OK, how does this work??

So last night I was importing ‘Stranger’s World’ by the wonderful Patty Larkin from CD into iTunes. For some reason the CD wouldn’t read on my iBook (about 1 CD in 4 doesn’t…), so I hooked up my external drive to my desktop PC (now safely installed in new house) and burnt it on there. took external drive, hooked it back up to iBook, sync’d iPod, and listened to said album… now here’s the inexplicable weirdness – for some reason there are bits of one or two of my tunes scattered in amongst the MP3s – you get 30 seconds of ‘Dear Diary’ by Patty, followed by a load of something off one of the Lessons Learned albums… then back to Dear Diary… WTF??? How the hell does that happen? How have I managed, by sheer force of narcissistic will, to pollute other people’s lovely music with chunks of my own lovely bass noises??? that surely doesn’t make sense?? Geeks? Bueller? Anyone?

iMac/iBook tip…

Should’ve blogged this ages ago, but was using it a lot at Greenbelt and introduced quite a few people to it, so here it is –

if you need to either a) extend your battery life or b) see the screen in a really sunny place, you can invert the colour of the screen (like a negative of a photo) by holding down the control, alt and apple keys and pressing number 8. If the screen is predominantly white space, it saves lots on the battery, and you can then turn down the brightness of the screen (with the two buttons in the top left of the keyboard) and save lots of battery life.

I was shown this in LA in January by Janek, and used it a lot when trying to jack wifi from outside cafes in Hollywood. :o)

broked laptop

Just been to the Apple Store on Regent Street to get my laptop seen to. The firewire port is fried, which I discovered when I tried to hook up my M-Audio soundcard last week, in order to get my new copy of Pro-Tools M-Powered working. No joy. Tried the soundcard on the PC, worked fine, so must be the Mac.

Took it in today, helpful bloke called Edd (two ‘d’s, it’s on the form) did the usual trouble-shooting stuff before agreeing that it was, indeed, fooked. The remedy, sadly, is having the Logic Board replaced, which means leaving my beloved ibook with them for up to a week. With my desktop beastie not really set up at the moment to manage my life, I’m taking the ibook home for a couple of days to get all the info I need on a daily basis transferred across, and I’ll drop this back in on thursday for the repair. Fortunately it’s a warranty repair, so it’s free, as was the replacement of my keyboard, which they did today, as most of the letters had rubbed off. Yay!

So next week, I’ll be laptopless for a week, unless I can convince TSP to lend me her lovely new ibook… fat chance – she’s got more sense than that.

Gotta love macs.

Ever since TSP and I got an iBook last summer, I’ve wrestled with trying to get things on the laptop to print via printer sharing on my XP PC. now that the iBook is connected to the internet independently of the PC, I thought ‘ah, it’d be nice to connect it straight to the printer as well’. So I go to the Epson website to find the drivers. ‘no driver available’ which at first seems like a bad thing, but the second sentence says ‘possibly because it’s already built in to OSX’ or something like that.

So I plug in the printer, and hit ‘print’ and up comes a box that tells me it’s an Epson Colour 680 (oh yes, 2001’s finest technology) and proceeds to print the document.

Live with OSX gets easier and easier. Roll on the 12 intel-powered MacBook…

Soundtrack – Andrew Buckton, ‘Now, But Not Yet’ (probably my favourite of all the albums I’ve played on that don’t have my name on the cover. The whole process was a pleasure from start to finish)

Back on a PC after two weeks on a mac…

This is very odd indeed, being back on my trusty desktop PC after two weeks using the new iBook… I’m not sure I like it…

There are certain things that the mac does so well, particularly the RSS/XML integration with Safari.

It’s also a lot newer, so my email set up on there isn’t in quite such a dreadful state as it is on here.

Lots of work to do!

First entry from new toy

For a while now, TSP and I have been wanting to get a laptop between us – I could use it for travelling, and TSP could use it for writing when away.

So on Thursday I nipped into the Apple Store on Regent’s Street in London, and on the advice of Photographer Steve, asked if they had any ‘refreshed’ stock – that is computers that have been bought, but then brought back within the 30 day returns period. They are fully checked, reformatted and warrantied etc. as new, just 10% cheaper than the brand new ones! Result.

So we’ve now got a 12″ bog-standard bottom of the range iBook between us, which it has to be said, kicks ass. OSX 10.4.2 is fantastic! It’s called ‘Tiger’, but I haven’t found the ‘install Seigfried and Roy theme’ button yet that makes everything orange… I’m loving some of the features in OSX – the dashboard and expose features are really cool, and the way Safari handles RSS is very cool indeed. I still have to connect to the net via an ethernet cable plugged into my pc, as we’ve not set up wireless or anything yet, but thus far, it’s much coolness.

Soundtrack – Tracy Chapman, ‘Tracy Chapman’ (came across her singing ‘Thrill Is Gone’ with BB King earlier on today, and her voice sent shivers down my spine, so I borrowed the CD off TSP as I’ve only got her stuff on vinyl)

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