jazzfish: Windows error message "Error 255: Too many errors." (Too many errors)
A month or more ago Jimmy Maher did a write-up of Zork Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor, the last two official Zork games. Those were some excellent games: Grand Inquisitor in particular was a lot of fun, but even Nemesis was an enjoyable and atmospheric puzzle-romp. They're among the games for which I'm still lugging the CD-ROMs around, despite not having owned a machine that can run them for at least a decade now.

Except it then occurred to me that that hasn't been true for at least a year. I've got this new laptop, and Windows is famously backwards-compatible. Maybe, I thought when I read the article, I'd take some time this summer and play through them again.

Cut to today. Today I have been out of sorts for a number of reasons I don't want to go into, so I have decided that today will be the day Actaeon the Windows laptop earns its keep. (Yes yes, it's been a fine workhorse for classwork, but its REAL virtue is in allowing me to relive my college gaming years.) So I dug out the three-disc jewelcase for Zork Nemesis and started the installation process. (First convincing the Windows laptop that it wanted to talk to the Apple CD/DVD drive.)

Except: foiled! Turns out the upgrade to a 64-bit OS has finally broken some amount of backwards compatibility. I can't actually just install the game directly from the CD-ROM and party like it's 1996. Or, more likely, 1998-1999. I certainly didn't get Nemesis immediately upon release; more likely I picked it up from the bargain bin a few years later.

Which means that I have installed an emulator on, not my Windows laptop, but my Macbook, and am now in the slow process of copying most of three CD-ROMs onto my hard drive, where they will take up less than one percent of its storage capacity.

I'm looking forward to this.

ooh, shiny

Mar. 7th, 2024 10:25 am
jazzfish: Windows error message "Error 255: Too many errors." (Too many errors)
I am obviously not in the market for a new computer. I paid way too much money for my current one two and a half years ago, when Apple finally deigned to release a non-terrible Macbook Pro. (Specifically, I was holding out for a Magsafe power connector and a better keyboard.) I've been quite happy with it. It is way more computer than I need, but I'm glad I splurged on something I use for multiple hours a day. It makes my life better.

But every time I think about getting a new laptop, I look at the Macbooks Air with longing. Ultimately I decide to stick with a Pro because I want the larger screen. Airs are (were) available in ridiculously tiny 11" and slightly undersized 13" models, and I've been quite fond of my 15" (later, 16" for the same footprint) Pros.

Looks like this is the year Apple put out a 15" Air. It's a smaller screen than I've gotten used to but I expect I could go back. Less max RAM than my current machine, which isn't ideal but I could probably live with; no HDMI port, which is obnoxious but doable with an adapter. (My use-cases are websurfing etc, writing, watching videos, and watching videos on television, more or less in that order.) It's a little smaller footprint, which might mean it would fit in the laptop pocket of my blue bag without overstretching it, and it's half a kilo lighter, which is a significant point in favour. It's also less than two-thirds the price I paid for my current machine.

I hold out hope that this machine will last longer than the fiveish years I got out of my previous two. But it's nice to know that when I do need to replace it I'll most likely have options.

ongoing

Feb. 16th, 2022 11:30 am
jazzfish: A small grey Totoro, turning around. (Totoro)
Let's see. Last workday is this Friday. I am not looking forward to newjob, simply because I don't know enough about it to look forward to it. It's just the next thing on the list. I am looking forward to not having to deal with currentjob. We got acquired (again) back in November and the last several months have been an unending stream of nonfunctional tech integration, pronouncements from On High that make no mention of any of the products I've been working on, and the expected "your benefits will be a little worse this year". On Friday a message came in about yet another stupid trick the developers have pulled, and instead of getting annoyed I just said "in seven days this will no longer be my problem."

