mac – Page 3 – We Saw a Chicken …

my lappy is not well

My ThinkPad T21 is dying. Well, its processor and interfaces are fine, but its backlight is erratic, the battery lasts about 20 minutes, and the case is badly cracked. Because it takes so long for the screen to come on, it’s almost no use as a portable computer.

It’s a shame; it has been a nice machine. I’d prefer not to have to buy a new machine — it’s a toss-up between another used ThinkPad, or a new iBook — but this gets me very frustrated. Catherine has been complaining about how tetchy I am about it.

I’ve probably been very bad at responding to e-mail over the last few weeks because of this. Apologies.

faster mac

I upgraded the memory in Catherine‘s eMac last night. It was deathly slow with the original 128MB, but now runs good an’ fast with 384. CPUsed isn’t the cheapest place to get RAM (it’s the same 8-chip PC133 that mini-ITX boxes use), but at least it’s a Mac place, so I could rant at them if it didn’t work.

See how propriteary systems beget proprietary systems …?

needed another box

I wrote earlier that an iPod Mini failed to just work, straight out of the box. Thanks to Chris Slothouber‘s suggestion, it now works fine with an additional firewire cable.

It’s still very annoying to have to fork out $$ (and a lot of $$, too) for an extra cable that should have been in the box.

failing to work just out of the box

Bloody iPod Mini. Catherine’s 10.1.15 eMac sees it, but iTunes says “No iPod Connected”, despite the obvious. It just sits there, flashing “Do Not Disconnect” from the USB port. iTunes 4.7.1 says it has iPod Mini support. So go on, do what you’re supposed to!

I’ve spent more time futzing with this crappy thing than any hardware on my Linux boxes. It’s just an MP3 player, it should just work.