Posted Monday, June 29, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Hi all.
Just a quick note here. A blogger who I have been reading for a while is in need of some help. She recently had some gall bladder problems and she had it removed in the emergency room. She is in pain and needs a couple of bucks to get a bed. She recently moved and has been sleeping on the couch.
I "met" Amanda through her blog as she was writing her thoughts as she deconverted from a pretty strong fundamentalist faith into agnosticism. It was a very hard journey for her (as I understand it is for many who go through similar trials). In the process she lost some friends and most of her readership. As I said, its a tough road. One I never had to go through.
I can already imagine the fundies reacting with some heartwarming responses such as "You deserve it for turning your back on god". I don't know if anyone said that, I can just imagine it. Throw a couple of bucks her way, she doesnt need much, show her how helpful the atheist community can be.
Update: Mandi has got her bed! Thanks to whomever helped!
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Posted Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by
Techskeptic
I've mentioned the perpetual motion machine company Steorn before. But it unlike other companies sellng nonsense, they never tried to justify their claims by warping science or actually, you know, selling a device. So I have kept quiet on it. The last I had heard was that they were going to get a jury of scientists to evaluate their claims. I knew that if it was a real panel, they would sort out where the extra energy was coming from.
I knew that there was a problem just from their description of their "technology" they made the claim that magnets somehow allowed them to gain energy "just like when you walk up and down a hill, you have gained energy". I knew that they would either find the error (this was being very optimistic on my part), or they were simply trying to pull a fast one (the realist in me).
Today from Ben Goldacre, I learned that the panel has spoken. Guess what. Nada. Funny part is that the company claims that the jury only looked at the technology while it suffered from a problem that has been corrected after the jury was complete. Pretty funny.
Implementing Orbo in a reliable and consistent manner had remained a challenge for the organization, one that we had made no secret of. Due to these difficulties we had focused on providing the Jury with test data relating to the underlying magnetic effect behind Orbo. This work concluded at the end of 2008.”
McCarthy concluded by stating that “during 2009 the company had resolved the key technical problems related to the implementation of Orbo and is now focused on commercial launch towards the end of this year, at which time academic and engineering validation would be released concurrent with public demonstrations”.
Typical woo.
That said, I am pretty pleased how this has all turned out. I even commend Steorn for going through with the jury. They must have themselves pretty deluded to think that they would get past an honest panel of skeptics. Regardless, they honestly went about the testing and let the jury publish their findings ( sans the details unfortunately).
This sort of reminds me of my position about NCCAM. Orac and PZ have been railing against NCCAM for years. We have found out that they spent 2.5 billion dollars finding out that virtually nothing of the CAM industry works.
But isn't that good? Isn't that exactly what we want some organization to do? Check if something works and publish the results? I'd love for CAM to work. I'd love for all that nice comforting woo to work. But I want an organization to check for efficacy with rigorous studies. Considering the scope of studies, finding out that only one worked (ginseng for chemotherapy nausea), to me was worth it. This is enough for me, you, and the government to point to and say "nonsense!". I'm pretty happy wth both the Steorn outcome and the NCCAM outcome.
I realize that Steorn has spun the result already, and most woos will simply ignore the NCCAM results. But we now have a big thing to point at. And I like that.
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Posted Monday, June 22, 2009 by
Techskeptic
For my current work I have to be aware of and understand a lot of the goings-on in the heat treating world. One avenue for pursuing this are trade journals. Like virtually every field there is a trade journal for it, and the one I am going to be talking about in Industrial Heating.
Reed Miller (pictured) puts out a rant pretty much every month about how bad the Obama administration is (or how bad it was going to be). Its pretty funny, as the economy is falling apart all around him, he was decrying how bad the next administration was going to be.
Anyway, this month was their energy savings edition. In it we get treated to not one but two rants by Miller, the editor and also Barry Ashby the Washington editor. First lets look at Millers contribution.
He starts out with the same canard you hear from every denialist: Implementing actions designed to curb climate change will ruin the economy.
As our nation became engaged in a protracted recession, no one believed “climate taxes” would happen here because it would be pure foolishness. Nobody is foolish enough to tax the engine of our economy in the midst of a recession, right?
When our president was elected, how-ever, it became clear that he wasn’t going to let a little thing like a recession prevent him from going down that road. Since President Obama seems to take his cues from Europe, I began to watch what was happening there to get a sense of where we would likely go in the U.S. In January, we began to document the news reported by our friends in Europe as well as what was happening right here in a bulletin-board thread on our website.
