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WEEK 45 2012

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Saturday 10 November 2012
Saturday - One interesting thing about the old Sony laptop (ca. 2004) is that it handles streaming video much better that the newer HP Pavilion (ca. 2009). I wonder, is it hardware - quality components and design, or software - Xp versus Vista? It's quite striking.

I've downloaded Fedora 17, I'll install that on the old desktop instead of Mint 13, and see if I have better luck. It may be the hardware - I've had issues with Win2k, Mint and Ubuntu on this box from time to time. Mostly revolving around USB insertion/deletion. Why this would affect the hard drive address, the wireless connection, and so on it hard to say, and it's not really worth trying to research forums for old hardware to find out. If I can't get it to work I'll probably go get a Win8 laptop, I need some sort of windows for work and the old laptop, good as it it, is pushing 10 years old and can't be relied upon not to die at any time.

Since both the efforts that require windows hardware haven't actually materialized I'll wait on that...



A friend called from San Diego, her mother's laptop had a semi-blue-screen-of-death, but I talked her through a safe-mode reboot and that seemed to fix things. It involved removing the battery - it may be that the laptop battery was dead, dead, dead, and that the system was trying hard to charge it and didn't have enough power left over to run system.

I sent her a spreadsheet of my takeaway from her notes on the iPad app, and some artwork. I believe her mother the art professor was probably amused by 'louvre.zip'. A man's got to know his limitations, and I'm no artist, but I needed something to try out random vs. sequential options in the program I'm writing.

Regarding that : An interesting thing I discovered (the hard way, by trial and error) is that if you are making transparent gif's to overlay on a background  it's best to start with a single piece of artwork, then select the bits you want to make transparent, and save them as individual images, then save the final 'background' without them. I guess it's some sort of palette thing, but it was driving me crazy for a while, sometimes stuff would be transparent and sometimes it wouldn't be, even following the exact same toolchain and options. 



I also went out and got a new Droid, the "Stellar". It's about the same size screen as the old one, not the current mini-tablet size, and doesn't have a keyboard (that I never used)  so it's quite a bit lighter. It's also running 4.0, so that's an improvement. So far no problems. I was thinking about the iPhone, but they had none in stock, not the new one and not the older 4S, and I pretty much needed a phone right away. I also changed my plan - fewer minutes, more texting, and a 2GB data cap but the phone is also a (legal) hotspot which is nice. I should save $20 or more a month. Given that I used 66 minutes and 300MB last month the 'unlimited' plan was overkill.

Friday 9 November 2012
Friday - After a lot of fooling about I got the old Sony laptop to work. I had forgotten that the built-in wireless had failed. Once I used an external USB antenna it connected up just fine ... and immediately decided to download boatloads of Windows updates and Anti-virus updates. To the point where the hard drive was full. So I stopped what I was doing, pulled a lot of stuff off onto an external drive, deleted a bunch of other stuff, then restarted.

Eventually that was all done (hours of work) and I was able to download and view the final revisions of the demolition project that Tim had sent.

And I have PSP available again, for as long as this machine lasts. I'm feeling a bit snakebit. I did go and look at new machines, but they are all Windows 8 and I have, as I mentioned, way too much completely new stuff to digest to add that into the mix!



It's raining and hailing.

Thursday 8 November 2012

Thursday - Update: 9/Nov. Went down to Ventura. I met with Tim and Chris and we reviewed the Plans and Specs for the demolition one last time. The boss was a no show - no check for me.

I had intended to stay a few days and work on the boat, but the miserable weather impelled me to just head home again. It rained all the way home, and they are predicting rain and snow tonight and tomorrow.



My phone has gotten so bad that people have started hanging up on me. So, new droid or iphone? Verizon or AT&T? The reviews on Yelp of the local phone stores for each are all one and two star.

Wednesday 7 November 2012

Wednesday  - Update: 9/Nov. Working away on the Xcode stuff. It's brutal, but I'm making progress.

Tuesday 6 November 2012
Tuesday - Update: 9/Nov. Election Day. Well, that could have gone better.

Monday 5 November 2012
Monday - Update: 9/Nov. I was going to use the Mint 13 desktop, but it decided not to connect to the internet any more. At first it was just the wireless connection to 'coronado', then as I tried to get it working more and more of the network connectivity stuff - all hidden from the user now, like Windows or OSX - started failing, until it claimed there was no network at all.

I was also trying to run Paint Shop Pro under Wine, with dismal results. After install of WINE, then install of PSP under that, it worked OK - once. Then it claimed that the executables - which I could see - didn't exist. So much for using that. Not that, without internet, it would have done me much good. I don't do a lot of graphics, but I'm familiar with PSP which I bought ca. 2001, and am (again) not eager to try to learn something new at the same nice as C++, Cocoa and Xcode :-(

Sunday  4 November 2012
Sunday - Update: 9/Nov. It seems that HP Pavilion laptops have a design flaw where the graphics card eventually overheats and fails. The forums suggest this takes 18 to24 months, which puts it outside HP's warranty period. This laptop is much older than that, but has only been used as the main machine for the last year or so, so I guess it was due. The sad thing is that it is probably booting and running just fine, it's the embedded graphics that has died. Oh well. I did a backup in late October, so only a couple of weeks were lost. Possibly I can pull the hard drive and put it into an external chassis and recover even that stuff.

Or I could spend a few hundred bucks and buy a new laptop. Or try to use the Mac laptop. Which is probably the smart thing, but it's hard to face - Macs do everything ass backwards so even without trying it I know it'll be a struggle.



Nice warm weather.


Picture of the Week
riley
Photo Notes: Riley and Cactus No. 2, 2012.


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