Month: November 2015

Black Friday: Fixing Things

I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself today. I had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday at my friend’s house. And I have today off from work. And I’m mostly healed up from my surgery last month. So I considered going into NYC to check out the Jackson Pollock exhibit at MoMA.

But I decided this morning that maybe I should see about getting the speaker on my iPhone fixed. There’s a local store called Batteries + Bulbs that, I recently discovered, does iPhone repair. I don’t know much about them, but they appear to be reputable, so I thought I’d give them a shot. Alas, the repair guy had the day off, so I’ll have to come back tomorrow. But I walked there and back, so I got some exercise at least.

I read an interesting article on Vice this week about iFixit, and about computer repair in general, called How to Fix Everything. I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately, since all of the trouble I had with my MacBook recently, and since I’ve been on the fence about geting a new iPhone vs. repairing the old one.

I almost managed to replace the hard drive cable on my MacBook, but had to give up and let someone else do it. But, if not for those two pesky screws, I would have been able to do it, no problem. For the iPhone, I did check out iFixit’s page on speaker replacement. It looks a little too complicated for me to handle on my own, especially if I can get someone else to do it for a reasonable price. But I appreciate, in general, the idea of repairing existing hardware, and keeping it useful for as long as possible. It does seem like Apple, and other manufacturers, and going out of their way to make end-user and third-party repair and upgrades as difficult as possible. But Apple gear is still a good choice, since it’s so populat that you can always find instructions and parts via sites like iFixit.

I’ve managed to avoid blowing any serious money on Black Friday sales, so far, but I have spent a few bucks here and there. I ordered one of the 7″ Kindle Fire tablets that are currently on sale for $35. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but for $35, I’ll find something semi-useful. And I bought Commander One Pro from the Mac App Store for 99 cents. I’ve been using the free version, since I got my MacBook set up again, and I like it. I had needed to find something to replace Total Finder, which doesn’t really work with El Capitan, and Commander One seems to fit the bill.

It’s really nice out today, so, in addition to the walk to Batteries + Bulbs earlier, I also walked to Bridgewater Commons and back. I didn’t buy anything while I was there, but I wandered around and looked at what was on sale. I didn’t see anything I really needed, nor did I see anything I really wanted to buy for anyone else. (I really don’t need to buy many Christmas presents these days anyway.) But all this walking put me over the 7500 step threshold for the first time since the hernia issue arose. So I feel pretty good about that. And I now feel like I can spend the rest of day binge-watching Jessica Jones, if I want to, and not feel guilty about it.

The new WordPress application

I thought I’d give the new WordPress app a shot. It’s not bad, and may be good enough that I’ll start using it regularly for writing posts. It allows for quick switching between WYSIWYG and HTML views, as the normal WP admin page does, which was an issue with the other Mac blog authoring products I tried.

The “preview” button doesn’t seem to do anything though. I’m probably missing something there. Maybe I need to configure something first? Well, let’s see if the “publish” button does anything…

 

The MacBook is back

Tekserve fixed my MacBook on Wednesday, so I decided to run into the city after work and pick it up, rather than waiting until the weekend. I got there about a half-hour before they closed, but I didn’t have any problem picking up the machine and getting it back home. And it turns out that it was just the hard drive cable, as I’d hoped. It seems to be working fine now.

Last night and tonight, I’ve been working on getting it set up again. I restored a bunch of stuff from my old drive, which I’d swapped out back in December. So I lost anything that I had on the machine since then, if I didn’t have it anywhere else. That turns out to be not much, really. I’ve been keeping important stuff in Evernote or Dropbox, or on my desktop PC, so there wasn’t much that was only on my Mac. (And I’m now looking at consolidating a bunch of stuff in OneDrive.) Still, I really need to get a better backup strategy going.

As part of the setup, I upgraded to El Capitan. I’m not having any problems with it so far. I’ve got the newest versions of all my applications installed, and they all seem to be compatible. The one app I haven’t reinstalled is f.lux, as there appears to be a minor issue with that.

So I’m hoping for no more problems with this MacBook for at least another year. I may think about getting a new one next year (2016), but not until the end of the year, if I can manage to keep this one going until then.

a trip to Tekserve

After thinking through the various options I had for getting past the issue I had with the hard drive cable in my MacBook, I decided that handing the whole thing off to someone else was my best option. So I dropped off my MacBook at Tekserve yesterday. I had to take a half-day off work to do it, but if I waited until Saturday, that would be another whole week gone, and then probably another week before I could pick it up. I’ve now been without a working MacBook for a whole month, so I decided it was worth burning a half-day of PTO.

I’d never actually been to Tekserve before, though I’ve known about them for a long time. When I got there, I had to take a number and wait about a half-hour. Then, I explained the issue to a nice young man who took down all my info, then consulted with a tech, and came back with an $80 estimate. If all goes according to plan, it should be ready on Wednesday. I’ll probably go back into the city on Saturday and pick it up.

I feel like a bit of a failure for not being able to replace the hard drive cable myself, but heck, I’m old and I’m really more of a software guy anyway.

