Managing a failing Canadian videotron cable connection

Many of the posts in this blog are of interest to very few people.

That's not an accident. There are some who subscribe to this blog, but it's really intended to be a set of references that work with Google. My most appreciated posts are often my most exotic. It's a big world now.

This post is very exotic. It will be of interest only to foreigners supporting a Canadian, well, maybe Quebecois, Videotron customer.

The background is that my mother, who lives in Quebec and is quite disabled, has an archaic Videotron modem. It was old when they installed it -- as a minimal-charge ($30/month for cable internet access) customer she may have been given a recycled model.

Her cable modem is now well beyond its service life; it's dropping connections every 1-2 weeks. The connection can be restored by power cycling, but it is very hard for her to get to the the power strip. More importantly, this is a typical way for a router/modem to fail. The connection drops will increase over time until the modem fails completely.

The device needs to be replaced. I thought I could just buy a new one during one of my periodic check-in visits. Wrong. This is what I learned ...

• You cannot buy a replacement for a failing Videotron cable modem. Actually, I did buy one at Future Shop, but that was a bad mistake. What I bought appears to have been forgotten inventory. Happily Future Shop did accept the return. Videotron should contact their past resellers and ask them to return their inventory. (Amazon US, by contrast, sells DOCSIS-compliant cable modems that are reported to work with many American ISPs.)
• Videotron has two sorts of retail outlets in Quebec. One sells movies and the like, the other sells services to new customers. Neither variety provides support, neither variety will accept an old device to exchange for a new one. I think if you discontinue Videotron service that it might be possible to return an old device to some of these outlets.
• Videotron "rents" devices. I'm not quite sure what that means. There's some complexity about a $99 fee that might be charged if one leaves Videotron, but maybe that's not charged if you return the device.
• Videotron's support model is entirely on their installers and onsite visits. You can do small things with their reasonably well staffed support people, but device problems require a visit. The usual routine is to call on one day, the service call is the next day. So someone has to be home. They will typically phone a brief time before a service call. I have a hard time imagining how people can arrange to be home like this.
• Videotron has a well staffed support line but many of the staffers are very new. Even the managers are fairly new; they were all flummoxed by the Future Shop device I bought -- that was before their time. (Just to make things harder on Videotron's support staff, I am effectively unilingual English. Quebec is a French province/nation with a slowly shrinking English minority. All of the service people are speaking to me in an alien tongue.)

Update: When the Videotron service guy arrived, he confirmed all was well outside. He seemed at first mildly skeptical about replacing the modem -- until he saw it. He claimed it was 15 years old, which I think is impossible. Maybe 8. He put the tiny new one in place and started to leave -- until I showed it didn't work. Yes, dead out of the box. So we pulled another toy out, and that one works.

Can't select Jabber or Google Talk for iChat? Here's one reason.

I really felt like crying when I ran into this latest bit of Apple tragi-comedy.

I tried configuring iChat on my mother's managed account (protect the Dock from accidental deletions), but I couldn't use her Gmail credentials (Google Talk option). Jabber and Google Talk were grayed out.

Why?

Google tells us ..

Apple - Support - Discussions - Can't add jabber or google talk, ...

... Jabber [and Google Talk] and in Fact Bonjour over iChat are excluded in Leopard when Parental Controls are activated...

It doesn't matter that the Parental Controls have no restrictions on iChat or the web. If you enable parental controls, even if all you're doing is protecting the Dock from changes, then iChat can't use Google Talk.

Why not? Why this senseless, irrational, bit of blithering madness that's persisted, without documentation, through 7 point updates to 10.5.7?

Because Apple hates us.

There's a comparable mysterious "Gray out" in iTunes related to iPhone parental controls, but at least that makes a kind of sense.

I hate you too Apple.

Update 4/17/2010: An Apple Discussion post describes enabling Adium functionality even with Parental Controls:

http://*.*.live.com
https://*.*.live.com
http://messenger.live.com

By adding the above we were able to Adium to work while still having parental controls turned on.

See also: OS X Parental Controls: The https bug and our family Google Apps services.

Accessibility in 10.5.7 - the magnify toolbars and VisiKey

(See accessibility posts for prior tips.)

I've upgraded my mother's Mini from 10.4 to 10.5.7 and installed a VisiKey keyboard.

