Kindle Mania

We purchased a KOBO eReader for our grand daughter for Christmas and helped one of our girls buy and set up a Kindle before we headed south for the winter.  Although we were aware of eReaders before then, this was our first really solid look at these things.  As a result, we thought we would integrate eReaders into our Computer classes and wow what a great reaction!

This is the first year we have done a class on eReaders and based on the number of Kindles that have been purchased since that first class it is also the most popular.

So, today we have another class to help those folks who purchased Kindles in the last week.  The Kindle is pretty easy to use but people have to deal with wireless connections, signing up with Amazon and how to get free books. 

It's not only Kindles though, purchases in the last two weeks (no class last week because of St Patrick's Day) have included at lease 2 iPad 2's, 1 Sony Reader, an Android Tablet and at least one KOBO.  Not only have they purchased these things for themselves many of those who made a purchase also ordered them for remote family members one as far away as Alaska.

I think today's class will be challenging.  I expect to even get questions I won't be able to answer.

Belkin-N Router Problems

This is the second Belkin-N router I have encountered.  Like the first, I spent over 2 hours trying to make it work and failed.  These are not cheap - $70.

These were purchased from regular consumer outlets, Walmart and OfficeMax.  That would make you think that a regular person could install them easily.  But for someone with the skillset I have, it was obviously too difficult.

The router just wouldn't get an IP address from the cable modem in one case and a DSL modem in the other.  There was no problem making a wireless connection to the LAN side of the modem but there seemed to be no way to get it to connect to the WAN.  I tried both the setup disk, which cycled for over 30 minutes before we gave up and then tried attaching directly to the modem through the 192.168.2.1 address.

In both cases, the router was returned and replaced with a new one.  The new US Robotics router and the Cisco router attached in seconds and got an address from the modem.  Both were up and running in less than 5 minutes.  Belkin - what a waste of time!!!!.