Category: Computer

Quiet <> good?

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imac5clr.jpgA week or so ago I told you about the iMac we took in. I’d described it as another one of the original Bondi Blue models, to go along with the other two we have already (one that works, and another that’s fried, but we keep for parts). Cheryl brought it home after getting in late that night and we put it on the only horizontal space available: the desk in Adam’s room.

Adam woke the next morning with eyes wide enough to drive a small car through.

We opened up the blinds in his room and my eyes got wider too. This wasn’t just another Bondi Blue iMac, it was yet another piece of Apple lore to add to my collection: one of the five fruity color iMacs… in this case lime.

My son was already excited, and my yep of glee pushed him right over the edge. He took a few excited leaps on his bed before we could restrain him, visions of our last ER visit still fresh in our minds.

Since that morning I’ve had to take the power cord away, to keep him from powering the thing up constantly. Even with a password required at start-up, he still got a kick out of turning it on, hearing the Mac OS 9 start-up chime, and shutting it down. Without a password required, he quickly figured out how to turn it on and launch one of the old educational games we installed from when Beth was his age (we woke up one morning to the sounds of “Jump Start Preschool” not long ago).

Now both of our kids have computers, and whenever we allow them access to the power cord (such as this morning), the house descends into almost total silence.

Silence is a troubling thing in a house with two small kids, no matter what they’re up to.

This is a true story

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“What’s this?” Cheryl asked, as she turned on the lights of her office this morning.

“I saw it sitting in a PC store.” A coworker said. “They said they were just going to throw it away, and I thought you’d give it a good home.”

It was a old, neglected, Bondi-Blue iMac.

Some people give unwanted animals a loving home. We give shelter to unloved Macs.

Saving my sanity

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How’s this for a testimonial:
“I’d sign over my next paycheck to these folks, if my wife didn’t have any say in it.”

Fat Cat Software and their little app: iPhoto Library Manager saved my bacon this evening. My iMac did something to me that an Apple computer hasn’t done to me in years: it crashed.

It’s been so long I didn’t know what to do. If I was at work, toiling away on the dark knight of personal computing, there’d be no question; I’d give the three-finger salute and be done with it. Well, maybe it wouldn’t be that simple, but this isn’t a post about Microsoft so let’s move on.

So how do you escape from a crash on a Mac? There’s a key combination to force quit applications, but I’d graduated to full-fledged kernel panic – or to put this in the vernacular, my poor iMac was reduced to a pretty decoration (complete with a funky pattern on the screen). It may be that the only escape from this predicament was just what I did: I pushed and held the power button.

Man was that weird. I hope I don’t have to do that again.

Friends, that wasn’t the worst of it though. The crash occurred during an edit operation in iPhoto. And you guessed it, the crash corrupted my iPhoto library. As I soon discovered, there’s no easy way to recover a thoroughly corrupted iPhoto library. It was so bad that iPhoto’s “rebuild library” command option didn’t work (press and hold option-command as iPhoto starts up). I tried creating a new library, importing the old pictures (since it was just the library files that were corrupted, not the image files themselves). The problem here is that over half of my image files are scanned photographs from my old film cameras. You may or may not know this, but iPhoto does not add information to the image file itself (like when you change the tag info on an MP3), it keeps all of your comments – and more importantly, in my case, all of your custom date info, in separate files.

So I could reimport all of my image files into a new library, but I’d loose all of my collection info, my tags, and the actual dates I’d assigned to the pictures (so they’d sort by the date the picture was actually taken, not the date the file was created by my scanner).

UNCLE!

I did a little searching on the Apple support discussion boards, and found out about the little app I mentioned above. Among other things, it apparently has a more advanced engine for recreating iPhoto library files (from the ruin of corrupted files). It’s not perfect, but I’ve got most of it back.

I’m not going to bore you with a lot of details, but for reasons I’d rather not get into, my backups were no good. So its a good thing this worked, or I’d be looking forward to unimaginable hours sorting through this mess, re-entering image data.

You couldn’t hear it from there, but that was a BIG sigh.

Ho-hum

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I’ve got nothing better to do than to catalog my Macs, so here we go. (I’m a little bored.)