Current major stress source is moving. The moving coordinator I worked with to get up here last time, who was communicative and efficient and effective, is currently batting .333. It's an open question whether he'll find anyone at all, and if he does it sounds like they'll charge me double because I'm starting in an out-of-the-way location. The other option is to load up Erin's trailer and go south with that. I would much prefer to just throw money at someone else to deal with the moving logistics, and also the kitchen packing, and also the physical labor of carrying everything out and safely stacking it in a truck. Bah. Bright side, if I do end up using the trailer then once I get myself to the other end I can probably (probably) call Tranquility, the guys who moved me half a dozen times in three years, and say "hey, come unload this truck, it's half the work you usually do but you'll still get paid your full minimum."

Books. Reread This Is How You Lose The Time War, which has quickly become a Comfort Read. The slowly deepening relationship, the varied backgrounds, the way they play with words ("whacked seal"), the lovely lovely prose. It's just wonderful. Still halfway through a first reread of Fonda Lee's Jade War, the middle volume of her Green Bone Saga, which does not feel middle-volume-y at all, I'm just lacking in reading brain.

I've also picked up a game controller for the new laptop. Turns out that, as expected, I hate wireless controllers because I hate things that run out of battery when I'm using them, but other than that it's pretty decent. Unfortunately Apple's decision to ditch normal USB ports means I can't use it as a wired controller. Bah.

O yes: I'm generally pretty happy with ye new laptop ("Patrise," after the fellow in The Last Hot Time: dark, and powerful despite its stature). My main gripes are a lack of normal USB ports, an oversized touchpad that makes it harder to type than necessary, and a lack of a proper Delete key. Given time I can probably train myself into Fn+Delete but I shouldn't have to. Oh well. This has been a gripe for over a decade, and an insoluble one since 2017. The screen's lovely, as are the speakers, and the battery life and general system coolth make me quite happy.

I suppose five things make a post.

things

Nov. 3rd, 2021 02:46 pm
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Time is getting away from me rapidly, so have some odds and ends before I forget them entirely.

Last weekend I failed to find a condo in Vancouver, after looking at a half dozen. There's one that might work out; it's not yet on the market, but Rhonda the awesome realtor sold the person into the condo so she wrangled me a sneak preview. It's in New Westminster, which is Not Ideal but maybe less Not Ideal than other options. Bah. All were either too expensive or not pleasant to inhabit even for the short time I was viewing them. I hate house hunting in Vancouver. I don't know if I hate it elsewhere but in Vancouver it is a constant source of frustration.

Other living options might include "renting," which is problematic because the places in Van I know of to rent from are even less convenient than New West; Victoria, which might be fine and would certainly be cheaper but would entail starting over again on the social front; possibly somewhere with Erin?; and just staying put and being depressed. Always an option, that last.

Other than that I had a good weekend in Vancouver, crashing in Holly/James/Zee's new house (which they bought with Rhonda, whom I recommended, so I can take some small pride in that). It's a Vancouver century-old house: it has high temperature gradients and questionable remodeling choices, but it's also quite pretty. It's in the same neighborhood as my old condo. I miss that neighborhood.

As a consolation for house-hunting nonsense I bought myself a magnetic "wallet" (credit card sleeve) for my phone, because I wanted a better solution for transit passes and hotel keys. The wallet is pretty neat: it connects solidly and is mostly unobtrusive. It also, unsurprisingly, includes a location tag, so I can theoretically find it again if and when I leave it somewhere. No speaker, so I can't make it make noise, but still.

My new Macbook arrived. As noted elseweb, this computer cost more than my first car; to the left, the car caught fire after I'd had it for three years, whereas the Macbook boasts some significant advances in heat dissipation. Its footprint is very slightly smaller than that of my current machine despite having a larger screen (15" vs 16"); it's slightly thicker and not-slightly heavier. Other than that I have no opinion of it just yet, since it's still in the process of restoring from backup. It does look pretty; I'll certainly give it that. I don't expect to be using it nearly as hard as Pelorios, my current machine, so here's hoping it lasts longer than five years.

I finished Wyrd Sisters last week but it's being stubborn about being written up.

