Fly By Night

October 3rd, 2005 by ironsoap

Whoa man. So much to cover. So not sufficient time.

I have Part 3 of the “Box in the Living Room” series coming, including thoughts on returning shows, but that will have to wait. Instead, I have bullets. A veritable shower of bullets.

  • Much of what I’m passing on here relates to an event that occurred Friday. My contracting job paid its dividends with a bounty of goodness including: An AirPort Express, a copy of OS X Tiger, a RAM upgrade for the laptop, a powered USB hub for the mini and a new printer/copier/scanner. This will give you the appropriate reference later.
  • So I finally installed Tiger over the weekend. Here’s the thing about installing stuff… really about upgrades in general. My rule of upgrades is that you have to give some in order to get some. As an example, the RAM upgrade I got turned out to be faulty. That is, the stick of RAM is bad and causes my computer to display badness instead of, you know, computery stuff. Since the RAM did not display its corrupt, vile intentions until after the upgrade process had begun, the result was that instead of doing a nice “OS Upgrade” which would leave my system largely intact, I wiped the whole thing clean and started over. In theory, not so bad since I did lots of backups before I started upgrading away. However, here’s some things you forget about when you’re backing stuff up:
    • Caches, cookies and site-specific logins.
    • Application-specific settings that aren’t stored in the usual places like ~/User/Library
    • Registered software that uses weird hashes to verify registration status.
    • How incredibly large of a pain it is to set up a system the way you like.

I discovered that I have 21 months invested into this laptop. That’s very close to two years of custom tweaks, installations and upgrades that have to be meticulously re-created if I want to get things back the way they were. Of course the point of upgrading in some cases is to not go back to the way things were, but to say that I’m running a bit behind due to this is an understatement.

  • My Tiger impressions: Wonderful. Spotlight: Good. Dashboard: Very Good. Safari RSS: Nifty. RSS Screensaver: Super Nifty. Command-Control-D: Hotness. New Mail.app: Actually, I dig it. Overall the new features are cool but perhaps only worth the $129 if you, like me, are constantly losing files or you, like me, have a specific need for the Dashboard. In my case I use a Dictionary every single day. Dictionary.com is a good site but it is dog slow, even on a fast connection. That kills me. System-level dictionary: Lifesaver. Also, I managed to delete my Calculator.app out of Panther like, the first day I got it. Even later OS Upgrades didn’t bring it back. I use calculators a lot (because I suck at math) so I downloaded an app called Calculator+ which was okay, but not nearly as handy as the Dashboard calculator widget, which I’ve used five times just today. Maybe that’s only because I could, but then again, that’s the point. Right?

  • Setting up the AirPort Express was, in typical Apple fashion, cake. Carrot cake. I got some of them Monster cables to connect it to the stereo system in the living room and seconds later: iTunes-in-Living-Room bliss. I talked a while back about the logic of this kind of system. On one hand, TiVo lets you do something like this already, and control the whole works with the remote for the TV. Which is cool, but TiVo likes to claim to support Macs and then promptly not so lots and lots of my files are in AAC which TiVo ignores like a child having a meltdown in the middle of a department store. I could re-encode my files into TiVo-friendly mp3, but that’s annoying to have to do each time I buy something from iTunes. There are other ancillary benefits as well. The wireless connection we have at home is courtesy of SBC at the moment. Their modem includes an access point. But since the demise of the old HP Wireless Switch some time ago, if we ever did something besides SBC, we’d be back to the wired stone ages. Now, this is no concern. Also, the APE is portable so I’m already kind of thinking that for Gin and Nikki’s birthday BBQ this weekend I may DJ it up right with my laptop and the APE over at HB and Gin’s place. Convenience, not provided by TiVo. Check and check.

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