So, Sal had free reign on the laptop I bought from Fry’s and even though it was a red dot special, didn’t have a manual, and came home in only a generic plastic bag, it was a decent little PC.
Took him a few months to spill milk into the keyboard. Juice, or soda, it would have been trouble. But how to fault the kid for having milk around while computing? Then eventually the wheels started spinning off. His desktop was some big warning about something I never bothered to understand. And the computer kept on getting busier and busier for reasons I couldn’t figure out either. Eventually it was shelved and he had to start sharing time with me or his mother to get any computer time.
It had the benefit of less screen time. But at the cost of a unique hit over at lego.com.
Enter the 27″ iMac that Sal says is “too big”. And yes, it doesn’t all fit into my eyes at 2.5 feet away, but “too big” seems a little harsh. Still, I didn’t want him hosing up my environment and so I’ve entered the realm of computer accounts for the first time.
And yes, I’m up at 4am writing about it. Our first (and to be fair, only) problem stemmed from Spore. We’ve of course lost the manual, but there are instructions about how to recover your key from the registry on windows, so we got the license without too much trouble. Just that I installed it in my account and Sal couldn’t play it from his account – couldn’t connect to license server. Message boards didn’t help. Except to let me know I wasn’t alone struggling to play out of multiple accounts.
So, I let him play on my account while I went to work, figuring I’d come home and re-install it in his account later on. Later on comes and I re-install it and the same problem. Some people say don’t take the last patch, but when you’re in a series of updates, it’s hard to tell which is the last patch.
Eventually, since I was browsing while the installs were going on, I was rejected by the parental controls when I went to mail.yahoo.com. https isn’t supported in Sal’s account I guess and login.yahoo.com uses that. Reading up on it, that makes sense, since they can’t validate the content on the page…so https sites need to be whitelisted.
Took me an hour for it to click, but eventually it did. The license server was connecting over https too. And conveniently enough, you can look through the browsing log and see what was rejected and whitelist from there.
Now Spore’s running in Sal’s account, and he doesn’t have iWork icons or address books cluttering his dock. (And now when I try and play in my account, it asks for a license key…which it didn’t for Sal’s install – so there is something odd there, but I’m not asking questions anymore).
The controls also allow you to set how many minutes a day he can be in his account. And what time of day (which was neat – how once I set that, it promptly kicked me out, due to 2am not being a time when Sal’s allowed to be logged in and I was doing it from his account).
So this all could be kind of useful and hopefully makes our shared environment stable. Though I wonder how long it is until Sal hacks my password…