Win Some, Lose Some.

I spent a good portion of this morning in a creaky, drafty garage, attempting to make one good laser printer out of three. You never know what you’ll find when answering a Craigslist ad, which is why I always travel with tools, flashlight, cellphone, and the minimum amount of cash possible to hold an item until I’ve taken stock of the situation. These printers were three Phaser 7700 models, big tabloid-sized laser printers bought at a GSA auction and stored for several years behind a surplus hospital gurney covered in books and old Silicon Graphics workstations. Between the three of them there were two full sets of ink cartridges, one set of fusers, and one working hard drive (the other two had been pulled as per government regulations), and after swapping parts around, finagling balky fusers into place and doing delicate transplant surgery on the motherboards, we got one to power up and make it to the “print test page” step before paper jams and my ice-cold feet brought us to a halt. I don’t think these three machines were worth purchasing, but I’m still keeping my eyes open.

Dear AT&T,

Six dropped calls in the last two weeks means your network, while fast, sucks. While talking on the phone with my sister this evening, I got dropped twice. WTF? The church steeple across the street from my house is built out of cellular repeaters. Your responses to customer complaints about the quality and coverage of your network leave much to be desired; in fact, they are the reason I will be dropping your service as soon as your iPhone exclusivity contract expires with Apple. Get bent.

Snow Leopard and Appletalk

I only just got Snow Leopard from Santa over the holidays (thanks, Santa!), so I’m behind the curve as far as what’s new and what it does. One thing I was not aware of was that Apple was removing Appletalk support altogether, which means no more direct printing to either of our printers—something I wasn’t aware of when I upgraded my laptop last week. Thankfully, it’s an easy fix: I set up Shared Printing on our G5 server (which can’t run Snow Leopard anyway) and all was right again.

Back On The Air.

After some wrangling, several phone calls, and a weekend of frightening media darkness, we’re back online. A Verizon dude came to the house, looked at the outside boxes, mumbled something to Jen about “going back to look at the mainframe”, and left. Hours passed, and then another nice man came out to make sure service had been restored. His efforts to make sure the DSL was working were thwarted by the updates I’d made to our cable routing during the downtime; I set up a honest-to-god punchdown block in the basement and commenced to rerouting and sorting miles of data cable hanging from the rafters like so many burmese pythons. After I got home from work, I made a few quick changes to the patch cables and restored the internet to glorious cinemascope. I still have to tighten up the remainder of the wiring, reroute coax that’s mixed in with the data cabling, and finish cleaning up the punchdown block before I can call it done, but it’s better than before. Oh, yeah, adding a 24-port switch to add into the rack would be nice…but it’s not necessary.

* * *
Over the weekend our neighbors invited us to a “green” meeting (local folks coming together to talk about environmentally friendly methods and practices at the Lutheran church), and while the speaker was relatively good (a semi-nervous woman who sells eco-friendly products), it just so happened there was a used tool sale going on in the back of the room. For $15, we walked away with a 22″ hedge clipper, a full-size shovel, edging tool, and gravel rake, a pipe cutter, two channel locks, several snap-on wrenches, two unused paint scrapers, a sharpening stone, and the big find: a shaft-driven Bolens edging trimmer in unknown condition for the princely sum of $3. If I can get it running and swap out the gas tank (there’s a hole in it), my days of hauling 150′ of electrical cord around the yard will be over for good.

* * *
After some confusion and a misplaced paper were cleared up last week, I finally got a box this afternoon containing ten window balances from Pullman, which will go into use just as soon as I can block the time out to install them.

Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Well, it’s final: I powered up my MacBook Pro yesterday and was greeted with a dark screen where I could only see the faintest hint of items on the screen. It looks like the backlight on my LCD has finally crapped out, which means one of two things: either the cables to the display have frayed and worn to the point of breaking, or I’ll probably have to replace the LCD/backlight assembly. Only some hours spent cracking the case will tell for sure. Unfortunately, I don’t currently see any replacement cables for sale.
If it’s the cable, we’re talking $30. If it’s the display, then we’re talking $300. In the meantime, I’m using remote desktop to work on my laptop from my work machine, which is like looking through a slightly blurry windowpane at my monitor—but still usable.

Quick Updates.

