Not long ago, I decided to replace my hinky old iBook with a new MacBook. I just got it today and I'm getting the basic setup and software updates done. Then, tomorrow evening, I will move all my stuff from the Maxtor external firewire drive I've been running the iBook off of (since the hard drive doesn't work properly) to the new MacBook. It will be nice to have a truly portable laptop again -- the iBook has not been portable for quite some time because it had to run off an external drive. After the move is complete, I will see if I can sell the iBook for parts or to someone who would be interested in fixing it. I didn't think the iBook was worth the money it would take to fix it.
I love what I've seen of the MacBook so far...the Leopard operating system looks really nice. And it's so much faster than the iBook. I had no problems connecting to my wireless network. I've had some problems getting my PC and iBook to connect to each other consistently. Maybe the newer operating system and network card in the MacBook will have less problems with that.
So, while I'm busy, here's some music in honor of my new toy:
Despite the fact that Pinnacle Studio Plus 10.8 caused an outburst of hatred a few days ago, I decided to upgrade to version 11 anyway. I read some reviews saying that version 11 is more stable, so I'm taking a chance with the upgrade. Along with the upgrade, I also ordered some packages of score music. Most of my family's home movies were taken with a camera with no sound, so instead of silent movies, I though some appropriate theme music would be good.
I found a workaround for the problem that was frustrating me a couple of days ago, but still, I wish the program were more stable. (I use Pinnacle Studio Plus because it's the program that came with my Pinnacle MovieBox, which is used to capture video from the VCR.) I just hope I'm not setting myself up for more frustration with the new version.
I haven't been around much because I've been learning how to edit video and burn it to DVD. When I know what I'm doing, I'm going to put the family movies on DVD. I've already captured them from the tapes. Most were on film and we had them copied to videotape several years ago.
Anyway, I have just one thing to say:
I HATE PINNACLE STUDIO PLUS! It hangs, it crashes, it won't do what I tell it to do. I hate it, hate it, HATE IT! Pinnacle SUCKS!
There...I feel better now...
More: I googled "Pinnacle Studio Sucks" and this is the second result. I'm using version 10.8, BTW. At least I'm not alone. And I know that there's a version 11 out, but I don't want to take a chance and spend $50 upgrading to something that still sucks.
Just an FYI...my main PC is having a lot of problems right now. It's the same problem I've been having for months off and on -- it either will not boot (the BIOS doesn't even come up) or it hangs soon after booting. I've been getting by with it because I didn't have the problem all the time. However, it's gotten much worse over the past couple of weeks and now I cannot bring my computer up long enough to do anything...that is if it boots at all. I suspect it is either a video card problem (I've gotten some weird errors that have led me to believe this) or a memory problem. I guess I'm going to finally have to break down and put it in the shop.
I can still use my iBook, which I run off an external firewire drive because the hard drive is flaky. I will probably not be checking my email as much over the next few days, so if you email me, be patient.
Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while knows the continuing saga of my iBook. Basically, the thing is a lemon. I have still been having problems with the thing refusing to boot from the hard drive. When it does work, it doesn't work for long. The thing hangs or starts acting funny (like refusing to save files or empty the trash). If it starts acting weird, I immediately shut it down. I cannot just restart it because if I do so, the hard drive will be trashed and I will have to recreate the partition and reinstall the operating system.
Over the past week, the problems have gotten so bad now that I can rarely boot from the hard drive and when I do, the thing hangs within minutes. (Macs don't have a blue screen of death but rather a spinning, multicolored beach ball of death.)
However, I have found a way to use this iBook. I have a Maxtor One Touch firewire drive. I could never get the bootable backup to work, probably because of the problems with the iBook. However, I have taken the partition set aside for the bootable backup and made it my main hard drive for the iBook. I installed Mac OS X, installed all my programs, moved my iTunes library there, the whole deal. It works great -- I just attach it and press F while booting to make it boot from the firewire drive.
The thing is, the main hard drive is accessible. I run the disk utility on it and it seems to be okay. I'm thinking that there may be a controller problem, but I know very little about Mac hardware, so who knows.
I guess I will be taking this thing to be fixed, which I dread. The problem is, the service people don't really listen to you, treat you like you're dumb and if they boot it and it comes up, they assume it's okay. They don't spend time investigating the problem. They may replace the hard drive and declare the problem "fixed", but I don't think the problem is the hard drive itself.
Anyway, I'll probably take it down Friday afternoon, since I have a hair appointment close by on that side of town. Until then, I will use the firewire boot drive. While it makes the iBook considerably less portable, at least I can use it.
