Bonafide Lovin

Speaking of Chromeo, here’s a new music video that might seem a little old.

Regarding Music | No Comments »

You’ll never get a good ear without good cans

Before I found out that the dog had chewed up the foam from my Grado SR80 headphones, Holland had already called Brooklyn and ordered replacements. For $15 they didn’t arrive very fast. I think it took about 3 weeks. I began to doubt they’d ever come.

I guess I should have tried the headphones sans foam anyway. The left can is busted, maybe due to dog spit. There’s a tiny intermittent rattle that drives me nuts.

Even with that rattle, I rolled around in the sound I have been missing since September. Those headphones are awesome. In the meantime I’ve been using the Bang & Olufsen A8 earbuds I bought as a present to myself for working 6 day weeks for a month in late 2005. Frankly I don’t think they’re all that spectacular. Good for earbuds I guess. They list for over $150 but apparently can be had for nearly half that.

And man I didn’t remember that the SR 80’s cost this much. Maybe they were cheaper two years ago. Somehow I had pegged in my mind that the product number approximated its price. Most likely because it amused me.

Maybe I’ll get some SR 60’s instead. They’ll probably go louder, anyway. Reviews of the 80’s say they need a separate headphone amp to achieve the full volume range, but it’s probably just as well I didn’t totally blast out my ears. They went pretty loud.

I dug my old Sennheiser HD497’s out of a drawer. I got them quite a while ago and without any research, just buying a set that CompUSA had for neither the max nor minimum price (and by Sennheiser, which at the time was the only lead I had on good phones).

I suppose they’re not too bad. They clearly showed the encoding problems of She’s In Control, which I bought from iTunes at 128kbps and never noticed before. Maybe I should have pirated it.

But the change from an open stage to a closed one feels claustrophobic.

Anyone got some good headphones? I mean good. I use my iPhone earbuds every day when I’m out and about, but when it comes time to drink a beer and rock out late at night without the neighbors calling the cops, you gotta have the gear.

Regarding Music | No Comments »

There’s also so many NBC shows to pirate now they can’t be bought for any price on a Mac.

As I constantly complain about running out of disk space, my brother Brian wondered why my girlfriend Holland and I don’t compare notes about how we’re using the computer we share (which I bought 2.5 years ago, the same as the age difference between myself and Brian, as well as the age difference between Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard).

The answer is basically we both run XTorrent constantly and download different things. She downloads movies I’ve never heard of but that I like watching with her. She also downloads idiotic shows like Desperate Housewives, but who am I to say no? (if she watches them when I’m around, I start to get interested in the plot).

I do the same thing in the inverse but I can’t portray myself negatively, can I?

But Holland has gotten quite involved in the old Grenada Sherlock Holmes episodes, as well as catching up on House episodes, and whatever else. I get Daily Shows and Colbert Reports from iTunes since it works like a Podcast and they deserve some recompense.

She’s farther along in Battlestar Galactica than I am, too!

I guess the gist is that this iMac is our Tivo. It’s right next to our TV but its screen is much larger.

So since in Texas we only buy telephone and 6Mbps DSL service (instead of Comcast internet and basic cable that accidentally included HBO back in NJ), well then hard drives are a small price to pay.

(And I’m glad to now subscribe to AT&T née SBC instead of Comcast)

All the regular channels come over the air but I keep forgetting it’s Central time and I’m usually an hour too late.

Regarding A Series of Tubes | No Comments »

Purring

The key to getting a cat to snuggle with you is temperature.

If the cat is cold, it wants to steal your heat.

If a cat trusts you, pinch an ear (not hard, like how you’d pick up a quarter) to gauge its body temperature. Of course they’re much higher or lower than the feline’s own temp, but that’s a mechanism to radiate heat and to gauge it aside from rectal thermometers.

Therefore: make a kitty cold and it will snuggle up to you.

I first noticed this when I was nervous the night before my flight to California last January. Mind, you, I was in a poorly heated Bloomfield NJ tenement with a broken front window. I didn’t break it, and the person who did had an excuse but it did end up costing an awful lot of money.

Anyway. Cats get clingy when it’s cold and drafty. (and it was drafty earlier before I figured out how to turn on the circuit breakers to the baseboard heat! Christ what an apartment.)

I managed to get my kitten Harper to sleep under the covers — with his head on the pillow — with me all night. He was only four months old then, and just delightfully cute.

