“Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father. …”
The problem with having an Apple orchard is that you’ve got to tend to the sonsabitches when you’d rather be doing something else.
Like, say, making money so you can afford to tend to the sonsabitches, or even buy a new one now and again.
I have five outdated Apple products in heavy rotation around the rancheroo. Three need OS updates, one needs a vigorous cloning, and the fifth — well, let’s just say that it’s devolved to running Adobe Photoshop 4.0 in Classic mode.
And yes, I said Adobe Photoshop 4.0.
“What’s it all mean?” you ask. Why, it means that yes, yes, yes, it’s time for another thrilling episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.
P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H
• Technical notes: This episode was recorded with an Audio-Technica AT2035 microphone and a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. I edited this hot mess using Apple’s GarageBand on the 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro. The background music is “Asunder,” from Taylor Howard at Zapsplat.com. Typewriter sounds courtesy of Tomlija at Freesound.org. Emperor Palpatine comes to you from the Dark Side, while “Alarm!” comes from “Das Boot.” And “The G4 Awakens” comes straight from the 1999 G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac, which don’t need no steekeeng updates because it’s immortal, thank you very much. Lemme know if your iPhone is still working 20 years from now. But don’t ask me to work on it.
Tags: Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Radio Free Dogpatch
Mad Blog Media 
December 16, 2019 at 1:49 pm |
Weird bit of space-time continuum worm-hole biz there … RFD popped up in Overcast a good hour before I got the email notification and before it showed up in the Apple Podcast app. Crazy that you can point to something that doesn’t exist yet. Leap, and the net shall appear, I guess. Anyway, a great counter-point to spending $18k for a new MacPro. Hey, I’m not buying one, either … what are we going to do with all that money we just saved?
December 16, 2019 at 2:05 pm |
I tell ya, Bubba, you wanna keep an eye on your technology if you don’t want it to turn into techgnawology and start in a-chewin’ on yore ass.
I still don’t see it in iTunes, or in the Podcasts app on the iPad Pro, which is reasonably up to date. But then, I don’t subscribe to my own podcast, and it can take as long as 24 hours for a new episode to get catalogued.
Especially since ever’ man-jack and his gran’maw has a podcast now.
“Git in line, bwah, you ain’t nothin’ special. Six minutes about old Macs? Sheeeeeeeee-yit! You’re lucky we even let you in the queue.”
December 16, 2019 at 7:51 pm |
Seen this at the Apple Store?
Lumos Matrix Urban Bike Helmet
https://store.apple.com/xc/product/HNNN2ZM/A
I don’t know anyone, especially that dude in the mirror, with a noggin worth $250 of protection.
December 16, 2019 at 8:01 pm |
Ay, Chihuahua. Fewer smart products, more smart people, please.
December 16, 2019 at 2:20 pm |
I just checked my iTunes podcast subscription, and it doesn’t appear there or has it downloaded into my podcast queue and all the apple gadgets around this joint. I guess the electrons it’s on haven’t yet jumped to warp speed. Oh well, no matter, I have low friends in high places in Dogpatch.
December 16, 2019 at 2:21 pm |
PS: What’s a Zip?
December 16, 2019 at 2:26 pm |
Welp, if it hasn’t landed in the Apple barrel* by tomorrow, I’ll have a look-see.
That’s where I used to use an internal Zip drive. Remember when Iomega Zip floppy disks were all the rage? I had a couple external Zips cluttering up the office Back in the Day®, and so replaced it with another internal hard drive.
* As of 3:40 p.m. Mad Dog Time on Monday the latest episode shows up in the Podcast app.
December 16, 2019 at 3:09 pm |
That was a cheap shot from me. I remember Zip drives, but I haven’t seen one in a long time. If I remember right, which doesn’t happen often, the Zip drive technology had a short life span.
December 16, 2019 at 3:34 pm |
I figgered you must’ve dealt with them at some time or another. They were handy for big-ass files, like cartoons, for SneakerNet® while putting out the Show Daily at Interbike, and for archiving stuff.
Didn’t the CD burner pretty much do for ’em, once those became common? And now who has a CD/DVD burner? The times, they are a-changin’. …
December 16, 2019 at 4:24 pm |
I still have a Apple Super Drive CD/DVD burner. Use it for backing up the photo files on DVD and burning music to CDs. And, I think my 2017 Rav 4 was one of the last Toyotas to have a CD player which I still use.
Believe it or not, Apple still sells them.
December 16, 2019 at 5:49 pm |
I have one of those too. And a non-Apple version. Annnnnnnd an external floppy drive. Yes, I still have some stuff archived on Zips and floppies. Good Lord, am I ever a dinosaur.