Update: I decided not to take the computer to be fixed on Friday because I just didn't feel like it. I can get by with it for now. When I get some time, I'd like to research the problem, find out exactly what's wrong (I suspect a controller problem) and see if I can fix it myself.
Well, it looks like I'll be spending yet another evening formatting the hard drive and reinstalling the Tiger operating system. The disk repair won't fix whatever is wrong and the darn thing hangs every time it comes out of sleep mode. At least I'm able to bring it up, so I can do backups before reformatting.
If there are any Apple people reading this, tell me: did I get a lemon or something? Is this a common problem? I assure you, I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm very gentle with the iBook -- it never even leaves my house. I always sleep it or turn it off if I'm not using it. I'm wondering if the Dashboard might be the problem. It seems like every time I use the Dashboard with any frequency, the iBook starts acting up.
Sorry for the lack of posts...I just don't have the brain cells to post anything lately. My back is acting up again and my legs are also achy and stiff. I'm sitting with a heating pad on my back right now. I don't think I've done anything to strain it, so I was hoping that it was aching because we would be getting some rain soon. But it looks like the rain may just miss us yet again. It has been very dry and hot here this spring. We had a rather warm and dry winter this year as well. I have a feeling it's going to be a miserable summer.
While I'm complaining...I had to format and reinstall Mac OS X (Tiger) on my iBook for the second time this year. I'm glad I keep good backups (I have one of those Maxtor One Touch firewire drives.) Twice, the iBook has hung up while doing something perfectly innocent, like opening a program. This, of course, forced me to turn off the computer, since I couldn't shut down or restart. Upon restarting the computer, I would find that the operating system would not load. I used the start-up disk to correct any disk errors, but the damage had been done, so I formatted the disk and reinstalled everything. I just went through this drill again this week.
There are certain things about Apple I really like. I love my iPod and iTunes. (I was a die-hard WinAmp user before discovering iTunes.) But I've also had all kinds of problems with my Mac while my Windows PCs have stayed relatively trouble-free. I have never had Windows get so messed up from an ungraceful exit that I was forced to format and reinstall, whereas this happened to the iBook twice in about three months time. Last year, after having the iBook for eleven months, the hard drive crashed. I had to have it serviced twice because the first time they claimed the problem was the motherboard and not the hard drive. When I first upgraded to Tiger, it kept crashing my wireless router. I've had other little irritating problems that I won't go into here. My point is this: I don't understand why some people think Macs are superior to Windows PCs. They are different, but not better. And Windows PCs are a lot less trouble from my perspective.
Well, that's enough whining for the night. Hopefully, it will rain, my back will feel better and I will quit having problems with my iBook. Then I can post something more interesting... :-)
Just wanted to let you know that my Internet connection at home is not working at all. The cable guy is supposed to look at it today. If the problem isn't with the cable, I may end up having to buy a new cable modem. If anyone has sent me email, I won't be able to read it until I get my connection back. (I can't access webmail from work.)
Update (5:40pm): My home connection is now working again. The problem was indeed my ancient cable modem. It has been replaced with a nice new one.
Yes, this is the 1000th entry I've posted to this blog. And the first entry posted from my new PC. I'm still getting everything copied over and installed, which is why I've been so busy. I love my new PC...it's what they call a gaming system, even though I'm not really into games. I just wanted a fast computer with lots of disk space so that I could convert the family movies to DVD format. I had gotten a wireless keyboard and mouse for it, but I had a lot of trouble with them. They kept losing the connection and I couldn't get it back without shutting down the PC and turning it on again. I tried various things, including uninstalling and reinstalling the devices and drivers, but nothing solved the problem. I decided I didn't need the aggravation, so I returned them and exchanged them for a regular (optical) mouse and keyboard. After that, I was finally able to get comfortable with the new PC.
Anyway, I'll be back soon with the Seven Things Meme that Bill tagged me with and a little review of the Narnia movie, which was wonderful. Also, my Christmas turned out really great. I hope everyone else had a great Christmas.
I just want to make up for the nasty things I said in this post. Naturally, I was frustrated and disappointed that I couldn't get Tiger to connect to the Internet. But now that I've solved that problem, I have to say that Tiger is pretty nice so far. The Dashboard is really cool. I haven't explored a lot of the widgets available yet, but one I added is called DashFlix, which shows what NetFlix movies you currently have and what's in your queue.
