Happy Birthday, blondie. I love you!
I took the girls out for a pre-birthday brunch on Sunday at a place called, unfortunately, Bunny’s Buckets & Bubbles, a southern comfort food place now installed in the dear departed Wharf Rat in Fell’s Point. The food was very good, the drinks were strong, and we ate enough that we went home and didn’t eat for the rest of the day.
I was using my old MacBook Air as a travel machine for a while, leaving the big new one on my desk as a dedicated video editing machine, and I found it to be super-handy. Not worrying as much about bringing my primary laptop out to the dirty garage, for example, was liberating. About a month ago I threw the travel laptop in my bag, not realizing one of Hazel’s travel water bottles was also inside, and that it was leaking from the lid. Before I knew it, about 1/4 cup of water had leaked onto the laptop, and when I noticed it, I immediately shut it down and tipped it up to drain out for a couple of days. Carefully booting it back up, I was happy to hear the startup chime and see the screen come up, but the trackpad and keyboard refused to work.
Annoyed, I followed the disassembly directions on iFixit and pulled the trackpad assembly out to find corroded circuitry at the base, where the trackpad/keyboard ribbon connect to the main controller board. Pulling the bottom cover off with the required force to disconnect a bunch of clips, I wound up cutting into the ribbon at one of the 90˚ bends (d’oh!) but was able to get the trackpad assembly out with no problem. iFixit had the trackpad I need in stock, but the ribbon is not. I ordered the trackpad and put myself on the notification list for the ribbon. I’m hoping water did not find its way further inside and onto the logic board—but I figure the fact that it boots up with no problem means I’m in the clear there.
Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that Apple will have to raise its prices due to the skyrocketing demand for RAM and storage.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”
I’m feeling pretty good about pulling the trigger on this new MacBook Air. It’s made editing videos much quicker, and I know it’ll be a solid workhorse for the next four or five years. Meanwhile, the M2 Air I got back from the estimator is now my walk-around machine, something I’m not afraid to bring out into the garage to look things up or follow a video tutorial on.
I got word from the second-party evaluator that the MacBook Air I sent in as a trade, which was initially quoted as being worth $485, was, according to them, only worth $85. They claimed there was damage to the screen (there is nothing wrong with the screen) and that there was damage to the case larger than 2 inches (there is one ding on the front edge of the case less than 1/4″ tall). I told them to send me my perfectly good machine back.
I’m not quite sure what to do with it, honestly; I originally figured I’d list it myself on Marketplace for $500 to see if I could recoup some money, but now I’m wondering if I should hang on to it as a secondary unit.
I’ve got a brand-new MacBook Air on my desk after some delays in shipping from Vietnam, and overall I’m very happy with it. I sprung for the larger 15″ model, and it’s taking some time to get used to the new form factor in relation to my old 13″ model (and even my work 14″ MacBook Pro). I used it to finish up and export a video this weekend and I was happy with the smoother previews and speed. It didn’t take long to set up and install my various accounts and software suites—I don’t migrate settings, but prefer to do clean installs—and with only a few short hiccups where I couldn’t immediately lay hands on a serial number, it only took a few hours. Then I carefully wiped the drive on my old machine and cleaned it carefully with cotton swabs before packaging it up for trade-in. I added both of these to the technology list along with the Chromebook.
Along with that, I dropped another, heavier package off at the post office: I was contacted on the Binder Planet about some of my spare soft top hardware, and made a deal to ship a bunch of duplicate steel to a nice guy in South Carolina so that he can make one good top out of a bunch of parts. With that, I’m headed to Nats with $600 in my pocket for any shiny parts I might need.
Reading multiple stories about how AI demand has made hard drive, GPU and RAM prices all skyrocket, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade my laptop to something that will handle video editing better than the one I’ve currently got. This is an M2 Macbook Air that I bought three years ago, and I made the mistake of only speccing 8GB of RAM. It’s been a solid machine, but it has a few quirks I dislike (mainly software-related) and it just chugs when I’m working with heavy video files. I specced out a new M5 Air with 16GB of RAM last week, and with a trade in on my current machine I should save about 1/3 of the total cost. However, the order is currently stuck in processing—what was supposed to be in stock locally is now estimated to be here between May 15-19.
Interestingly, when I look at the stats for IK here, my daily numbers have jumped up to about four times where they used to be a year ago, and when I compare that with the Scout journal, those numbers have dropped. My guess (and I need to do a lot more digging in my server logs) is that I’m getting hit by the AI bots, who are scraping the site for content. I would have expected that the Scout journal would be hit just as much, but apparently not.
I’ve had the drumbeat and bassline of Angel by Massive Attack stuck in my head for the last three days. I was fortunate enough to see them live in 2019 during the Mezzanine 30th Anniversary tour, and this was more powerful in person than the recorded version, if that’s possible. Being able to see Horace Andy and Liz Fraser sing their tracks live was incredible.
It says on the Apple Store that they’ll give me $450 for my current M2 MacBook Air as a trade-in on a new 15″ M5 model. This Air has been a good soldier, but I’ve had a couple of small issues with it restarting itself randomly (this seems to have cured itself with some of the latest software updates), wired keyboards randomly disconnecting themselves, and Safari choking after a day or so of constant use. This last issue may be related to the fact that it only has 8GB of RAM, something I’ve been bumping into constantly as I do more and more video editing. The machine I spec’d out starts with 16GB, has a comparable hard drive, and jumps three generations in chip design, plus the extra screen size. I think, once I get to my next pay period, that I’m going to upgrade to a better machine.
