I got an email this morning from Apple; my iPhone is in Hong Kong on its way to me!
After a skip week last week where I was only one of two people who showed up for a class that never happened, I was back at figure drawing last night. Only one model showed up, and she’s someone I’ve drawn about ten times over the last ten years (plus two weeks ago) so there’s not much challenge as far as subject matter. I’m still working out the brush technique, and I haven’t done any research on paper yet, so I stuck mainly to the sketchbook and got a few decent poses out of the evening.
Meanwhile, my 8-year-old iPod is sick; any attempt to use a playlist results in a crash and shutdown. I put a new battery in it about two years ago but it’s not registering a full charge. I haven’t done any troubleshooting yet to determine causes, but I hope I don’t have to retire it.
My Smashing Pumpkin Ale kit is in, but I think I’m going to go all the way and brew it with real pumpkin (instead of pumpkin spice), which also means I have to run out and pick up some extra grains to boil it with before the extract goes in. I’m going to shoot for this weekend to get it going (first, I’ve got to bottle the IPA in the basement).
My order is placed; I’m advancing directly to 2011 from the dark ages of 2007. A shiny new iPhone 4S should be on its way to the house with my name on it, bringing better reception (I’m told), a better camera, Siri, and all of the bells and whistles I’ve missed out on. Rejoice!
Apple CEO Steve Jobs resigns. Wow, it seems to me to be a great time to buy stock–while all of the idiots unload theirs for no reason. I don’t think Apple is going downhill anytime soon; I hope he’s OK.
Among several asinine things Apple did with the purchase and install process for Lion, there’s this:
Clicking on the Install button brought up another modal dialog that said an installer couldn’t be found; I did a Google search and found one here. They don’t usually make things this redundant. That’s why I’ve been a diehard user for all these years. This is just… inexplicable. It’s what I would have expected to find in Vista.
File this under I’ll get to it at some point: Stream Your iTunes Library To your iPhone Over The Web. Eventually, when the new room is done and we upgrade our ancient TV to a modern model, I’m going to set the home server up as a combination file/AV server, and it will be able to stream music and movies. Or, I’ll spring for a $100 MacTV and have that handle all the work (as well as stream on demand from Netflix).
I read on Fucked Company that Cidera, a former employer of mine, shut down its service for good yesterday. Godspeed, and god bless. And quiet props go to Doug Humphrey, who was Doug enough to add a goofy farewell haiku in the announcement instead of some bullshit NewEconomySpeak excuse/diatribe.
(Jen just reminded me via email of one of the design ideas she had for a streaming media brochure featuring a test pattern. )
I also read today that Mr. Rogers passed away this morning. Bye, Fred.
Now that I have a wireless network set up at the house, I’m paranoid that it’s insecure. In reading some basic online articles about the 802.11b protocol, I have cause to be concerned. The Wi-Fi Alliance has this basic information to offer, and there’s a good book written on the subject ($20). The ever-timely Airportblog leads me to believe that there’s no really good way to lock a wireless network down other than implementing a bunch of technical third-party fixes, which is discouraging. WEP is a jacket made of holes, which is disturbing, and simply denying MAC addresses is useless as well. Still, something is better than nothing, and it would be nice for Apple to implement something. We can hold out for Leap or some other encryption standard, but the long and short of it is that it’s going to take time to sort this all out.
Found via Wired: Musicbrainz.org, a service that automatically tags and catalogs your existing MP3’s based on metadata and ID tags submitted by you and other folks. It’s a great idea, along the lines of the CDDB, but there’s one drawback: The client is only available for Windows.
So between three guys, two days, and twenty sheets of drywall, there are still gaps in the walls in the bathroom. I knew I wasn’t hiring the A-Team here, but the lackadaisical approach to, um, completing the job has been a bit frustrating. They’ve got the majority of it hung, and there’s tape on half of it so far, but I had to have them remove one panel because they screwed it in over an outlet box. As long as I stay on top of them, things should turn out alright.
In the meantime, I’m waffling about what I should do with my old MacBook Pro. Originally I was going to sell it, but the pictures I took for Craigslist disappeared off my camera. At that point I thought about installing Plex and making it into a media server, but talking it over with a friend made me realize I couldn’t hook it up to our shitty TV if I wanted to. So now I may go back to Craigslist and see if I can get $500 for it.
Here’s a great article on how to wake up a sleeping Mac (provided you’ve set it up correctly): Wake on LAN: don’t let sleeping Macs lie.
I just found this very interesting link on the Apple discussion forums regarding my MacBook and its video card. An excerpt:
“…someone mentioned that Apple knows internally that it is an issue with the solder connection between BGA packages and the main board. These machines came out right around when manufacturers were just starting to become ROHS compliant, (the standard that forbids the use of solder containing lead in electronics,) and so it is not surprising to me, (having dealt with some similar issues from the point of view of the manufacturer at work,) that these problems are happening. The lead-free solder is much more brittle than the old kind and solder joints that crack after many thermal cycles are a common problem that everyone trying to use the lead-free solder has had to confront.”
There’s some suggestions about deleting some of the video drivers that basically disable the video card; I’m going to run and get my machine to see if the quick fix works.