Although I didn’t sleep much, I enjoyed having him with me. And back then I thought he was a girl! And alas for the human girl on my left, Holland!

A week later when I got back home and saw Harper violating his mother, I felt very angry at Holland for allowing this sex change to happen. Eventually we realized we had never seen baby cats before and holy shit they were all dudes when we had thought they were all girls. They had pointy red penises.

But, yes, the cuddling of kittens. And it’s easier once you have them fixed.

My success is increasingly lately again as I have the windows and sometimes the back door wide open*. October in Texas is a very lovely month. 60 50 at night, perhaps up to 80 during the day but maybe not that high. The sun is still quite intense but the temperature and the wind on the balcony is lovely. I open up every window and just bathe myself in sweet smelling, cool, blowing air. It’s a delicious break from the summer of outrageous heat and nonstop air conditioning. I bet Holland’s saving a bundle on the electric bill, too. (I pay the data bills, she pays the utilities)

What I like best is if I pick up a kitty and put it on my lap, he will stay there and purr forever. I have Harper passed out on my lap right now. All they want is the warm.

*Holland doesn’t like the various insects that come via a wide-open back door, but I know the cats enjoy tracking them down, killing, and eating them. Now who’s the humanitarian!

My parents have stories of their cat (named Hilary with one L, whom I knew) hunting and killing mice and hiding them in shoes. Doesn’t the next generation deserve a share?

Regarding Outdoors, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Siracusa

John Siracusa only pops up on Ars Technica a few times a year and it’s usually not even in his blog there. But when he does, he’s worth reading.

This is his review of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Not a review like MacWorld or Consumer Reports. A review from the perspective of a technology curmudgeon. Or is it fanatic?

I thought maybe I’d had enough of him whining about the Finder and dock (annoying as they were) when the Tiger review came out (Mac OS X reviews were a lot more frequent back then) but this new one is a good read.

It is quite fascinating.

After we ignore the bitching about Blue Screens (don’t use APE or any software from Logitech) and Time Machine, Leopard is the first window into the future of the Mac OS we have had since Tiger shipped in 2005. It’s clear Apple is doing a lot of very interesting and forward looking stuff. With all their iPod and now Macbook money to fund it, the future might not be as bleak as I worried 7 years ago when I was using a Windows machine at an AT&T subsidiary to dial into a server in Rochester to reconcile something or other and then Bungie with its hope of the future, Halo, announced they were being bought by Microsoft. And I felt like maybe we should just pay Vodafone what they wanted this month.

Leopard promises so much more good news even now it’s done.

There are many interesting technologies for Siracusa to talk about: the new public API for FSEvents stuff is intriguing. Then there’s CoreAnimation.

It’s starting to look like Apple is competing with Microsoft’s boneheaded moves only on the barest surface level. And they’re doing some crazy dumb stuff there. Windoze has transparent window frames? Sure that’s dumb but we can make our menu bar not only translucent but smudged in vaseline! And how about this reflective dock! If you can make out the blurry blue dot against the desktop starfield, then that means your app is running!

Based on my use of pre-release Leopard, the 3D dock is very distracting and inscrutable … the transparent menu bar is fun though perhaps not for long. Good thing it’s easy to reign them in.

But behind the scenes? There’s magic.

And I still don’t have Leopard…

Eventually Apple will give Holland a free copy or my Torrent download will finish. Since the torrent is estimating 40 days I hope Holland gets a copy tomorrow. Or my dad will send me a copy of his free copy from a new iMac. I managed to download the last developer seed in less than 40 hours so what’s up with this.

Why am I so anxious? I think it’s the fast-pace of internet feedback on the OS. When 10.0.0 shipped I was in London and didn’t pick it up at my college post office for several days, but also there were no Apple stores to line up at. (I took a look at the line at The Domain but Holland snagged me a shirt anyway so I didn’t wait … I went home to struggle with disk cloning).

I still remember my jubilant walk in September 2000 to my sophomore dorm room from the Post Office with my Mac OS X Public Beta. It was a little disappointing but also quite amazing. After a horrifying Friday, I spent a Fall Break detoxing, watching volleyball games, and learning about Unix.

