Slashdot is reporting this afternoon that iFixit, a handy website known for Mac teardowns and repair guides, is moving into console repair. Which is goodto know, because I’ve been considering some upgrades to my $20 yardsale Xbox.
I got a little time yesterday afternoon to take apart my 17″ MBP, which has been suffering from screen-itis for several months now. In January I purchased a new (used) display cable, hoping that was the root of the problem, and attempted to install it at work with a new inverter board, but was foiled by unclear directions and the clutch cover refusing to come off. This time I was more successful, and had the entire thing swapped out and replaced in 15 minutes. unfortunately, though, the screen is still only half-visible, which probably means the replacement inverter board I put in has gone bad.
No luck yet on selling the Jeep, either; I had a nice guy come and look yesterday (after a lot of near-misses due to scheduling conflicts last week) but he balked when his advisor told him he’d realistically get 2-3 years of use out of it. I don’t really know what he was expecting, considering the price I’m offering it for (I knocked a bit off the advertised price during negotiations, actually) and its age—it’s 12 years old, and I plainly stated “AS-IS” in the ad. I’m not giving the fucking thing away for free, sorry. I gave him some time to think it over, but I doubt he’ll bite. We’ll see.
Filed in the It’s About Friggin’ Time Department: Netflix is now available for the iPhone and iPod touch. Side note: the Netflix blog looks like it was designed in 1998.
No, We’re not selling the house. Or leaving the leafy, muggy idyll of the Baltimore suburbs. I’m talking about webhosting, specifically the hosting of this particular website, which has become slower than the Chinese traffic jam lately. Simple HTML requests are fast enough, but serving any kind of PHP from WordPress can be measured in minutes, which is unacceptable. The tentative plan goes something like this:
Get the caching situation sorted out– Done. Does anybody see a difference in load times? I do.- Switch out the template for a little while to see if there’s something there that’s slowing things down.
- Look through the template to see if there’s anything in the code that’s slowing things down—a rogue plugin, greedy PHP call, or flaky image request.
Optimize the database to see if that’s the issue.- Set up a mirror over on my other site, load the database, and see if it’s any faster over there (meaning the DB server here is just slow or overloaded).
I got a beautiful new MacBook Pro delivered to the house via FedEx last Thursday, and I’ve been spending most of my free time migrating all of my important data over without crufting up the OS with years of legacy gunk. It’s light, it’s fast, it feels solid, it’s not blisteringly hot, it doesn’t feature the whine of cooling fans, and it’s paid for. The trackpad is an absolute joy to use; whatever Apple did to improve the sensor, it’s a magnitude of difference better than the old style (which, admittedly, was getting wonkier in part due to the battery swelling) and ten times more precise. The keyboard is solid and I appreciate the addition of volume and playback controls in the top Function keys (where the old model had brightness controls and two unused keys), although I miss the monitor switching key, forfeited to a Dashboard hotkey (ecch). I got the model with a glossy display, and it’s not as distracting as I thought it might be. The display itself is bright and even, and has a slight bluish tint out of the box. I’m going to use the calibrator on it tomorrow to warm things up and build a profile.
Next on the to-do list will be taking IdiotCentral down to a bare shell in order to swap out the inverter board cable, and see if that will solve the screen issues once and for all. If it works, I may consider selling her to recoup some of the money spent on IdiotCommand here, and if it doesn’t, she’ll become a production machine relegated to my desk.
Mama has been rocking a 5-year-old Motorola 551 for way too long now, and the replacement battery is nearing its end of life (when it deigns to charge from the wall plug at all). Last Saturday we paddled through the rain to the Apple Store to see if they had any iPhone 4‘s available for her birthday present, but I was unaware that they were so scarce right now. We left empty-handed. I was also going to see about replacing my MBP battery while we were there, but the throngs of people in the store (avoiding the downpour like we were) made that impossible too. At home, I jumped online and ordered a phone, which should be here sometime in the next three weeks.
As mentioned earlier, I took Jen out to dinner Sunday evening at le Petit Louis, a french bistro up in Roland Park, while our kindly neighbors watched Finn. What can I say? My bride was beautiful, the food was delicious, and the atmosphere was perfect. Happy Birthday, baby. Returning to our neighbors’, Finn was happily playing on the slide, while her counterpart had already melted down and gone upstairs for night-nights. She’s completely gotten over her initial fear of the slide, and now spends most of her time at the playground in a constant loop: up the stairs, down the slide. Up the stairs, down the slide.
