The true fallout from the storm has now been tallied:
- Our cable box was fried and needed to be replaced. The Verizon guy handled this for us yesterday. Thank god the TV is OK.
- Our landline phone base station is fried and needs a replacement.
- The HDMI switchbox controlling our media electronics died and has been replaced.
- Our Airport Extreme base station is unresponsive. (I went back to using the Verizon router wifi).
- An older 8-port Netgear router in the basement died and has been replaced with a noisier but robust 32-port Netgear switch I saved from the electronics dumpster at WRI. I have to look into replacing the fans on this unit.
- The RJ-45 cable running from the AppleTV to the basement router is unresponsive; I’ve got to chase this down (or run a new one).
This is probably the worst loss of electronics we’ve suffered since we moved in, and it was only from a power loss. Obviously I’ve got to harden some of our crucial electronics (the server in the basement needs a new UPS unit, for one thing).
I’ve had an iPhone 6 since early 2015, and with only a few hiccups, it’s been great. In 2018 it still does 95% of the stuff I need it to do, and seems to keep up with most of the modern apps I need to use. Unfortunately the battery was on its last legs last year, right about the time I wasn’t able to do anything about it. I was getting about a quarter of a day of light use, which was alarming.
I finally made an appointment at the Apple Store at the beginning of April to have the battery replaced, and in the meantime was using a Mophie battery pack to extend its life. Unfortunately on the Saturday before my appointment, the phone fell onto the concrete sidewalk out back and shattered the screen, so my service call now included two replacements instead of one. At the Apple Store I waited for a Genius to help me, and he told me they would have to send it out overnight for a fix instead of being able to handle it in-store. Grudgingly I obliged, and the next day I picked up my shiny phone–only to find the battery life still sucked. Unable to get back in before my Colombia trip, I stuck the Mophie case back on it and made do until I got back.
A brief note: the Mophie case is a great idea with one fatal flaw. In execution it works brilliantly: it goes on like a standard case but adds a switch on the back to send a charge to the phone when you need it. You charge it with a mini-USB connector and it charges the phone first and the battery pack second. The problem is that it’s not shock resistant, and with the added weight of another battery pack, any drop above about 3 feet will result in a broken phone.
Last Saturday I made another appointment at the Apple Store and went about my weekend. At the Dunkin Donuts on Sunday evening, as I jumped out of the Scout, my phone slipped out of my jacket pocket to the pavement…and smashed the screen again. Disgusted, I walked into the Apple Store today and explained the issue; the Genius looked up my account and admitted that they’d replaced the screen in April but not the battery. I handed over my phone and let them take it for a couple of hours to do the repair, and we went on with our day.
Upon return, the Genius showed me my phone, which had failed their validation test (the screen looked like a distorted screencap of Qbert) and they handed me a brand new phone, charging me only for the $30 battery replacement. I brought it home, restored it from a March backup, and updated the apps on board. All is well again, and it looks like that iPhone 8 will have to wait another couple of years.
My iPhone is now over three years old and the battery life has been getting progressively worse over the last six months. It’s included in Apple’s replacement program, so I made an appointment on Tuesday to go into the store and have it swapped out. In the meantime, I had it with me in the backyard as I was raking leaves on Saturday, and stupidly placed it on top of one of the bags while I adjusted my fleece. the bag toppled over and my phone hit the sidewalk with a crunch: the screen blew up into a million pieces. Amazingly, it still worked!
At the store they were backed up so I had to leave it overnight for a screen replacement, and now that I’ve got it back, it seems to be working well. The battery feels like it’s still draining quickly but it’s got more life than it did.
I’m working on plans for shooting lots of video and photos in the next three weeks: I’ve got a dinner photo shoot followed by an early morning event shoot next week. The week after that I’ve got a full-day video shoot designed as a follow-on to the NCE video I made in London two years ago, which Jen is going to come down and help me with. The week after that I’m in Colombia shooting more video for a bike-sharing project, which should be a real adventure. I’ll have a new Canon 5D Mk4 to work with, and I’m renting a DJI Osmo to shoot crowd scenes while we’re there, and I’ll be with a co-worker who speaks Spanish so that I’ve got help with the language barrier.
Apple has rolled out a battery replacement program for the iPhone 6 in reply to the recent throttling controversy. I’ve noticed my 6 getting both slower and weaker over the last year, and especially after the recent update. Looks like I’ve got a $29 battery replacement in my future this spring.
My circa 2010 MacBook Pro has been having random kernel panics that I traced back to one of the two graphics processors failing. A little internet research brought me to this site, with some helpful advice on how to disable the bad chip permanently.
Lifehacker has a good writeup on how to get Siri to pronounce names correctly. When Finn was a toddler we bought her a doll that talked and played games and responded to buttons; it used a weird pronunciation of her name that I still haven’t been able to get out of my head.
