Having followed Apple's advice repeatedly to clean the ball on my Mighty Mouse, today, it came to the point where this would no longer work.
Following the rather more drastic advice of mightymouserepair.com, I soon got the mouse apart and found the cause of the problem:
There's no way that rubbing with a damp cloth would ever have got all of this out.
Fortunately, I was able to prise the plastic ring off the base of the mouse with my Swiss Army Knife with no cosmetic damage to the mouse and then glue it back in place with silicone glue, as recommended by the website. However, Apple really should have designed the device so that it could be taken apart and cleaned by the user more easily.
Yesterday, I took advantage of the "Mac Heist" deal that's currently on. One of the programs included is iStopMotion - stop motion video software. I've wanted to have a go at stop motion animation since I did GCSE Art (I had wanted to animate the scene from the BFG where he blew dreams into peoples' bedroom windows). I still have the models I made for that somewhere, so perhaps I'll give that a go at some point. For now though, here's my first attempt:
Flashback to 3rd September:
09:24 Dez: Morning
09:24 Dez: This is ungood
09:24 Dez: I turned my monitor on this morning to find that my mac had crashed
09:24 Dez: I turned it off, turned it on again and after about 5 minutes of it sitting on the grey screen with the whirly whirling, I turned it off
09:25 Dez: Left if a few minutes and turned it on again
09:25 Dez: I come back to find that I've been given a root prompt
09:26 frosty: dez: ooh :/
09:29 Dez: fro> know what the appropriate fsck equivalent is?
09:29 frosty: dez: nope, sorry
09:30 rollercow: dez: fsck oddly enough
09:30 Dez: rc:
09:30 Dez: ** /dev/rdisk0s3
09:30 Dez: BAD SUPER BLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG
09:31 Dez: LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SUPERBLOCKS? [yn]
09:31 FireFury: dez: sounds like your hard disk may have exploded
09:31 rollercow: dez: thats generaly not good
I tried several more times to boot and fsck, all to no avail and so bit the bullet and ordered a new hard drive - opting for a 160GB model rather than simply getting an identical 80GB replacement.
I then set about opening my Mac Mini's case in order to allow me to replace the drive when it arrived and discovered that the RAM in it was identical in specification to that in my PC. It had been suggested by sits that it might be the RAM and not the hard drive that had failed, so I swapped the RAM over and lo and behold, the machine booted as normal with no problems at all.
So I didn't need a new hard drive after all. Still, the extra space would be very helpful - every time I want to do anything video related, I have to make space on the drive by moving things onto other machines.
I had a look at finding some replacement RAM, found a suitably-priced 1GB stick and ordered it.
I decided to take photos of the process of installing the new hardware as on my first attempt at opening the case, following rather unclear instructions I found online, I mistakenly attempted (and succeeded :-/ ) in removing the shiny plastic top of my mac mini, rather than the chassis.
I was going to write a blog entry on Tuesday describing my first week with the Nokia 770. Just before I was about to start, I installed a package that broke the machine to such an extent that I had to reflash it and start from scratch. I decided to leave writing the blog entry until I had got the system stable again - which has taken until today.
As I was reflashing the device, I decided to take the opportunity to try out IT2007 Hacker Edition on the basis that if I didn't like it, it would be a simple matter to flash back to IT2006 and I wouldn't have wasted a lot of time installing software on IT2006 only to lose it all when I finally decided to give IT2007 a go.
I was pleased with how quickly the device flashed and in very short order, I had IT2007 HE in front of me. I was quite surprised to find that IT2007 was a vast improvement over IT2006 - a lot of the rather badly designed or ill-thought-out components had been improved a great deal and it didn't take very long at all for me to realise that I wanted to stick with IT2007.
Because it was designed for the Nokia n800 - the newer Internet Tablet - there were some packages I found you couldn't install on the Nokia 770, and worse, some that would install quite happily only for you to discover on your next reboot that the device would no longer successfully boot and instead go into a "boot loop" where it would get part-way through the boot process before failing and starting again. Once the device got into this state, there was nothing to do but reflash again.
Very quickly, I got pretty tired of reflashing and having to install all the packages I wanted again so I started looking for a backup solution. The OS comes with a backup tool, but this only preserves your settings and user data - not any of the applications you have installed. I came across a Makefile written by Andrew Flegg which used rsync to back the device up. However, this was specifically tailored to IT2005 and wouldn't work with either IT2006 or IT2007. After adjusting what the script backed up, I had something that was rather more useful to me and after a few experiments (and several more reflashes), I had a system that would reliably back up all the files on the device (excluding devices, temporary files and caches) and restore them to the device after a reflash.