But I don’t have Leopard yet, nor a modern Mac on which to run it. Choose an obsolete 64-bit PPC desktop or a 32-bit obsolete Intel portable. And guess which one is older. And guess which one is still under AppleCare! (what a crazy menagerie. I let the MBP lapse rather than pay for the most expensive AppleCare plan. Amex ought to cover any repairs. Meanwhile the iMac’s logic board is iffy and the DVD drive won’t burn, but I don’t really want to give it over to the Apple Store just now. Hell otherwise it runs just fine and can stay up indefinitely as far as I can tell.)

There’s also a rather obsolete 1Ghz 17″ PowerBook with bad fans in the house, but my old travelogue PowerBook is traveling yet again to be Brian’s backup computer in Iowa, serving the Obama campaign, while he has his MacBook serviced. It just celebrated its 6 year birthday and I think right now it’s probably parked in a FedEx truck somewhere in Oklahoma. It looks like hell (green corrosion, etc) but the only component ever replaced was the hard drive, which failed last summer and was surprisingly easy to replace (and what a bargain 40GB hard drives are these days!).

Ah well, it sounds like any Mac will run faster and more delightfully with Leopard.

And I finally got that 750GB drive working in the iMac (although I think the SSC business will give me some trouble) so I have room to upgrade. But the iMac is already much faster with a non-fragmented drive — we had been running it down to 100s of MB of free space multiple times a week for half a year.

Unlike many horrifying iMac G4’s I’ve seen (everything inside coated in dusty crap), clearly sometime in 2004/2005 Apple decided they didn’t need to blast every internal component with cigarette smoke and cat hair. A year and a half with many cats and then a dog in sealed-bubble spaceship air conditioning and the inside of my very old iMac was surprisingly immaculate.

Regarding Apple Computers | No Comments »

Having a lot of computer trouble and I didn’t even get leopard yet. Can anyone remember what problems old G5s had with SATA drives?

Regarding Uncategorized | No Comments »

Delivery Status

If you were wondering what the best (and perhaps only functional) package tracking widget is, it’s Delivery Status.

Took me a while to find one that works. A lot of early widgets from around the Tiger launch depended on screen scraping long since changed websites.

Regarding Apple Computers | No Comments »

Do not warn me about this again

When my new hard drive that supposedly shipped on Monday afternoon from Fresno, CA (nearish to San Jose) didn’t show any FedEx status updates for over 24 hours, I began to wonder if I’d have it before Friday when I might get Leopard.

Has years of FedEx tracking with Apple taught me nothing? As I suspected, the package’s status was not updated when it was picked up, nor when it transited a local sorting center. I saw nothing until it got to City of Industry (nearish to Los Angeles and a bizarre wikipedia entry in itself. Hey, let’s incorporate an industrial wasteland to prevent surrounding burbs from collecting taxes!).

I should have known. Well I did know that FedEx Express updates nearly to the level of a package leaving an airplane. But FedEx Ground is quite another matter. They might give you three updates on a transcontinental week-long journey. And those often after the package arrived.

Now that I ought to have a bigger HDD by sometime on Friday, I hope Holland gets her free Leopard disc that day too.

It’s a struggle to keep even a gigabyte free for VM on this 500GB drive with two users constantly downloading via bit torrent without consulting each other, and managing separate iTunes and iPhoto libraries. It’s the Apple ideal but then I see this a lot, or worse:

To be fair, I have managed to maintain my computing lifestyle for many years and across operating systems and decades. I have all my homework from 6th grade on (about 14 years ago), for example, and crazy internet files and chat transcripts saved since it was invented. My own user folder is over 310GB so place blame where it’s due. Ah well.

I have a feeling the disk is horrifyingly fragmented, even though OS X does have some tricks up its sleeve in this matter. I downloaded a well regarded disk defragmenter to survey the damage before I might have paid $30 and it crashed.

I suppose I might feel tempted to install Mac OS X 10.5 into each of the however many thousands of noncontiguous blocks comprise the 10GB I just managed to free up. Since a lot of what I deleted were *very* old files, and we’ve been Bit Torrenting this thing up to capacity for over a year, perhaps I ought to hold out until I can use the drive as a backup.

It will be a struggle to Time Machine a 750GB drive onto a 500GB external anyway. Good thing I didn’t get the 1TB. (I thought about it but 750GB drives have gotten to the point where they’re so cheap you’d be stupid not to get one. 1TB drives still command the premium I paid for my 500GB drive in January 06. I’m not very employed now, so I feel I should reign myself in. Still, I am a slut for massive amounts of nonvolatile storage.)

