powerbook

I love Apple.

Posted on by grahams

I got my Powerbook back from the Apple Store today…  Thank god for AppleCare…   They not only finished it in less time than they quoted me, but they also noticed that myoptical drive was louder than it should be, figured it was close to failing, and replaced that on their own as well…   In an ideal world, hard disks wouldn’t shit the bed, but I abuse this one quite a bit, so it didn’t surprise me that it died… 

Now after restoring my backup I’m pretty much up and running, although I’m reinstalling all the applications, since I don’t back those up..  I teeter on whether or not to backup apps…  When I don’t, I have to go through this bullshit of reinstalling everything (which is made worse by Comcast being not very Comcastic tonight; I can’t get to several sites), but when I do back them up, they end up needing updating anyway, so I figure it’s a good enema…

Update: So I wasn’t crazy, Comcast was, in fact, being less Comcastic last night…

Futile attempt to recover my Powerbook disk

Posted on by grahams

Out of the blue last night my laptop’s hard disk died… The machine locked up, I hard rebooted it, but it hung on the Apple logo… I booted it up with my 10.4 system disk and tried to use Disk Utility to repair the disk, but that said it couldn’t fix the problem.. I tried (as you can see in this photo) TechTool Deluxe to try and repair the volume, but that also couldn’t fix things…

I finally decided to try and reformat the disk, but when that didn’t work, I realized the drives number was pulled… Fortunately I have Applecare and I backed up the disk on Thursday… =)

Warranty Fortune Smiles Upon Me

Posted on by grahams

I had a great time in Rochester for the CSH Welcome Back Party, but I think I might be skipping future Welcome Back parties… More and more of my friends are leaving Rochester, and I know fewer and fewer people who live at CSH. I think this realization comes to all alumni, but I guess I finally hit the sweet spot. It seems that each year I spend more time in Rochester catching up with my friends who are visiting from out of town, and less time doing anything with the house. It occured to us that if all we are going to do is hang out with each other, we can pick a place that’s a bit more fun than Rochester… :P This decision doesn’t effect Fucked Up Movie Night, however, so I still plan on being at CSH once or twice a year.. Of course, it’s very possible that next September I will change my mind and end up in Rochester anyway, so this could all be bullshit.

I have had great warranty luck lately… First off, Apple recalled both of the batteries I have for my Powerbook. This worked out fantastically, because I was just getting annoyed by the diminished capacity of the two recalled batteries. Around the same time, I got an email from Sirius saying that due to supply shortages, my warranty exchange on my Starmate Replay (for a scratchy 1/8″ audio jack) was being upgraded to a brand new Sportster 4, which is a much nicer radio. I got that in the mail the other day, the only sucky thing is that I have to send back all of the original equipment for the Starmate, so I had to rip out the old antenna and install the new. I had the Antenna wire hid very nicely through the trunk, and under the molding on the passenger side of the car, so I had to reproduce all of that again. Also, the Starmate ran on 12V DC so lopped off the lighter adaptor that came with it and hardwired it into the cars power inside the dash. I can’t exactly return that, and the new radio runs on 5V DC, so I will take some kind of hit on that..

and I have been trying to finish up all of the lingering projects around the house. She started staining the doors the other day, and I masked off the bathroom to finally prime and paint it. After it’s painted, the bathroom needs baseboard and door trim, and all of the old radiators still need to be painted. I want to finish all of the woodwork this weekend so we can finally clean up the apartment fully…

A Noted Harvard Symbologist

Posted on by grahams

I’ve been killing myself trying to finish this design document at work and I finally was able to send it out for review on Friday afternoon. Hopefully people won’t have too many comments about it, because I’d really like to write some code sometime this year.

Got my Powerbook back on Friday, it was shipped out, fixed, and back in the apple store in less than 72 hours. Seems to be working great now, I had forgotten how nice the keyboard backlight was after going without it for a few months. If I had known how fast the turnaround would be on the repair I would have had it fixed ages ago.

Pretty laid back weekend, saw The DaVinci Code with the film club last night. As I expected it was way better than the book, which is a worthless steaming pile of shit. That said, it isn’t a GREAT movie, just a good, entertaining flick. It was pretty much exactly what I was expecting, and I’m not entirely sure why the critics have been so harsh on it… Maybe they are all in the pockets of Opus Dei.

Take us back to DEFCON 5

Posted on by grahams

Sometime soon after I got back from CSH Welcome Back I noticed that there was a minor scratch on the screen of my beloved Powerbook, dead center no less. At first I just thought it was a hair or something, so I busted out the Windex and gave it a good bath to no avail. I started looking online and some people recommended the Janvil Plastic Scratch Removal System for removing scratches from LCDs. Nobody with a Powerbook specifically, so I was a little worried that the screen would melt or something, but I ordered the kit anyway with a little trepidation.

I got the kit last week, but didn’t build up the nerve to actually try it until tonight. It seems to work like a champ… I mean, when the screen is off (or under really heavy glare), you can clearly see the “polished” spot, so I mean, it has some effect on the screen, but for my usage it is way, way, WAY less distracting than the dead-center scratch. And as far as heavy-glare usage…. let’s face reality, the Powerbook screen isn’t all that useful under those conditions as it is… :)

PC Load Letter

Posted on by grahams

Took care of lots of administrivia this weekend, cleaning the apartment a bit, helping , and doing computer maintenance… I realized the reason I hadn’t been backing up my Powerbook as often as I should was just the amount of time it took to burn several DVDs… I had a 60g IDE drive lying around as well as an IDE to USB2 cable, so I decided that this is now my new backup mechanism. I am actually not very confident in the drive, however, so at some point soon I will probably replace it with a newer drive. Before I did the backup I decided it wouldn’t hurt to scan my system for virii using ClamXav, since I had never actually done that… Amusingly enough, it actually did find a few viruses, but two of them were infecting my VirtualPC “disk file”, and the others were email messages that it identified as phishing attacks, but they were all spam sitting in my “deleted” folder.

Last night I checked out “The Baxter” with the Sunday Night Film Club.. It was written and directed by Michael Showalter (of “The State”, “Stella”, and “Wet Hot American Summer” fame), and while the trailer had me on the fence, the film was really funny and entertaining. It seems to me that for years we’ve had very loud comedies like “Old School”, “Austin Powers”, etc… But this year, with “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” and “The Baxter”, I was reminded that you don’t need to be beat over the head with blunt, abrasive jokes constantly for 90 minutes…