Snow and ice this week. Winter would appear to be here.
jazzfish: Windows error message "Error 255: Too many errors." (Too many errors)
Today I learned that "0%" is an amount of battery life that my computer will display.

(I plugged it in as soon as I noticed, and it's all the way back to 1% now.)
jazzfish: Windows error message "Error 255: Too many errors." (Too many errors)
This weekend's odd experience: attempting to type on Erin's laptop and having half the letters be either completely wrong or missing.

Turns out that for me, touch-typing extends to not only knowing instinctively where the letters/keys are, but to where my hands should go in relation to the sides of the keyboard. And I'm so used to Pelōrios the Macbook and its lack of 10-key pad that I didn't account for the extra keys on Erin's machine. So my right hand was half on the 10-key pad and half on the normal keys.

When I first got Taranis the previous Macbook, lo these nearly-nine years ago, I thought the lack of 10-key pad would drive me nuts. I guess I don't miss it as much as I'd expected.

(I still miss the dedicated Delete key, and still get unreasonably annoyed at macOS's insistence on labeling the Backspace key as "Delete," though.)
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
On Wednesday I finally got the home office area set up. Now I can work from home with an actual monitor and keyboard and trackball and standing-desk, rather than laptop on couch/bed.

It's all in acceptable shape, but only just. I'll need to drag in another mat or two to stand on, to get the desk to the right height. My Mac keyboard has lost the use of the S key and spacebar, but I've got a Windows keyboard which works well enough for now. The real problem is that Microsoft hasn't updated the Mac software for my trackball in several years, and it won't talk to the latest version of macOS. So the trackball works, but the buttons are ALL WRONG. I've found a couple of potential workarounds but they looked more involved than I wanted to get on Wednesday afternoon. Sometime next week, I expect.

The office is actually the back of the second bedroom. It's got yellow walls that desperately need some art hung, the (two? three?) TUCKER'S OFFICE boxen need to be unpacked onto desk / bookcase, and there's some other miscellaneous /stuff/ that needs sorted or scooted or something. But the window's nice (though glare is problematic in the afternoon) and it's good to start to feel like there's a space that's mine again. The 'office' in the New West place was that, more or less, but it was dim and stuffy and caught a lot of dust from the dryer vent. This room is substantially nicer, if more cramped.

There are things about this apartment that frustrate and irritate me: the laundromat-style laundry, the dining room being a little narrower than we'd thought, the kitchen in general. Overall, though, it's not so bad. It'll do for now.



I am also now the proud owner of a bass guitar (Freeway 4) and an amp. My friend Chani's partner had been talking about selling his bass and amp for, o, months now, and it's sort of been at the back of my mind since then.

I think I have this idea that it'll be faster to pick up bass than it has been for viola, or that I'll be more readily able to find places/people to play bass with than viola, or something. This of course all depends on me finding my way to the alternate universe where I have enough time to learn not one but two instruments.

I'm also looking into an ear-training app for the phone, for commutes and such. And perhaps some actual formalised music theory learning, instead of the ad-hoc bits Tegen's been teaching me.

I'm not sure why music's becoming more of a focus than fiction-writing. Maybe it's that I understand how to get better at music, or that I'm more comfortable with not being very good. There's something in there about smashing awful pots, too. With music I'm learning a skill; writing feels more like creating a work. And yes, I do know that there's a hell of a lot of skill inherent in writing, skill that improves with practice, but I've not figured out how to feel comfortable practicing my skills in fiction.

Or maybe it's as simple as music being what's pulling me right now. Being more interested in accessing a space without words.

It's not like I can make rent (well, "mortgage payment," which sounds even worse despite being a smaller number) on either of those activities in any case. So in that sense it doesn't really matter which it is, as long as I'm having fun with it.

As always, we shall see.

cleanup

Nov. 4th, 2016 06:45 am
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Whee, been a week. Among other excitement: Taranis's wifi card has decided that intermittent faults are the hip new accessory, so I broke down and got an old new laptop. Same model as the one I experimented with last spring. Still not entirely convinced of the need for a new machine but a) I'll need one in the next couple of years for certain, and b) Macbook design is getting worse all the time. (Latest models removed the extraneous Eject/Power button. This wouldn't matter except that now I have nothing to map a proper Delete to, and I require both Backspace and Delete.)

