AT&T is now the worst carrier

File this under “Duh”: AT&T is now the worst carrier, according to Consumer Reports. Seriously, Verizon, I hope you get the iPhone early next year like I’ve heard.

Email Migration

Recently I’ve been researching the process of archiving my ancient email from the turn of the millenium. The whole process got started when I decided to cull my collection of old Mac hardware, including 4 old laptops from the basement which don’t work anymore. The day I’ll need to resurrect another Pismo is long since gone, so I’m ditching three carcasses as well as a Titanium shell.

So, what I’ve got is a CD with an Outlook Express 5 (Mac) database, and I’d like to (in the best possible outcome) convert the email to text so that it’s out of a proprietary format. I got a version of OE5 running on a spare laptop (my venerable old Powerbook 1400) and found a script that converts an OE mailbox into individual .EML files. I should be able to crack open an .EML file into text to at least read the headers and message data.

The other method I found was to set up a spare IMAP mailbox and point OE5 at it; uploading mailboxes and messages to the IMAP folder converts them, and then they can be pulled down by a newer email client which can save them out as something else.

In the meantime, with all of the spare time I’ve got, I’m gonna re-burn the CD with the database, the converted files, a copy of the script linked above, and an install of OE5 for the future, when I’ve forgotten what I did with the text archive and I need to do this all over again.

Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X

I’m filing this one away under Future Upgrades: Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It, from Daring Fireball. I’ve finally belatedly made the switch from Safari to Firefox after multiple crashes and worry about unencrypted HTTP headers, and I think another timely upgrade would be disabling Flash in my browser altogether. There are things I like about Safari (most importantly the RSS subscription counter) that I’m purposely giving up for added security, given the amount of logging in I do on a daily basis. I’ve noticed that when I boot up Safari on my G5 server at the house the fan spins up and the hard drive starts spinning almost immediately—this on a system with 2GB of RAM.

Rebirth?

I purchased a used display inverter off eBay a week ago, figuring I’d give IdiotCentral (My 17″ MacBook Pro) one last shot at usefulness before putting her up for sale. This morning at work I took 15 minutes to crack the case and drop the part in, and closed everything back up with my fingers crossed. Upon first boot, the lower half of the screen was still obscured, but after about thirty seconds all the lines disappeared and I was looking at my Dock for the first time in eight months. I just ran some updates and plugged it in to charge the battery, and now I’m wondering what I should do with this thing. The lines might come back, which makes me a little hesitant to try and sell it, but I don’t want it crapping out on us again. I’d love to hand it off to Jen to use as a backup machine for presentations and travel, which is what I’m leaning towards right now, but I’m afraid it’ll start acting up on her right when she needs it the most. What to do?

(I’m also realizing how much I like the new keyboard style better than the old. What a difference!)

Slashdot Games Story | iFixit Moves Into Console Repair

Slashdot is reporting this afternoon that iFixit, a handy website known for Mac teardowns and repair guides, is moving into console repair. Which is goodto know, because I’ve been considering some upgrades to my $20 yardsale Xbox.

Still Borked.

I got a little time yesterday afternoon to take apart my 17″ MBP, which has been suffering from screen-itis for several months now. In January I purchased a new (used) display cable, hoping that was the root of the problem, and attempted to install it at work with a new inverter board, but was foiled by unclear directions and the clutch cover refusing to come off. This time I was more successful, and had the entire thing swapped out and replaced in 15 minutes. unfortunately, though, the screen is still only half-visible, which probably means the replacement inverter board I put in has gone bad.

No luck yet on selling the Jeep, either; I had a nice guy come and look yesterday (after a lot of near-misses due to scheduling conflicts last week) but he balked when his advisor told him he’d realistically get 2-3 years of use out of it. I don’t really know what he was expecting, considering the price I’m offering it for (I knocked a bit off the advertised price during negotiations, actually) and its age—it’s 12 years old, and I plainly stated “AS-IS” in the ad. I’m not giving the fucking thing away for free, sorry. I gave him some time to think it over, but I doubt he’ll bite. We’ll see.

