plodding along in my young old age

I could've sworn it was just a few weeks ago I heard about CDs. Obviously employing some hyperbole here, but groove with me on it...

I was still quite happy with the improvement of cassettes over records and 8-tracks, honestly. Tapes you could record...create with. Capture your own voice, snippets of the teevee, or your little brother scratching with your Sesame Street records.

I read storybooks, told jokes, and made my brothers laugh on those old tapes. They're in a box around here somewhere. You'd think I'd wanna listen to them, but any time I do the voices sound alien - like someone and somebody else. So I rarely listen to them anymore.

But there came a day when Grandma started to be reluctant to let me use her tape recorder. I chalked it up to the random moody nature of these adult things, and went back to watching Woody Woodpecker on the black and white teevee at the foot of her bed. And no cookies, either, or I'd spoil my dinner. :P

About two weeks later was my birthday, which for a kid of that single-digit-age was months away. But I got my very own tape recorder for my birthday. Which I then proceeded to wear out, leave running as I fell asleep, or push my fingers into when it was running without a tape in it. Mom and dad always wondered why we had to get it repaired so often. Yeah...we're all stupid sometimes...at least most of mine was back then, eh?

I've never been well-off monetarily. I've worked and earned and bought things that were on sale, spent wisely. I've never been able to afford the newest, latest, greatest tech. I usually have to wait till all the gaudy, stupid, classless people with the money and none of the brains buy, break, wear out, and replace the new shit.

So here we are in some year they all claim is 1020. ...oh, wait...2010. (Oops/same diff.) I have a collection of slightly outdated tech that serves me decently. A few key pieces are almost new, just a year or two old. But I still feel proud of my 3G ipod and my phat old pre-lite nintendo ds.

I have a digital camera, but it damn sure doesn't fit in my pocket. It shoots RAW and has other features I wanted, but it doesn't do HD video or anything. I got it cheap off craigslist. My spare digital cam, the one that does fit in my pocket...it's from savers and the battery has to be taken out after every shot or it drains quickly.

I found myself finally lusting after the Wii when I've seen all the "homebrew" independent software filling the gaps in the "legitimate" usefulness of the console. I couldn't really care less about it, despite the obvious lure of the actual Mario title Super Mario Galaxy.

So many false Mario games have come out in the last 7 years. These Mario Party things, the Smash Brothers BS...I've never understood those. Like taking Mario's face and slapping it on a ton of things. I have owned many nintendo titles. But the only ones worth keeping were the ones with actual Mario doing actual Super things. Not golf, not dancing, not board games, and not Rf'nPGs.

RPGs interest me about as much as steampunk. Like a cheerleader with a 40-year-old antique calculator keypad where her face is supposed to be.

New SMB for Wii took the game I enjoyed so much on that little tiny DS screen and lets it breathe on a bigger screen. Pretty much at the same time, nintendo announced a bigger handheld for those of us who could hardly play anything on their existing millions of kiddie devices. Our hands, fingers, thumbs and arms are not compatible with the twee itty bitty size of these things for long...no how.

It's worth mentioning that the most fun I had with the DS were doing two things. Playing NSMB until I got sick of holding the tiny system up to my face, and scratching samples with protein-ds.

I want a Wii. I've wanted to check it out since I played exactly ONE swing of golf during a micro-break at a relentlessly-aggressive media company's call center one day over two years ago. That's the sum total of experience I have with the concept, controls, any of it first-hand.

I use my xbox every other day or so, but couldn't care less about the 330 or whatever it is they're calling the new one. Linux and open-source hackers and freedom fighters created the useful part of the xbox for me, Xbox Media Center. I can't say enough good things about it, and if you've ever used it, you wouldn't be able to stop gushing about it either.

Seeing this level of functionality being achieved in fits and starts on the wii is inspiring me to want to pony up the loot and fetch me one. I'm not prepared to spend more than I have to. So maybe $120-150 for the console, all connections, at least one controller and one game. *shrug*

That's assuming I can find the deal, the pieces all look in good enough shape, and it's after April. I'm not in any hurry. I might be able to do tons of tricks with my xbox but I still can't get the damn thing to play N64 games.

I've seen the emulation for the 64 improving. Since the xbox thwarts my attempts and I have a couple of usb controllers, I'm gonna give mupen64 a try under an operating system or two. Last I tried to emu the 64 on the mac, the controller wouldn't map the sticks, just the buttons. Either the controller's borked or the mac's just an asshole!?!

I came over here - well-caffeinated as one might by this point assume - after seeing evidence in the chatter here and there that ye olde apple nee computer finally dropped their long-awaited "tablet" device.