I'm not a fanatic when it comes to computer systems. I use and like both Windows and Mac. They both have their good and bad points. A good point about Apple is that I could upgrade to the Tiger system right over the Panther system without needing to reformat and reinstall. While you can do the same with Windows, it's not something I would recommend. With Windows, it's best to back everything up, reformat and do a fresh install. The reason for this is that over time, Windows collects a lot of junk in the registry. That's why every year or two, I back everything up on my Windows PC, format the disk and install Windows from scratch. In fact, I'm going to do this again on my PC pretty soon, because the current install is starting to run slower and have a few problems.
Last night I installed Tiger, the new version of MacOS X, on my iBook and I can't say I'm happy with it right now. I am unable to connect to the network with it and when the iBook is running, it does crazy things to my router, causing it to continuously reboot itself. The only way I can stop it is to turn the iBook off or sleep it, otherwise I can't use the network on my main PC.
I worked with the settings a little while last night and got it to quit rebooting my router. However, even though it says that Airport is connected to the Internet, Safari tells me otherwise. I got too tired to continue working with it and I had to go to bed.
This morning I quickly checked the Apple discussion forums and found that other people are having similar problems. Supposedly, an update will resolve some of these issues, but in order to get the update I have to be able to, you know, connect to the Internet with my iBook.
**rolling eyes**
So, this evening, I will have to figure out how to get my iBook on the network again. And yes, I already tried using Ethernet to connect to the router directly and that didn't work either.
But remember folks, Apple is perfect in every way and never has any problems...they are not at all like those incompetents at Microsoft. [/sarcasm]
Update: W00t! It's working now! I was too tired to think of trying this last night, but here's what I did: I bypassed the router altogether and plugged the iBook directly into the cable modem via Ethernet. (I found out through reading many discussion threads that the issue was Tiger not liking my D-Link wireless router.) I was able to get connected and I downloaded the updates (which fix the problems Tiger has with D-Link routers). Then I put everything back the way it was and tried setting up the wireless connection again and it worked!
I got my iBook back yesterday evening and it appears to be working great now. It should be -- they replaced both the logic board (again) and the hard drive. I had to set everything up again, but I had backups of things like my browser settings, photos from my digital camera (including the last pictures I took of my dog about a week before she died), and my purchased iTunes songs. And I was able to restore all the other songs that were on my iPod using iPodRip.
Also, my wireless connection is still working much better than before the iBook had problems. I have no idea why, unless I didn't install the Airport Extreme card quite right or something.
A couple of weeks ago, I first mentioned that my iBook was on the blink. The day after I posted that, I took it to a computer shop in town that is an official Apple service center. Since this was on a Saturday, and the Apple guy was only there Monday through Friday, I would have to wait a few days to hear from him because of his workload.
Now, there's one thing I had noticed about the problem I was having with the iBook -- if the computer was left off for a few hours, it would come back up and work fine (if perhaps a bit slow)...for a few minutes. Then the buzzing, grinding noise would start up again and it would hang. Here's what I was afraid of -- that since the iBook would have been off for several days, the Apple guy would turn it on and it would work fine. And that's exactly what happened.
When the Apple guy called and told me it seemed to be fine, I described the problem to him. He said that since it was still under warranty, and since it was an iBook, it would have to be shipped to (I think) Texas to be looked at by Apple. He asked me if I needed to backup the hard drive, since he couldn't guarantee my data would still be intact when I got it back. Since I had just done a backup a couple of days before the problems started, and since I discovered that there's a utility I can use to get my iTunes library off my iPod if need be, I told him to go ahead and ship it off.
Yesterday, the Apple guy called me and told me my iBook was back. The hard drive was okay, my data was intact, and they replaced the motherboard. So, after work, I gladly drove in the horrendous late Friday afternoon traffic to go pick up my iBook. No charge, of course.
I brought it home and had it on about three hours. It was working beautifully. I noticed that my wireless connection was getting a much stronger signal. I don't know if they tweaked a setting or if it's the new motherboard, but whatever the cause, I was very happy about this unexpected improvement.
Then, once again, the grinding and buzzing started up and it started hanging. I felt like a deflated balloon.
I'm going to call the Apple guy Monday and tell him about this. Then I'm going to make sure the problem is occurring and take the iBook there and show him what it's doing. I won't let this machine make a liar out of me again!
I now suspect that the problem has to do with the computer getting too hot. It seems to have these problems once it's been on a long time. When it gets cool (after I turn it off or sleep it for several hours) it will work again for a little while. I don't remember hearing the fan kick on when I was running it last night, and it usually comes on after a couple of hours (if it's not sleeping).
