Category: Activities

A little close to home

This morning, I got an email from another member of the flying club. He wanted to know if the aircraft in this news story was the one that belongs to a member of our flying club. I happened to know that “Rochester Waterwings” was a LLC that he and another guy set up to buy a Cessna 172 on floats, and that they’d then gone and bought a Taylorcraft so they’d have something to put on skis last winter. (Yeah, they’re living my dream.)

A few hours later, that club member wrote to the club officers to confirm that he was at the controls during the crash, and while he came out of it with scrapes and bruises, the other man in the airplane, his partner in both aircraft, had a lower back injury but thankfully no spinal cord damage. He didn’t offer any clues as to the cause, probably a prudent thing before the NTSB has issued at least a preliminary report.

I still want a ride in his float plane.

Suggestion for Apple

I’d like to make a suggestion for Apple: If you’re going to sell an HP Printer/Scanner/Copier PSC 1510, you should make sure that HP bundles drivers THAT WERE WRITTEN IN THIS FUCKING CENTURY! No shit – I hit the “Scan” button, and it launched “Classic”, the backwards compatibility program that allows it to run programs written for the old OS 9. It then fired up some limited edition of an ancient version of Photoshop.

Come on, you guys.

The Computer Doctor strikes again

As reported in Rants and Revelations : The Computer Doctor is IN, I did some major disk swappery when Stevie’s iBook died a few months ago. I put Stevie’s hard drive in Vicki’s iBook, and Vicki’s hard drive in a 15″ Powerbook Titanium that she borrowed from work. Well, Stevie graduated, and as a graduation present she was given a MacBook. So it’s time to reverse the surgery, putting Vicki’s hard drive back in her iBook, and the original hard drive back in the Powerbook.

Time to haul out the Torx and Phillips screw drivers, and most importantly the Fixit Guilde.

Putting the hard drive back in the Powerbook is pretty straight forward, except taking the ide cable off the hard drive is a little brute force for my liking. Only 9 screws, all the same head and general size. And after a little coaxing and swearing, it went back together and booted.

Putting the hard drive back in the iBook is a real pain in the ass. Lots of fiddly crap, including a bit where it says

Breathe deeply. Trying times are ahead, but we promise the lower case does come off.

and another bit where after about 30-45 minutes of work, you get to the bit where it says

Remove the following 16 screws:

But at least they put handy little loops on the ide cables so that they could be removed without bending any pins.

In progressThis is about that stage. (As you can see, I’m a firm believer that a clean organized desk is obviously a pre-requisite for doing good work.)

Actually, it was a lot easier having done this a few times now. But I still held my breath as I booted it up and make sure the fiddliest bits, the trackpad and speaker cables got hooked up correctly and it boots properly. And it did! Yay for me!

While dis-assembling and assembling this iBook, several of the Torx screws were getting very rounded off – I had a hell of a time removing one or two of them. I have my doubts that I’ll be able to get the screws off again. I guess next time it breaks, Vicki will have to get a MacBook too.

Product Review: Innopocket Hard Case for Palm Treo

After wrecking my Treo at Pinckneyville, I decided the replacement (that goodness I bought insurance on it) needed a bit more protection. I got the Innopocket Magnesium Case for Palm Treo.

The case appeared to be ideal, with strong clear plastic over the screen and strong magnesium everywhere else important. Even better, the case has a good double hinge so you can get the front out of the way to use the whole device. The reviews warned me about one drawback – there is a nubbin on the back to clip into the belt clip, and when you fold back the front the nubbin touches the clear screen protector. And sure enough, there is a bit of a wear mark there. But then again, better wear on a replaceable case than on the Treo itself.

The design of the case seems to have placed a premium on access to all the extraneous bits of the phone, like the SD card and the camera. That can be handy at times. But it has also lead to a couple of drawbacks:

  • The SD card keeps popping out. Especially when the phone pops out of the belt clip and drops on the ground.
  • There isn’t anything along the top to secure the phone in place if the hinge opens, which has lead on more than one occassion to the phone dropping on the floor.

The belt clip is an interesting design and works pretty well, except when the clip itself falls off my shorts.

Not a complaint about the case itself, but more a simple observation: a couple of times I’ve forgotten that the case was closed and attempted to “touch” on the touch screen. Doesn’t work through the screen protector.

In summary: I like the case, and can overlook the small flaws. I hope it will protect the Treo, especially since Cingular cancelled my insurance for having the temerity for making a claim against it.

Basso!

Ivan Basso’s performance on this year’s Giro d’Italia leave no doubt in my mind who the real inheritor of Lance Armstrong’s mantle is. It looks like he’s going to try for the impossible – back to back wins in the Giro and le Tour, and if anybody can do it, he can. In a way it amazes me that a team from Denmark of all places can be so dominant in the mountains, but Basso had much better support in the mountains in the Giro than Armstrong had in last year’s Tour. Last year it seemed that whenever there was a mountain stage after a flat one, Discovery would get caught flat footed when the peleton broke up, leaving Armstrong alone without support. But Basso always seemed to have another rider or two until the crux of the stage.

It’s not as good as watching it on TV, but I’ve been following the race thanks to live.cyclingnews.com, and when away from the computer, using their WAP equivalent on my Treo. I think next year I’m going to spring for the money and get OLN’s webcast version. I didn’t do it last year because it was just the bare tv feed with no commentary, and because it required a Windows computer. This year they seem to have added commentary, and it works on Macintosh computers, but I didn’t go for it because I wasn’t sure if it was worth the money. But I’ve spent more for less, so next year I think I’m going to try it.