This is the last post I’m going to write about my MacBook Pro. I had a bad hard drive, and I still don’t have a working machine after several months. In fact, I don’t have a machine at all. It is at AppleCare, and has been there since 12/19. The repair status is ‘on hold’, and I have called 3 times and spend several house on the phone to get the hold removed. It is still ‘on hold’, despite many promises to the contrary.

Filed under: sucky companies, support | 0 Comments
Tagged: applecare , flowchart

Ethan and Emily adopted Ella from Wonder Dog Rescue. What a cuuuuuuutie!!!

Filed under: bobslobster, cuuuuute | 1 Comment

I’m going to India soon, and I know a bit of Hindi, but I usually become frustrated when trying to remember a word in the middle of a conversation and switch to English. Years ago I learned a bunch of German conversation snippets that I still remember, so I’m going to try the same with Hindi. I’ll add more and get Hindi translations as soon as I can figure out unicode..

• Door Into Hindi
• More Hindi videos
• HiTrans transliterator
• Hindi Type Pad
  

• Would you like more sabji?
• No thanks!
• How about some more rice?
• No thanks, I’m full!
• Then how about one more spoonful of dal?
• ….
  

• A polite way to ask for boiled water..
• Where is the chai store? - चाय की दुकान कहाँ है?
• More chai please!
  

Buying things:

• How much does this cost? - यह कितने का है?
  

• Can I pay for things in dollars? - क्य मै डॉलर (dollar) मे सामान खरीद सख्ते हुँ?
  

• Can I pay in dollars? (instead of rupees) - क्य मै डॉलर मे पैसे दे सख्ते हुँ?
• How about I give you X rupees for it?
• Ok, we’ll settle on Y
• Is there an ATM near here? क्य कोई ATM (pronounced like ETM) पस मे है?
  

• Can you repeat that?
• What time is it?
• Do you have a map of Delhi? - क्या आपके पास दिल्ली का नक़्शा है?
• I’m hot/cold/tired.
• Can I borrow a blanket?
• Are there any internet cafes near here? - क्य कोई internet cafe पस मे है?
  

• I am sick.
• I need a doctor.
• I need to get to a hospital.
  

Vocabulary:
नक़्शा = map
दाम = price

Filed under: all talk, excursions | 4 Comments
Tagged: hindi , india

Covers is a nice site dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design.

When I was a kid, my fantasy job was to be a book cover designer. I imagined reading books all day and then designing covers for them, thereby combining my 2 favorite childhood activities. How cool would that be?!

Anyways, I don’t design books right now and I’ve been buying most of my books from Amazon these days but I still love going to Green Apple Books (my very favorite store in all of SF) to browse…I think part of the pleasure I get from going there comes from looking at all the different covers and touching the different types of paper…I always walk out with something beautiful I didn’t know about that makes me happy or that pokes my head in the all the right places, reminding me of how tiny my world is and expanding it just a little bit.

Browsing through this site feels a little bit closer to the serendipitous experience of browsing through Green Apple than browsing through Amazon. (though of course still not the same)

Filed under: books, design | 0 Comments

XKCD captures the stupidity of YouTube commenters who are quick to shout FAKE:

The thing is, for a site with open membership, YouTube comments are pretty damn good. Check out this video of our friend, a genius film director, on YouTube:

Check the comments at YouTube, and then go read the MetaFilter comments about this video. MetaFilter is supposedly a community of 20,000 of the smartest people you know. Bob even jumped in the thread and tried to correct people who were shouting FAKE!

Looks staged, but I’ve got no audio at work.

This has done the rounds before - and IIRC, it’s staged.

Yup! That’s definitely what’s happening. Look what his cheek is doing while he has his fist to his mouth — definitely filling up with something.

It’s definitely staged. Too poor production value to not be. And no tv show in their right mind would let an unknown in his condition on live television.

Actually, it does look staged. Had me fooled though.

meh. if you’re going to faux vomit on television, try and make it looks real. or exciting.

Eventually BoingBoing linked to the video, which I put online for FFFF, and it killed our server. The clip has been linked from everywhere (MetaFilter, eBaumsworld, fark, VH1) but it took BoingBoing to kill it. I moved the video to InfiniteBandwidthTube.

Anyway, it’s not fake.