I watched the video. I love how condescendingly they proclaim that it's "affordable" at five hundred fucking dollars. Maybe if I'm one of the artists whose music you use as bed under the video. I'm sure Ben fucking Folds gets a free iPad. I could - you know - actually use one. He's undoubtedly already got either an iphone or a widescreen kickass imac and laptop.

The world spins out of control and wobbles on its axis. These sorts of minor injustices bear my bleeding brain to spew them out here in the land of digitally volatile futuretext, where any old emp or rogue pulse can wipe them from the collective consciousness just like *that*?

I watch the carnage unfolding from Haiti. The statistics claim that anyone left in the rubble is dead. But they keep pulling live people out after 15 days. I can't imagine the horror of making it this far, perhaps even able to hear the rescuers but unable to make a sound...and having them pass you by because a statistician told them to!?!?

And all the aid workers getting hammered down there. Haiti wasn't a wealthy nation before. I hesitate to even think it...but how many of these hungry mouths, these homeless people were homeless and hungry before the quake? How many of them didn't have anyone even in their own neighborhood noticing their plight 90 days ago?

I digress...but with good cause.

I came here to whine about how the ipad might go on my list of wanted items. But not for the obvious reasons. No...for painfully few of those.

I'm not a cellphone user. I have one, but only a basic model that does just what it needs to, and charges me the least amount of loot to do it.

I once had aspirations of being a techological gadget man, up on the times and buying every new thing. I have long since abandoned such expensive foolishness. And I'm not even old enough to have any grey hairs, I just got wise.

If I had an ipad, I'd basically playtest it, see where it wobbled, where I could poke at the underpinnings, and what I could do with it to amuse myself that perhaps no one intended. I'd play games, I'd run apps, I'd learn a lot of what my friends and family have been getting from their iphones for years already.

I'd catch up and I'd run loops out ahead of many of the people using these things now. Or at least I'd try.

I'm still amused at recent news that someone busted the outermost ring of the onion that is no doubt the security features of the sony/fony pee-ess 3. I have been calling for the fall of sony for a long time. Their minidiscs were an abomination before logic and reason and the company's folly has only grown since.

I'd love to play the newest Ratchet and Clank games, but on my terms, NOT theirs. So the console can take a big leap until the price of admission is no greater than it would've been to buy another game for my PS2. I saw no need to upgrade, and won't pay to be forced to do it.

So that's it. I'm a cellphone noob, hate microsoft and fony, not so hot on apple's bloated app issues and phone phetish, want a wii, would gladly playtest and rigorously use an ipad - but it'll be at least a year and probably three before I could/would pay for the privilege.

(But go ahead, let commence the consumeristic stampede of blind sheep and early adopters. Don't let me stop you from blazing the path, stomping down the bugs, and selling me your used 1G ipad for $120 about 18-24 months from now!)

progress and awe

So I just did something I've noticed my mac is good for.

As I'll do from time to time with longer political, scientific, and research articles, I copy/pasted the text to a doc in my word processor. Then I had the computer voice read it to me.

I've already set the voice to read at the speed I prefer to keep up with. I think I could twiddle the Services menu to read it directly from the browser, but haven't bothered search-or-researching that just yet.

I re-absorbed the content of my latest blog entries here and elsewhere in the span of about 8 minutes. 1700 words here, 800 there...etc and I'm refreshed and ready to reflect on the last few days.

The process for scanning old slides has been repaired and functions onward.

I am on a mission to preserve the historical visual record of the family whut I come. Attempting to get their help identifying all these faces and places in these images. Before any more of the elders who'd remember these details pass through the veil where it's far harder to hear their answers.

I envision, goofily like a teenager drunk in the world of too much futuristic tech, mapping my Grandparents house with the images I'm finding of it, making it into a quake map or a qtvr file.

Normally I placate myself with strong coffee and some mental filler like teevee or cartoons while I scan images. It usually involves the monkey-like persistence to a pattern of:

insert slide
press preview
wait
crop to image
press scan
wait
press save
type filename
hit enter
wait
close file

and repeat till hard drive is full.

I usually keep myself aware of the tech available for these projects. I'm just not aware of anything in even remotely the same ballpark of monetary investment that can do the same thing.

I believe there are bulk slide scanners out there in excess of five hundred bucks, and steadily upward from there.

If I found a deal for the target photo lab or someone else to do the whole mess - several hundred and perhaps more than 2000 slides, for anything approaching what I'd drop on one of these devices...I'd seriously consider it.

But the fact remains that I'm using a monitor whose housing is crumbling, a $14.99 powermac that I got at the goodwill on half price day. I scored a film scanner better than the one I got trained on at work 7 years ago for a Jackson from a guy on craigslist just over a year ago. Add to that a couple of spare zip drives, a handful of disks I've been using since college, and a 512mb usb stick.

