Why you can't do this on their website I don't know -- it is already possible to configure every other thing about a cable modem there. I gave the app a 1 star rating and I had a lot of company for that. We haven't tested the range yet but it does seem to address some airflow issues that made the old one overheat a lot.
A script at work has been nagging me to upgrade the OS on my work laptop to a newer version, using a provided installer. Said installer has bricked the machines of several of my coworkers and I was hoping to wait until I could bring the brick to a person and exchange it for a new computer instead of having to do that by mail. But that's not going to be for a long time now. After gathering some evidence it appeared that the problem is that the amount of free disk space required is more than the installer thinks, and so people who're clearing out only that much space wind up clearing out their whole machine. Clearing out twice that much space seems to work, and I have plenty of external drive space so I moved a few large files around and everything went fine. First, though, I made sure that I could get work done from my personal laptop if I had to, and that effort will probably turn out to be useful.
Some construction here required shutting the power off for a couple of hours and one of our ethernet-over-powerline boxes didn't come back from that. F materialized a new one in what seemed like no time at all and we plugged it in. We had to rearrange the plugs in the outlet to fit it in with the new cable box's power plug but that did work after a bit of trial and error. F is testing it out with some Overwatch and it seems to work OK. Supposedly the new ones are a little less fragile.
We got a new cable modem a couple of days ago that can keep up with the supposedly faster speeds that the latest service gives us. I finally got around to installing it. Annoyingly, it refuses to go until you install a smartphone app on a phone (anywhere in the world, as far as I can tell) and use that to tell the cable provider the MAC address of the cable modem you're enabling. Why you can't do this on their website I don't know -- it is already possible to configure every other thing about a cable modem there. I gave the app a 1 star rating and I had a lot of company for that. We haven't tested the range yet but it does seem to address some airflow issues that made the old one overheat a lot.
A script at work has been nagging me to upgrade the OS on my work laptop to a newer version, using a provided installer. Said installer has bricked the machines of several of my coworkers and I was hoping to wait until I could bring the brick to a person and exchange it for a new computer instead of having to do that by mail. But that's not going to be for a long time now. After gathering some evidence it appeared that the problem is that the amount of free disk space required is more than the installer thinks, and so people who're clearing out only that much space wind up clearing out their whole machine. Clearing out twice that much space seems to work, and I have plenty of external drive space so I moved a few large files around and everything went fine. First, though, I made sure that I could get work done from my personal laptop if I had to, and that effort will probably turn out to be useful.
Some construction here required shutting the power off for a couple of hours and one of our ethernet-over-powerline boxes didn't come back from that. F materialized a new one in what seemed like no time at all and we plugged it in. We had to rearrange the plugs in the outlet to fit it in with the new cable box's power plug but that did work after a bit of trial and error. F is testing it out with some Overwatch and it seems to work OK. Supposedly the new ones are a little less fragile.