So if I get the MacBook back on Saturday, then I can pick back up on all the stuff I had to put aside before things went south. Like upgrading to El Capitan, getting a new iPhone, and doing some more work on straightening out my music library. Oh, and setting up a better backup plan too.

MacBook trouble, OneDrive, and other stuff

My replacement hard drive cable for the MacBook showed up yesterday, which is great, but I had no luck whatsoever extracting the two tiny screws that hold the old cable in place, which is not so great. There are a number of MacGyver moves I could try to get them out, but I’m not feeling really confident about any of them. So I think maybe I’ll be taking the thing into Tekserve next weekend and let them figure it out.

Meanwhile, I wanted to do something useful yesterday, so I decided to move a bunch of my personal files on my desktop PC into OneDrive. Microsoft announced last week that they were dropping unlimited storage in OneDrive, which annoyed a lot of people. But seeing this in the news reminded me that I have a lot of OneDrive space that I’m not using. I have an Office 365 Home subscription that formerly had unlimited storage, but now has 1TB of storage, which is still quite a lot. So I moved most of the files out of my local documents folder into OneDrive. Now I’m using about 3GB in OneDrive, and I have all of those files backed up to the cloud, and available on both my desktop PC and laptop. I also moved some files out of Dropbox and Google Drive into OneDrive. I have a free Dropbox account, so that’s only good for 2GB, and Google Drive is good for 15GB, but that’s shared with Gmail. So, for anything I can keep  in OneDrive, I think I’m going to try to standardize on that as my default cloud storage.

I’ve found that, while Microsoft hasn’t been great with multi-platform support in the past, they’re currently doing really good with that. Their Mac client and iOS client are both quite good. And they have an IFTTT channel, which might come in handy at some point.

I’ve been thinking about how far I can go with moving stuff into OneDrive. A terabyte seems like a lot of storage, but I could use that all up if I tried. If I were to move all my photos into OneDrive, that would be about 15 GB. A lot, but manageable. And if I were to try to move my iTunes library (music, videos, and audio books) in, that would be another 500 GB or so, which would be a bit too much, I think. But if I limited it to just music, it would be about 50 GB, which might be ok, though it would be a bit of a mess. And I have quite a lot of random DRM-free audio books, comic books, ebooks, and videos purchased through various Humble Bundle sales and other places. The total size on all of those is quite large, but, for most of them, I can re-download them if they get lost. Humble and Big Finish, at least, allow you to re-download past purchases easily.

I’ve also been thinking about other ways that I could get more use out of the services included in the Office 365 subscription. One odd thing that’s included is 60 minutes of outgoing calls via Skype each month. This doesn’t really help me much; I have plenty of minutes on my cell phone plan, so there’s no reason to use Skype for outgoing calls on my cell phone. If I could replace my home phone with Skype, though, that might be useful. But I looked into that, and it seems like that wouldn’t be worth the trouble. First, I’d have to sign up for a Skype phone number, so I could receive incoming calls. That would cost $5/month. And I can’t port my existing home phone number into Skype, so I’d have to deal with having a new phone number. Then, I’d have to figure out how to hook up a phone to use with Skype. Stand-alone Skype phones (and adapters to hook regular phones up to Skype) were a thing for a while, but it seems their time has passed. Looking for any of them on Amazon generally shows them all as being discontinued and only available from third-party sellers. So, in a nutshell, those Skype minutes are pretty useless.

I miss my MacBook

I was hoping that the replacement hard drive cable for my MacBook would show up in the mail yesterday, so I’d be able to get my MacBook back together this weekend. But there was nothing in my mailbox when I got home from work. So now I’m hoping it will show up today.

The weather has been great in NJ this week, so it would be a good day to forget about computers and go for a long walk, but I’m still recovering from my hernia surgery, so I’m stuck with short walks for now. I guess I’m going to continue catching up on my comic book reading today. If I was in better shape, I’d be heading out to the Superheroes for Hospice show today, but I’m probably better off skipping it this time around.

replacing a MacBook hard drive cable

So it’s Sunday morning now, and Monday will be one week since my surgery. I’m feeling good enough now to do some walking outside, back and forth to the bank or grocery store, but I get tired a lot quicker than normal. And I’m starting to feel like I can pick up on some projects, like trying to get my MacBook working again.

I’ve figured out, through trial and error, that I most likely have a bad hard drive cable. I’m going to try replacing it, using these instructions from iFixit, and see if that works. I ordered the cable (and a couple of tools) from iFixit today, so I’ll likely have them by the end of the week, and try to do the replacement next weekend.

Just for laughs, I called Apple and verified that they won’t touch my MacBook, since I replaced the stock HD with an SSD, thereby violating the sanctity of their precious hardware. If that wasn’t the case, I’d be really tempted to take it to the Apple Store and let them take care of it, even if it would cost a lot more than doing it myself. And if I had enough energy to take the train into NYC, I’d probably take it to Tekserve, and let them do it,  but I don’t think I’m going to be able to handle NYC any time real soon. So I’m going to hope I have enough manual dexterity to remove and replace the cable myself.

My MacBook is about two years old, and I’m hoping to get another couple of years out of it, so here’s hoping this works!