Flickr and facebook to share with the family, amuse my friends. The offline photo-organizing app Picasa pwns iphoto; but I narrowly prefer Flickr's website over G's picasa-web.

All it took was reformatting the laptop, thanking Goddess that I have a firewire dvd drive that it'll boot from, and putting 10.4 on it like all the tuts and howtos said would work. (Tip of the hat to lowendmac!)

Now the grind comes down to the 90 minute chunk of time it takes to scan up a full hard-drive of tiffs that are 1.x inch wide and 2700 dpi. Then editing them, backing them up, etc. Then 20+ minutes of hustling files from powermac to ibook to usb stick. Comes down to 10 minutes per scan, roughly.

Normally I'd watch Rachel Maddow or Amy Goodman process the day's affairs. Even Jon Stewart is always amusing. But the carnage in Haiti swells to take up all the news, sucks all the air out of the room. My heart goes out to those who suffer as it always should.

I'm just left swatted away like an overly intelligent fly, an unwitting sheep, when all the pathos of the zombie media converges. And the eye of that great storm causes a reporter, some dimwitted human-shaped robot that runs on money, interviews someone still being rescued from the rubble. Still being pinned under concrete, still writhing in pain.

Lest anyone ask what's wrong with this world...it's always waiting right there on the news. For some idiot reporter to do something just like this, and cause everyone with two brain cells to rub together to collectively facepalm for all of humanity and the dim prospects of her future.

crumbling tech in the time of empty pockets

this post failed to be posted at facebook, 1011pm 6 january 2010

I blogged much whinge-ing about my sorry state of affairs last night. I tried to import the blog, but facebook said 'no.' I could've copy/pasted it, but I've decided to re-write it instead.

Tonight I'm on a different trip, thanks to some reflective passages in books from Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs.

Rather than hating on what doesn't work anymore, I'm appreciating what I got that still functions. I don't intend to go on a horn-tooting solo, but I am thankful to all that is for letting me have any tools that haven't failed.

At the top of the list of what's working as intended: the open source miracle that is XBMC - that I've been using to defeat old NES/SNES games in emulators and watch cartoons, movies, and other stuff on in the meantime...

Any whiner knows it's easiest to describe what hasn't been working -
so here's what I've been burning brainwaves puzzling out during the past 24 hours:

Last night I assembled the - literally - crumbling system of old mac-ness, sourced from goodwill parts and craigslist bargains. The monitor is still held together with tape (clear, because by that point in packing-up-to-move I'd exhausted all supply of duct tape) and hope.

I remember rolling the beige plastic in my arms, turning the tape around and around the shape of it, confused and disbelieving my eyes and ears, but witnessing it’s housing crumble for no reason. I simply taped it up and put it on a bare bookshelf near the rest of the growing stack of piles in our garage - waiting for the moving truck in the chill minnesotan springtime weather.

The monitor sits on top of the cpu housing. Too bad it's from before zip drives were standard on macs. For that brief time in which they were, anyway...

This model has just a floppy slot and a 2x cdrom. The cpu, one of apple's first powerpc chips, hums along at a blazing 100 mhz. I bet I could up the ram, tho.

I know in one of the half dozen boxes of electronic flotsam in the closet, I have a small assortment of mac ram sticks. I pondered seeking them out, since I'm no longer in a clime where they'd be useful for scraping thick ice off car windows, and seeing if I could improve the speed of 2700 dpi slide scans with more dam ram.

No...the treachery didn't lie in the usual suspects this time. I hustled the scanned untitled, numerically sequential tiff files from the paltry little 3/4 gb hard drive to zip disks via scsi.

Then from the clear blue usb zip to my main desktop mac. But oh...oops. Yeah, every website and reference you can check will tell you usb zip drives are supposed to be supported without drivers in mac os x.

What they don't tell you is that 100mb zip disks and drives are dinosaurs no one even tries to sell anymore. They float through thrift stores at pennies on the dollar. And plugging in your usb 100mb zip drive will get you nothing.

Maybe if you reboot with it connected to the usb port, and turned ON...it might auto-detect it like it claims it already does/will. But I didn't have time for that.

With the mini out as a place to shuttle my untitled 20-30 mb tiff files to...I fetched out my old ibook, dusted her off, and got to work.

See I also would've hustled this - still admittedly rather sweet looking "toilet-seat" aka "hello kitty purse" ibook. But the airport card - the old pre-extreme airport card that became rare when apple stopped making it...it causes the keyboard to bow upwards.