Filed under: bobslobster, comix, video | 2 Comments

It seems my grandma was probably good at math without really knowing she was good at math! (she could simply look at you and knit up a sweater without so much as a pattern) According to this article in Science magazine on the relationship between knitting and math,

Mathematics has long been an essential tool for the fiber arts. Knitters and crocheters use mathematical principles—often without recognizing them as such—to map the pattern of a cable sweater, for instance, or figure out how to space the stitches when adding a sleeve onto a jacket.

The mathematicans featured, Hinke Osinga and Bernd Krauskopf, will be coming out with a book in the spring called Making Mathematics with Needlework which will contain patterns and mathematical discussions of 10 craft projects. (via Boing Boing which also has a few links to some neat projects you can make).

UPDATE: The mathematicians are actually not involved with the book but there’s more info on it here.

Filed under: science | 2 Comments
Tagged: crafty

DHL “released” my macbook pro box back to me today after I called and hassled them about it. Just another note in the Apple Support Saga: According to DHL, Apple’s Contract with DHL does now allow the customer (me) to sign for and pick up the laptop box from DHL dispatch if there is a missed delivery attempt. Apparently they feel this reduces theft somehow. Anyway, to avoid this annoyance, make sure Apple Support sends “The Box” to your workplace, or be prepared to stand outside your door all day waiting for the DHL guy.

So now I get to go through Apple Setup again and create my user account and go to System Preferences and change “key repeat rate” to “Fast” and change “delay until repeat” to “short” and pull out all the crap that’s in the dock and put terminal in the dock and I think you get the idea. I have to set up my mac again. Every time. I’ve done this around 40 times in 2006 alone.

Apple Setup has an option to transfer data from you old mac, but it’s pretty specific to transferring your home directory from a previous machine. There is no option to “restore you laptop to the way it was before the hard drive crapped out”.

And wouldn’t it be nice if it was simple as copying my home directory? But no, many applications install stuff into the “/Library” folder and so on, kernel extensions, registration keys. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the music that I purchased from the iTunes Music Store will no longer work on my macbook pro even though it is exactly the same machine with a new hard drive. Everywhere in the iTMS documentation it says you can “authorize up to 5 computers” … but really what is implemented is you can have up 5 different installations of Mac OS X authorized to play your songs at any given time. If you lose access to those installations for whatever reason you are screwed and/or have to deal with Apple Support to reset some counters. I am really curious how Apple Support handles this iTMS authorization issue but I haven’t had the energy to make the phone calls yet.

I was hoping the boot-disk-RAID-mirror would solve the problem of backup but in the end it didn’t work out due to complexity, poor documentation of Apple RAID Mirroring, and just plain not understanding what happens when there is a conflict between two mirrored disks. In one of my tests, the file with a conflict just ended up with some bogus data in it … I didn’t feel like it was worth my time to analyze what does and does not work with Apple RAID when the mirrored pairs are disconnected, modified differently, and then reconnected. There is no point to making a backup if you are unsure whether it’s even going to work.

This is a long way of saying I would love to hear about a way to back up your mac in a way that minimizes all these problems.

Filed under: all talk, osx, support | 14 Comments

Mashable picked Slide.com as the editor’s choice in the Widgets and Add-Ons category. A co-worker observed:

We got Editor’s Choice in our category in a contest sponsored by Photobucket.

His point being (I think) that Photobucket re-launched their Slide Show widget this summer and Slide is still kicking ass.

I like what Mashable has to say about our category:

Slide.com and RockYou have been the most talked-about widgets this year, with Slide.com gaining a little more traction with the MySpace set. Both are impressive products which give users the freedom to express themselves. Even the launch of MySpace’s own service, MySpace slideshows, didn’t put a dent in the popularity of these two slideshow tools.

Aha! I think I understand now …. :-)

Link to Mashable’s 2006 Social Networking Awards

Filed under: no code, slide | 1 Comment

Did you know that the One Laptop Per Child laptop was a tablet as well?

It has a transflective screen so you can read it in the sun (and turn off the backlight and save battery). Also, it has three trackpads, mounted side-by-side, that can be used as a drawing surface. Only the middle trackpad is wired up right now..

Filed under: design, inspiration | 1 Comment

Tom sent a link to this neat Etch-A-Servo project, which reminded me of the completely reduckulous Digital Doodle Dome!

The Doodle Dome was a toy made by Tyco in the early 1990’s. It is basically an Etch-A-Sketch type deal, except that instead of a flat rectangle, it is (most of) a sphere. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, there are two knobs that move a little pointer around a drawing surface, and it scrapes some silver dust-like stuff off to draw a picture.

