Month: March 2018

So yesterday, I was lamenting the demise of my 3rd favorite program. From a creative perspective, this sucks. About 10 years ago, Adobe put a collective boot up the ass of its users by getting rid of “Go-Live”. It was a Web GUI coders dream. It wasn’t the easiest program to learn, but it was way powerful. In my college career, I learned to program in HTML which at the time was ok but there were GUI tools that could do hundreds of lines of complex code easily. This realization is what drove me to Go-Live. Instead of being flummoxed and confused with complex code, I began using GUI drag and drop tools that programmed behind the scenes and made my wildest dreams come true. It was a programmer’s nightmare or an artists dream. No more crappy rules to remember, structures to mess with, no syntax worries. WYSIWYG drag and drop – that codes. Sweet. But as my grandfather said: “All good things must come to an end…” And GoLive was discontinued in 2007 and replaced by it’s dumbed down cousin – MUSE. MUSE was not nearly as powerful as GoLive, but it came with fairly decent templates that a slightly technical type could use. It still had some of the cool power that GoLive used to have, but it was now neutered and only a fraction of what it once was – I’ll use the metaphor of a “Eunuch”. Now, alas Adobe has euthanized even the Eunuch – MUSE – and gave us “Spark”. Where the hell is Adobe going with this? It’s so basic that that the proverbial “Monkey with a hammer” could use it. Do I want Dreamweaver? Hell no – it’s so complex I feel that I could theoretically send a man to the moon before I could finish a web page. What is the driving force behind this? Lazy Millennial’s with their cell phones and social media??? Lazier technophobic, baby-boomers who are still think that the web is a passing fancy? Gen-X’ers who never really learned the fundamentals of either lay-out or coding, that put no stock in tools to help build websites at home and are willing to just offshore their intellectual property and are solely money driven? Or just bad leadership decisions within Adobe? In any event, I’m just pissed.

-Rat

So, here I am working this evening and F4211 is giving me fits as usual. Flipping Planner environment and C code. So, I finally figured out my RatsNest basement dilemma. The issue is that the old Airport utility that manages the apple products no longer works as advertised. With one of the iOS releases, you can now manage Apple routers, much to my chagrin. So, now that’s fixed. I ran the cable for the AppleTV POC and the wife likes it. I ordered DirectTV Now with the free AppleTV for a steal. It really feels like petty larceny, but who am I to argue with a 10B LargeCap Company? So, I finally get to cut the cable TV cord with Comcast – yeah! Now I get honors to also cut the VOIP cord. Heh, heh. I’m going to MagicJack and porting my number. I even get to give back the router for 10$/month and the extra box for 5$/month since I have a Cable modem that supports DOCSIS 3.0. Just need to somehow get 2 more AppleTVs. I guess I can just order another DTV service. I made kind of an interesting email move today going with proton mail. They are a service that encrypts their content and you can get a service with VPN to block the cable provider and keep them from spying on your content. Facebook should learn something.

-Rat

Wow! I just learned how to put a picture in my post. Very cool.

So, I have been wrestling with my Apple infrastructure in my basement. It was stable with one Apple router, I added a second and it was just crazy unstable. The whole reason behind this was to create a wifi network/infrastructure in the basement that rivaled my upstairs. Which when actually examining it, it wouldn’t be that difficult due to the lack of signal strength. I am trying to connect the AppleTV in the front room, what a pain. Tonight I need to reset the Apple routers again for the third time. Hopefully, it will work for me. I think I’m just going to order from DirectTV and go with the DirectTVNow on the Apple TV and be done with it. However, I need to some longer cables. Maybe 2 50ft CAT 6 cables. Also been looking at a Gigabit Ethernet Switch – 16 port and manageable. My Router is only 4 ports and is could easily need 4 more. Maybe just look at the Asus ROG Tri-band 5300 instead. That would give me 4 extra ports on the 1st floor by the cable modem. Move the current 5300 to the office via wire to extend the wifi footprint out to the backyard. I actually could use both.

-Rat