I have a little less than a month left on my warranty, so I've got to get this thing fixed soon. Unfortunately, I can't buy an extended warranty because I'm a Florida resident.
In the newest skin, I get the opacity effect in the content and sidebar areas by using a PNG file with alpha transparency for the background image. Alpha transparency simply means that the file has areas that are partially transparent. Only PNG files support this kind of transparency. (GIF files can have areas that are completely transparent, but not partially transparent.) Unfortunately, Internet Explorer does not support PNG files with alpha transparency, so the skin will look a little different in IE.
Actually, this now applies not only to the latest skin but also to two other skins that use the opacity effect ("Strawberry Letter 2003" and "Lost My Marbles"). I used to use non-standard CSS hacks to get this effect in these skins, but I have changed them so that they use PNG files instead.
Why did change these skins to use PNG files instead of using the hacks to get the same opacity effect? Because I wanted all the stylesheets to validate.
When I used IE as my primary browser, I would go by how IE rendered things when creating layouts. Then, I would get upset if I had to change things to accommodate other browsers. Now, I realize the problem was with IE and not all the other browsers. I also now understand why standards are important. Proper support for standards is yet another reason to switch to browsers like Firefox or Opera. If Microsoft wants Internet Explorer to be competitive, they need to add PNG alpha transparency support and better CSS standards support to future versions of their browser.
If anything on this site looks funny for the next couple of days, it's because I'm going through all the stylesheets for the site skins and making changes so that they validate properly.
I ran them through the validator and was pleasantly surprised that they were not in bad shape as far as standards go. Besides the scrollbar properties and opacity stuff, the only other problems were very minor things (like needing to replace a color name with a hex code).
I'm not sure yet, but I may dump the colored scrollbars. They only work in IE, anyway. I have two skins that use opacity and I'm going to see if there is a CSS standards compliant way of getting the same effect (one that's not too time consuming). If not, I'll just leave them alone for now.
I recently followed the herd and switched to Mozilla Firefox as my primary browser. I have used IE for years and have been satisfied with it. However, I ended up having to install the Google Toolbar to get rid of the pop-ups (and some would still sneak through sometimes). I've also been concerned with the security problems with IE. Finally, after using Safari on my iBook, I've become fond of tabbed browsing, and wanted to use a tabbed browser on my PC as well. Another thing I like about Firefox is that it has a built-in toolbar area to search Google, Dictionary.com, the Urban Dictionary and many other sites of your choosing. No more adding toolbars.
I'm also giving the Mozilla mail client, Thunderbird, a try. I like it better than Outlook in many ways. One thing I like is how each mail account has its own set of folders and its own inbox. The only problem I have is that when I imported my saved email from Outlook, the time stamps on any messages I sent are six hours off. They seem to be going by GMT instead of Central time. I've looked for a solution to this problem but have had no luck so far. It's not a huge deal, but it's kind of annoying.
BTW, if you use Firefox and Movable Type, you will need to add this to your MT install if you want to get your editing buttons back.
I recently set up a wireless network in my house. I did this shortly after purchasing a Mac iBook. (I had been wanting a laptop, but I also wanted to learn some new things. So I bought the iBook instead of a PC laptop. I've never really dealt with Macs all that much, so I decided this little laptop would be a good place to start.)
At first, I was unsatisfied with the wireless reception in certain parts of the house. I expected a little better after all I had heard about the wonders of wi-fi.
So, I ended up buying one of those antenna boosters for my wireless router. That seemed to help quite a lot. The signal is still a bit weak in the living room, but at least I can get a consistent signal now.
One thing I can say...it's nice to not have to sit up at the PC when you want to read some blogs or browse the web.
I'm blocking search bots from spidering my archives directory. That means the only thing the search bots will be allowed to spider is my main page and my skins directory. The latest "gr4nny s3x" search from an obscene URL did it. I know this sounds draconian, but I feel I have no other choice.
It seems that it takes a while for the changes to take effect. Some time ago, I blocked search bots from my cgi-bin directory to prevent searches from serving up my trackback boxes (I know some people are annoyed by that aspect of MT). It took a couple of months for me to quit getting referrals from my trackback boxes.
I also blocked spidering of all my image directories. And I fixed my .htaccess so that people can't hotlink to my images. You can also fix your .htaccess file to forward people coming from certain URLs to other sites. For example, the perv searchers who are coming here from perv URLs I've found in my referrals get sent here instead. Here's a guide to configuring .htaccess.
Check this out. (Warning: it might take a while to load.) See that "image" of colored pencils? It's not an image...it's all done with CSS. Here's how it was done.