We have an old iPod that was working for a long time but has suddenly started displaying the sad face and refusing to boot. Because I am a nerd and I like to fix 13-year-old things, I poked around the interwebs to see if there was a replacement hard drive I could install. Apparently they stopped making hard drives for this iPod about 5 years ago, because my usual go-to parts resource had none. I then stumbled upon an Instructable which claims I can replace the drive with a Compact Flash card using a CF to SD adapter. Amazon Prime had one for $7, and I have an old 4GB CF card laying around that I can test with, so that was a no-brainer. After following the directions and adding a CF card through the adapter I’m still getting the sad folder icon–so it might be time to replace the battery.
Update: New battery, same problem. I think this thing is toast.
I found out through a post on Instagram that the venerable Bel-Loc Diner has closed after 53 years, due to be knocked down and replaced with a fucking Starbucks of all things. I’ve loved the Bel-Loc since I moved to Baltimore 28 years ago (damn); in college we made pilgrimages up to the Parkville area for breakfast, haircuts, and the Hechinger’s when there was no diner food, weekend banking or lumberyards in the city. It’s been a landmark since I’ve been here, a shining neon constant. I think I’ve shot pictures of it with every camera I own save one. In a world of cavernous fake modern diners with no soul, it was a cozy room made of curves and angles and stainless steel. You could sit in a booth and feel the conversations around you while you ate; it had a communal sense about it. Much like the departed Forest Diner, it was an experience. And we don’t have too many authentic experiences left anymore.
I made some updates to the backend of both this site and the Scout blog, which were both being unreliable (the Scout blog was actually going down and up for a few weeks). Shutting off all of the plugins, updating them, and selectively turning on just the crucial ones brought full functionality back, and tweaking the settings in Jetpack helped fix a couple of strange bugs (the Media library wasn’t loading, for example). I was thinking my ancient handmade template was obsolete for a while there, but everything seems to be working correctly now. Thankfully I run this blog fast and lean, because if I had to deal with multiple dependencies or outdated plugins, I’d be sunk. At one time I could make WordPress sing, but I’ve forgotten most of it in the last couple of years.
I got a freelance check in the mail for the job I did on the flight to Paraguay, so I’m researching the iPad Pro, paired with an Apple Pencil and an app called Procreate. My hope is that I can use this combination of hardware and software to emulate scratchboard and also work in Illustrator. The big question here is whether the smaller model would be big enough for my needs or if I should shell out for the larger one. Unfortunately the education discount is only $20 for the iPad, so I’ll have to consider carefully. I think a visit to the local Apple Store is in order.
I’m sitting on the couch drinking an oatmeal stout with my brain turned almost completely off. The last week has been a blur, with family in town, a freelance gig, several appointments, and a large event happening at work all at once.
Family was the high point; my sister drove down from NY for Second Christmas and we all enjoyed opening presents in January (especially Finn, who had the lion’s share.). Renie had to bomb in and out due to work, and so only got to spend Saturday with us before heading home on Sunday. We did have a great afternoon, ate a delicious dinner, watched the playoffs, and went to bed early. Thus ends my season of holiday eating; I’m throttling way back on desserts and heavy foods because I feel like it’s gaining on me.
The kittens are settling in well with everyone; Bellatrix (hereafter known as Trixie) is chill by day but a raving terror at night. Nox will let me pick him up and lay in my arms like a drugged-out hippie for as long as I want to scratch his head. The two of them wrestle and fight and chase each other around the house, then pass out cold for hours at a time. As much as I hate cleaning a litterbox, it’s great to have the sound of paws on the floor again.
I took on a freelance gig last Wednesday, figuring I could knock it out in a couple of days, but was only able to really get to it over the weekend. The sketch went together quickly but the client asked to change the view after I’d gone to final art, so I had to redo the whole thing Monday night. It was a pretty simple job but it could finance the purchase of something I’ve been thinking about for a while–an iPad Pro. This would allow for the use of a pen and real-time drawing on the screen for illustration, something I’ve been waiting on for 10 years. One of my self-improvement goals for the year is to commit to drawing again, and find a workflow to make illustration fast and easy from sketch to screen. I think this might be the answer, and my ultimate goal would be to make it another source of income by the end of the year.
We held one of our major events at work Wednesday morning, which was the culmination of two weeks’ work for my team and about a months’ writing time for the larger group. My designers are aces and knocked together a great deck, and the system we put into place for production a few years ago helped streamline the process. Meanwhile, during production last week, I accidentally spilled coffee into my laptop, thus frying it, and had to scramble for a replacement. The IT guys gave me a castoff machine that wasn’t booting, and after some work I got it up and running, set up my workspace, and scraped the stickers off the case. It’s two years older than the dead unit but it’s the same form factor and has more memory. With a larger hard drive it should be usable, and I’m not going to complain one bit.
Using my personal laptop in the interim, it became clear how painfully slow a seven year old machine is. I can still make good use of it–so I purchased a SSD to speed up the disk. At some point this year I’m going to have to bite the bullet and buy a new machine; the question is whether I go all-in on a Thunderbolt-only MacBook Pro or get one of the last multi-port models available.
I’m tired of having to sign in to my fucking iCloud account every five fucking minutes. Fix that shit please.