Well, it’s official: Saturn is dead. I kind of knew it would happen, even when they claimed that Roger Penske was going to buy it (buy what, exactly? Build what? That whole story never made sense).
I’ve spent a good deal of quality time with OS X Server (Tiger) over the last couple of weeks, and my experience has been very good overall. I had a previous install to learn from, so doing things like setting up users, groups, share points and sharing were a lot easier to do than if I’d tried it out of the box. Opening up ports for HTTP, FTP and VNC went smoothly, and I followed some helpful directions to log into the server using SSH and then share via AFP over a secure connection. I’m curious to get a copy of Snow Leopard Server and look at the differences.
I also bartered some networking help for a used G5 tower, which means our setup here at the house will be current as of 2004. The big thing is to have a machine that will take a SATA drive, which are cheap and plentiful—I’ve been cobbling together servers with ancient hardware for years, so when I can put an enterprise-level terrabyte drive in a five-year-old machine for ~$100, it means I can finally collect all of our photos, music, video, and backups in one place. I started moving files last night, and with the help of a utility called SmartReporter, I’m hoping I can avoid the catastrophic failure of our last music server.
I did not know this before, but the 3rd generation iPod will not charge from a USB connection, which sucks, because Apple decided to drop FireWire 400 ports from the back of new Intel iMacs. Which means I can listen to what’s on my iPod from my work computer, but I can’t charge it unless it’s plugged into the wall.
We are inching closer to that new car, but it’s slow going.
I’m going to have to break down and dip into the home equity fund to buy three more windows for the front porch before the really cold weather hits. It’s chillier at night now, and I’m too used to being able to work out there quietly. Also, having two computers on the dining room table for a second year in a row is unacceptable—especially with all of the cords hanging at Finn-height. Meanwhile, I just ordered ten more Pullman window counterbalances for the rest of the upstairs windows. Ten is about all the budget for this month will allow, and it’ll take me a weekend or two to get them all installed. The next step is to figure out a good way to blow paper insulation into the empty window pocket cavities without getting it all over the house.

Just When I Need It Least Dept.

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.

Random Bits, Early September.

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 her 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.

Random Notes.

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.

Automator Redux.

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.

Mind: Blown.

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.

GoCraigsy.

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!

Late To The Party.

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.

RTFM, or: You Write Not Good.

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.

Geek Update.

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).

To Social Network, Or Not To Social Network?

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.

Change of Venue?

After making the decision to keep the Scout, I decided to revive the old /scout/ directory on my work server. (For a time in the early part of this decade, that directory was the most popular destination on that domain). After reviewing a page I’d last edited in 2003, I decided to install WordPress in that directory and document my progress with a simple weblog. Installation was a snap, and within minutes I’d changed the template to something cleaner and more useful—a process that would have taken hours in Movable Type.

I’ve been wanting to update/upgrade/redesign this site for about a year now, and the technical and logistical realities of working with Movable Type have been the thing that holds me back. I don’t really want to spend hours fighting with a clunky template interface just to change a color sitewide, or have to wrestle with MySQL to upgrade the database using lousy installation instructions. The WordPress interface is smooth, there are a million plugins to make life easier, the PHP is cleaner, as are the templates, and it just feels better.

So, at the crossroads, I’m considering a switch of allegiance. Doing some preliminary research, I found some pages that talk about migrating data, which doesn’t sound easy but could be harder. I think what I’ll have to do is set up a subdirectory here on idiotking.org, export the data from MT and then import it into WP to get the guts in place. Then it’s going to be a lot of tweaking to get all the old URLs working correctly (this seems to be the biggest hassle) and stuff where it belongs. Where I’ll find the time for this I don’t know, but it will be nice to have a change of scenery around these parts again.

Purple Haze.

In the last eight years or so, I’ve had a total of about ten all-in-one iMacs come through Idiot Central in assorted models and colors. I’ve kept my eye out for them here and there because they are usually very cheap, mostly bombproof, and will still run OS X at a reasonable enough speed to be useful. However, ten-year-old circuitry gets finicky after awhile, and like anything else, exhibits personality quirks. I’ve had a handful of first-generation colored versions with wonky old hard drives and dead CD-ROM drives, and slot-loading models with twitchy video and fragile power units just waiting for a brief hiccup in current to fry the motherboard. All have been purchased from Craigslist and flea markets and rummage sales, all were put to good use for various projects (or resold), and over the years they’ve finally bit the dust in one way or another, except for one.