Many years ago, I bought an old analog HP X/Y plotter in an auction. It reminded me of an Etch-a-sketch, but it was built like a tank and weighed a ton. It followed me back and forth across the country until a few years ago, when I took it to the RanCh. Mr. Foo, the resident wizard, popped open the plotter, blew off 30 years worth of dust, and after some poking and probing we got it too move. Foo wrote about the old plotter on this blog, which unfortunately hasn’t been updated in a long time. I’m going to copy his entire post here.. It’s too good, and it would be a shame if it disappeared into the ether.

The problem with Utopias is that they are perfect. The problem with perfection, is it’s static. The problem with being static is that the Universe keeps moving. And the problem with that is no usuable information comes from the future.

Further the boundry of now is chaotic. What that means is you can predict the future, but not exactly. Eventually the future becomes something quite different than what you predicted.

Thus the problem with Utopias. You can only design them to last forever with the information you have now. But you can’t see the future and you can’t really predict the future from the past very well. Which sucks if you’re trying to build a static Utopia. Cause eventually things become unperfect as the universe you thought you were going to have drifts from the universe that you really end up with.

Well actually it’s even worse then that. Because the universe is big and chaotic, and our minds are really small, usually what we end up with isn’t really a Utopia, it’s hell on earth. In fact there is a positive cooralation between how perfect the utopia was supposed to be and how shitty it actually ends up as. It’s because only fools think they are smart enough to build a Utopia.

So what to do….

Well if you can’t build a staticUtopia, then how about a dynamic one? Well the trouble with that is that a Utopia is ‘perfect’ and dynamic means that it deviates from perfect. Thus damm it all! it’s not perfect Arrrggggghhhhh!

So what to do…. Poink! Well if something eventually fails, then it can’t really be perfect can it? Or maybe failure is part of being perfect. Hmm….

So there is this machine at the Ranch. It’s an old plotter. And it’s in hell. The demons at the ranch are poking at it, trying to get it to plot porn. It’s old, everything built out of descete parts, resistors, capasitors, and old transistors in metal cans with GE stamped on them. The Y axis ain’t working, but the X axis does. The interesting thing is that if you put your hand on the X-axis motor you can feel it vibrate. Thats the dithering circuit, moving the motor ever so slightly back and forth to keep it from sticking.

It’s perfect, even though it’s not quite right. Because over the long run it works better, because it’ll still work even though the bearings get sticky.

There is a leason here. Perfection in the real world is imperfect, and better chaotic. That is the perfect society is one that is just fucked up enough.

This explains everything, why we die and why the ecconomy of France underperforms. In a utopia we’d still be building plotter like this old dead one. But we’re not, we’re fucked up. Everything is done half assed if we have an ass at all. Cause we’re fucked up.

And only Perfect

Filed under: tronix | 0 Comments

We had sherpa soup with peliom a couple days ago.. followed by lemondrops for dessert! Lemondrops always remind me of Christmas..

Easy recipe for making mass quantities of lemondrops:

• One part vodka
• One part Odwalla lemonade
• Squeeze of lemon to counteract the excessive sweetness of the Odwalla
• Splash of orange liqueur or triple sec to taste.

We made a pitcher yesterday to take over for our weekly neighborhood dinner/doggie date. If you use the lemonade trick, you can prepare an entire pitcher in the amount of time that it usually takes to make one drink!

Filed under: tikibar | 2 Comments

My head spins when I read what peliom has to say about AppleCare:

It’s very frustrating but still, I would *much* rather be dealing with Apple Support than Dell or HP.

As I write this, my MacBook Pro is in a DHL box, on it’s way to Apple’s repair facility for the third time. I’ve had five different problems with this machine (very early MBP, serial number starts with 860) and come to realize that AppleCare is fundementally broken. When they encounter a hardware problem, they do two things:

1. They try to convince you that your hardware problem is really a software problem.
2. When that fails and they actually accept your machine for repair, they try to make it boot and then stop trying to fix your machine.

The first time I sent my MacBook Pro in for repair, I had a bad hard drive that was quite obviously bad. I explained, in great detail, what was wrong, and after the usual AppleCare run-around they finally sent me ‘the box’, and I sent it in. They sent it back with same hard drive installed, the machine was still crashing in the exact same way, but the machine booted, and that’s what’s important. If they can get the OS to boot, then they can tell you that you have a software problem.

