making it work for you

After Hamachi didn’t work for us to network a printer, we were disappointed and a bit downtrodden. Though we still have the network up at home, it doesn’t function like a regular network (least as far as we can tell). But regardless, we are still trying other things.

One thing that looks promising is Bonjour. Now, Bonjour is something that popped up under Processes in our Task Manager and ZoneAlarm a while ago, and we could never quite figure out what the heck it does or who put it there. We believe it is attached to iTunes in some way. And we did figure out that crippling it crippled our access to the Internets. Which saddened us greatly. And lifehacker says an actual download of Bonjour (different from say its embedded cousin in Itunes, perhaps?) can help us set up networked printers. Joy! Ask Metafilter also has some interesting lines on how to share information across computers in-house.

Edit: Yes, iTunes 5.0 and beyond installs Bonjour without your knowing it. Both Bonjour and iTunes talk to the Internets separately, as evidenced by their separate ZoneAlarm calls.

Also on the networking tip, lifehacker has a handy slice of info about how to set up subdomains on a server.

It would be passe to say now that GoogleMaps (Double True!) is a killer app. But we’d say it anyway. One of the things we love about it is being able to link it into our web pages. Exploration Age has a nice tutorial about how to add Google Maps to any web page.

It would also be passe to gush over Firefox. But we just came across yet another extension that makes us squeee like little girls. X-Ray for Firefox. With a simple right click you can see the markup of a page. Shazam. For little hackers like us who learn by watching, this is amazing. Kids these days have it so fucking easy. Back in my day we had to view source if we wanted to check markup!

And, if you can’t make it work, if you can’t get it done yourself, you can always ask a favor of someone. Favorville is a neat web community that allows people to ask and offer favors. Rock.