ETA: The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin: "She had been mildly cheered up, she added, by following a Twitter feed with the hashtag #BundyEroticFanFic."

Litany, by Billy Collins. There are poems like "After the Pyre" that leave me ripped open and bleeding, and I understand why. Then there's this one. I don't understand in the slightest what it is that it does to me. (I also don't expect it to do that to anyone else; like Among Others, whatever it is feels too intensely personal to possibly affect the rest of the world.)

The Arches of The Little Prince: "Can you build an arch from a pole to the equator? Can you build an arch from the north pole to the south pole?" Which is all fascinating, but the thing that really caught me is the simple and obvious realisation that you can model arches upside-down with hanging chains.

Hipsterism and Cultural Appropriation: "So to make explicit what lies implicit: when hipsters 'ironically' don clothing associated with working class people, when hipsters 'ironically' profess tastes for products associated with working class people, they are communicating 'we all know I couldn't possibly actually like this, because we all know that this is unworthy and beneath us.'"

The Yale Record Does Not Endorse Hillary Clinton: "Because of unambiguous tax law, we do not encourage you to support the most qualified presidential candidate in modern American history, nor do we encourage all citizens to shatter the glass ceiling once and for all by electing Secretary Clinton on November 8."



Also, it's been ages since I paid any attention to my 101 in 1001 list.

101 in 1001 update )
jazzfish: an open bottle of ether, and George conked out (Ether George)
0) ... and still insists he reads of ghosts.

1) One amusing in retrospect bit I didn't mention earlier: when I arrived at the train station in Toronto (after an unpleasant redeye flight featuring loud drunk bachelor-partiers, and a wholly pleasant ride on the new no-longer-$38 train from the airport to the train station) I attempted to present my passport so I could pick up my ticket and ... opened to a picture of [personal profile] uilos. Apparently our passports got switched for the wrong wallets the last time we travelled (down to the used bookstores with Steph in December). Luckily I had my own Nexus card and my own PR card, and the train folks were happy enough to take the Nexus card, but it made for a somewhat tense ride down.

E FedExed me my passport so I could get on a plane to go home. I could *probably* have worked it out with just the Nexus card, but I had used the passport to buy the ticket, and better safe than stranded in Buffalo.

2) Speaking of, home from the Gathering as of eleven-thirty last night. Still tired, still heavily overpeopled. I didn't take care of myself as well as I could have this year; the weather was miserable for the first half of the week and for whatever reason once it nicened up I still didn't go outside and wander. Something to bear in mind for next year.

3) More on this later, but: consider this another plug for Graydon Saunders's Commonweal novels (available in ebook from the Google Play store). Reread the first (The March North) and read the first third or so of the second (A Succession of Bad Days) over the week. Comparisons with the work of Mr Ford are not inapt. The bone-deep understanding of trauma and healing and loneliness and identity is still there in Graydon's work, it's just even further down than in The Dragon Waiting. Or maybe I just haven't reread these enough times for it to be obvious to me.

4) It seems I have a strong predilection for flawed characters in difficult situations who are trying their damnedest. I have no further use for stories about terrible people being terrible, and I think this means I should let the Joe Abercrombie books go.

4a) Losing people you’re responsible for hurts. If it didn’t, the Line wouldn’t give you a warrant of commission.

If it stops, they take the warrant away.


--Graydon Saunders, "The March North"

5) I am returning the nameless new laptop. A week with Taranis has convinced me that I don't need to spend an exorbitant sum of money on a new machine, not yet and likely not for another couple of years. I *do* need a battery replacement and could do with a clean reinstall, but that can wait for the weekend.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
My laptop hath arrived. Initial impressions: thinner and glossier and about the same weight as Taranis. The Power key is a stupid idea. I miss having both USB ports on the same side: makes it a little harder to charge two things at once. The very very clever battery-power-lights on the side of the case seem to have been dispensed with, which makes me sad. Overall I see nothing to challenge my belief that laptop case design reached its pinnacle with Taranis and it will all be downhill from here.