So you can have either a wireless laptop, or a keyboard that functions. Not both. So the value of it plummets for the average noob. Add to this that before I even had a wireless card for it, back in the day when I just attached a blue ethernet cable I kept across the back of my desk...it had already started to lose function in its cd drive.

I found myself able to get the pics on to the ibook's 9gb hard drive. It's just that every attempt since then has resulted in varying levels of frustration. And I've tried many different things only a geek might appreciate.

First I tried my 1gb poker chip usb stick. Every try it told me the disk was full. The ibook's sure isn't, and the usb stick isn't either. I ejected it, reinserted it...tried again. It'd start the 2nd time, but get 2 mb into the transfer and fail...beachballing to eternity.

I'd let it sit for a few minutes, confirming we were borked, and then restart, withdrawing the usb stick after the chime/bong sound.

After the first usb stick, I tried 2 others. Same effects completely.

This caused me to try running disk utility and repair permissions. I did so, it appeared to find some nominal permissions errors on internet plug-ins used for streaming video. I'd never be surprised to find that adobe nee macromedia flash is a virus. I've often said it is one.

After the repair permissions came up clean and green, I rebooted and tried again. No usb. Same thing.

I tried connecting my 40gb ipod. No. It refused to mount it, despite it being activated for 'disk use', without starting itunes. Then of course, since it's an old ass laptop with 10.3 on it, itunes went beachbally and got borked.

So I had to wait a bit, confirm my suspicions of borkitude, and reboot again.

Nothing's let me mount the disk portion of my ipod on the clamshell ibook.

I tried to connect my firewire dvd burner. It saw it, recognized the model, read a disc and told me the dye identifier code and speed designation. As soon as I tried to burn, it failed and went beachball spinny again.

I wouldn't be so bummed if I hadn't been practicing too aggressively with my file-move protocol. I've already deleted the original files from the itty bitty power mac 7500 hard drive. They exist, of course, and could be 'un-deleted'. But they're all moved over to the ibook.

Short of uploading them to the internet, you know, if the files will even do *that*, I am perplexed. I wonder if the I/O controller is damaged. If I could wrangle out the hard drive, put it in a new firewire enclosure, and mount it...it might be okay.

I'm left with the three options:

a) undelete the files from the source drive and move them to something less unstable than my old useless ibook. then break it down into parts and hustle them b-tches on ebay and use the profits to buy a wii, a big NAS drive, or a new monitor.

b) configure closed network to allow ibook net access, and bitterly-sardonically laugh as the files fail to upload from the dead old b-stard of an ibook.

c) hustle files back from ibook on usb zip disks and onto something else that might read them. including but not limited to: the old zombie mac desktop tower that may or may not boot, and the final possibility - the heretofore untread ground of the wife's laptop.

Whenever I get done slamming my head against the wall, I'll let you know if I find anything that works.

punished, tarnished, bitter & mean

I began this evening with a surge of productivity. Perhaps even a little excitement.

I reassembled the crumbling ancient system that works with my ancient slide scanner.

I scanned till I filled up the quaint little 750mb HD in there. I then rebooted with the zip drive on the scsi connector, and filled up my zip disks with the scanned pics.

Connecting the usb zip drive I have to my mac mini did nothing. So I grabbed a really old ibook and dumped the pics on there.

Of course this seemed to be the tipping point. Laid out like a trap, the ibook let me connect the usb zip and dump a whole bunch of tiffs on it.

Trying to get them back off it, via any other means but the zips that put them there, remains the challenge these several hours later.

I appreciated the warm soulful voice of Paul Mooney as I sat here before the fire and scanned pics of my grandparents vacationing in my new home state.

Now I sit here in the dark, shaking my angry monkey fist at the inane pathetic ridiculousness of technology.

Every time I try to copy the files off the ibook, it gets 2 mb into a copy and then blammo - beachball of spinning rainbow doom. Nothing recovers from that.

I can't copy off to a usb stick, I can't copy off to the firewire ipods, I can't hook up the firewire burner and burn a damn CDR...

...and all this despite having run disk utility twice and getting a clean green bill of health.

Now I write these words of ire as my crappy old second-hand monitor keeps winking and wiggling at the edges...blinking and shooting occasional paranoia-inducing lines of static.

I'd post this to FML but I didn't even come here to wallow or share...just bitch.

I could've been posting corrected pics of slides my family hasn't seen in 7-10 years.

Instead I'm wishing I could sell a kidney or a testicle so I could buy a decent monitor
and a damn slide scanner that can do more than 3 every 10 minutes,
which uses a connectivity standard designed since 1986.

I'm gonna go smoke a cigarette and try to keep from smashing my head in the door.