Let’s look at an important part there. He says that he has been looking at what is going on with other countries that have in fact implemented cap and trade schemes.
It’s hard to even mention this topic without discussing the basic reason for a carbon tax. The overhyped global-warming issue is the reason/excuse that is used. Because there has been no documented warming in the past 11 years, however, global warming is now referred to as climate change, but by any name the remedy is apparently the same – taxing consumers.
Sigh. I sigh every time I read that sort of nonsense. There is plenty of warming that has occurred, it is masked by the extremely high maximum that occurred in 1998 and the recent solar minimum. You only think that global warming has stopped if you choose a small data set and try to fit a straight line to it. You have to completely ignore the physics. You have to ignore the fact that temperature has not dropped off when solar irradiance has.
The sun only recently has reversed course to start shining more and more light on the Earth. We can expect this “global Warming has stopped” trend to be at an end now. So once you have put yourself into the global warming denial camp, is there any reason to expect endorsement of policies that go towards countering these issues? I think not.
Obama’s goal from the beginning has been to enact a European-style cap-and-trade system as a tax. If you don’t think this type of system is taxation, here’s what Obama had to say: “Under my cap-and-trade plan, electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket.” Testifying before Congress, Obama’s budget director said, “Firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the (cap-and-trade) allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices … price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program.”
uh oh… an ellipsis. Now I have to go look this up. Well first off, I find out that the first quote was not in regard to the current energy plan. Obama said this over a year and a half ago with respect to a different plan altogether. The second quote is not related to the first.
Now I am not going to pretend that I understand the intricacies of a Cap and Trade program and its effects on the economy. Seems to me, since industry is unwilling to cut carbon emissions voluntarily, some form of regulation needs to be put in place. Cap and trade is not only being used in Europe (remember Mr. Miller said he has been watching the results over there), but we use cap and trade for emissions already!
What? You didn’t know that? Yeah, we implemented a successful cap and trade program for sulfur dioxide, the main cause of acid rain. Since then acid rain and its effects have improved.
As it became obvious Congress was not going to enact cap and trade quickly enough for Mr. Obama, he decided to force their hand through the regulatory process. On April 17, the EPA declared that CO2 and five other greenhouse gases “endanger public health and welfare.” Obama is clearly trying to skirt the legislative process by not allowing the necessary discussion to take place. About cap and trade, lawmakers have stated, “Legislation so far-reaching should be fully vetted and given appropriate time for debate.” Unfortunately, if legislators take the proper amount of time, Obama seems ready to use the EPA ruling under the Clean Air Act to short-circuit the process and accomplish the same objective.
I’m sorry, where have you been for the last 30 year that this has been discussed? Obama is not short circuiting the process. The bill still has to go through congress. No congress, no debate. 30 years is plenty of time. Never mind the fact that this quote is also out of context. It was by Mike Johanns, a nebraska republican, who was not complaining that the Cap and Trade system was being skirted by congress, he was taking issue with the method by which it was being introduced in congress (through a budget reconciliation process rather than a stand alone bill). I agree it shoudl be a stand alone bill, but Mr. Reed, by taking his quote out of context had implied that Obama was trying to skirt Congress altogether, which is simply not true.
Cap-and-trade legislation is intended to apply to power plants, steel mills or other large emitters of CO2. If taxation occurs through regulation with the EPA invoking the Clean Air Act, however, smaller businesses could also be affected.
And out comes the slippery slope argument.
Under this type of heavy-handed rule making, I wonder what will happen when all of the Wal-Mart haters of the world get their hands on this?
And the fear mongering.
Assuming cap-and-trade legislation is the likely result, what will it cost the consumer? An MIT study looked at the scheme proposed by the president, who projects revenue of $366 billion in a single year. Quoting the study, John Ensign, a U.S. Senator from Nevada, estimated the tax burden on each family would be $3,000 per year. Using an alternative household number given in the MIT study, the annual impact could be as high as $4,560 per year. It is promised that some of the taxed money will be rebated back to consumers, but some of it will also be used for other purposes. Most of us know how effective government rebates are. Once they get the money, they are unable to let it go. So, it’s anyone’s guess as to what our net tax liability will be. Needless to say, it will be painful.
