New banner photo! Actually an old digipic, but I thought it was about time to bump Dad off the roster, and I was too lazy to scan in the pics from the last coast trip. So ya get to see Kelly snoozing. How old is that pic anyway?
Funny thing is, it's been sitting on the compactflash card I use in my Nikon Coolpix 950 forever. I let my wife use the camera to take pictures of Kelly during her horseback riding lessons, and downloaded them to the kitchen computer for her. The kitchen computer, Haruko, is still running Mac OS X 10.1.5, and the older flashcard reader I've had since Mac OS 8 days, works with it fine. [unfortunately, the horsey pictures were all kinda fuzzy, so you won't see them in the banner for now]
I then tried to grab the one banner photo shown above by downloading it to my den computer, Megumi, which is running Panther (Mac OS X 10.3.1). No go. Not even after reinstalling drivers, rebooting, etc., etc.
After some research on the Internet, I find this is a familiar problem with some USB card readers, in fact with any which require you to install drivers to use them. USB 1.1 is a standard device API, and any modern OS is supposedly able to work with any compliant device. No drivers required. So the older gadget ain't compliant. A round of email with the manufacturer, who shall remain unnamed and hence unpromoted, informed me that they had no plans to supply drivers for Panther. "I have no plans to buy your brand again", I thought.
A trip to Fry's got me a new Lexar USB card reader, this one labelled Mass Storage Compliant, which are the magic words assuring compatibility with the USB 1.1 spec. By the way, buzz on the web is that Lexar knows how to do this right. I fussed with whether to buy a $20 no-name card reader, $10 cheaper than the Lexar one, but decided to go with the known quantity. As it turns out, there was a markdown on the Lexar item, and I only paid $9.90 for it. Cool!
So the crusade to switch all our machines over to Panther proceeds apace. And printer sharing over the Airport works great too! Can't wait for Christmas season when I finally transition Jean's machine to Panther.
That's such a darling pic of Kelly. I love the Ariel and Powerpuff Girls motif =) So when do we get to see the anime bedsheets? *chuckle*
ReplyDeleteAnime bedsheets? Jean does all the kid's clothes and bedding purchases, and she isn't an anime fan like me.
ReplyDeleteNow if you want to see three stuffed Totoros, eighteen variations on Pikachu, and a mountain of Pokemon cards, I can oblige you