I made the move to 10.5 because 10.4 is nearing end of life, and I thought 10.5 was becoming reasonably well baked (wrong, wrong). I also wanted the option of using 10.5's mediocre iChat in place of Google's elder unfriendly Google Video Chat. Lastly, since I no longer have a 10.4 machine at home and I use LogMeIn to manage her machine I wanted her on the same OS as our family.

I installed the VisiKey because her macular degeneration has progressed far enough that the need to see the keys has overcome her fondness for the cool look of her Apple keyboard (she's not a geek, she really does like "coolness").

The VisiKey's not bad, but there's a bug in the driver installer. In a multi-user machine you have to manually add the VisiKey driver to each user's LogIn list. Without the driver most of the kb features work, but not the "Internet", Email, and Search buttons.

Although I'm no great fan of 10.5 (and believe me, I'm going to take my time with 10.6!), there are a few accessibility improvements. In several app toolbars (Safari 4beta, Mail.app 3.0) there are Smaller/Bigger buttons like these (grayed out here so very murky):

Ok, so I lied. They're not automatically there, you have to customize the toolbars to get them (right click  on toolbar then choose customize). You have to modify the toolbars in Mail.app for browsing, new message, reply, etc. In some cases, like "New message" you can add these controls but they don't seem to do anything [1]. In reading mode, however, they do work [1].

It helps.

I also found the album view in iTunes 8.1.1 isn't bad for low vision use.

So a few accessibility improvements, though so far they don't outweigh the misery of 10.4 to 10.5 migration for me.

Update 5/31/09: There are bugs here. In some modes they enlarge all text, in other modes you have to select the text first. Looks like the responsible dev teams weren't always on speaking terms.

OS X Printer driver problems with 10.5 (Leopard) - the HP 1012

I'm having just so much fun upgrading my mother's vanilla Mac Mini to 10.5. First it was the buggy Mail.app update, now I find her Apple's 10.5.7 (Leopard) HP 1012 printer driver doesn't work. The printer worked perfectly with 10.4 (Tiger) - of course.

Print jobs pause for a time, then there's a printer response, then they hang, then they just ... stop.

Of course I have lots of company:

• Apple - Support - Discussions - HP 1012 printer & Leopard ...
• Can't print to HP 1012 with Leopard

I've tried a few fixes, such as resetting the print system (right click on printer in print and fax preference display, choose reset). I also found that the printer was shared by default but that there was a "Printer Sharing is turned off" message; I turned off sharing.

I seem to have fixed the problem for the Administrator account, but not for a regular user account. I may try promoting the user to Administrator, seeing if I can fix it, then trying them again as a regular user.

Power cycling the printer, or clicking on hold/resume a few times, will restart printing. Neither is a good option for my mother of course.

This 10.5 update has helped me think differently about 10.6. I'll take a look at that one in 2011. Of course that means I'll need to buy my new machine while they're still shipping with 10.5 ...

I'll update this post if I'm able to fix the problem ...

Update 5/29/09: At the moment things are working. It is a weird situation, however.

To recap, I was able to print successfully from my admin account using the installed printer drivers, perhaps because (from my Software Update Preference Pane Installed Update history) Apple released an HP Printer driver update in September 2008. I couldn't, however, print from my primary non-admin account.

Here's where it gets tricky. In order to print from my admin account I'd had to reset the printing system.

Even after I did that though, I couldn't print from my mother's non-admin account on the same machine. My hunch is that with the 1.1.1 update if I'd also reset the printing system from my mother's account it might have worked.

Yes, reset from the separate accounts.

Why do I think that might have worked?

Because, instead of doing that I installed the Gutenprint drivers (per Apple). Hint: Don't waste time trying to figure out the install directions, reading the manual, etc. The current version has an installer that does all the work for you, and, for you Gimp veterans, there's no longer any need for Ghostscript, web configuration, etc. All the directions and tips you need are in the installer documentation folder (DO read the readme file).

After installing the Admin account worked fine -- but the user account still didn't. I reset the admin account (again), but still only the Admin account worked.

That's when I did a reset from the user account as well as the admin account. Then I could print from the user account and the admin account. (Interestingly other accounts I created on the machine were also able to print, without a reset).