Any chance that this is the study that you are misusing? Republicans in congress were specifically corrected by the author who specified the additional cost may be 340 dollars. Mr. Miller is over stating this cost by ten times. Then we are supposed to trust him that the $3000/year is definitely right, but the rest of the program will never come through. Mr. Reed is cherry picking.
Can we afford another tax? Will manufacturers remain in the U.S., or will they find a less-taxed place in which to do business?
More fear mongering.
But wait! I thought he said he has been examining the effects of cap and trade in Europe. Well? What happened with that riveting analysis?
I’m am not making any claims that Cap and Trade is the right thing to do, I’d support a straight out tax on carbon that many republicans are calling for. The fact is that it is high time to get some action going and I am glad to see our president finally breaking the shackles of mediocrity and getting something in motion. Articles like Mr. Reeds provide absolutely nothing but a one sided masturbatory exercise in denialism.
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Posted Thursday, June 11, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Short post here. I'm not going to do a detailed critique.
woot.com had a sale on a Roomba. I got one. Its awesome. Even my generally technophobic wife likes it. We have a pretty big place so we keep it confined to our bedroom where the two dogs sleep at night. Our room is about 25x25, I leave the door open to the bathroom and it finds our way into the walk in closet. Its really great. Neither of us like to vacuum (who does?), so now you hit a button in the morning, go to work, dump the dirt when you get home. Really, not a lot of work there.
There are two drawbacks using it. The first is that you have to roomba-size the room. That means taping down throw rugs with strong double sided rug tape (you get it at home depot), getting rid of clutter, push stray wires against the wall, and things like that. The second is that it is not methodical. For the most part it moves around the room in a random pattern. That means you can't expect it to do that same sort of job you would do with a vacuum. That is why you bend over and press the button every day. Yeesh, so much work! Its not really a drawback, its more of a shift in the way you have to think about vacuuming your room.
Our room looks very clean all the time now, but I am still amazed that it still manages to find dog hair and such (honestly, its a little gross that the dirt cartridge is transparent, you can see how much skin and dander it sucks up).
Every week it need minimal maintenance. You need to pop out the brushes (no tools needed) and pull out the long hair (not mine!) and threads that have rolled up into the brushes. Its a 5 minute job.
Anyway, even my mom wants one now. I think these are great and I want more for the rest of our house.
Now, Dear iRobot, could you please make the following:
Lawn mower that nibbles at the grass (i.e. no large lawnmower blades, something closer to small hedge clippers. Solar powered in a way it just charges batteries during the day and nibbles at night. GPS guided in a way that I can just walk around with the GPS module to create waypoints that define the mowing area. Provide a differential transmitter so that the accuracy can be good.
For 500 bucks, I'd buy this in 2 seconds.
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Posted Tuesday, June 09, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Today Phil Plait decided it would be fun to start a firestorm by discussing denialism, in particular with respect to global climate change. Of course the denialists chimed in, always fun.
But reading (and commenting) at BA it is clear it doesn't matter how much evidence is created towards demonstrating climate change is real. The same old canards come up. Economy will get ruined. No evidence for Global warming. Ok, evidence for Global warming but no evidence that humans have anything to do with it. etc etc.
It made me realize what a denialist is.
Denialist
Someone who asks for evidence but expects proof.
What inevitably happens is that someone claims "No evidence for AGW" and you will present lots of evidence like CO2 absorption bands, upper stratospheric cooling, and a host of other things, and they may read it (or not) and simply claim "No evidence!" afterwards. They are expecting proof and if no proof is given, then no evidence is good enough. This is a form of the Nirvana Fallacy, as related to scientific study. The proof of the claim has to be perfect before any of the supporting evidence can gain any validity.
They fail to understand the concept of conditional proof of which all science is based upon. Newton "proved" out his laws of motion, and he was right, until Einstein came along and "proved" that Newton was inaccurate (as opposed to wrong). Einstein didn't even have good evidence other than paper studies until the Michelson-Morley experiments were completed. Even those didn't prove out relativity, they gave a lot of evidence supporting the theory. the new theory has to encompass the existing data. The new theory will usually be a superset of the existing inaccurate one.