So I have this machine that has been to Apple for a new HD, and come back with the same 100GB HD that has only 30GB total free space after reformat, and the console is filling up with read errors. I called AppleCare again, and got connected to a ’specialist’, who attempted to convince me that this was a software problem:

him: OK, your machine is booted? Now in the Application menu…
me (wondering what app has an Application menu): Um, which app..
him: …choose the Utilities menu
me: ..um.. wait…
him: … now select Disk Utility
me: Oh, you mean the Utilities folder…
him: Yeah, also known as the Utilities MENU.
him: So does the S.M.A.R.T. Status say Verified?
me: Let me explain what’s going on.. I sent this machine in for a new HD, and it came back with the same HD. After a format-and-install, the HD has only 30GB total space. It also read errors when trying to access a lot of the system files.
him: Well, I don’t know how you found those read errors. I’m going to ask you to run Verify Disk Permissions..

To the engineer who put ‘Verify Disk Permissions’ into Disk Utility, congratulations. You’ve probably saved Apple hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. AppleCare thanks you for giving them an easy way to hang up on customers suffering from hard drive problems.

My friend Shag only buys laptops from companies that sell on-site support. Watching him interact with Toshiba support is eye-opening. When he has a problem, he calls them up, and the next day they send a repair guy to whereever shag happens to be. And they come with the part they need to fix the laptop. And they don’t try to talk him out of the repair by blaming it on some bogus disk permission voodoo. I am through with trying to deal with AppleCare, and I doubt my next laptop purchase will be a mac.

Filed under: sucky companies, support | 3 Comments

MacBooks appear to be dropping like flies. It’s so frustrating to have this supposedly “premium” computing gear just flake out. I had to get “the box” from Apple Support in order to send in my MacBook Pro for service - there is a ghost in the hard drive that starts corrupting sectors even after a fresh install of Mac OS X (yes, zeroing all blocks first).

Just now the backlight on my white MacBook is kaput. I can see the display is working back there but just barely because there is no backlight. Apparently I am not the only one. A failed backlight almost certainly indicates a loose connection or a failed inverter board. This means … you guessed it, I have to get “the box” for my MacBook now.

I have three mac laptops. Only one of them is functional right now, all due to hardware failures that are not my fault. I’m really glad I kept this PowerBook 12″ with which I am composing this post. It has worked like charm for the nearly two years that I’ve owned it. And at the moment it’s the only mac I own that works at all.

It’s very frustrating but still, I would *much* rather be dealing with Apple Support than Dell or HP. I am noting down some techniques for how to get the fast path through Apple Support when you know you have a hardware issue and just want to have them send you “the box” with minimal amounts of BS.

Link to a helpful “my backlight is broken!” Apple Discussions thread

Filed under: all talk, osx, tronix | 1 Comment

Did you know that you can order EL wire from Amazon? Well I didn’t until recently and was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s also pretty cheap! at least cheaper than I remember it being elsewhere. $17.90 will get you 20 ft in red, green, or white and that includes the battery pack. I’ve been having some dangerously close encounters with cars while riding home from the train station at night so I just ordered some for my bike.

Filed under: cycling, tronix | 0 Comments

OK, so this is not an Apple product but to me it’s a huge breakthrough. I want a mac table bad! I want Mac OS X in my pocket. Computers are too big. For many of my tasks (email, web surfing) an iPod class of device would easily be able to run a stripped down version of Mac OS X. I’m curious to see how much this news resonates in the blogosphere, it would be a good indicator of demand for mac tablet (err… market demand from bloggers anyway).

So this guy was able to install and boot Mac OS X on type of windows tablet PC (x86 I guess). Very tempting. If there is no mac table from Apple at MacWorld (and I don’t think there will be), I will probably sell one of my macbook’s and try to get this working.

Link to the Mac OS X on a tablet story

Filed under: all talk, gadgets, osx | 2 Comments

peliom’s party last night was a doozy! We made hundreds of drinks at the bar, but in the process of making some mai tais, I destroyed the lime squeezer! Squeezing enough lemons and limes for a hundered drinks without a squeezer is *hard*. Here at TikiRobot, when the situation gets hard, we build robots.

Well, there’s no McMaster Barr (yet), but imagine how many drinks we can make with the RoboSqueeze3000, coming soon to a TikiBar near you!

