{“Hmm, it seems the clever folks at Crazy Apple Rumors have ferreted out the “,”. While I attempt to find a way to obtain a refund on four dinners ingested last Tuesday night, I might mention another issue or two that cropped up during the now-successful move from my mother’s old iMac to her new flat-panel model (and from a slow dial-up connection to cable modem).
The new iMac sits on the desk on the far side of Mom’s bedroom. While giving her the lowdown on the Mac and OS X, she asked how to shut down.
“Don’t worry about shutting down. Just put it to sleep. It will come to life much more quickly than if you were to start it up after it’s been shut down.”
This morning she had another question:
“How do you turn off that annoying light?”
“Huh?”
“The one that pulses all night and keeps you awake.”
“Oohhh, uh, there isn’t a setting for doing that.”
“Then here’s something you can pass along to your readers: Sticky Notes. I had to peel off about five of them to make the pulsing tolerable. Maybe you could find some black tape today to really take care of the problem.”
Consider it passed along, Mom.
The other issue worth bringing up is that there’s a trick to using some cable modems (the one here, for example) with another computer.
While the cable modem works fine with Mom’s iMac, it didn’t deliver the goods when I plugged it into my PowerBook — no, not even when I renewed the DHCP lease in my Network system preference. Here’s the scoop:
The cable modem glommed onto the iMac’s MAC (Media Access Control) address — the unique ID serial number of the Ethernet card in a computer. When I plugged the modem into my PowerBook, it refused to let go of that address and therefore wouldn’t recognize my computer. To force it to work with my laptop I had to reset the modem by briefly pulling its power cord (there’s no on/off switch) and then plug it into the PowerBook. When reset, the modem pulled the MAC address from the PowerBook and performed as expected. “}