Posts Tagged ‘mac’

I entered Jobsworld with the new (secondhand) iMac and apart from the general shinyness and it-just-works feeling I encountered the downside.

My cowon i7 audio player (which I bought because my old rio Karma didn’t play nice with linux) is not recognised at all by the new toy. Not at all, not even as a drive (which the website claims it should be, in very small print, possibly followed by a ‘maybe’ with an invisible tag. We don’t watch a lot of telly, but we do listen to a fair number of podcasts, just going to work I usually walk about four miles a day, and listening to In Our Time is a distinct pleasure.

The rio, the i7 and the ipod touch

So this state of affairs could not continue. At the same time my ebook reader (which was genuinely lovely to read on) developed a display fault, the fault being that the display looked like one big bar code which, when reported to the manufacturer, elicited a gallic shrug and an estimated repair cost of €lots (well, that’s the downside of living on the weeping edge (like the bleeding edge but it’s become infected and all gooey) of technology.

Putting both of these things together I thought, well you’re in Jobsworld, why not go all the way to the light/dark side (delete as appropriate [and as an aside to the aside about sides, is the opposite of the dark side actually called the light side?]). I wandered along to the apple shop and looked at the ipod touch, read up on whether I could use it to read my ebooks (I can but I’ll have to break the law and remove the DRM from some of my books if I want to continue reading them), I could.

I bought one, the cheapest one, 8GB, for about €50 more than the repair cost of my ebook reader.

And it’s good, very good, blimey there’s a lot of stuff there for it. So Liz bought one as well (her little netbook is in the shop (still under warranty) because the flash drive went belly up). I wouldn’t say I’m smitten but I’m certainly have a fine platonic relationship with my apple setup.

Now, any recommendations for apps?

Th'mac

As I mentioned, there is a new toy. Liz is resigned to me spending a little bit of time in front of this beast. Not least because It’s my first taste of the fabled mac OS.  Having dumped windows a few years back and having spent time in the comparative openness of linux it’s like putting on a suit and tie (a nice suit and tie that makes you look good). You feel a little restricted and then you look in the mirror and think ‘damn that’s pretty smart’.

I know that under the hood is a variant of unix, and I can open a command line and play in bash so that’s not a problem, and I know that the programs are there if I want them (Firefox instead of Safari for example). The good thing is that most of it just works (Time machine is a thing of beauty), but therein lies the bit I have to get used to. There are parts I should not mess with. Otherwise it will stop just working and start just not working.

And another thing I learned in the process:

A backup is not a backup if you haven’t verified it.

A backup is not a backup if it is the only copy.

My backup of photos from May last year onwards was corrupted. I only found out when I came to restore it. Now I’m looking for something to recover corrupt archives (heh, makes me think of librarians cackling). Still, it’s not so bad, there are photos on Flickr and most of the stuff I really want is on paper (harder to corrupt a piece of paper), despite that, I did feel rather foolish/annoyed.

I shall not think about it for a while as tomorrow we’re off to do another three days of the Camino de Santiago. So guess what the next post will be about.

There will be none left in short order

This week Spring has most definitely sprung. One of the signs here (as opposed to the UK, where Spring seems to be marked by the same shot of someone having a butty in a London park without a jacket) is the sudden appearance of strawberries in vast quantities. Liz cannot pass up the opportunity of fruit, so she bought a crate (no punnets here, just little crates, holding 2Kg) at the frutería just around the corner. We have some requesón (cream cheese) ready and waiting.