Tuesday afternoon I went to store.apple.com, picked out a refurbished 15″ MacBook Pro with as many bells and whistles as I could afford (newest processor, RAM, widescreen display, fast video card), squinched up my eyes, and clicked the “buy now” button. It’s been a long time coming, and it took a lot of convincing myself that this was really necessary, but having a laptop that actually has a usable screen, working optical media drive, and functioning battery will be a huge improvement. FedEx says it will be here on Thursday, which is faster than I’d hoped for. I still need to pick up a Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter to run an external display, but a colleague at work tells me there’s a supplier online that has them for considerably less than the $40 Apple is charging.
Finn sat on the potty, looking intently at me with her big blue eyes. She had asked to use the potty three times in a half an hour, which on one hand is awesome, but on the other hand is a little tiring for Jen and I. We knew she was working up to something but it wasn’t happening, and usually the trick in that situation—much as it is for the rest of us—is to distract her from thinking too much about things and find her inner peace.
I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her, and tapped the YouTube icon. Doing a search for “Sesame Street” returned a list of clips I knew she’d like, and we started out with a classic Cookie Monster bit. I flipped it over, the picture re-oriented itself, and she smiled while Cookie started explaining numbers. Almost immediately, there were prodigious results, and we watched a few more clips while things sorted themselves out.
There are many excellent reasons to have one of these things beyond a potty training aid. (For the record, we prefer books). Friday night after Jen drifted off to sleep, I stayed awake streaming a Ghost In The Shell movie from Netflix until 1:30 in the morning, something that was inadvisable considering I was on baby duty early the next morning. (Review: The movie was middling to poor, but it was good enough to get me sucked in. The Netflix app has a lousy UI but streams movies very well). I’ve tagged and labeled photos, updated my Mint account, written forum posts, looked for recipes, and checked the weather. It’s so much easier to deal with for certain things than a laptop would be, even with a screen-based keyboard, and it’s much easier to carry around.
Compared to a first-gen iPhone, it’s slicker and faster than a politician at a county fair; everything is immediate and smooth. It makes my 4-year-old MacBook Pro feel like a Mac Classic. I spent two hours watching the movie with a full charge and when it was over, the battery was still at 90%. Even better: the back was cool to the touch, unlike my MBP, which gets blazing hot. The browser is fast and responsive, scrolling and redraw is immediate (unlike my iPhone), and as a pretty heavy-duty internet user, I’ve only stumbled across one or two sites with video I couldn’t watch.
I’d like to say I’m writing this post on the iPad, but because it’s owned by my company I’m keeping my personal login details off the machine. There is a WordPress app available, and many of the things I use our backup laptop for are accomplished easily on the iPad. One thing that looks a little sketchy right now is printing from the iPad, but there are some solutions available and it looks like Apple may be working on something as well. I do find myself wanting to do certain things with it that I can’t (hook up a camera and download pictures, for one) but overall I see this as a no-brainer for our near-term future. I think we will wait, however, for when they put a camera in the next generation—shortly, I’m guessing, given the advent of FaceTime.
Wow, I’m totally digging Flickr’s new photo interface—they’ve done a bunch of things that make using it a lot easier. The share menu is so much nicer now (instead of two clicks to get to a chunk of HTML, they’ve made it a DHTML rollover) and the mapping widget is really slick. My Pro account is up for renewal in a few weeks, and even though I was planning on continuing, they’ve made me a happy repeat customer.
Here’s a link to Engadget’s iPhone 4 guide, including preview, pricing, and availability. Both Jen and I are eligible for the “$18 upgrade” with a 2-year contract. I’d prefer not to give AT&T another two years of my money, but they’re still the only game in town. And I’m not paying $20/mo. extra for the “privilege” of tethering.
I’m working on an information architecture document here at work, and streaming live footage of the BP oil pipe at the bottom of the gulf. Currently there are two ROVs hovering over the fresh cut in the top of the pipe, and one of them is using a sawblade to (I guess) dress the cut before they do whatever is happening next.
I take my hat off not to BP, but to the incredibly skilled workers and operators who are piloting million-dollar machines by remote control five thousand feet below the surface of the ocean to fix a problem that never should have happened in the first place. They make it look easy.