Tag: geek

mysterious file/disk suck on my powerbook

I get disk I/O errors, which are the computer equivalent of coughing up blood; ominous.

They only happen with certain files. I notice it when syncing to my iPod or listening to music, for example. One music file will be a DEVIL FILE and cause the system to throw the I/O errors into the log after hanging up really badly (slow UI, processes crash, etc).

If I delete that one file then no problems for a while until another DEVIL FILE shows up.

I’m trying to figure out if maybe the iTunes-LAME script I use so I can use the LAME MP3 encoder might be contributing to this, or maybe LAME itself, but I can’t see how. Maybe something is messed up with 10.4.3?

MacMomMania

I helped my mom buy a new Mac. She’s on a 350 MHz blue G3 right now.

Refurbished Mac Minis from the Apple web site are going for $400 right now, no joke! Good time to get a Mac if you haven’t before because of price.

We got her a Mac Mini, a 23″ flat panel display, Applecare, and an HP color printer/scanner/everything box all for $2,136 with tax, shipped free.

I swear my mom gets more use out of less money than anyone I know in computing. She’s bought a total of three computers since 1994 and still has the same laserprinter we bought that year.

DEAR QUICKTIME

WHEN SOMEONE SENDS A REQUEST TO MY WEBSERVER FOR AN MP3 FILE, THEY GET HEADERS LIKE THIS:

200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 20:10:47 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: “2b0a8-60ac4b-765d9280”
Server: Apache/2.0.55 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.55 OpenSSL/0.9.8 DAV/2 PHP/4.4.0
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Length: 6335563
Content-Type: audio/mpeg
Last-Modified: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 20:03:06 GMT
Client-Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 20:10:47 GMT
Client-Peer: 64.81.85.145:80
Client-Response-Num: 1

PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME, IN YOUR OWN WORDS, HOW THIS IS A “MOVIE” AND WHY YOU ARE RESTRICTING HER FROM SAVING IT TO HER LOCAL DISK UNLESS SHE PURCHASES QUICKTIME PRO. WE HAVE ALREADY UNCHECKED ALL THE BOXES. THERE IS A STORE WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE OF MY HOUSE THAT SELLS SHOTGUNS, AND I HAVE A FULL TANK OF GAS IN THE CAR. I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND THE IMPLICATION HERE.

LOVE,

SOMEONE WHO READS THE RFC’S AND TAKES THEM SERIOUSLY

Thanks, Covad!

Yeah, so if you could not route my packets to Google through an RFC1918 address, that would be great. Yeah. Glad they’re just Diedrich’s ISP and not mine.

Edit: looks like lots of other people are having this problem. I think someone bent their router, and stuff. Oops!

no

Technical victories

First, I finally got my Powerbook to stop miscellaneously slowing to a crawl several times an hour, and also got it to stop hanging on “Open” dialogs. The solutions were 1) completely and utterly disable Spotlight and 2) turn off syncing the iDisk. So I had to disable two useful features of my operating system because they were buggy and painful, but at least I’m not swearing at top volume every 15 minutes.

Second, Jeff Eaton was kind enough to post on his blog the solution to a horrible Photoshop problem I’d been having. All my pictures would look lovely in Photoshop and then get washed out and crappy as soon as I saved them as web-optimized jpegs to put on Flickr, etc. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was happening, and it was making me something something. Turns out there was a bad preference in the “view” menu in Photoshop under “proofing”. End of problem.

Man, it’s like taking a rock out of each shoe.

The Bootup Kids

The local rich kids all showed up at once and began staring at this laptop, giving me the opportunity to create my own D.I.Y. Apple ad. I’m not sure whether “Think Different” or “The Power To Crush The Other Kids” would be the best slogan to use. Maybe a new slogan for emo kids with lots of cash?

The Bootup Kids