Sweetpea Manor Musings

I bought Mom a rooted Nook for an early birthday pressie. I got it off of ebay and it went somewhat well, though it took an evening to get it minimally sorted out. The Nook was as advertised from the ebay guy. The trouble is that it's an Android OS and that's new for me. The first free app didn't want to dl, the notice said there was no phone number associated with that account. To make a long story short, I needed to go to the 'Talk' icon on the Nook and set up a gmail account. Go figure.

After that, I dled an antivirus app, an app for making the battery more effecient, and file manager and some games. I bookmarked Fairyland and her email page. I've tutored her a few times on how to go from what place to another (just three or four clicks, but she gets confused.) I will have to make a cheat sheet for her, I believe. Part of the problem is that the icons seem to disappear. I need to learn all about that, too, but I've just been overwhelmed with all this crap. Plus summer has hit with a vengence and I hate the heat. I just want to crawl into a nice cool cave for a few months.

Really.

But, Mom loves her Nook. She downloaded a book and has exhausted the battery every day. The reason I bought the Nook instead of a tablet was that the Nook was lighter than any of the tablets I held. Since it's mainly for reading, that was important. Since it's rooted, and she actually likes the Amazon site better, she's using the Kindle app for her reading. It's all good. But that was why, giving the choices I currently have.

Last week before the Tull concert, I got the dreaded pop ups from XP Antispyware 2012--and that is a VERY BAD THING. To make a long story short, I ran my antivirus and that caught 5 things, but I still had the popups. Malwarebytes would get shut down as it tried to start up. I did a restore to a previous date and after that Windows was deeply confused and useless.

I dug the desktop out of it's cubby (spraining my back a bit) and took it into Geek Squad. Today they let me know the drive would have to be reformated. :( I had some stuff backed up, but not everythings so I'm having the data transfered to an external drive (that I bought to make backups on.) And I had to bring all my disks in to reload some of the programs. Of interest is my computer is 7 years old today. It runs XP and I've been meaning to retire it but since this is getting formated, I guess I'll have to keep it for a bit more. I'll have time to figure out what to replace it with. Next year.

Just before they called, I bought a rooted color Nook on ebay. Mom wants a ereader because the novels she's reading are huge books. A rooted Nook means some computer geek has loaded it with a full Android OS on it. Now it can have any app on it, and Mom can have a couple of ereading programs so she can buy from Amazon or B&N. She'll be able to get games, and get her email and browse the web and play her FB game. It should be a really nice tablet now. Here's a seller if anyone is interested. I'll report back in a few weeks once I have it and have played with it.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150599969171&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

I have a itouch and am only familiar with Itunes. This Android stuff is AFLE. (another f-ing learning experience.) :(

Anyone got any advice as to what app is good to get?

Last week the computer was acting screwy and one of the things I did was to upgrade Firefox to the latest version, 3.5. It seems like the right clicking does squat now. I used to right click on misspelled words and possible spellings would pop up and I'd just click on the right one. Also, if I wanted a photo, I'd right click and be able to save it. Now, the right clicking does nothing.

Does anyone know if there's a way to enable those commands? Or do I need to try to find a way revert back to an older version?

Thanks!

Mom comes home tomorrow. Yay! The cats are irritable because they miss her. I've tried to cater to their every whim, but apparently it's Just. Not. Right. Humpf. Mom called today and the laptop has worked very well. I finally went with Nod32 for the anti-virus program, btw. And I bought a Crumpler Luncheon bag from ebay for carrying the laptop around. Like someone else on my flist, I have a problem with acquiring bags and luggage and totes and purses and stuff like that.

There was just a coon argument outside. Momma with three kits was by earlier and they were very playful. This was between momma of one kit and a single coon. It wasn't that growling/snorting like bears but nevertheless when I opened the door, one adult chased the other out of the courtyard and towards the street. The nearly grown kit looked a little lost and slowly walked up towards the hill. I wonder how they find each other again after something like that? Do they meet up at the den? But doesn't that mean the youngster has to walk up by himself? The coyotes have been very active again.


SGA: ( Read more... )

ETA: Tivo quit recording on the hour and this apparently went on for another 2 or 3 minutes. ( Read more... )

Hi all,

My computer died on Christmas day and the soonest I can take it into the shop is Tuesday. Hopefully, I'll be back online a week from now. I'm hopelessly out of touch with what's going on.

Happy New Year to all! Be sure to make lots of noise at midnight to scare away the evil spirits from the new year.