Filed under: tikibar | 6 Comments

I just saw the Wii on our sidebar. From that page there is a link to a ’special promotion’ page where you have until tomorrow to sign up for Wii lottery. If you win, you get the privilege of being able to buy a Wii from Amazon. I guess their marketing works, because I just signed up. They say I have a 1/6 chance of winning.. Please take my money!!!

Filed under: tronix | 7 Comments

I just added a javascript snippet to our site that lets you hover over a link and see an image preview of the page that the link is pointing to. It was super easy to add and comes from this site - Snap Preview Anywhere.

Filed under: meta | 9 Comments

Does your YouTube have no audio? Does the console on your MacBook Pro display this spew?

Some app set your output sample rate too high.. fix is here.

Filed under: support | 1 Comment

Bob, Q, Rhea, Trish and Cory, and Will and Nat were in town for the AGU conference.

Zara was so excited to hang out with rock nerds that she was moving at lightning speed… she just couldn’t stay still!

We hadn’t seen each other in years and met up for YUMMMMMY DIM SUM with the Johnsons at Legendary Palace.. pics!

Filed under: photos, zara | 0 Comments

as documented by our expert TR trend spotters and seen
here, here, here, here, here, and here! I dunno…looks like red is in.

Filed under: bobslobster, photos | 2 Comments

Look what I found on the blog of someone who recently left a comment on our site.
 

Filed under: cuuuuute, doodles | 2 Comments

I’ve just spent the last 4 hours reading about Leslie Harpold. She passed away last week. I don’t know what happened. Just that her mother found her. I never knew Leslie, but I always think of her in December because of her annual Advent Calendar which she’s been doing for many many years, longer than I’ve been making things for the internet I think. I never actually knew what an Advent Calendar was before hers. I’m still not sure I know what it is. My favorite thing of Leslie’s though is the harpold 500 (previously the hoopla 500), a collection of stories and writing snippets, each about 500 words…some true…some not…but usually poignant, or funny, or wise, or all 3…and always inspiring.

Call to Action
California
List Number Thirty Three
Things Andrew Had No Intention of Telling Hannah
#1 Fantasy

Filed under: why are we here? | 2 Comments

Oh noe! It’s cold outside and the snow is soooo deep! I’m a little pup-pup with little feets.. but even us little doggies need walkies!

Meet Oscar, Amy J.’s sister’s cuuuuute pup!

Filed under: bobslobster, cuuuuute, video | 3 Comments

You could say I’m a power user of Mac OS X: I know a fair bit about it and I reinstall the OS a fair bit. Sometimes I reinstall because I messed something up, but more often it’s because of HFS+ filesystem corruption or other bugs that are in Mac OS X itself. As if dealing with all these backups and re-installations was not enough, I found out recently that Apple’s FairPlay technology is tied to the OS installation, rather than a hardware ID. What this means to you is that Apple locks you out of the music you paid for if you reinstall Mac OS X on your machine. If this isn’t adding insult to injury, I don’t know what is. All this from a company that does allow you to use “protected music” with iMovie and iDVD, but not with Traktor or other 3rd party music applications.

It goes something like this:

Step One: Re-install Mac OS X

According to the Apple playbook, you are supposed to remember that you have to “deauthorize” your mac before you send it in for service or reinstall the OS. Seriously, who is going to remember to do this?

Step Two: Double Click on Your Hard Earned Music

You will be greeted by this friendly iTunes dialog that says:

This computer is not authorized to play “The Mambo Craze”. Would you like to authorize it?

What!?!!? Oh yeah, I reinstalled, I guess I have to log into my account and deauthorize that “installation”, even though that installation doesn’t even exist anymore and I’m still using the same exact laptop.

Step Three: Help!

You can click the question mark button to figure out what the heck is going on. Next you will see a pleasantly worded explanation of how fucked you are:

Well that’s all very nice. But this documentation isn’t going to help you … instead:

If you have trouble deauthorizing the computer, visit the Music Store billing support webpage at www.apple.com/support/itunes/authorization.html.

It says you can authorize “up to five computers” but really this is “up to five installations of Mac OS X.” Once you hit 5, you can deauthorize all your installations and start over again. But only once per year. Given the rate I’ve been forced to reinstall Mac OS X recently, I won’t be able to hear my music in about a month.

Link to iTunes Music Store authorization policy

Filed under: beats, osx | 4 Comments