Results tagged “Macs” from The Word is Not Enough

Like most freelances, I'm extremely stingy when it comes to upgrading gadgets. I don't know why it should be any different for those on staff than those not - maybe it's because we're a bit older than most and the gadget phase is starting to pass us by.

All I know for sure is that it was three and a half years before my iMac was out of its prime and that I've now had my PowerBook for three years (almost as long as I've been a freelance) and I still haven't upgraded it.

As you may know from my earlier entry on the subject, my PowerBook has been getting a bit temperamental of late. Well, yet another thing's gone wrong with it. It still works, but it's gone wrong.

Here's a list of all the flaws I've come across so far. At what point would you have returned or replaced it?

• Tendency to freeze for no adequately explored reason (I ignored it)
• Little rubber feet falling off (I let them)
• Great big black marks appearing on the surface (nothing I could do)
• Heat scoring appearing on the surface (nothing I could do)
• Hard drive packing up (replaced it)
• New hard drive packing up (replaced it again)
• '7' key falling off (keep putting it back on)
• AC power supply stopped working (replaced it)
• Battery life reduced to 40 minutes (replaced it)
• Screen starting to split away from the back (looking for the super-glue, right now)

If I hadn't read such scary things about the new MacBooks, I think I would have bought a replacement by now. Plus the 12" PowerBook has such a great keyboard, even if the 7 keeps falling off. Plus probably all my accessories would stop working as well if I upgraded.

I'm still thinking about it though. Maybe next year...

Updates and related entries
July 21, 2006: I've mentioned my ailing PowerBook and the ever-vexing question of whether I should get a new one or not. Here's another one for you: if your camera is slightly broken, when should you get a new one? We have...

My iMac wouldn't start up yesterday. Well, first it just turned itself off while I was in the middle of something. Then it wouldn't start up again – most of the time, I got nothing other than a glowing light when I pressed the On button; sometimes I got as far as the Apple logo.

I'd had the mysterious shutdown happen to me before, but this was the first time it wouldn't restart afterwards. All things being equal, I figured it was a hardware problem, particularly once I found the iMac wouldn't even boot into Target disk mode when connected via FireWire to my PowerBook. So I unplugged all the peripherals. Nothing. Final resort: I took out the extra 1GB of RAM I'd installed the first day I got the iMac.

Hooray! It worked. The iMac booted just fine.

I would then have tried to get Crucial, the company from which I bought the memory, to exchange it, but it was 8am and no one was in yet. So I waited and carried on using the iMac.

I tell you something: don't even think about using a new Intel Mac without boosting the memory beyond 512MB because it's unusable otherwise. A complete dog.

Anyway, deciding there was no way I could work in a glacier, I took a risk and decided to put the RAM chip back in. This time though, I swapped it with the chip that Apple had included in the first slot.

The results:

1. The iMac works just fine again and is actually usable
2. It seems a little/a lot faster than it did before the whole disaster occurred. Maybe the Crucial memory is faster than the Apple memory and it's being used by the system for most operations, rather than the Apple memory.
3. I'm mystified about what caused the freeze. Maybe the iMac had overheated and all that moving the iMac around, unscrewing the memory hatch, etc, cooled it down a bit. Or maybe one of the chips wasn't quite seated properly and when I swapped the chips, I seated them correctly.
4. I'm now working in constant fear my iMac is going to have another hiccup. After that incident with Linux a week ago, my backup strategy is becoming meticulous.

I bought my laptop about three years ago. It's a PowerBook G4 12“. There have been things wrong with it since day one, including an odd tendency to crash at random intervals, no matter what operating system I'm using, if I happen to have moved it recently – obviously a useful feature in a laptop.

However, it's been getting worse. The ”7“ key keeps falling off; there's some great big black marks on the wrist-rests, either caused by fused toner cartridge or by the G4 superheating its outer coating to the point where it starts to carbonise. The battery life has also dropped off, and until a couple of days had dropped to about an hour and half during normal usage and less than 40 minutes if I'm playing a DivX. I had bought an extra battery at the same time as the laptop, but about a year ago it started to refuse charge.

Miraculously, though, I tried charging it again yesterday and it works just fine. I've now gone from under 40 minutes of battery life to over three hours. The moral of this story, then, is always to buy a spare battery, but to avoid using it until your main battery has gone pear-shaped. And also, never trust Apple to produce a battery that has any kind of longevity in everyday use.

UPDATE: Incidentally, finally having battery power again meant I was able to test the Notebook feature of Word 2004, which allows you to type notes as Word records via your Mac's microphone. It's actually pretty good. The quality was fine, the file didn't get too large and you're able to play back the audio at (almost) the corresponding points to your typing. I'll be using that feature again, I think.

