My trusty MacBook Pro, after several years of faithful service, has started exhibiting signs of flaky behavior over the last couple of months. If I put it to sleep for my ride home, there’s a 50% chance it will have woken up and be cooking itself inside my computer bag. This happened when I was running 10.4 and has only gotten worse when I upgraded to 10.5, so I know it’s not software-related. I’ve reset the power management unit several times, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Running Photoshop, Windows XP under Parallels, Mail, FTP, and three or four other essential applications concurrently makes the processor get hot to the point where I have the cooling fans on maximum. I’d guess several years of this have begun to fry some of the innards, making things flakier over time. Plus, I’m continually bashing my head against the 2GB RAM ceiling in this model.
Now I’m getting a single horizontal line across the screen about 1/3 of the way from the top, which is small enough to almost be invisible but large enough to be really annoying. When this line appeared in the past (always after the sleep-waking incidents) it would go away on its own after several minutes, but I’ve had a permanent line for 24 hours, which has me worried.
This is actually the second display for this particular laptop; I had the first one replaced under warranty only months after I got the unit. It’s well outside the warranty and Applecare coverage at this point, so I’m on my own. Some initial research prices a replacement at around $800, which is about $200 less than a new MacBook. I’m not afraid of doing the surgery myself, but for that kind of cash, I’d rather just buy something new.
I get the feeling this is a symptom of greater problems down the line.
So, new MacBook Pros (I don’t think I could trade down to a consumer-level MacBook) start at $1700 for a 15″ and go all the way up to $2400 for a 17″, which is considerably less than what they were 3 years ago. Refurbs are $200-400 less than list, and I have no hesitation buying last years’ model to save some cash, but right now is not a good time, considering we’re saving up for a baby-hauling vehicle. I can make do with what I’ve got by running an external monitor and just living with the problem, but I’m depressed that I can’t stretch the lifespan of this machine out another year or two.
Update: It seems to come and go. I though it might be because I was jamming the laptop in a bag with a bunch of other items, but carrying it separately had no effect. After several hours of sleep, the line goes away sometimes, and sometimes not.
Currently, the weather in Baltimore is glorious. Sunny, breezy, 75° San-Francisco-like weather. It’s heaven. Last night I was home a little early from work, so we decided to put Finn in the backpack and take a walk down into town for some ice cream after dinner. There are many days I wish my neck was double-jointed so that I could see the expressions on Finn’s face as she reaches out to brush her hand against bushes and trees and flowers as they pass by. Right before bedtime, she wanted to do some standing, so I put her down on the floor between my knees so she had something to hang onto. She decided she wanted to play with the tube of butt paste on the bed behind her left shoulder, and turned herself completely around, unaided, to be able to reach it. Tonight I have to lower the bed in her crib so that when she pulls herself to a sitting position, she can’t pull herself to a standing position and attempt a jailbreak.
Last week, the hard drive we were storing our entire music collection on started having catastrophic problems, to the point where it wouldn’t boot anymore. I pulled it out, dropped a spare drive in, and resurrected the server, but DiskWarrior is unable to rebuild the directory on the music drive at all. I’ve got a backup that dates back to the middle of 2008, but everything I’ve collected since then (minus the new stuff stored on my iPod) may be kaput. Ouch!
After an inauspicious start, Jen’s garden is going strong. She’s got pumpkins, cantaloupe, plenty of beautiful tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and basil all growing happily. The asparagus is out of control—our cup will runneth over with pee-stinkin’ vegetables next year. On the other hand, my container plants are just sort of moping along, probably pissed that I haven’t been watering them religiously. I lost one of my eggplants to critters, some of my Big Boy tomatoes got blight, and the first crop of beautiful peppers I had coming in got nibbled on by something (most likely squirrels). Of course, they had to nibble on all of them just to be sure they didn’t like the taste instead of only one.
There is dog in our future, and it will be a breed that likes to chase squirrels.
After about four months of suffering through a faulty email setup, I got tired of manually marking and deleting junk mail every half an hour. So today at lunch I finally nuked my main account and set it up from scratch. The way mail.app handles IMAP accounts is confusing, to say the least, and Apple’s explanation of how it interacts is pretty thin on details. (Most searches, predictably, focus on setting up Gmail for IMAP on mail.app). I’m still having some hiccups here and there but all seems to be better in my email world now.
Finding a decent video encoding scheme for Flickr has been a huge nightmare. I’ve found that the default encoding from our Canon SD900 (AVI format) works flawlessly, while almost every encoding schema for Flip video footage processed through Quicktime Pro looks like garbage. I’ve got a ton of footage that gets pixellated and blocky as soon as it hits Flickr (or, alternately, bonks out with a yellow “This video cannot be processed” message). I’m going to keep working on this and hopefully find a solution I like.
The heat has returned to Baltimore, and with it, our peculiar pattern of hot, muggy sunshine in the morning, cloudy afternoons, short, violent thunderstorms towards the evening commute, and unbearably humid evenings. I may have to put the full soft top back on the Scout in order to drive it to work once a week; nothing sucks more than driving home in the rain.
This next clip is sheer genius. I was confused, at first; I hadn’t realized Sarah Palin’s “Speech” was so disjointed and illogical until I read the actual transcript.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I had a scare last week where I thought I might have lost a whole mess of data from my production server, and realized I didn’t have a recent backup of either of my websites. Last night I set up the new server in the basement with a pair of Automator scripts based on the original one I’d written last year, utilizing built-in functionality in the superb Transmit and a little AppleScript-fu.