Meanwhile, Apple quietly discontinued the Mac Pro last week, their last tower-based enclosure. I’ve got two Mac Pro towers here at the house, a 2010 model stuffed with 22TB of storage for all of our family data, and a 2012 model with 32TB of storage for work video and photos. They are absolute tanks, but their OS is limited to their architecture—which means the 2010 is running 9-year-old software. When it’s time to retire them, I’m going to have to find a modern Mac Pro for sale somewhere or splurge on a NAS of some kind, I guess. The Synology NAS I’m running at work has been solid, but was not cheap.
This tank of a laptop is an Aluminum G4 I bought off Craigslist nine years ago to repair and use as a backup/utility machine for sunsetted software. It’s been stored carefully in a bin in the basement, and occasionally it gets dusted off to be pressed into service. The last time I used it for a big project was when I batch-processed all of our first and second-generation font files into OpenType format (modern Macs and most current software doesn’t play well with TrueType or Type1 fonts) with an ancient, unsupported specialty app, generate sample sheets for each folder, and compile them into PDF booklets.
I’ve got two big bins of legacy hardware down there, everything from original MS Word 3.5″ floppy drives to whole laptops, and every time I straighten up the basement I look at the bins and think about culling the whole collection, minus one or two machines. And every time a mixture of apathy and unease stops me. Hoarding situations always start with the words, “…I might need that someday,” so I have to be very careful about what constitutes being useful and having a serious problem. In my defense, I have lightened the collection a couple of times already, but there are still more machines that probably need to be dropped off at an e-cycling center.
Yesterday Jen was working on a file provided by a client with an embedded typeface that wouldn’t open on her machine. After looking it over for a few minutes, I went down to grab the G4, booted it up, and converted the old TrueType font they sent into OpenType and got the file working for her. The machine fired right up, and even though the spinning hard drive is making some kind of vibrating noise, it worked like a charm.
Is it hoarding if they still make you money (or save it in this case)?
I got an email this morning from Bank of America assuring me that they have ruled in my favor for the fraud claim I filed last Thanksgiving. I’m glad they made an actual human review the case instead of just letting the robots decide everything was legit, because I was ready to go nuclear on them.
IKEA just announced a suite of smart home products that work with the Matter standard, including a whole slew of smart light bulbs, five smart sensors, remote controls and a smart plug. I’ve dabbled with home automation before, and I’ll be looking at these carefully to see how well they work with HomeKit. Our AppleTV is ancient, and if we upgraded to a new 4K version I could use that as the hub for smart devices, including these.
It’s been a minute since I’ve bought digital music online. Here’s the bullshit I had to go through to buy an album this afternoon:
- Apple’s Music app (the replacement for iTunes) in its normal state, does not have a visible link or menu item for the iTunes Store. It can be made visible in the Preferences. Why is this?
- The only visible way to see new music is to sign up for a subscription plan, which I refuse to do. I have enough subscriptions.
- So I went to Amazon, where the only visible link is a subscription shill as well. I refuse to do this too. Surely there must be a better way.
- A couple of searches later, I found a CNET article on how to buy and download new music. CNET still exists?
- This contained a link to a page on Amazon that was not immediately available from my Prime account. Thanks.
- From here I found my album. I purchased and downloaded it in MP3 format.
- Now, to get it on my iPhone. I imported it into Apple Music, figuring it would sync. It did not.
- Another search told me to AirDrop the files to my phone. I did this, and it only put the files in my iCloud Files folder without importing them. I deleted them. The fuck?
- More searching revealed that I needed to connect my phone via a cable to my computer. How very 2005 of them.
- I did this, the first time I’ve connected this phone to my computer ever. I had to tell each machine to trust the other, and wait for the handshake.
- Then I went through Ye Olde Sync screen to manually select the music and load it on my phone. How can this still be the way?
I am aghast at the state of things. I figured surely these days there would be a quicker, easier way that didn’t involve yet another subscription, but this is The State Of Things, I guess.
When I started learning graphic design, the program I worked in was Quark Xpress. From the earliest versions in black and white up through their disastrous switch over to V.5, I was a staunch Quark guy; I knew PageMaker but found it was inferior in many ways. In the early aughts I finally switched over to InDesign as it eventually was bundled as part of the Creative Suite and the IT support I was doing required me to know how to debug and troubleshoot it. I found that InDesign was relatively easy to learn and integrated easily with Photoshop and Illustrator, making the switch that much easier. All of my legacy files remain in Quark format, which is why I’ve still got at least two machines that run it reliably, but I haven’t booted it up in probably ten years.
I’ve been using Final Cut Pro ever since I got the gig at WRI, and it’s served me very well for that entire time. It was easy to learn, followed many of the same UI and conceptual frameworks I was already familiar with, and ran quickly (in 2014) on a 5-year-old Mac Pro. But as the length and breadth of the videos I’m producing have gotten longer and more involved, FCP has gotten slower and slower, making the editing process a slog. The latest video I worked on clocks in over an hour, with about 90 gigs of source files. Getting it to the finish line has been painful—it should have been finished several days ago, held up only by the spinning beach ball. I’m not using slow machines; my personal laptop is a M1 model, and my work laptop is a M4 with twice the memory. But I see no difference authoring on the work laptop than I do on my personal machine, which is ridiculous.
The guys at work both use Adobe Premiere and have been telling me to switch over for years, and I’ve been putting it off for that entire time. I’m going to make two big changes to see if it makes a difference in my editing workflow: I’m going to work off a solid state drive instead of a spinning disc to see if that helps at all, and if there’s no difference, I’m going to try using Premiere.