Mr. T (a Mac Plus)
I bought this one new from the UF bookstore in the Fall of 1989, tricked out with two, count ’em: TWO megabytes of RAM. Throw in an Imagewriter II and a 20 megabyte external hard drive, thanks to that ultra-fast, 2.1 MBps SCSI bus… and I was the envy of Hume Hall! (It was sad to hear the place was torn down a few years ago to make way for a new honors dorm.)

Performa 577
This one came out during Apple’s dark days. We bought it sometime in the Summer of 1994. It was probably my least favorite Mac. Out of the box it was underpowered, making me wish I had done a little research before buying it. We should have saved a little more money and sprung for one of the PowerPCs that were just starting to appear at the time. It was still better than the PC I had at work that ran Windows 3.1/95, but doesn’t really say much, does it.

I found it interesting at the time that despite this job being my first experience with Windows, I was the de-facto tech support guy. It was shortly after this experience that the local school system decided to replace all of their Macs with Windows PCs; to give students “real life” experience on the computers they’d be more likely to see in the world after graduation. It’s kind of funny that the Mac guy in the office was the expert trouble shooting Windows PCs (and training folks in the “real world” how to use them).

Two revision B, Bondi Blue iMacs
We bought our first one new, shortly after they came out in the fall of 1998. We bought the second one used in 2000. I fell in love with computing again on this computer. Mr. T was mostly a homework machine. The Performa got us by. Our first iMacs were part of the family. After they were replaced by the eMac and an iBook, they continued to serve us as the server for this site (until 2004).

12″ iBook G3/600
We picked this one up in November 2001, along with a second generation Airport base station. It was my first purchase at the Apple Store in Tampa, my first laptop, and the least reliable computer I’ve had. I’ve had it in for service twice. The last problem was never fixed, due to the cost to fix it. As a result, you can’t open the lid beyond 90 degrees, or the screen goes black. It’s still in use though, as a homework machine for my daughter. It’s just not portable anymore. One thing this did do: it addicted me to portable computing… a purchase my wife may rue till the day she leaves this world.

After we picked up the PowerBook, this little guy replaced the Bondi iMac as the server for this site until late 2006 (when we shutdown the home server, took apart my set-up of multiple routers and firewalls to isolate the server from our home network, and moved everything off site).

eMac (800 MHz)
We picked this one up at the Apple Store in Tampa in the Summer of 2003. It would have been one of my favorites, if the fan wasn’t so darn loud. Otherwise a really nice machine. The clear case on the keyboard looks really cool, until it gets filled with crumbs, bug parts, and all sorts of small, indecipherable gunk. Then it looks a little disturbing.

Spartacus
I got this mint, 20th Anniversary Mac for free. It’s ten years old and I still use it every day, as a second computer in my office at work – playing iTunes and NPR through its Bose sound system (and FM tuner). Some people loved this computer. Others saw it as a BIG waste of money, and I hear Steve Jobs really hated the thing. This is one place where Steve and I disagree (I’m sure he’s losing sleep over it).

12″ PowerBook G4
This little guy is my baby. We picked this one up with a state employee discount at the Apple Store in the Summer of 2004, while Cheryl was pregnant with our son. (Is it sad that I associate the purchase of a computer with the birth of a child?) Even though the iMac is faster, brighter, and prettier, my 12″ PowerBook is like an extension of my hands. I know this isn’t the most responsible use of energy, but since we bought it, I don’t think it’s been off for more than a few hours (for take-off and landing on various flights we’ve taken). I don’t remember having to restart it for a system crash (or kernel panic)… ever. Part of that is probably luck, but I think it’s at least partially because of the solid OS (Mac OS X was pretty mature by the time it came out – I believe it shipped with a mid to late version of Jaguar). Compared to various Dell notebooks I’ve used for work, and several iBooks I’ve used (all of them being the G3 “Icebooks”), my 12″ PowerBook is a work of art. The case is tight, the keyboard is just the right combination of firm and responsive, and the size is ideal (for my purposes). By comparison, the iBook keyboards were a little mushy, and the Dells were/are a creaking, flimsy piece of crap. I’ll bet my PowerBook cost more, but sometimes you do get what you pay for.

Intel iMac
This is the most excited I’ve been about a desktop computer purchase, and the biggest performance jump I’ve noticed since we went from the Performa 577 (33 MHz, Moto 68LC040 processor), to the Bondi iMac (233 MHz G3 processor). The difference between our two G4 Macs and the dual core Intel processor is substantial. It’s just this side of silent (you can barely hear the high pitched hum of what may be a fan, if you turn off every other noise making device in the house), and as many reviewers suggested, I have gotten used to the quirky keyboard.