If I don’t keep a lot of apps running and not too many dozens of Safari windows, I can keep the swapfiles low. Man this is starting to feel like Windoze. Well at least now I only have 1GB of external swapfiles in /var/vm. Before I logged out both user accounts to erase some hacks (preparing for leopard), it was up to 4GB in what I find to be fascinating increments. A 64MB swapfile. Then a 128MB. Then 256 and on it goes until you have several 1 gigabyte files. It’s Computer Science 101 but I’m so fascinated they start that low. Maybe Leopard will start with a gigabyte.

Anyway that ignores what’s paged out in-place on the disk. Usually with our two users fully loaded with apps, safari pages, and bit torrent downloads, the kernel reckons it’s managing 14GB of Virtual Memory. The machine has 1.5GB of RAM. And I’m not complaining, it’s still quite responsive for a Spring ‘05 vintage machine. I just wish it had a 14 terabyte hard drive.

And to hell with my external 400GB movies drive and 250GB backup (now movies and more) drive.

Seven years ago I wondered when movies would be as easy to download as music.

Now I have nearly 1.6TB of storage ready to be knocked off a desk and I feel desperately close to disaster. With 100GB of music in my iTunes library, most of my CDs still only exist under my bed.

I’d like to (re-)import them all losslessly, but that’s another topic.

Regarding Apple Computers | 3 Comments »

Mark 3

I got iPhone #3 today since iPhone #2 had a bad Home button. Exchanged with no fuss once again at the Apple Store.

My original iPhone was built in week 26 of 2007. My first replacement was built in week 39 and my new replacement in week 40. This is based my obscure and unique knowledge of how to read an Apple finished-goods serial number.

I got to thinking about Apple part numbers and serial numbers. Did you want to know more about something basically meaningless than you ever thought you could? Week 40 sounds pretty recent but how recent is that? I suppose divided by 4 (weeks in a month) it’s roughly early October.

My math has been off recently because Holland spilled on the numeric keypad and put the operator keys back in the wrong place.

As for my new iPhone, seems to work well and it’s much less scuffed around the front-facing chrome. My old rubber case trapped grit in there and rubbed it. I have realized not to use a case with an iPhone.

Of course now I have a probably — but maybe not — refurbished model. But with a new case and (allegedly) new battery, I guess that’s ok. If some guy had to return his iPhone the first week with a bad headphone jack then I suppose I don’t mind if I have his screen now, although I wonder who he was and where he enjoyed his multi-touching.

I’ve always wondered if they ship the bad iPods/iPhones back to China from California to be remanufactured. Perhaps they do. On the other hand, if it’s such a rush maybe they do it in California?

Do any of my enormous lot of viewers have an iPhone serial number that starts with 5K?

Refurbished computers are sufficiently zombie-like for this Halloween season.

Swapping a SIM is a brain transplant (except not really since it’s not the real brain). But what would Apple have done if Verizon wanted to be their buddy instead of Cingular?

Regarding Apple Computers, iPhone | No Comments »

iPhone Number 2

First one thing, then the next. Now the hearing-part of my iPhone doesn’t work. (what do you call that? earpiece sounds like it’s Bluetooth or the earphones … speaker sounds like it’s the speakerphone. But all of those work).

I should have known Apple couldn’t make a durable cell phone. Well I’ll get it taken care of tomorrow. But I wonder if this will be my last replacement iPhone.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone. That’s what makes it hard to give up my little buddy that came in my pack (in a ziploc) up all those Colorado mountains. And everywhere else I’ve been, everything else I’ve listened to, and everybody else I’ve talked to, since June 29. I had a cell phone, nano, shuffle, and video iPods but now I don’t use any of them. Holland and I were going to recycle our old cell phones in a mailer from Petsmart but it doesn’t fit in the mailbox, so now it roams around the floor as a cat toy.

Anyway. You have big shoes, future iPhone number 2.

In the meantime I’m keeping happy:

Beautiful Burnout is ripping me apart.

And I got a DVD and a t-shirt. Thanks, Jesse, for letting me know when to pre-order.

In the meantime, holy shit, when did dirty.org turn into a domain squatter? And the forums moved to darktrain.org. I saw it first about a month ago but I thought they just got a really bad redesign… I’ve got a goddamn t-shirt that needs its DNS updated.

Regarding Music | No Comments »