nanovivid

My PowerBook came home today! It’s all better, well, except for the 512 Megs of memory that Apple said was bad. I’ve ordered replacement RAM that should be here by the end of the week.

I’m tempted to sleep with my laptop tonight as if it were a large, flat, metal teddy bear, but I don’t think Bryan would appreciate that much.

♫ Clea - We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off

I’m still ‘Bookless. Since Tuesday, the status of the repair has been “Hold - Awaiting Part.” When I called today to get more information, I was told that the motherboard is bad, but the person didn’t know if that was the part they were waiting for. (It was some combination of a database being down for maintenance and today being Sunday that kept him from getting more details).

Discovering that they are replacing the motherboard is a bit odd — do they still make motherboards for Rev. A 17″ PowerBooks? I can’t see how it would be very economical for them to do so, unless there’s an epidemic of dead ones.

Regardless of what’s happening, I just want my PowerBook back soon!

My laptop is sick. Yesterday I started having the first serious issue I’ve had with my PowerBook. I figure two years with almost zero problems is pretty good, so I’m not too upset, but is is a bit of a pain. On the plus side, I was able to do a full backup, so I’m not worried about losing anything.

I was happily using my laptop when all of a sudden it totally froze up and I had to power it off. When I tried to turn it back on, nothing happened. After trying every troubleshooting step I could think of with no results, I called Apple support. They weren’t able to help, so they told me to bring it to the Genius Bar. And here I am.

Hopefully they’ll be able to clear things up quickly!

Update: Well, they weren’t able to figure anything out here, so my PowerBook is on its way to Apple. Have a safe trip!

Also, I’m trying out a Mighty Mouse here and I want to like it. I mean, I drink the Apple Kool-Aid, right? This mouse just doesn’t feel right though. To make the side buttons activate, I have to push way harder than I expect. The scroll ball also has issues — it’s not very responsive and feels too small. II really like the idea of the Mighty Mouse, but the implementation is a bit too meh.

But three to seven days without my computer… how will I survive?

Since I’m at the Apple Store, I have to make a post. It’s tradition!

Bryan, the ultimate impulse shopper, decided this afternoon that he needs a 12″ iBook. He’s been missing having a Mac laptop since selling his old iBook to RyanHarne.com. Thus, we’re here and he’s checking out as I write this.

Also while here, we ran into some guy named Jason who knows Attarian from way back when. Itsy bitsy world! So Adam, Jason says hi.

♫ I think "The Way You Move" by Outkast is playing somewhere in the background.

What would my site be without the somewhat frequent geeky post? Not my site, that’s for sure! Ha ha!

After being grumpy about Apple’s shipping fuckup, I finally got Tiger on monday night. Just to be sure, I did a full backup, formatted, and installed.

Everything went quite smoothly. The biggest nuisance I ran into was when, for some reason, mdimport (the process that indexes files for Spotlight) got locked into some sort of a loop and wouldn’t stop scanning. I let it run for a couple days and it just kept taking up lots of CPU time.

Eventually I gave up hope that it would finish on its own and killed the process. Then I ran sudo mdutil -E / in Terminal to restart the indexing. In about twenty minutes, Spotlight was all ready for use.

For the most part, I haven’t noticed major differences from Panther. Safari 2.0 is even faster than 1.3 was, which of course is nice. I’m still using NetNewsWire for my newsfeeds though… Safari’s RSS doesn’t do it for me. Dashboard is ok, but I haven’t found much use for it beyond the weather.

Overall though, performance is a bit snappier and everything feels a bit nicer. There are of course some bugs to be ironed out, especially with the new Mail (which, by the way, I don’t hate. It’s a tad strange looking, but I don’t think it’s all that bad, except for that bizarre light blue folder list.) Apple’s done a good job and once they get a couple of point updates out, Tiger should solidify. It’s definitely a worthwhile upgrade.

PS - Please forgive me for the title. Sorry about that. Though I am surprised I haven’t seen it used elsewhere.

♫ Ben Gibbard - This Is The Dream Of Evan And Chan (Acoustic)

With apologies to Ryan and Toby.

(If you want to do this with your Adium, just grab the Dinosaur Comics Emoticon Pack).

♫ The Killers - Somebody Told Me (Mylo Mix)

I have a GMail account that I use for a few mailing lists and such, but since they don’t support IMAP, I’m not ready to forward my nanovivid.com email addresses there. Since I don’t get much mail there, I never remember to check it and I need a way to be notified of new messages.

After realizing yesterday that gCount was taking up over 60 megs of memory (a bit much for a simple mail checker), I decided to find another way to get GMail new mail notifications. Since I don’t like the way GmailStatus‘ menu item looks, and Gee! doesn’t quite do it for me either, I was a bit concerned that I wasn’t going to find a good solution.

My next thought was that maybe someone had created an RSS or Atom feed for GMail, so I searched around. After not finding much, one result caught my eye that mentioned something about GMail having Atom feeds. I went over to GMail and sure enough, if you point your newsreader at the Atom feed, you’ll get a feed of your new mail messages. Goodbye menubar items! I do feel a little silly since the Atom feeds have been around since at least October of last year, but oh well.

♫ Elkland - Salvation

In the recent and not-so-recent past, I’ve left a few posts hanging with no resolution. This is an attempt to rectify that situation.

The Speakers I asked for advice on buying the Logitech Z-2200. After Ryan’s strong encouragement, I went ahead and got them. It’s been a very good choice that I’ve been extremely happy with — in more than one way. Not only are they incredibly kickass speakers, but I ended up getting them for free. After ordering and sending in my rebate request, Amazon credited me $50, saying that Logitech wasn’t going to be able to honor the rebate. Then a few weeks later I got the rebate check in the mail.

NewsFire When I first discovered NewsFire, I thought it was incredible, and compared to NetNewsWire 1.x, it is. However, after NNW 2 came out, NewsFire got kicked back off my dock in a hurry. I find NNW to be faster, more powerful, and easier to use. The only feature that I miss from NewsFire is the auto-discovery of feeds for the current site in Safari. Ranchero… you listening?

The thing that causes reproductive difficulties Following up on this post, the answer is: a box of computer cables. Very strange.

♫ Palestrina - Dilectus Meus Mihi

My big plan for the evening was to get the new site design in place. However, my Powerbook had other ideas. All of a sudden my internet access stopped accessing, but Bryan’s iMac was still working. Rebooted… nothing. After some mucking around with restarting the Airport base station and other such things, I found this thread describing the exact symptoms of my problem. I repaired permissions, and voila! All better.

Except of course for the not finishing my site.

Maybe I’ll get it done after the Real World Phily season finale. Yes, trashy TV is coming before my site. Damn you, MTV!

♫ Basement Jaxx - Oh My Gosh

CallVantage Dialer 1.3 is released! Here’s the changelog:

• Quicksilver action support.
• Allow passing a number to the script using LaunchBar.
• Growl 0.6 fixes and support.
• Automatic conversion of +XX-number to 011-XX-number for international dialing (thanks to Paul for the request).
• Migrated from saving in text file to saving in a plist (thanks to Jon for the suggestion).
• Added Install and Uninstall scripts.

♫ DJ Rawkus - Audio Differenz