Monthly Archive for July, 2007

idiot tax

Published on 26/07/2007 in everything and geek. 1 Comment

2002 eMac, 700Mhz, 640MB RAM, not booting up… “just displaying some text”. Her friend had told her that meant it was a kernel panic, the young lady feared the worst as she entrusted her machine to my care and I informed her solemnly that the worst in this case could mean a £300+ logic-board replacement. She began eyeing the new iMacs, pragmatic even as she mourned her poor eMac.

Turns out a home-burned Tiger disc was in the drive, causing the machine to hang at boot.

Presenting “ways to remove a troublesome boot disc from your eMac”, in order of obviousness:

1. As the machine boots, hold the eject key on your keyboard.

2. Open the white flap on the front of the disc drive, and use a pen or something thing to push the eject button lurking therein.

3. As above, but stuff a paper-clip down the emergency eject hole.

4. Hold down the mouse button as your machine boots.

5. Hold alt as it boots, so as to be presented with a list of things the machine thinks are bootable. Now press the eject key.

6. Boot into open-firmware and type “eject-disc”.

7. Lug your eMac all the way down to the local Apple Reseller, covered in plastic bags to protect against the rain, and pay them £58.05 to perform any one of the above.

NB – all but #2 and #3 work on any mac, not just eMacs

cleaning house

Published on 24/07/2007 in everything and geek. 0 Comments

So you sold your mac on eBay, good job!

But now you want to clean it up and prepare it for the new buyer, but… maybe you don’t have the setup discs to do a clean install? Maybe you want to apply the latest software updates because you’re nice or something, but not leave a user-account sat cluttering up the mac for the new owner.

Have no fear!

First, boot to single-user-mode by powering up your computer while holding down the Apple and S keys.

Then, as it suggests, run /sbin/fsck -y and /sbin/mount -uw /

Now for the hard part!

Remove the user account(s) from the OS’s database:
nicl -raw /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb -delete /users/[user-name]

Then delete the actual folder with:
rm -r /Users/[user-name]

And then tell the mac that it’s never been set up:
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

thunk different

Published on 23/07/2007 in everything. 4 Comments

Last week one of my mother’s friends asked me if I could transfer her life from her old computer to her new one. Naturally I agreed, but I am now perhaps wishing I had not.

See, tomorrow, when she picks it up, I am going to have to have a difficult conversation with her. I am going to have to explain why her brand new, £380 Vista laptop is slower, less responsive and uglier in every respect than her three year old iBook G4 running Mac OS 10.4. For me that’s right up there with explaining to a pubescent girl why she just started bleeding from her womb.

The worst thing is that the iBook shipped with OS 10.3, an operating system a good 18 months older than 10.4, and upgrading it to the very latest, state-of-the-art OS actually made it snappier, more responsive, and added genuinely useful features. The Windows machine, by comparison, would be very much better-off running XP or even 2000.

Incidentally, did you know that Vista’s new window chrome is drawn on top of the old 98-style windows? Seriously. It tried to show a dialogue box before it had finished loading properly, and for several seconds it was displayed in the classic livery, before the glass effect was laid clumsily on top.

Oh, and when I say glass, I mean plastic, since this thing’s graphics card has not the muscle required for the mighty Aero… even though every last drop of OSX’s prettiness is running quite smoothly on the three-year-old machine beside it.

tl;dr version: Windows engineers have never heard of efficiency and this lady is either crazy, or ill-informed enough to switch back to Windows, from a Mac.

my kingdom for a horse

Published on 19/07/2007 in everything. 2 Comments

I am writing this post perched on a traffic light control box off the A6 near Alvaston.

I am counting how many pedestrians (“peds” in the trade), cyclists and horses pass by and in which direction.

The fee for this banality is eighty of your English pounds, at roughly ten of them for each hour. It’s not all fun and games though, since I had to arise at five of the morning clock.

I know!

Dumbledore dies!

Published on 17/07/2007 in everything. 2 Comments

You may have heard; the new Harry Potter book has slipped out onto the tubes.

I’m reading it now out of a sick sense of masochism more than anything. You see, it’s in the form of photos, taken by some dude with a digicam. The left pages are all curved inwards at the top, the flash makes the text near the bottom hard to discern and occasionally the dude’s hand covers words on the bottom-most lines. Not to mention the occasional illegible pair of pages where the focus messed-up, and the horrible jpeg artefacts on the text throughout.

Still, I’ll know how the whole shebang ends before any of those schmucks who wait for a print copy.

Yes, I know: I am both big and clever.