There is now a lot of compelling data for the hypothesis that man is spewing too much GHGs into the atmosphere. Other theories like that it is natural Malinkovich cycles, sun and cosmic ray fluctuations, and other have been posed, argued, defended, and put away. One of the compelling arguments for the GHG as a significant factor is the fact that the physics based models depicting previous data (these aren't line fits), require the additional forcing of artificial release of GHGs to match as well as they do. I have yet to see a single denialist show that a physics based model can match historical data as well as these but leave out the GHGs.
But what a denialst will see when they look at a series of graphs like that is that they don't match perfectly. Newsflash, models never match actual data perfectly for three main reasons:
- Historical data has error in its measurements
- Models don't contain every single minor mechanism or they have approximations of some mechanisms
- Transient events happen that affect the models (like the el Nino in 1998)
But a denialist won't care. It's not perfect and therefore its useless. Meanwhile we have similar inaccuracies in modeling rocket launches but that goes Ok. We model cars and performance before we build them, and that seems to work out OK. We model chemical processing plants before sinking 100 millions into building one. Modeling as part of science is a tried and true method by which to learn about a subject. It allows for faster evaluation of "what if" scenarios and don't need to have absolute precision to be useful and reliable.
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Posted Tuesday, June 09, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Today, while looking up something for work (I am an engineering manager), I came across an interesting article written 5 years ago but is as relevant today as it was then. The huge point that this article makes is that there is no silver bullet to deal with climate change. Solar is but one part of the solution. It's not a good solution for all of our energy needs, but its good for a good part of it. Wind is the same. Even solar thermal, one of my favorites, is not a good all around solution. The answer comes in part from nukes, efficiency improvements and conservation. some of the answer will come from taking some aggressive risks on new technologies.
What is nice to see is the table they present on page 970 (it starts on page 968). When you compare this with the funding opportunities made available by the Department of Energy, you will see a high correlation. There are also a number of opportunities coming from ARPA-E and other grants specifically crafted for new and radical technologies. Finally someone in Washington is listening to scientists.
While I am glad to see a good chunk of change going towards alternative energy, conservation and efficiency, things like this make me sad.
New York
MTI MicroFuel Cells (Albany, NY)
To accelerate fuel cell use in consumer markets, MTI will demonstrate a one-watt consumer electronics power pack. The project will focus on improving reliability to meet the standards required by the electronics market and will include testing of individual components, subsystems and complete direct methanol fuel cell systems. MTI will also develop manufacturing processes to improve product yields and reduce overall costs. $2.4 million.
Why does it make me sad? Well, never mind the fact that they are making a stupid product. Let's examine this company for a second, what the latest news about them just before this funding?
Mechanical Technology says that if it does not get external funding for its fuel cell by April, it may have to curtail fuel cell work or sell the business
The stimulus money did save jobs. MTI spends about 12 million a year and were going to close their doors at the end of april. They get 2.4 million bucks... so now they can close their doors in July! Jobs have been saved! Clearly no one checked the companies who were getting immediate funds (most of the DoE stimulus money has not been spent. Solicitations are out, money has been allocated, but it is not spent). So how many other companies that were on their last leg got money like this for the sake of "saving jobs"? I see Plug Power getting two awards, did anyone check that companies financial health?
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Posted Friday, June 05, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Since the shooting of Dr. tiller, and every time something happens to an abortion clinic or a doctor who provides family planning services, there is a spate of articles and blog posts about abortion. These range from the calm and understanding to the ridiculous and inflammatory. I fully understand that pro-lifers think that abortion is murder and that murderers are getting away with an evil act.
The thing is..I simply don’t believe you.
I don’t believe you because I have never once heard of a pro-lifer acting in a way that indicates that they really believe what they say. Here is what I mean.
According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists miscarriages happen so often they rival the number of abortions that are performed. Specifically,
Miscarriages occur in about 15–20% of pregnancies. Most occur in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. Some miscarriages take place before a woman misses a menstrual period or is even aware that she is pregnant.
This is confirmed even at pro-life sites (this one puts the number at 40%). That means that if you are truly pro-life, you would be holding a funeral, like you would for any dead child, if you (or your wife, or whoever would be the one who gets pregnant) have a period while trying to get pregnant, or even are just having unprotected sex. You would check to see if the blood contained a fertilized egg (you need a lab for that), and even if you couldn’t prove there was one, you would be having the same type of funeral that you would for any child who died regardless, since, by your standard, there is a dead child in there. You would do this for a fertilized egg, a blastocyte, and embryo whether you can see them or not. Otherwise I simply don’t see how you can claim that you think that a fertilized egg is a baby.