Netflix now available for iPhone.

Filed in the It’s About Friggin’ Time Department: Netflix is now available for the  iPhone and iPod touch. Side note: the Netflix blog looks like it was designed in 1998.

Possible Moving Plans.

No, We’re not selling the house. Or leaving the leafy, muggy idyll of the Baltimore suburbs. I’m talking about webhosting, specifically the hosting of this particular website, which has become slower than the Chinese traffic jam lately. Simple HTML requests are fast enough, but serving any kind of PHP from WordPress can be measured in minutes, which is unacceptable. The tentative plan goes something like this:

1. Get the caching situation sorted out – Done. Does anybody see a difference in load times? I do.
2. Switch out the template for a little while to see if there’s something there that’s slowing things down.
3. Look through the template to see if there’s anything in the code that’s slowing things down—a rogue plugin, greedy PHP call, or flaky image request.
4. Optimize the database to see if that’s the issue.
5. Set up a mirror over on my other site, load the database, and see if it’s any faster over there (meaning the DB server here is just slow or overloaded).

Shiny and New.

I got a beautiful new MacBook Pro delivered to the house via FedEx last Thursday, and I’ve been spending most of my free time migrating all of my important data over without crufting up the OS with years of legacy gunk. It’s light, it’s fast, it feels solid, it’s not blisteringly hot, it doesn’t feature the whine of cooling fans, and it’s paid for. The trackpad is an absolute joy to use; whatever Apple did to improve the sensor, it’s a magnitude of difference better than the old style (which, admittedly, was getting wonkier in part due to the battery swelling) and ten times more precise. The keyboard is solid and I appreciate the addition of volume and playback controls in the top Function keys (where the old model had brightness controls and two unused keys), although I miss the monitor switching key, forfeited to a Dashboard hotkey (ecch). I got the model with a glossy display, and it’s not as distracting as I thought it might be. The display itself is bright and even, and has a slight bluish tint out of the box. I’m going to use the calibrator on it tomorrow to warm things up and build a profile.

Next on the to-do list will be taking IdiotCentral down to a bare shell in order to swap out the inverter board cable, and see if that will solve the screen issues once and for all. If it works, I may consider selling her to recoup some of the money spent on IdiotCommand here, and if it doesn’t, she’ll become a production machine relegated to my desk.

Shiny, Shiny.

Mama has been rocking a 5-year-old Motorola 551 for way too long now, and the replacement battery is nearing its end of life (when it deigns to charge from the wall plug at all). Last Saturday we paddled through the rain to the Apple Store to see if they had any iPhone 4‘s available for her birthday present, but I was unaware that they were so scarce right now. We left empty-handed. I was also going to see about replacing my MBP battery while we were there, but the throngs of people in the store (avoiding the downpour like we were) made that impossible too. At home, I jumped online and ordered a phone, which should be here sometime in the next three weeks.

As mentioned earlier, I took Jen out to dinner Sunday evening at le Petit Louis, a french bistro up in Roland Park, while our kindly neighbors watched Finn. What can I say? My bride was beautiful, the food was delicious, and the atmosphere was perfect. Happy Birthday, baby. Returning to our neighbors’, Finn was happily playing on the slide, while her counterpart had already melted down and gone upstairs for night-nights. She’s completely gotten over her initial fear of the slide, and now spends most of her time at the playground in a constant loop: up the stairs, down the slide. Up the stairs, down the slide.

Tuesday afternoon I went to store.apple.com, picked out a refurbished 15″ MacBook Pro with as many bells and whistles as I could afford (newest processor, RAM, widescreen display, fast video card), squinched up my eyes, and clicked the “buy now” button. It’s been a long time coming, and it took a lot of convincing myself that this was really necessary, but having a laptop that actually has a usable screen, working optical media drive, and functioning battery will be a huge improvement. FedEx says it will be here on Thursday, which is faster than I’d hoped for. I still need to pick up a Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter to run an external display, but a colleague at work tells me there’s a supplier online that has them for considerably less than the $40 Apple is charging.