I bought Purple—named for its case color—through an ad in the Pennysaver (yeah, that’s right, this was before Craigslist made it to Mobtown) from a chain-smoking dude in Glen Burnie, who may or may not have acquired it by means illegal, and who certainly sketched me out. Before I had a music server set up on it, it first ran home-automation software here at the house. Then, it was a production webserver. For a while it was my mother’s stand-in iMac when her original blueberry model bit the dust, until we got her a laptop. For the next four years, I stuffed it to the gills with my music collection, and it sat under my desk, dutifully hosting my music library. It’s been opened and closed so many times, I can’t remember what the original configuration ever was. A few weeks ago I humped it into idfive and booted it up after a year of retirement, and it cheerfully resumed its duties without complaint.

Like the proverbial Timex, it kept ticking, until this week, when it suddenly refused to wake up from sleep. Several attempts to get it to boot from an emergency disk failed, and finally it offered the weirdest possible sign of trouble I’ve ever seen: a shifted, half-blank display of pixels all running for the edges like animals escaping from a zoo. I pulled the drive the other night and booted it from a spare enclosure; it came up immediately and with no problems, which pointed back to problems within the machine itself. Sadly, I pulled the RAM and clock battery out, then buttoned it back up in preparation for a trip to the dump. I have one last iMac in the basement that’s available for a heart transplant; strangely enough, I’ve been meaning to get rid of that one for the last few months every time I trip over it, but providence made sure I was too busy to ever get around to it.

So, farewell, old friend. It’s been a good five years, and you’ve certainly paid for yourself.

Excellent Customer Service.

I finally got around to sending our older Canon PowerShot off to the company’s customer service center a few weeks ago. To recap the story quickly, earlier this year our PowerShot SD110 started malfunctioning, taking shots with a magenta cast and horizontal lines through each frame. Research revealed that Canon had an out-of-warranty replacement program for the problem, and a quick phone call confirmed our camera was eligible.

I had dawdled in sending our camera in not because I was waiting on the company for anything, but because I never got around to the UPS store to drop the package off (new baby and all). I should also mention that Canon’s customer service has been nothing but stellar from the beginning. Each call I made was handled by someone obviously well-trained and motivated, and they sent me a pre-paid UPS label promptly via email after my first contact. When our camera arrived at their shop, I got an email notification. And when they emailed me about a return package en route, I expected it to take a week or so to arrive.

Imagine my surprise when we got a FedEx delivery this week, with a small but curiously heavy box inside. Accompanying the box was a dry, matter-of-fact letter which informed me they had, in fact, tested out camera and found it was defective, and because parts weren’t available anymore, they shipped us a replacement PowerShot SD900 instead. I think you could have knocked me over with a feather.

It’s a refurbished model, which means it had been returned to Canon for repair/replacement; there are a few small nicks on the corner where it had been dropped somewhere. Otherwise, it’s a clean unit with a huge LCD display and 10MP resolution. (The physical condition of our old 110 was embarrassing). The battery is charging on the wall as I write this, and I can’t wait to try it out.

My first serious digital camera was a Canon G3, which I loved, and when it came time to go to DSLRs, I went with Nikon over Canon for various reasons I don’t recall even though it seemed like everyone I read was doing the opposite. I’ve got nothing but good words for our Nikons, and I still plan to upgrade to a D90 when I can afford one (I have already made a sizeable investment in Nikon glass), but I still praise Canon to the heavens whenever I’m asked for an opinion. This customer service experience almost makes me regret going with Nikon, because I do vote with my pocketbook, and I’d like to reward this company for going above and beyond the call of duty. They could simply have told me there was nothing they could do, and shipped back our brick; they could have discontinued the program years ago. Instead, they have further cemented my brand loyalty, and made an evangelist out of me. Nice work, Canon.

A Question.

Why does Dreamweaver continue to be such a giant bag of dicks? I mean, it was shite eight years ago; it’s still shite now. God, how fucking annoying it is.