I haven't done much with it: installed a few programs, made some configuration changes. So I haven't really noticed that it's much faster, or anything like that. The retina display *is* nice: everything just feels a bit crisper, brighter, more solid.

I expect I'll take Taranis with me next week, and then come back and offload all my documents onto the new currently-nameless machine.

What are you currently reading?

John Morressy's Kedrigern and the Charming Couple, book 4 in a series of five slim light fantasy paperbacks from the late eighties. I read the third (Kedrigern in Wanderland) several times in high school / early college and have been carting around the set of five for years; don't know if I ever actually read them or not. I don't think I did. They're utter fluff with occasional bright spots ("Ah yes, the hermit Goode, who lives in the wood that slopes down to the sea") and more than occasional visits from the sexism fairy. Doubt I'll be keeping them.

What did you just finish reading?

Kedrigern 1-3. I don't want to get started on anything serious; I'd rather not carry any physical books with me to Niagara this weekend.

Before that, Philip Knightley's biography of Kim Philby, followed by a reread of Tim Powers's Declare because of course. Knightley paints Philby in a positive light: not sympathetic but definitely admiring, and very critical of the British intelligence service as an old-boys' club and nothing more than a grand old adventure, a Great Game if you will. I came out of it vaguely dissatisfied. It felt too hagiographic to be trusted, I think.

Declare is of course fantastic, although I was less taken by it this time round as well. Powers wrote an excellent secondary female character in Elena and then reduced her to a prize to be won. The interleaving of the timelines worked well, I thought; it's just the wrap-up that felt wanting.

What do you think you'll read next?

Kedrigern 5 if I get to it before I leave on Friday night. Otherwise, since Graydon Saunders's third Commonweal book is out, probably a reread of The March North and then reading A Succession of Bad Days and Safely You Deliver. I've got the third of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Trilogy waiting for me, too.
jazzfish: Randall Munroe, xkcd180 ("If you die in Canada, you die in Real Life!") (Canada)
Let's see. Still writing (mostly just on Wednesdays with Steph), still playing the viola and starting to sometimes feel like I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Still less than thrilled by job but hey, they pay me. Still looking for a better (closer to downtown, less frustrating) apartment. Settling into getting used to the idea of having a stable living situation, and being able to think and plan about what happens next.

Finally got the cats on all wet food all the time. They've been on dry food for long enough that wet food has been "okay this is a nice treat but where is my REAL dinner?" It's taken a couple of brands to get to some that they'll consistently eat most of. I say "some" because we had one that we thought would work but after a week that turned into "aww, the humans bought a case of our favorite food, now we can't like that kind anymore." Mixing it up seems to be sufficient.

Apple has deigned to offer new normal-sized phones, so we'd intended to go pick those up this weekend. In addition they now give you some amount of credit for your old phones, which seems like a win-win proposition. Unfortunately the local stores are sold out of new normal-sized phones for the next couple of weeks. And the easiest way to get credit from the old phones is to exchange them at the time of purchase, which precludes ordering online. So, new phones once I get back from Niagara.

I did go ahead and pull the trigger on a new laptop, though. I may go to my grave defending the hardware setup of Taranis, my current laptop, as The Best Ever. It's got a CD drive, a Magsafe power connector that detaches safely when you accidentally kick the cord rather than yanking the laptop off the table, and it's got a software Eject key that is intensely stupid but can be remapped to be a proper Delete. Sadly newer models of Macbook have removed the optical drive and replaced the useless Eject key with what I think is a Power key that I can't remap. And all indications are that Apple is getting serious about moving to USB3 for power ports with the new models that ought to be out this fall. I figured, I may as well get while the getting is no worse, and if the new laptop lasts me five years like this one did then it's a fine investment.

