The iPod has a warranty of only a year (which does suck). After the year’s up,
you have to pay Apple to do any work on it.
So some guy is crying because Apple is charging him $250 to replace the battery in something that’s out of warranty?
Because he doesn’t want to do it himself for $50?
What a crybaby. He probably cried when he got kicked off the soccer team for crying too much.
If Apple ends up giving him a free new battery for his out-of-warranty
iPod, I wonder if they’ll give me a new motherboard for that old Apple
IIci I’ve got in the garage.
Hey, and then I’ll ask Nissan if they’ll give me a free new transmission
on that 1981 Datsun 210 that’s stashed out back.
Oh, and those Starbucks bastards are in for it. That mocha I got this morning? It’s empty now, and they’d better damn well refill it for free.
Although I think the whole concept of ‘referrer spam‘ is stupid and a waste of time, here’s a quick fix for those of you running Analog:
REFEXCLUDE http://*jennifersblog.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*malixya.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*bongohome.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*a-b-l-o-g.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*kwalablog.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*wr18.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*mikesblog.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*saulem.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*akksess.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*worldnewslog.com/* REFEXCLUDE http://*teoras.com/*
Over the weekend, I upgraded my G4 to Panther. I’ve been pretty nervous about doing so, because there were a few things wrong with the existing Jaguar install. The G4 acts as my main fileserver, with 160GB of storage in a mirrored RAID, so it’s pretty important that it didn’t crash and burn during an upgrade.
I got a 120GB drive from Tech-EE’s and crammed it into the G4’s case. With 3 drives, I’ve still got room for 3 more, though I’m not sure the power supply can handle that many, considering the main drive is a Quantum Fireball 18GB SCSI LVD 15,000rpm drive.
I’d hoped copying 120GB of files would be as easy as “copying 120GB of files.” Wrong. Apparently there’s no way to tell any OS to “copy and ignore any errors, dammit!” I tried using ‘cp’ from the terminal, and it decided that since some of the mp3s had odd names that included ampersands or hashes, it’d fail a few hours into the copy. Great.
Finally, Robert suggested using rsync, which happens to be included in a base install of OSX. “rsync -av /directory /otherdirectory”, wait several hours, and the copy was done. The “-av” flag tells rsync to “archive, verbosely”, which means it’ll only copy files that don’t already exist in the target location, or are older than the source files. rsync did show errors, especially considering I was copying from HFS to Fat32 (Fat32 doesn’t support chown, hmm, why not?), but any small amount of file loss is acceptable, considering I was only making a backup “just in case” something terrible happened during the upgrade.
Once the backup was done, I pulled the 120GB drive out and put it into my Windows PC, which has been suffering on an old and multi-partitioned 40GB drive for far too long.
The upgrade to Panther went well, except the User Accounts preference panel was blank. I expected this, because it had been blank since I tried [abortively] to install the Tyrell OpenNMS package. (Note: don’t ever do this. This package is pure concentrated ratshit, squozed down into a small OSX installer. Granted, I installed an earlier package, and Tyrell’s made a newer one, but they still call it an “alpha.” I personally think they should’ve replaced “alpha” with “radioactive anal vomit.”)
After some extensive research, I found the problem. In NetInfo Manager, the user ‘opennms’ had a UID of .. nothing. Beautiful. So, I deleted that username, and deleted any other reference to OpenNMS on the filesystem, and deleted /Users/username/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache, rebooted, and now it works. Hooray.
Now I’m off to smack the Exposé buttons some more.
Mom writes:
“Do you remember me telling you about Bill Z?
“He apparently was forging checks. It was a big hoo ha involving bankers and stuff, so he made the Most Wanted list back in April.
“Right before you moved back to go to college, he had to attend a managers meeting in Pensacola (he had go because it was required for them to become accredited for something or other.) He’d bought a house over behind the mall in that spiffy neighborhood and movers were coming to move his grand piano. So, your stepfather[D] volunteered to go impersonate him at the meeting, if he paid both our ways, etc.
“He agreed, so we went down to the meeting being Bill and Betsy Z.
“I stayed in the room and ate room service and so on with company money. Your stepdad went to the meeting where he had to stand up spontaneously and tell them about himself, even though he wasn’t really himself.
“One of the guys knew Bill, but he didn’t rat D out.
“The guy that ran the thing just loved your stepdad/Bill. I went downstairs too early and he insisted on buying my lunch cause “Bill” had added so much to the program.
“The next year your stepdad had to go to a meeting for salespeople. He had his nametag on, and ran into the guy who ran up saying, “Hey, Bill!”, to which D replied “D”. He said, “Bill?”, D said, “D”. He said, “Aren’t you Bill Z?”
“So your stepdad said, “People always get us mixed up.”
“Bill is the sweetest man in the world, so we thought there had to be some mistake and maybe he just wrote the bad checks meaning to cover them. In fact, I didn’t think he did it at all
“However, I just found out that they’ve caught him working in a convenience store in a different state. It turns out he is not Bill Z. It was never his name. He changed it 30 years ago when he moved to this area.
“I figure that when his picture is on the news, that guy from that meeting will call up the FBI and say, “Wait, that’s not Bill Z! I have a tape of the real Bill in a meeting back in ‘97!” And then we’ll wake up to flashing lights and SWAT teams.
“We’re the only people I know who can impersonate people who are impersonating people.”
After a brief stint with the Stabbing Pain That Is Nextel, I upgraded my trusty old Nokia 8290 phone to a shiny new Sony Ericsson T610.
I love this phone. It’s truly a revolutionary leap beyond the old Nokia, acting as a PDA, a camera, and a voice-note recorder, as well being a pretty good phone.
I picked up a Belkin Bluetooth adapter for about $40, which drastically improves the usefulness of the phone. Using iSync, I’ve now got a standard set of contacts, calendars, and memos, between all my Macs, my .Mac account, my iPod, and my phone.
Bluetooth connectivity, paired with the Salling Clicker, allows me to use my phone as an integrated remote control for all manner of Mac OSX apps. So far I’ve tested it as a very handy remote control for iTunes, and as a DVD remote.
Salling Clicker is fairly smart, too: if I’m listening to iTunes, and I get a call, SC can pause iTunes, set iChat to be “away”, display the caller’s information and picture on the Mac’s screen, and answer the phone. I can also very easily move files between Mac and phone, which makes transferring ringtones, wallpapers, camera photos, and themes very easy.
Another nice feature of SC is ‘proximity-based actions’. If I’m listening to iTunes, and go out of Bluetooth range, SC will pause iTunes for me, until I get back within range.
James, (and anyone else who’s interested), go to MyT610.net for lots of free wallpapers, themes, and so on.