I don’t believe you when you say that an embryo is a baby. If you thought that then you would be appalled at the state of our healthcare system, one that is allowing a health care crisis beyond that of any other malady that humans get. There are between 800,000 and a million miscarriages a year (its hard to pin down because many times a woman doesn’t know she was pregnant nor that she miscarried). Compare this with other leading causes of death:
Number of deaths for leading causes of death:
- Heart disease: 631,636
- Cancer: 559,888
- Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
- Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
- Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
- Diabetes: 72,449
- Alzheimer's disease: 72,432
- Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
- Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
- Septicemia: 34,234
If you really believed that a blastocyte is a baby, you would be urging your politicians and health officials to be funding the #1 natural killer of people in America. Where is the outrage that so little is spent on preventing such a pervasive cause of death like miscarriage (I cant even fund the number) while over 170 billion dollars is spent on measly diabetes?
[sidenote: this argument has been feebly answered before, but its done by creating a straw man. No one is saying that murder isn’t bad, but we as a society fight hard to prevent murder and prevent and treat disease. We pursue both paths vigorously through government, education, law enforcement, and research and medicine. Pro-lifers only seem to care about the perceived murder. Somehow the death of an embryo is far worse is it is caused rather than natural]
I don’t believe that you really think conception is the formation of a human life because you don’t, as a stringent practice, name your embryo. Oh you think about names, but when that baby is born, you name it and that is the name he or she has for the rest of their life. If you thought a fertilized egg was a baby you would go through the naming process before you got pregnant or very quickly thereafter. The fact that its hard to do because you don’t know if its a boy or a girl is really your problem isn’t it? I suppose you could stick with names like Jean, or Chris, or Pat.
I don’t believe you when you say abortion is wrong because you do not fight hard enough to make alternatives viable. It costs about 15,000 dollars to have a baby in a hospital, but this is covered by insurance. It costs a similar amount to adopt a baby but it is not covered by anything (although there are starting to be some avenues for help that mostly involve financing). Your choice to have your own children instead of adopting is also telling. On this (and probably only this) I agree with focus on the family. If you want abortions to be made illegal, you have a moral obligation to adopt and make adoption a low bar to hurdle. Why should people put their children up for adoption, if in all likelihood, the child will not get adopted. Think of it, there are currently 2 million kids up for adoption and only about 1.5 million of them get adopted. That leaves 500,000 kids “in the system”, and now you want to add another 1.3 million or so to that?
I also don't believe you when you say that you think a fertilized egg is a baby because while you rail against unwed mother, unwanted pregnancies, and abortions, you don't do anything to help to prevent them in the first place. You cry on and on about teenagers having sex and unwed mothers and then promote utter nonsense as a remedy for that. Instead of providing information based programs to give everyone the tools they need to be cautious and knowledgeable about sex and pregnancy prevention in a realistic and proven fashion. you promote programs that increase unwanted pregnancies. You conflate "abstinence" as an effective prophylactic with "abstinence only", a ridiculous, demonstrably poor method of educating our teenagers about their sexuality.
You say you are pro-life. You say life starts at conception. But you don’t act as if you believe it yourself, why should I?
[second sidenote: I know that some pro-lifers do some of these things. I’m sure a number of them have adopted, although when I have asked people marching in front of a clinic I have so far found that none of them have. I’m sure some of them have written to health officials to help ease the rate of miscarriages, but I have never seen an organized response toward this. I’m sure some of them have attended funerals for late term miscarriages. The measly amount of pro-lifers that do any of these things, and startlingly few, if any, who do all of them, is the reason why I simply don’t believe most pro-lifers really believe what they say]
[Third sidenote: My wife an I are having a baby soon. We had intended on adopting..but err…um… well things happen. We may still. Anyway, I say this because I wrote a lot about miscarriages in here, and I understand that it sounds like I am mocking pro-lifers in their contentions. I am dead serious about what I wrote and am not mocking people who have had miscarriages at all. Women who experience a miscarriage are more significantly affected than those who have abortions, and I can totally understand the loss and horror they must experience, as do the fathers I am sure, particularly for late term miscarriages. For anyone who has had a late term miscarriage, my heart goes out to you.]
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Posted Thursday, June 04, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Sent to me by reader Damien.