And this Friday I fly out to Niagara for a week of gaming. I'm not really feeling the get-up-and-go urge, which seems ... odd. I suspect I'm pulling in on myself again. Eh. Will sort that out once I'm back from Niagara.



101 in 1001 update )

argh tech

Feb. 21st, 2015 09:03 am
jazzfish: Windows error message "Error 255: Too many errors." (Too many errors)
Awhile ago I was having some problems with Scrivener's RTF output. It would occasionally eat paragraph spacing info, I would fix it in OpenOffice (a free MS-Word clone), and then the next time I opened the file it would be even more broken. I thought those problems had been solved.

(This is what us writer types call foreshadowing.)

For reasons that are still unclear to me but which I'll attack this weekend or early next week, it's turning the last paragraph of the story into single-spaced. No problem, says I, I can fix that in OpenOffice. So I do, and open it again to make sure it hasn't broken anything (looks good), and submit to a market noted for its super-quick turnaround times.

Got a response back last night saying essentially "No, and by the way please use standard manuscript format."

Huh?

Opened it this morning in OpenOffice, and saw pages and pages of whitespace and broken headers.

So *that* was embarrassing.

I think (think) I have fixed the problem by switching to LibreOffice (a slightly different free MS-Word clone). I've heard before that this is something I should have done years ago but I have a great deal of software inertia.

On the bright side, the switch seems to have been painless, and LibreOffice is a touch faster than OpenOffice, too.

Stupid software. I'd go back to just using MS Word but a) while unemployed is not the time to start spending hundreds of dollars on software, b) versions of Word after 2003 have been increasingly less usable, and c) they've moved to a 'subscription' model where I get to pay them every month. As I don't anticipate using the software every month this seems like a terrible deal.
jazzfish: Windows error message "Error 255: Too many errors." (Too many errors)
No motivation this morning. Up til midnight trying to fix my stupid computer. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me it has forgotten how to tell the phone where to sync photos (clicking the [Sync] Photos tab results in endless spinning, and syncing gets a complaint that it can't find the folder to sync photos and then an endless "Waiting for sync to finish" message), on top of its couple-months-old tendency to crash the System Preferences when I try to open either Desktop/Screensaver or Spotlight prefs.

Been needing to get a new battery anyway; this one only holds about two hours of charge. Maybe I can get the genuises to take a look at the system when I bring it in.

I suspect the answer is gonna be "full system restore to old Time Machine backup" again, at best. Don't wanna.

Meanwhile I sit here with a stuffed-up nose and no interest in doing much of anything.

Today I will:
  • Stop beating myself up for not managing to fix my stupid computer
  • Get up off this couch WIKTORY
  • Exercise while rewatching two episodes of Better Off Ted
  • Practice the viola for at least an hour (two sessions)
  • Knock at least one thing off the "things to revise in story" list, either by doing or by saying "nope not gonna do that"
  • Email Jenn, cripes how did it get to be Friday already, I blame the stupid not-quite-sick
  • Meet [personal profile] uilos downtown for fishes and Holst

Looks like a full day for no motivation.



101 in 1001 update )
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Last weekend's lessons: 1) if you're going to drop your powered-on laptop, 'flat' is the worst way for it to land, as that causes the (non-SSD) hard drive to skip and throw a fit; 2) as long as the geniuses at the Apple Store don't actually have to *do* anything they're unlikely to charge you; 3) I now know how to enter 'recovery mode,' as distinct from 'safe mode,' in OSX; 4) always, always, always back up your data.

Total loss: about a day and a half worth of fiddling around with stuff, plus the cost of a chai at Starbucks. Could have been a lot worse.



The Veronica Mars movie was very good: snarky, character-driven, filled with shoutouts to the series but still (I think) comprehensible and amusing if you're a newcomer. As noted elseweb, it had too much Logan and not enough Wallace or Mac, but that's a flaw it shared with the series.



