What makes you happy ?

I’m using the macbook pro more and more when I don’t really need the mouse but the heat underneath has been really hot. The other night I closed the lid and attached the power as I took the dog out. On return it was very hot at 65 degrees. And the other day I opened it from sleep and it refused to wake, the little light kept pulsing though so I just had to switch it off. Anyway, heat.

I was after a lap protector/cooler type thing. Has anywhere in the county of Leicestershire got any? Yes they have – so long as you want fans underneath. I’d seen the iLap which seems good and I saw one that Joseph used in San Francisco last year. But that was like 3 days away by post. I was in more of an instant satisfaction mode. But shopping got in the way so off to Tesco we went (and we only went there because we needed dog food from the pet shop in the same place). J came in too so we looked almost everywhere but we also passed chopping boards. Amazingly Tesco have a chopping board that has nicely rounded corners, softened edges (I forget the proper word but it rounds down to the rounded edge) and it’s the perfect size for the mbp. The mbp has extra feet to lift it anyway (idea from Andy) so the area under is cool and the natural grain of the wood stops it sliding all over. Very good indeed, and only 7 quid. I’m running at a steady 47 deg here.

Incidentally, I ran an Apple shop in Nottingham and asked if they had any laptop stuff like iLap. The guy said no, and why would they sell them? Weird, these things cook…

Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs

It’s still not clear what’s causing the snafu. Seems at least some of the the people experiencing problems had a third-party developer app called Application Enhancer installed ……. To recover, users were instructed to rip “Ape,” short for Application Enhancement, from the Leopard’s maw. The process is too gory for us to print here, but suffice it to say that, among other things, it had users use a command line to purge files with names like “Enhancer.prefpane” and “com.unsanity.ape.plist.”

Just works eh?

Have I mentioned before how utterly useless large text file handling is on the mac? 3.4meg file. Textwrangler stops, textedit can’t cope, Smultron falls over if you try to do anything with it. BBedit works – but at $125 it should. Demo only thanks. I’ll use all the free Windows stuff next time.

Coffee-free mac returned complete with 2gb of ram. Nice.
Creative Audigy soundcard arrived, installed and now I have excellent sound.
Jade Empire installed. Game says it won’t work because the gfx card drivers are too old. But the game does run. Which is useful because the latest drivers won’t display games – which is odd. For instance in Neverwinter I can see the cursor but not the actual game screen. Not a big deal though.
Taito Legends bought for the PS2. (It was only 7 quid). So now I get to play Rainbow Islands, Bubble Bobble and Phoenix all on the TV. I have them in MAME but it’s better on the bigger TV.
Not a bad way to head into the weekend.

Insurance co rang this this morning. She said I would get a new laptop and that she needed to confirm it and arrange delivery – sounded fair enough. She then said that she would read me the name of the replacement computer and I had to agree and when it arrived even if it was wrong I would have no choice but to keep it because I was about to agree. (She didn’t use commas either). So she said it was an Apple Mac and I agreed. I made a distinct point that I wanted the 2gb of ram and she said something about that being there. Seemed odd though that they’d want an agreement over the phone. It’s easy with Mac stuff – Apple don’t believe in much choice either in model or design. But if it was a Windows machine it’d be awkward because laptops seem to cycle through models quite quickly. Anyway, it’s here Friday. Which is good.

J is working away. Someone knocks at the door. She moves hand, hand hits mug, mug falls over, macbook gets a drink it didn’t need. Flipped it over immediately, left to dry and as well as being very brown it’s also very dead. I blame the cheap cappucino coffee. I’m sure the machine expected quality caffeine. And now we await the insurance companies verdict.

Dear Apple,
Please can you stop making shiny toys for your adoring zealots and instead find 5 minutes to write decent mouse drivers. In this arena Microsoft comprehensively thrashes you. As Pirelli once said “Power is nothing without control” and Apple mouse control sucks donkey sized ones.

Cmd+v will not work.
Cmd+any other key is fine

Shift+r will not work
Shift+any other key is fine

v+Cmd will work but – obviously – throws a v at the start and it’s not meant to work like that anyway.
r+ShiftShiftShiftShift might work.

Mac forums are without a clue
restarting – a daily event here now with the ‘oh so stable’ mac does not work
running onyx does not work

It’s an apple keyboard
I dismantled the (stupidly assembled) thing and cleaned it fully a couple of weeks ago. It is NOT the reason.

So, why has the wondrous OS X decided to start crumbling even further? Any ideas?

Can Ubuntu be installed on a mac mini? If it can, I may well. (Yes it can. Dual boot? No. I have no loyalty to OS X. It’ll be the whole HD).

Update: What appears to happen – because I had this happen before – is that OS X forgets just what language settings are in use. So curing it involved choosing another language in the International prefs, then choosing the proper one again. When it happened before I posted to the apple forums I followed up within the hour to say it was working again. No-one replied that it was a known issue. Which means it isn’t, it doesn’t happen and I have a lemon?
Apart from Parallels, ubuntu is looking good……

There is this fabled myth that XP needs reinstalling every so often and depending which OS zealot you are talking to you will get a different reason.

Right now OS X is getting slower at everything. Opening apps, running apps, bringing up windows. It’s gone all treacle-like. Yes I have done the permissions stuff, maintenance scripts etc etc. So is it decayed? Do I need to do a fresh install? If so, what genius reason covers this and not Windows?

Edit: And when I have to do this – because all the mac sites declare this is needed but still scoff at Windows – then I’ll need to reinstall Windows in Parallels. Again. At some point that will say a flat No so I’ll have no way of running Windows because OS X needed a reinstall. How’s that then?

I want to play music and I don’t want to use iTunes.

Windows:
Right-click folder, open in music player. It doesn’t give a damn what’s in it, it doesn’t care if it’s never seen it before, it doesn’t want to tag / sort / organise / move or otherwise screw with it. It just plays.

Mac.
……….

So that’s that then.
Time to move things around.

Update:
The PC is now back where it was. I have the PC for music, for video, for games. The Mac can’t cut it there at all. It needs some sorting out as any ‘family’ machine would, and it needs 3 USB sockets replacing (no need to send it anywhere for that unlike anything Apple make).

Maybe I should have fired up Parallels and Ubuntu …