Category: Technology

Low-end mac

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
The 800 MHz G3 iBook feels like a Nash Metropolitan next to the Maserati that is the MacBook. Unlike the Maserati, however, the Metro' still runs.
The 800 MHz G3 iBook feels like a Nash Metropolitan next to the Maserati that is the MacBook. Unlike the Maserati, however, the Metro' still runs.

I visit Low End Mac frequently, because I have so many — a Quadra 650, a Power Computing PowerBase 200, a G3 250 MHz “Wall Street” PowerBook, a PowerBook Duo 2300c, a G3 500MHz “Pismo” ‘PowerBook, a G3 800 iBook, a G4 450MHz “Sawtooth” Power Mac (upgraded in all directions save a better video card), and the black 2.0 GHz Intel Dual Core MacBook that blew up on me last week in mid-edit. The high-end Mac, just shy of 3 years old.

Anyone with this much old crap cluttering up the vicinity needs backup, and plenty of it. I have enough ancient machinery to start up a newspaper, if I were interested in filing Chapter 11 by St. Patrick’s Day. And it’s nice to have multiple redundancy systems in case something gets sideways come deadline time. I recall a story, perhaps a bit of writerly folklore, that the famously prolific Isaac Asimov kept three IBM Selectrics on hand because he feared one croaking on him in mid-novel.

I’m clearly no Asimov for a variety of reasons, most of them literary and scientific, but especially because my backups are not identical. When the high end crumbles, I start sliding down a slippery technological slope. It’s like a bad “Star Trek” episode: “Engage auxiliary power … switch to manual override … fuck it, where are the oars?”

As we speak I’m working on the dual-boot G3 iBook, which I upgraded to OS X 10.4.11 as soon as the MacBook croaked so I could use Flash 10 and a webcam and a whole mess of other nonsense that has little or nothing to do with writing columns or drawing cartoons.

The thing has that adhesive stink much discussed in Apple forums, its LCD display is non-awesome and the keyboard sucks — maybe one of the worst Apple has ever inflicted on its long-suffering fanboys — and Twitter drags on it like a three-legged dog with a butt full of buckshot. I’d switch to the Pismo, which has an excellent keyboard, but it’s three years farther behind the technological curve, even more video-challenged and sports an LCD that is starting to look like an art-class watercolor of a laptop screen as painted by a glaucoma patient with a head full of medicinal ditch weed.

If I were a good American I’d dash right on over to the Apple store, buy me a brand-new MacBook and use the old one for backup, when and if it returns from the Apple depot. I confess to having lust in my heart.

But I have no bucks in my bank account, and an early-riser of a wife who knows where the guns are, so I’ll forgo showing Steve Jobs my stimulus package in hopes that it will remain attached to my body.

i m bending u over lol

~ Patrick O'Grady

Like to text, do you? You may like it less after reading this story from Randall Stross, a business prof at a Cali’ college, who reports what carriers aren’t eager to tell you about texting — like, that it costs them bupkis but they charge you through the snoot anyway.

Happily, as a certified geezer and AARP member, I don’t text, so AT&T has to find another, more circuitous route into my wallet. The $99 refurbished iPhone 3G, now . . . I can feel those cold corporate fingers exploring my lint-filled pockets even as we speak.

It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s aliiiiive!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
SuperTurk melts the snow with his X-ray vision.
SuperTurk melts the snow with his X-ray vision.

Once again Zombie Mad Dog Media (Hosted WordPress Edition) walks the earth in search of fresh brains.

The shamans of Waxedstringandacanistan resurrected the evil dead sometime on Thanksgiving Day, while Herself and I were in Fort Collins eating a defunct bird and related items with my sister, her husband and his brother. I should probably sacrifice a laptop to the XHTML gods to show my gratitude.

The drive home was the real party, as the first actual wintry weather we’ve seen so far swept in and glazed Interstate 25 like a cop’s doughnut. We were in second gear for most of the way from Larkspur to Bibleburg, but oddly enough saw only one leadfoot knucklehead backasswards in the ditch, at the south entrance to the Air Force Academy. Last year, in dry conditions, we saw a half-dozen or so.

The local nitwits are making up for lost time today, though, bashing into one another with a will as they race from mall to mall hunting Black Friday bargains. And in New York, one poor bastard, a Wal-Mart temp, got stomped to death by an unruly mob of cheapskates who broke down the doors and piled into the store, devil take the hindmost. Reports The New York Times:

People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid Mr. Damour. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

“They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”

Now that’s what I call a “door-buster.” The coppers should confiscate every single one of these yahoos’ credit cards, take the maximum cash advance from each, and hand the whole pile over to this poor sod’s survivors. I wouldn’t walk into a big-box store today if they were giving away eternal life with the Victoria’s Secret angels in a giant snow globe full of cocaine.

More holiday-shopping news:

Late update: OK, I confess, I surrendered to the siren song of consumerism, went out and bought … $125 worth of various groceries that over the next week will be magically transformed into chicken stew Provençal, chicken quesadillas, breaded pork chops with brown rice and braised kale, spaghetti alla puttanesca with Brussels sprouts, and black bean vegetable soup, along with various salads, breakfasts and lunches, the latter to be composed mostly of leftover dinners. Also a couple moderately priced bottles of Frog tonsil polish. And I didn’t have to trample anyone to get ’em, either.

A loss of focus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
"Without my super high-powered glasses I'm helpless!"

I’ve finally managed to lose my damn’ reading glasses after thousands of unsuccessful attempts, just in time for tomorrow’s shift in the virtual barrel at VeloNews.com. Expect typos in abundance.

I do have a set of bifocal “computer glasses” that I rarely use for actual computer work — they seem better suited to drawing cartoons — so, unlike Fearless Fly, who only had the one set, I am not entirely powerless. But these double-jointed sonsabitches give me a headache.

Come to think of it, so does editing. O, Lord, I will be gobbling the Advil like popcorn tomorrow.

Your call is important to us

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Herself and I have been trying to learn something any 10-year-old knows — how to send multimedia messages from our AT&T cellphones.

Mia Sopiapilla atop the fridge, wondering why I'm pointing a cellphone at her.
Mia Sopaipilla atop the fridge, wondering why I'm pointing a cellphone at her.

I’ve been wanting to take pix on rides, but didn’t want to lug a camera along. Even my little Canon PowerShot SD600 fills up a jersey pocket, once in its carrying case, and there’s always the chance of yard-saling and destroying the shooter. Then I remembered I always pack a cellphone, and that cellphone has (wait for it) a camera, built right in. Duh.

But how to get the pix out of the phone? My old Samsung SGH-c417 doesn’t have a USB port, so the only exit is via e-mail, and I couldn’t find the door. This meant I faced a call to the dread tech support, probably a Hindu robot linked to a Chinese satellite phone in Spaminacanistan.

Imagine my surprise when I got a series of pleasant, helpful English speakers who walked me through the laborious process of reconfiguring various factory settings, changing the IP address and finally resetting the phone. It took about 45 minutes, but that was partly because it was a lengthy procedure and partly because I only use this phone as a phone. I don’t download tunes, text my peeps or IM; I ring ’em up. Hell, I didn’t even know how to toggle the keypad from numbers to letters and back again.

The procedure is not error-free; sending this pic of Mia atop the refrigerator took three tries and two reboots of the phone. And the pictures suck, frankly. Still, I suppose it’s better than packing a real camera and taking the chance of waking up trailside in a pile of prickly pear with the damn’ thing embedded in one lacerated kidney, busily snapping pix of your ruptured spleen.