Steam for the Mac went live a couple of weeks ago, so I downloaded the app and set up an account to poke around. They’re offering Portal for free for a few weeks, so I downloaded that and played with it for about a half an hour last night. What an awesome, addictive game.
Last night, while watching the second-to-last episode of LOST, I decided to tear into my MacBook Pro to replace the LVDS cable: the wire that sends pretty much all of the signal to the LCD display, and what I suspect is the root cause of the issues with the lower half of the screen disappearing for the last five months or so. I found one available online for $12 last week, and figured that $12 was cheaper than $1,200 for a new MacBook, which is what I’ve been mulling over for a few months now.
Because I wasn’t able to find the exact service manual or take apart directions for the model A1151 17″ MBP, I got stumped by removal of the clutch cover, and no amount of searching at 11PM revealed anything that would help. So I reassembled the case and rebooted, which went fine, but upon logging in I found the trackpad button had become extremely sensitive, to the point of being unusable. So I’m back to considering a replacement, which is not a happy thought.
At this point, I think I’d keep the MBP on my desk at home and get something more portable, like a standard MacBook, for carting back and forth to the office. As much as I love a 17″ display, I don’t use it enough at work as a hardcore workstation to justify the extra $1,000.
I’m currently listening to a 9-year-old album by Ivy called Long Distance, which is slightly uptempo chilled francophile pop (does that make sense?) I also have the new album by Delorean on heavy rotation, which is good; I’ve been sick of all the music I have for months now, so I like having some options.
And, quickly: last night’s LOST was…good, I guess. Rushed, to be sure. I think they’re trying to wrap up two seasons’ worth of explanations and story arcs and mythos in one abbreviated season, and a lot of the action feels forced and tossed-off to me. I wasn’t expecting a “very special episode” dedicated to Jin and Sun, but their departure (while in keeping with the “rules” of the show, as explained last night) was pretty quick. I’d developed an attachment to certain characters over the last six years, and so having more than one of them disappear quickly has been a bit jarring. While I’m glad the writers didn’t resort to maudlin half-hour goodbyes, it would have been nice to get just a little more time with folks, especially since they’ve all hiked across the island seventeen zillion times just to meet up with each other.
I have a Facebook account, and I do try to keep it as minimal as possible, because the company’s continuing policy is to erode as much privacy from user accounts as possible. The EFF just published Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections, which is a handy guide to seeing exactly what they’re sharing (everything) and how. Remember, to Facebook, you’re not a user, you’re a product. Your personal information is bought and sold every day, and there is no “privacy”.
At least with a weblog, I can choose to share what I want with the world.
Steve Jobs wrote a love letter to Adobe today, and predictably, the internet is losing its mind. It seems like people land on one side of this argument or the other: Flash is a security hazard/resource pig/aging dinosaur, and Apple is closed/proprietary so this is the pot calling the kettle black. Personally, I’m agnostic about Flash either way, but I do know that it slows my Mac to a crawl (when it doesn’t crash my browser) and chews up battery power like a pothead in a convenience store. Adobe’s claims to the contrary are pitiful.
I’d really, really be happy if I could find a reason for why my MacBook Pro decides to wake itself from sleep at some point on my way into work every morning. I’m annoyed because sometimes I won’t know about it for a half an hour, after which I pull it from my bag and find that it’s been cooking itself to dangerous temperatures without going back to sleep—something which exacerbates the issues I’ve been having with the display. I’ve found some mentions of the problem here and there, but a year’s worth of sleuthing has turned up nothing conclusive.
At this point, I’d really just like to have a new laptop.
For some reason, my hosting provider’s pipes have been incredibly slow lately, which means this site is slow as dirt. That makes adding old content that much more time-consuming. It took me an hour to add the second half of September 2004 this evening, while jumping around doing other things.
I’ve been working on a WordPress-based portfolio site for a friend of ours, and over the course of the last couple of weeks I’ve dipped a toe back into working with PHP, which has been fun and challenging. This evening I was able to pull some snippets of code from here and there, make some educated guesses, and get a spiffy category display page working in the way that I’d originally imagined—something that I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to do. The site is coming together really well, and our friend sounded excited about it when we talked to her on the weekend.
Meanwhile, the simple fix I thought I had planned for the Slattern is not so easy after all. I read that simply manually cranking the sunroof motor would seal the window, but I couldn’t get it to budge on Sunday. So I have to pick up some Torx screwdriver bits and tear down part of the sunroof in order to slide the tracks back into place whenever the sun decides to come back out this week; in the meantime, I’m back in the Jeep. I guess it’s a good thing we haven’t sold that yet, huh?
My friend J. just stopped in my office with a beautiful new iPad and let me monkey around with it for ten minutes or so. It is as amazing as you may have heard. It’s so amazing, in fact, that I want one desperately, although I can’t afford it and don’t really need it. I’d buy it in a heartbeat if I was doing a lot of traveling. Apple is going to sell a million of these things.
At some point I’ll need to buy one so that I can design for it. Right now, there are other important things to spend money on.
From the NYT: Line2 Allows iPhone Users to Sidestep AT&T. Genius. There was a product with about 80% of the featureset called TalkPlus five years ago, something I had a hand in working on (and very nearly joined the company).
It appears, via a very interesting viral marketing campaign, that Valve will be releasing Steam, Half-Life, and Left 4 Dead on the Mac sometime in the immediate future. I’ve finished Half-Life 2 on the Xbox (one word: FANTASTIC), and they’ve only released the follow-up episodes on the 360. So I will be seriously considering a subscription.
Update: Confirmed.
“We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac and the Xbox 360,” Cook said.
I was really beginning to enjoy using Photoshop CS4, up until the point it started crashing randomly. This has been twice in one day. That’s twice more in one day than CS3 managed in the entire month of December.