I'll update this post again after I've had some more experience -- and to see if it still works post reboot.

To recap -- before you try the Gutenprint be sure you have the September 2008 Apple update and try resetting the printer on EVERY account that has trouble -- which means adding back the printer definitions multiple times.

If you still can't get the Gutenprint drivers to work, this post may help though it didn't apply to me.

My hunch is gunk in the queue -- like maybe permissions gunk.

PS. Early in this process I even "repaired permissions". As usual it did nothing but suck time. I think the OS X "repair permissions" utility is some sort of sick Apple joke.

Update 5/30/09: It's not really fixed, after a day or so I got only the infamous "PCL: Unsupported Personality" atop all printed pages. This time adding and removing printer while using Gutenprint had no effect. So I tried it with the Sept 2008 Apple HP drivers and they worked. I also turned on printer sharing, just for kicks.

Clearly we need a new printer. This won't work for long.

I'll probably buy the Brother HL 2140 for my mother. Neither Canon nor HP can produce OS X device drivers to save their shriveled little souls.

Update 9/3/09: Unsurprisingly, it stopped printing a week or so after I left my mothers. I replaced it with the Brother. Weirdly, this printer is showing as supported in 10.6 (CUPS)! I don't believe it, but if you have 10.6 and test it out please let me know in comments. I ended up buying the Brother HL-2170W for my mother -- the 2140 Amazon comments weren't that encouraging.

A well done tutorial on swapping out a Mac Mini drive

There are a lot of these, but this one is particularly nice: DIY: Replace your intel mac mini's hard disk drive.

Is being unserviceable a part of Apple's design rules for some machines?

Unable to delete messages - a Mail.app 3.0 bug

There's a bug (surprise!) that hits a few Mail.app users when they upgrade from OS X 10.4 to 10.5.

I just ran into it upgrading my mother's ultra-plain Mac Mini from 10.4.11 to 10.5.2 and then directly to 10.5.7.

I did an update in place, not an archive and install. I didn't run Mail until the machine was at 10.5.7 and had gone through a post-update "safe boot" cycle to clean out old caches and debris. So I was surprised to find a very significant bug!

When I tried to delete an email from Mail.app 3.0 I got this error message:

The destination mailbox “Deleted Messages ... " does not allow messages to be moved to it.

I found several posts on this topic, but they were all IMAP configurations. The associated fixes in those posts didn't work.

My mother's mail uses POP against her Gmail account, this 2008 post by "Davl" had the fix:

In finder I opened the folder containing the mailbox folders of my POP account. It was located at:

My User Home Folder --> Library --> Mail --> POP/account name --> additional POP folder

In this folder were the mailboxes folders with .mbox extensions.

• Deleted Messages --> empty
• Drafts.mbox --> Messages
• INBOX.mbox --> Messages
• Sent Messages.mbox --> Messages

Note my Deleted Messages doesn't have a .mbox extension like the others do...

This is what I found  in icon view. Clearly there's something wrong with Deleted Message!

Yech.

This is what I did after confirming my Gmail POP settings were correct.

• In Mail.app I saw some "child" trash items. I deleted those and emptied the Trash.
• I quite Mail.app and moved the "Deleted Messages" folder to the desktop
• I restarted Mail. app and then deleted a message. The Deleted Messages folder was recreated

This bug goes back over a year, so it's disappointing that even in 10.5.7 Apple hasn't fixed it.

OS X internet bridging is WEP only

My parents don't have a wireless LAN at the moment, so I turned on Mac OS X 10.5 Internet connection sharing on my mother's Mac Mini. This is a bridging connection; it links my wireless clients with the household wired cable modem connection.

It works pretty well in their house -- I can work with my laptop and iPhone as needed. If you want to do mail, etc though you either have to turn off the firewall on the Mini or mess with ports.

There's one oddity -- unchanged from 10.4. When you set up "connection sharing" (bridging) the only available encryption is WEP (!). This is slightly better than nothing, but not much better; it's now trivial to hack WEP encryption. WEP also a pain to configure on a PC.

So why just WEP? Seems out of place, esp in 10.5.

Update 5/29/09: It's not only old-fashioned, it's also flaky -- like a LOT of things in 10.5. I find I have to periodically toggle it off and on again on the Mac Mini to get it working.