We've started looking at new apartments. No real winners yet. The lack of wallspace for bookshelves has, as expected, been a problem. Heat in Vancouver tends to come from baseboard radiators, rather than vents, and baseboard heaters and bookcases are mutually exclusive. Oh well.

One place looked extremely promising: sort of like our current place, only in a more interesting neighborhood (closer to transit, further from groceries and a place to run) and slightly smaller. Not quite as much cheaper as I'd like but definitely cheaper. Downsides: first, they wanted a 1 April move-in date, which is awkward since we have a lease through the end of May. Second, they have a couple of bright orange cabinets bolted to the wall in the living room at about head height. I mean, *bright* orange. Don't-shoot-me orange. I have either not enough design sense to appreciate this, or too much.

Happy spring, or something like that.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
The latest OSX update (Mavericks[1]) was free, and I've been running an OS that's three years behind, and I have a vague recollection that there was software that was only available for more recent versions of OSX. So I went ahead and updated.

[1] "To install OSX Mavericks, say 'Siri, I feel the need for speed.'"

Good things: the update went smoothly. Nominally better battery life. I can finally disable Spellcheck on a system-wide level. I guess iBooks on the laptop is a good thing.

Not so much irritating as mildly baffling: whenever I close an app, rather than popping up whatever app was next in the task-switcher, as you'd expect, Finder opens. I got nothing. Seems to have fixed itself, probably when I updated the keyboard hack.

Decidedly non-minor: trackpad scrolling is less responsive than it used to be and my hacked Delete key (formerly the worthless Eject key) doesn't work about half the time. [Fixed that one by updating the hack.] Also Firefox will frequently decide to stop loading web pages altogether, necessitating a close-and-restart.

Verdict: eh, shouldn't have upgraded. Oh well. Since I've already decided against a new laptop in the next year or two, I guess I should go ahead and buy more RAM.
jazzfish: Windows error message "Error 255: Too many errors." (Too many errors)
21 days for Dreamwidth, #7:
What is your favorite community on Dreamwidth?

[community profile] endings, because it is awesome. It is, in fact, so awesome that I'm going to go post there now.



Problem: the W key is right next to the Q key, which makes for severe annoyances when I hit Cmd+Q instead of Cmd+W and close the entirety of Firefox instead of the tab I'm on.

Obvious yet nonworkable solution: turn on "Warn me when I'm closing multiple tabs" in Firefox's preferences. I don't know why it won't warn me when I Cmd+Q, but it won't. (Maybe I have something else set, maybe Cmd+Q is a system "quit this program" command that overrides Firefox's individual preferences.)

Suggestions?
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
My deliciously clicky Unicomp keyboard and Henge Dock both came in yesterday, so I spent the evening setting up a desktop workspace to test everything out.

24" is a heck of a lot of monitor. It is overpowering in its monitorness. On the other hand, I appreciate the ability to read text without squinting, and Portal looks pretty good at that size.

The display adapter for the Henge Dock is being finicky. The speaker and USB and power connectors all click into place perfectly but something about the display connector is just Not Fitting. I can still plug it in from the underside of the dock, so it works and is usable. It just defeats the drop-in-and-use nature of the dock. I'll mess with it more over the weekend, I guess. Other than that the dock is amazingly easy to use, and looks classy too. My only real complaint is that it really wants a dedicated charger. The power connector, like all the other connectors, has to be screwed into place. It's easy enough to unscrew, it just adds to the time and effort and makes it slightly less awesome. (Now, if I had convinced [personal profile] uilos to get a Macbook Air, there would be an extra charger lying around...)

It's the keyboard that's really wowed me. Unicomp has done a fantastic job with this thing: not too surprising, since I think they bought all the old IBM designs and manufacturing equipment. It is gorgeous and heavy-duty ("can stun a burglar in the dark, which is my definition of great art" --NG). Also, it just feels right to type on. It even came with extra keycaps to replace the Windows and Alt keys with Command and Option (no symbols, sadly; just the words). Now I just need to figure out if there's a way to map the worthless right-hand meta key to something useful. Fn, maybe.