Updates and related entries
July 12, 2006: Like most freelances, I'm extremely stingy when it comes to upgrading gadgets. I don't know why it should be any different for those on staff than those not - maybe it's because we're a bit older than most and...

Nearly killed my new iMac last weekend. I'd just got everything running nicely, including Windows, when I had a 'bright' idea. “Why don't I install Linux onto that extra partition I reserved for it.

Bad idea.

Bloody Gentoo wiped the partition map and I spent about 48 hours having to recover everything. I got everything back but that was a pain in the arse in spade.

So my new resolution is this: never have anything to do with Linux unless it's going to be installed in a virtualised environment that can't do anything bad. I've never yet had a good experience with Linux and somehow I don't see that changing...

My new iMac Dual Core arrived yesterday. My old iMac was about three and a half years old and lacking modern features that were actually forcing me to turn down work, so it was about time for an upgrade: I'll be handing my old one over to my sister, so at least it's going to a good home.

There has, of course, been a lot of fuss about being able to install Windows XP on the new iMacs, with many asking the not entirely invalid question, “Who would want to do that?” Well, I would. In fact, I'm going to try to get Linux running on it as well. Why? Because I have to write about Macs, Windows and Linux. Take two computers into my front room? No, I just want to triple boot and go...

So Apple are coming to take the G5 back. I'm gutted. After life with an 800MHz G4 iMac, a Quad G5 was something else altogether. I'm going to be holding a small memorial service on Sunday, if that's all right.

The impending repossession has set me thinking though. Why is that hardware vendors expect their hardware back after you've reviewed it, when software vendors don't?

Updates and related entries
June 13, 2006: Press trips are all very nice. Who doesn't enjoy flying off to far-away destinations, even if you don't get to see much except the inside of a hotel at the other end? There is, however, a problem for any...

What does it take to be a sub (Americans who are mystified, I'm talking about copy editors here, not sandwiches or submarines)? Some people drift into it, some people train for it. Whatever the entry route, you need to have an appreciation for language, a knowledge of the law, an understanding of production and design, the ability to write, a pedantic need to check facts and an eye for spotting mistakes at least.

Not any more though.

Updates and related entries
January 12, 2006: Ah, I know I've ranted a bit about 'subs' before, but a couple of things to complain about this month. First off, apologies to Ryan Style, whose perfectly reasonable question about Safari for iCreate's helpdesk this month got replaced...

Here's an interesting concept: a magazine about open source in the enterprise that's been put together using only open source software.

That's the claim anyway. Given that there's no print version, only a PDF version, I imagine they could just about put the whole thing together without needing a Mac; since The GIMP can't handle CMYK and spot colours, it would have been tricky doing image editing anyway (there are plug-ins, I know, but they're rudimentary at best. Any duotone as long as it's red and black?).

There are two problems with it:

1. It looks rubbish. That's true of most US trade mags, but this has the design quality you'd expect of something put together with Microsoft Word. Two column layouts with a third, bastard column: fair enough. But if you put a subhead in the first column and don't calculate the leading and spacing correctly, the second column's baselines won't match up, which is exactly what's happened throughout. The designers appear only to be able to cope with pictures running over two columns, as well, turning most articles in swathes of impenetrable text. This is not a good advert for open source DTP software.
2. The writing is awful. Most of the content is written by CTOs and techies and I fell asleep within seconds. For a magazine supposedly aimed at CIOs, there's an amazingly large amount of material covering installing from source, the size of downloads and so on. And an article covering Boolean syntax in Google metadata searches? WTF?

Most trade mags get sent through the post, so require minimal effort on the part of the reader to obtain the latest edition. O3 may be free, but people will have to want to download it to read it. That's not going to happen, based on this issue. Maybe it'll find its feet with later issues, which is the usual pattern of most mags.

I suspect that O3 is either going to have a short lifespan or it's going to have one of those slow, protracted deaths where people keep providing copy and working for nothing – the magazine keeps getting produced but the quality is so poor, no one ever reads it.

I've completed my migration to using my iPod for recording phone interviews. What a lot of people don't know is that the iPod has a built-in microphone and recording facility that third-party manufacturers can use. It records 8-bit, mono WAV files and when you plug it into your Mac or PC, iTunes automatically syncs it back into its library, where you can then convert them to AAC files to cut their size by half.

This makes it very useful for journalists: my iPod has a 60GB capacity and a 12-hour rechargeable battery, which means

1. it'll outlast any tape recorder
   
2. I can store all my interviews digitally, making it easier to keep them for years if I want without having to resort to renting a lock-up
   
3. it will almost never run out of power and is automatically recharged when it's plugged into my iMac.