December 16, 2019 at 7:55 pm |
I saw it on the official podcast app about 30 minutes after it showed up here.
December 16, 2019 at 7:58 pm |
The app probably had a stroke after it saw I’d started podcasting again. “Oh, God, no, not this guy again …. errk … agghhh … gahhhhh. …”
December 16, 2019 at 4:18 pm |
Thank Zeus I’ve “got a guy” who bails my various Windows PC’s out of this crash, that fritz and the ever popular frozen screen. But the wallet still smokes even though he’s a reasonable sort. My new IPhone and year old iPad have yet to reject my daily entreaties. But like POG I’ve got a good number of older Apple devices that while operative, can longer do the limbo no matter how high the bar is set. But they still play music which is what they do around these here parts. And…drum roll… your newest podcast. It was like receiving a transatlantic cable in WWI. Made my day.
December 16, 2019 at 5:59 pm |
You were the driving force behind the podcast revival, sir. I’d been thinking and thinking and thinking about it, but hadn’t gotten past the thinking-about-it part.
Like video, podcasting is difficult work — for me, anyway, because I haven’t been doing it for 40-odd years. If I had to think about all the steps I have to take to write and illustrate a blog post I probably wouldn’t do that more than a few times a year, either. But a lot of that stuff is on autopilot.
If I can just stay motivated and do these things regularly, I can “automate” a lot of the stuff that feels like rocket surgery. Brain science. You know, things only the smarties can do.
December 17, 2019 at 6:06 am |
Appreciated the little Firesignesque background effects even though I wasn’t stoned as per required back in the day. Great music too. Larry is right you know…bikes and computers share similarities. “Whatya mean you don’t have six speed, threaded freewheels no more! WTF..this bike is still running great. Rear dropout spacing changes? What you talking about?”
December 17, 2019 at 12:39 am |
The podcast came through the speaker on my gizmo just fine but a minute into the thing I realized it was a subject and language foreign to me. One thing I always say – “There’s nothing more obsolete than old “technology” whether it be a computer, Mavic Zap-equipped bicycle, cassette player, typewriter…etc. and far too much of this obsolescence is planned and forced upon us.”
December 17, 2019 at 8:34 am |
Mebbe, mebbe … but who decides what’s “obsolete?”
Word-processing software like MacWrite let you (wait for it) process words. Then the infamous bloatware clusterfuck called Microsoft Word became the industry standard and writers had to contend with a half-assed desktop-publishing application instead of something they could, like, y’know, like, write with, an’ shit.
I’d still use MacWrite. Instead I use TextEdit, which I guess is the 21st century’s MacWrite.
Likewise Photoshop. Quickly scan and doctor images? Beauty! Then it took on a hideous life of its own and you needed the Rosetta Stone, the Necronomicon, and Spock’s Universal Translator to puzzle the fucker out.
So I use Preview to edit photos for the blog, though for medium-heavy work I turn to the 2006 MacBook, which has a tolerable version of Photoshop Elements I can use for web graphics. For print work it’s still the 1999 Power Mac and Photoshop 4.0.
Bikes? Chromoly framesets, nine-speed drivetrains, and Paul Components brakes constitute the pinnacle of the art. Also, and too, pre-tubeless wheels and tires. It’s all downhill from there.
Bottom line: An engineer can put tits on a motor, but it doesn’t make it run any better. And the trouble is, they won’t let us have the old titless motors back.
December 17, 2019 at 9:31 am |
Yep, they make damn sure your “titless motor” can’t be used one way or another and the ways they can do it seem to be expanding at an insane rate in the electronic gizmo biz.
How many of the first-generation electronic bicycle shifting bits are no longer produced and incompatible with newer stuff? You don’t even have to go electronic- 7-speed stuff won’t work with 8 nor 8 with 9 and so on.
“Throw it away and buy a new one….” needs to stop unless we can at least send the old ones back at no charge to be recycled.
December 17, 2019 at 5:52 am |
If I may stray from the subject for a minute, we went the the theater, I guess that is old school too, to see the movie “Knives Out.” If you enjoyed Columbo or Poirot, I think you will love this movie.
December 17, 2019 at 9:11 am |
D’ye remember “Murder By Death?” The Neil Simon sendup of the whodunit? I got a bang out of that Back in the Day®.
I’ve always enjoyed the detective genre. James Crumley gave it a fresh spin with his two dissolute dicks, C.W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch.
December 17, 2019 at 9:34 am |
Anyone watch the Inspector Montalbano TV series? They have ’em with English subtitles. We LOVE the show, a lot of which is filmed not that far from us in southeast Sicily. We ran a cycling tour through the area a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Montalbano_(TV_series)