The first step is to have Automator open Transmit. Next we add a Transmit-specific Synchronize command to back up only the latest files from the remote server.
Once that’s all done, I had to do a little research to figure out how to close Transmit, because Automator 1.0.5 doesn’t come with a premade “close application” action (although the 2.0 version does). Drag the “Run AppleScript” action to the bottom, and in the supplied text area, replace
(* Your script goes here *)
with
Tell application “Transmit” to quit
Note: this screenshot is from Automator 2.0, but the basics are the same.
Save it out as an application, and then add it into a repeating iCal event to run weekly or monthly.
Next I’m going to tack on the email notification script I worked out before. One problem I had with that script was that even when the script did not run successfully—if the computer was asleep or shut off, for example—it still emailed me saying it had. I don’t know why this happened, but since this server is scheduled to run constantly, I shouldn’t have that problem.
Crap. now we have to wait until 20 fucking 10 for LOST to come back on. Last night was, as I kind of figured it would be, a lot of story arcs intertwining, a lot of exposition, precious few answers and the introduction of a whole new slew of questions, and some questionable character motivations designed to keep things moving along. Without publishing any spoilers here, I’ll just say this season was a pretty good ride, but the producers have a lot of work ahead to clean up the many loose ends they’ve tossed about.
A few months ago, I had the good luck to do some basic design work for an iPhone app (an icon, splashscreen, and some minor beta testing, but not the website) and it’s now available through the iTunes store: GoCraigsy is an app which will create and post new Craigslist listings. If you’ve got an account (and even if you don’t, I believe), you can create an ad, populate it with location and Google map data based on your phone’s location, take and add photos with the iPhone camera, and post the whole thing to the Craigslist city of your choosing.
It will also let you browse your current listings based on supplied account information, which makes it invaluable for people who have a ton of stuff to get rid of which doesn’t fit in one listing.
Overall, it’s clear there was a lot of thought put into how the overall user experience works; it’s designed to get the user to the places they need to be with a minimum of fuss and tapping around. Taking a picture is easy, and the ability to flip and delete photos is included; there’s a field for boilerplate text, which means tedious junk like contact and terms info can be entered once and forgotten. And, my suggestion to add horizontal text entry was included, so it’s that much easier to type longer entries.
My only beef with it is that it’s difficult to find through the iTunes store; you’ve got to know what to search for exactly in order to find it, but that’s an Apple issue.
If you have an iPhone and sell a lot of stuff on Craigslist, you can’t beat the price. Go try it out!
I’m using Adobe’s CS3 suite pretty regularly on my MacBook Pro now, and let me just say, it is a GOOD THING. Boot times measured in seconds, faster UI interaction, and, best of all, I don’t have to waste minutes of my day waiting for older, non-Intel applications to wake up and run through the emulator.
Other than that, it’s nose to the grindstone, baby.
Oh, how I love software documentation. As if most commercial documentation isn’t sucktacular enough (no offense to my technical writing homies, but I’ve had more bad luck in this regard than good), it seems like every open-source installation manual I’ve ever used was thrown together in ten minutes by someone filled with contempt for linear thinking. Usually I just close whatever online wiki or other half-assed collection of nouns and verbs they’ve provided and look through the code itself to see if I can figure out why I’m getting random, oblique errors and troubleshoot my way to success. Usually I get lucky. Tonight, with Drupal, I am up against the worst set of installation instructions I’ve encountered yet, and a pass through the assorted install files reveals settings I might change, if there was someplace that actually documented what they did.
I’m too tired to do the change-refresh-change-refresh dance tonight, so I will hang this one up and wave my middle finger high in the air.
Update: On a semi-related note (TURN THE SPEAKERS DOWN, KIDS):
This made me laugh out loud. Thanks, Onion.
Wednesday I moved all of my bookmarks, RSS feeds, and favorites over to Firefox 3.0 after getting bogged down by Safari’s memory leaks and slow response times once too often. Firefox has a nice new interface (much improved from 2.0) and seems to be zippy enough, but it’s got a nagging annoyance I’m not sure I’m cool with yet: the bookmarks bar allows for folders of links and RSS feeds, but doesn’t display the number of new RSS entries like Safari does. This, and some other minor differences, will take getting used to.
Meanwhile, the drive I spent an afternoon archiving ten years of digital pictures on started to go wonky, so I did some musical chairs with hard drives and servers and now I’m backing that up to a secondary drive, even though I don’t have much faith in either of them. Looks like I need to seriously consider yet another storage solution for all of our digital media. The need is increasing daily, too, because I’ve taken over 2 gigs of video of Finley since she was born, and I’m terrified of losing any of it. It’s all backed up on DVD, but given the uneven predictions for the lifespan of that media, I’m thinking I need to shoot some Super-8 film of her so that we’ll have physical media in 50 years. (I’ve already shot some medium-format film of her with the Rolleicord, but that’s a small amount relative to the digital format).
I consider myself a pretty technologically savvy idiot. I’ve had a weblog for eight years, I’ve been working on the internet for over ten; but I’ve resisted jumping on the social networking train, with one exception. It seems like everybody’s on the Facebook these days, and in the last two weeks, I’ve had three different people tell me I should join. I’ve made my reservations about social networking pretty plain here before, which basically boils down to avoiding the same crap I dealt with in high school, but this evening I decided to stick my toe in the pool, for reasons I don’t quite understand yet.