If you’ve spent any amount of time on this site (or read this entry), you probably know I’m partial to Macs. It’s true that I’ve never owned another kind of computer, but I spend all day working without them (Macs) at the office (the Windows hegemony).

I use Windows at work because I have to. I use Macs at home because I want to.

Dangerous computing

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Do you think it’s possible for laptop computers to be bad for you? I don’t mean bad for your budget or bad for your marriage… I mean bad for your health.

Lately I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, an intense dream just beyond recollection, suddenly in no mood for sleep. I keep my PowerBook on a table by the bed, so the internet is less than an arm’s length away.

Am I that pathetic? That’s a rhetorical question, so don’t feel compelled to reply.

I usually put in a good twenty minutes of searching and note taking before setting the PowerBook down and going back to sleep. Last night I found a couple of vegetarian recipes I thought looked good (I’ve been thinking about cooking with more grains). I wonder if my mind is growing accustomed to the close proximity of computing bliss, and that’s why I’m waking up more often?

I’m already getting too little sleep (thanks to the Sawks being in the World Series), so the last thing I need is another thing to keep me up. Maybe it’s time for my PowerBook to sleep in the other room.

Multi-tasking

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My wife thinks I’ve gotten a little out of hand. My daughter thinks I’m just a hair weirder. My son doesn’t have enough life experience to know what’s normal and what’s not.

Me? I think I’ve stumbled upon the best thing since HTML and www.

A few weeks ago I was getting a sore neck. The problem was my new iMac and it’s spatial relationship to the TV. As a child of the 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with a television as my constant companion. After college this relationship soured a little, but in the last few years I’ve taken to doing the evening routine with “the game” on in the background. I’m not a big baseball fan. In fact I find the game a little boring… if I’m watching the whole thing through. With crowd noise as the perfect alert to look, you can boil down a 3+ hour baseball game to 30 minutes or so of actual watching. At 30 minutes it’s just about right, and spread out through the evening it gives me a chance to do other things… playing with the kids, surfing the internet, reading an interesting news article, etc.

Then my headaches started to get worse, and looking over from the iMac to the TV got to be a pain. That’s when inspiration struck. I pulled out my old USB video capture device. It relies on software to digitize the signal so it didn’t do a great job of showing live video on my old Bondi Blue iMac (when I first got it), but the horsepower of the dual core beast in my new iMac makes the thing hum without missing a beat. It’s still just a USB 1 device, so it doesn’t have the bandwidth to transmit a full resolution analog signal to the iMac (to be digitized and viewed on screen), but it’s enough to show a pretty decent picture in the bottom corner of my gorgeous 20 inches of LCD magic. The iMac is close enough to my cable box that I only need a 3 ft cable to get from the composite video-out on my box to the USB video capture cable connected to my iMac.

So now I can do work on the computer and have the TV on, on the same screen.

What I really want to do now is get one of those EyeTV tuners so I can deliver an HD signal to my Mac. Then I may never have to leave my desk again.

Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

Knee deep in geekery

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Nothing takes my mind off real life like reconfiguring my web site. I could have left well enough alone and kept it easy for my handful of readers to find me, but what fun is that?

But seriously, I am a little sorry for the inconvenience. I hope you all haven’t had any trouble finding the new site, you’ll consider updating your links, and you’ll keep coming back.

iLife

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My last copy of iPhoto dated way back to version four. (And yes, this is another Mac entry… it’s all I’ve got to talk about… I haven’t been doing anything else.) I haven’t fiddled with any of the other iLife apps, but the new version of iPhoto has really impressed me. There aren’t a lot more editing tools, but the ones I’ve used are better. In particular, the touch-up tool has worked wonders on some of my scans of older pictures.

In the past I’ve opened images in Photoshop (Elements) and painstakingly touched up blemishes, scratches, and dust artifacts with a brush tool (sampling adjacent color and painting in the scratch a pixel or two at a time). There was probably an easier way, but I’m a hard way kind of guy. The touch-up tool in the latest iPhoto works like a brush, but it does a pretty good job of picking up the surrounding color and just filling in the scratch, without smearing or coloring over the stuff that was o.k.

Color me impressed.