As you may recall, a few weeks back, Thomas Sam, 42, a homeopath, and Manju Sam, 37, of Earlwood, Sydney let their daughter die of an easily treatable disease, eczema. This event was covered by numerous bloggers including Orac, and others.
The basics are sadly not unique and we have heard them before..
- child gets sick
- Parents refuse to use evidence based medicine and opt for [insert woo here]
- child gets more sick
- Parents use more [woo]
- Child dies
This was exactly the case of the Sams. They took their daughter to 2 actual doctors and specifically refused their advice. Thomas Sam said "I cant do that" when his sister pleaded to him to take the child to the emergency room. It really seems as if his pride got in the way. If he relented and let actual medicine heal his child then he will have done something contrary to what he have been preaching for years. He will have denied the efficacy of homeopathy.
I would like to say "happily" he was found guilty of negligence or better yet manslaughter. And he was, but it is not happy. That poor girl suffered immensely for months. No matter what his punishment is, its still not happy.
Note: Reading that article is a bit weird. I wonder how much of it has to do with Australian speech and how much of it is hyperbole. Infected eyes don't "melt". Also it would have been nice of they separated the condition eczema, something most people associate with itchy skin, from whatever it really was that she had:
Doctor after doctor told the jury that by the time they saw Gloria in those last few days her skin condition was unlike any they had seen before.
The child actually died of Sepsis.
Update: Reader Yakaru emailed me some interesting information. You'd think that an honest industry would disown this character. You'd think that they would say something to the effect of how he is not a "real" homeopath because he either prescribed the wrong water, or because he didn't do something different to prevent this result. You'd expect something that preserves their fantasy while chastising this man for his horrific attitude and results.
No such luck. Nada, nothing out there. Yakaru found a site about Thomas Sam (cached) that explains:
Along with the wholistic treatment, regular monitoring of the blood parameters by investigations are to be carried out according to your GP or specialist’s advice to assess the condition and to evaluate progress of treatment.
Regular medication will be required in most of the chronic cases
What is there now, after this episode with the Sams? Nothing. Its gone.
How about another homeopath site (cached again) who linked to an article that says that Homeopath Sam taught his students to go to GPs
A homeopath accused of his baby's manslaughter taught students to send seriously ill or worsening patients to conventional doctor
Why no outrage from homeopaths? Why the disappearance of all links to this story? What a nonsense industry.
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Posted Monday, June 01, 2009 by
Techskeptic
I’m redoing my computer system at home after much craziness with my windows machines. It was one of the things that pushed me to get a Mac. Anyway, I’m trying to make everything all happy with three PCs and a Mac.
- I want the printer to be available to all computers even if some of them are sleeping
- I want a large hard drive to store all my itunes stuff, including movies, music, and apps
- I want access to printer or hard drive, by any computer, to be wireless
So I got an Airport Extreme. It has a USB port on it that you can connect a hub to. Then you can put whatever you want on the hub, although I have so far only tried a printer and a hard drive.
With the Mac this set up with less brain cells required than I use to pee. I didn’t have to do anything for it to work. Different story for the windows machines. A disk comes with it that contains software (Airport Extreme Base Station Agent) that lets your PC see the hard drive attached to it. This worked pretty well, and I do not recall much of an issue as long as I set up the AirPort Extreme with the mac first.
Printing is a different story. I tried the method that apple suggested using the Bonjour Printer Wizard. It didn’t work at all. It set up just fine, but it would not print.
I found this to be the most helpful advice as to how to do it, but I would add a few steps.
- Make sure you have installed the latest drivers for your printer
- Make sure the printer is recognized by the base station.
- Select 'Add a new printer' in Windows
- Select 'Local Printer' in the dialog box (auto detect and install should be off), click next.
- Choose 'Create a new port' and "Standard TCP/IP Port'. Click next.
- For the printer IP address, enter the address of the base station ie. 10.0.1.1. The port name will be filled automatically. Click next.
- For the device type, choose 'Hewlet Packard Jet Direct', then click Finish.
- Choose your printer from the list and follow the rest of the prompts to install and configure the driver.
- When it asks you if you want to use the existing driver or the new one, choose ‘existing’
This worked really well for me on the first shot. I wrote this blog post so I could get to it from the other two PC. LOL. Next I will back up the wireless drive to one of the local drives using scheduling backup software.
I hope this post helps someone, somewhere, at some time.
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