Isle of Tortuga: it may be late in the day, mateys. But arr, I not be swingin from the yardarm yet.
(Really, I just stumbled into this site via one of the bibliographies, and it’s pretty great. For example, here are a few Letters of Marque for your consideration.)
Great gawd amighty!
Today has been a day of cursing and troubleshooting, brought about by my insufficient documentation practices. I’ve had two first-gen Apple Airport base stations for a very long time; sometime within the past couple of months I took one down for whatever reason and only today set it up again.
I had some sort of solution in place that allowed them to work together simultaneously, something that they are not designed to do (later versions of these things can do this handily). Today, of course, I cannot figure out what the solution was. I can’t even find discussions of how to solve this problem, as it was current over three years ago.
Given the time, I’m not going to be able to solve the problem today, which makes me surly at best.
Further entertaining me has been the activity of troubleshooting my Mom’s iChat setup. She uses a Powerbook and for some reason the internal mic does not appear to be turning off when iChat’s AV features are engaged. The mic is close enough, apparently, to one or both of the internal speakers that the resulting audio includes a distracting, tinny echo.
Apple’s discussion boards suggest tossing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat.plist to allow internal hardware sensing to correctly deal with this problem. We tried this with no result.
Foo!
Apologies for the outage this afternoon. I downed the server to do some gut swapping with the former primary desktop machine. Everything went smoothly enough.
For my next trick, a clean server rebuild onto the former desktop unit under 10.3! Thank you, I’ll be here all week!
TouchStream MacNTouch: Laptop KeyBoard Replacement for Apple PowerBook and iBook. [via Ted Leung]
Speaking of piles of hardware, here’s something I would scavenge to try in a second. But given that my marching orders involve getting rid of some of the aged gear I have, one more oddball peripheral is a no-go, as much as I love my strange input devices.
Eudora Mailbox Cleaner may be of help when I finalize my transition away from the venerable Eudora. I would love to keep my mail archives accessible. The archives are now well over ten years’ worth of mail.
I may fiddle with Eudora a bit before I do this – many of the email addresses I have in it are old and the filters are so crufty that it’s not all that useful anymore for autofiling.
Of course, I have to pick a client to move to. Mail is in consideration (for support reasons, mostly) as well as Entourage (for platform compatiblity and to better understand the PC version, which baffles me in classic Microsoftian ways).
I have actually found myself using Gmail almost exclusively of late, primarily because of the superior spam filtering. I would love to be able to hide and reveal messages by label in that UI, though. Certain other limitations make it not quite perfect, such as the inability to map my domain to gmail for email and the related problem of address-based segmenting. All of this points, once again, to selecting an email and hosting provider rather than doing the provisioning myself.
However, these matters are not for resolution today. Today I intend to work on my big pile of hardware, something that will probably take all weekend just to plan.
Jack T. Chick, noted graphic madman for Christ, makes a significant number of his oddities available in full online. I once new a fella who was later rumored to have gone to work producing these sweaty-browed exercises in fundamentalist paranoia. The combination of hateful caricature and saccharine cute makes these things worth perusing.
[via this comment at MeFi. The post itself refers to this LJ entry, which is hilariously worth reading.]
For some reason I had occasion to closely examine the hardware specs on my new Powerbook. It’s a new-reconditioned machine from Apple, and I had thought that I was getting something like a 15% discount on the configuration with one important bell and whistle, the DVD-burning superdrive.
To my shock, it became apparent to me that the machine is the default high-end configuration on the model that I purchased, and includes multiple items not specified on my original order. What can I say but “thanks, Apple!”
‘Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow’: Fending Off Alien Robots, but Still Time to Flirt [NYT] – One of the most positive reviews of an SF film I’ve ever read at the Times, by Stephen Holden. He complains only of the murk (“at times the film is hard to see”), and that perhaps you darn kids won’t get what’s so special about 1939, and damns it by noting that Jude Law’s presence is not as earthy as that of Harrison Ford as Indy (well, duh).
Maybe I’m reading this through rose colored glasses, but these are the kinds of things I find myself writing when I review a film I really, really love, and find it hard to come up with meaningful critical things to say.
So: GOODIE!
Two years ago today I began to write about something that happened to my family sixteen years ago this week.
As usual, I found myself puzzled all day today concerning the source of my blues. Mystery solved.
In happier news, the Big Easy got a reprieve. Hope those down the coast that received a visit from Ivan will recover quickly.
This was Googled up whilst searching for the Beatles/Ramones mashup “I Wanna Be Your Sedated Man.”