Techy wonderfulness

Alright, despite my inner geek being...well a geek. I sometimes come a little late to the tech game. Wireless internet in my own home is one of these examples. My mother in law was there before we were. Not that I didn't want it, not that I didn't think it was cool. I was just kind of lazy on the whole subject. Then MIL gave up on hers and her router ended up in our house, so we hooked it up. This was around last Christmas. I liked it. Internet from two computers at one time made life for the two of us easier. The she decided she wanted to try it again, so at Eastertime we gave the router back, and a few weeks later bought our own. All was good again. Then one day it just stopped working. Just like that. No more wireless internet. I tried everything, nothing worked. I talked to some friends who said that has been known to happen with the particular brand of router we had and that we probably should just get a better one....this was in June. Laziness again took over. Well, my parents just went wireless in their house and I was once again inspired. I decided to dust off the old router and see what I could do. An evening or so later I was back online. I always figured that the the problems before were a PC/Mac conflict, we use both in this house alternatively, and it just seemed that if you set the firewall settings for one the other would go wonky. So this time, I wired the router directly in the the Mac (it's an iMac anyways...so it stays in one place...it doesn't need to be wireless), and went wireless on the PC laptop. So far so good, it's working great. I'm blogging from my couch.

Why does this matter...why am I blogging about it. Because the really cool part is: I just printed from my couch too! I never did this before and it's been a question in my folks new wireless system, they have three computers and they'd like them all to be able to print to the same printers. My brother in law is setting up the system and asked if I knew, I didn't and my inner geek was shamed into trying. So I did, and it worked. Really simply. So if anyone else wants to try this, here's all I did. A key point I think is that my printer is hardwired to my mac, so it just prints regularly. I enabled printer sharing on the mac...under system preferences. Downloaded Bonjour for Windows from that apple site on to my PC, installed it and then clicked on the Bonjour Printer Wizard icon it made on my desktop. It found the printer that is hooked to my mac. I followed the prompts and voila. I can print wirelessly! I'm home alone and I felt that I needed to share my joy.

I'll post about Rhinebeck later.