It's most definitely Loud, though. We're talking machine-gun levels of Loud, here. As someone or other said, it's like a gigantic tailpipe for geeks. It is, in fact, so much louder than my previous Model M (from 1995) that I went ahead and pried a key off the old one to see what was going on. Turns out all this time I've been typing on a standard dome-switch keyboard: better than most, but still not the same. (I'd take it to work to replace the keyboard I have here, but I'm worried it would break the cheap keyboard tray they gave me.)

Also of some interest: it's fairly easy for me to adapt to the Mac keyboard shortcuts on the laptop, but I keep using Windows muscle memory on the new keyboard. I guess it's embedded on a deeper level than I'd thought.

So now I have most of what I need for a good desktop setup (still lacking: desk, also chair). The question now becomes, when I get settled in Vancouver, do I use the same desk setup for work and for fun, or do I need to put together a whole different desk for work?



Coda: This, incidentally, is the first keyboard I ever used. We had it for, mm, not quite nine years, Christmas 1982 to late August 1991. For context, this was two revisions earlier than the one true keyboard, of which all others, including our own 104-key, are but shadows. (Edit: fixt links)

Looking at that picture, it's the little things that come back to me. The ridiculously oversized meta keys with their normal-sized key caps. The random PrintScreen key under the vertical ENTER, and the backslash next to Z. The gigantic PLUS next to the number pad. What the heck were the designers thinking? (Of course they probably weren't, they were more interested in getting all those weird new keys on the keyboard than in putting them someplace usable.)
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
I've been using Taranis, my new Mac, pretty intensely for the past couple of weeks, and we more or less understand each other. I'm still looking for a better name, though. I keep hoping something vaguely piratical will strike me, as this computer has occasionally put me in mind of the pirate with a steering wheel attached to his crotch.

Experience: sometimes frustrating, mostly good. )

nano!

Oct. 31st, 2010 11:30 pm
jazzfish: artist painting a bird, looking at an egg for reference (Clairvoyance)
Because I am a) a crazy person who b) wants to become more acquainted with his new computer in a trial by fire and is c) in desperate need of something to distract his brain, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year for the first time.

This is madness for any number of reasons, but mostly because the only time I've ever written more than 1,667 words of fiction in a day, it wiped me out for several hours. 50,000 words is an order of magnitude longer than anything I've ever written. It may be more words than all the fiction I've written so far put together. Honestly, the only reason I think this is even possible is that I had several thousand-plus wordcount days in a row the last time I was writing anything, back in July.

(Also, I figure that if I get something else written, that'll give me the distance I need to go back and revise the space story.)

I've taken a couple days off from work in the middle of the month, and a couple more at the end, so in theory I'll have a chance to catch up when (not if) I fall behind on word count.

I have no intention of posting daily word counts here, no worries. I'll probably gripe about it here once a week or so, and give the same vague story info you've come to know and love from other things I've been working on. If you're actually interested I'll be keeping a running wordcount at the NaNo website. I'm jazzfish over there as well.

I fully expect to crash and burn with this but it'll be interesting to see how far I get at least. And yes, I do have a personal bribe waiting for me at the end of it, beyond just bragging rights.

(I'm using the special NaNo edition of Scrivener to write this thing, plus of course Neo for writing on my lunch break etc.)
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
The Hard Edge of Empire: "We know about the real world of the era steampunk is riffing off. And the picture is not good." Ladies and gentlemen, Charlie Stross has come through with the "steampunk sucks because fuck the victorians" post that I no longer feel any need to write. See also Nisi Shawl, who is currently on chapter 5 of her cotton-gin-punk novel.

(Side note: I have never understood the insistence that Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates, a novel of magical time travel in which deep sorcery and Egyptian mythology feature quite prominently, is somehow "proto-steampunk." What are these people smoking? It's not even Victorian, it's... whatever the era before Victorian was. Williamic? Georgian, I guess.)



Mac nattering )

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Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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