After lots of experimenting, testing and backing up, I got to a stage where most of what I wanted was installed and I was very pleased. That was until I discovered that one of the packages I'd installed had stopped my arrow keys from working - not only on my Bluetooth keyboard, but on the device as well! I thought I was going to have to reflash and start installing again, until it occurred to me that I could reflash, take an independent backup of the newly-flahsed device (where the arrow keys worked), flash back to the backup where they didn't then copy bits from the "clean" backup over the newer files until I found the cause of the problem and could resolve it. It turned out that it was the files in /usr/share/X11/xkb that broke the arrow keys. Once I knew this, it was a simple matter of restoring from the full backup in which the arrow keys didn't work, copying that dir over the top then taking a new backup.
Then I discovered that gpsd didn't work. I had spent quite a while playing with kismet when I was running IT2006 and produced a map of local wifi APs in Google Earth using some python written by FireFury. Having spent £80 on a GPS kit, I wasn't going to settle for it not working. It turned out the cause was that the gpsd supplied with IT2007 simply doesn't run on the 770. Going back to the gpsd I found for IT2006 (which was a lot of effort in itself), I extracted the files and copied them over those in IT2007 and thankfully got it working.
So now, I have finally - nearly two weeks after receiving the device - got it working how I want.
Installation notes I made during the process can be found in the SUCS Knowledge base.
This blog entry was entirely written using my Nokia 770.
Yesterday, I took delivery of the Nokia 770 I ordered from play.com on Friday. I opened the box to find that the power supply had a US plug on it and so before I could do anything at all, I had to go to Maplin and buy a socket converter. I brought it home and tried to plug the charger into it, only to find that the plastic lip was preventing me plugging it in. After attacking the converter with a kitchen knife, this problem was removed and I was able to plug the device in and power it up for the first time.
I had a brief play with it yesterday, during which time, I got root and installed xterm and an ssh client. My brother's band were playing at the Hope and Anchor that evening, and as I was driving my brother and his keyboards up there, I didn't get that long to explore.
As you, might expect, I'm writing this entry on the 770 and using this as an excuse to try out the various input methods. I wrote the first paragraph using the small on-screen keyboard with both styli and am writing this on the finger keyboard with the nails of my index fingers. This is certainly faster, but after a sentence or so, your hands start to hurt a bit.
I've tried using the handwriting system already and it sucks. It's nowhere near as good as Graffiti on the Palm. It is keen to make lowercase letters capitals and because it's interpretting as you type, the spacing changes and screws up what you're writing.
Having now discovered a shortcoming of the finger keyboard - that it duplicates text already written when you come out of it and go back in - I have switched to editing the entry on my Mac Mini. Fundamentally, a device that small is always going to have text input problems. When you're just entering a web address, it's OK, but you're not going to want to do much more than that. I might invest in one of those bluetooth laser keyboards - if it works well, that's really the only sensible solution. Clearly, typing with two fingers is going to be slower than normal typing.
Software-wise, the system is rather unstable. Several times, I've had an issue with the web browser whereby clicking anywhere on a web page caused the browser to immediately close. Rebooting the device resolved this. Visiting web pages with SWF files embedded in them also appears to cause the browser to crash. The audio player can apparently play Real Media streams, yet the browser can't, which seems rather silly - and prevents the use of BBC Radio's Listen Again service.
In a number of ways, the UI for several of the applications leaves a certain amount to be desired. The browser, in particular, falls down in that the arrow buttons to the left of the screen can't be used to directly scroll the web page but instead hop from one link to the next. This makes reading a long document in the browser more of a pain, because you have to keep using the stylus to scroll down.
I'm rather surprised that there are no software updates available for the device and that the range of software available in the Application manager is so small (even after having added the maemo repositories).
Having said all this, the display is good and I can see the device having the potential to be useful to me - particularly, for example, during a stay in hospital. The PDF reader is good (and the arrow keys do scroll the page in this), so it would be very good for reading ebooks, for example. I think I will probably buy the GPS add-on and use it as a sat nav device. Of course, the fact that it runs linux and so many people have been buying them recently (what with the price having suddenly dropped to £70-80) will hopefully mean that there will soon be a lot more software available for the platform.
Having come across some of Damien Hirst's works of art with medication (such as the "Untitled pill and syringe" series and cupboards full of medicine bottles and boxes) a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me how easy it would be for me to do something along the same lines given the large quantities of prescription medication I take every day.
So as an experiment, I saved all the packaging from my drugs over the last two weeks and then took photos of it. You can see the results in my gallery. I was slightly surprised at how much there was - it didn't even all fit in the (admittedly small) carrier bag I was collecting it in.
Something tells me I won't be making my fortune this way though...
As the History page tells us, SUCS was founded in the summer of 1988 which, of course, means that the society will be twenty this coming academic year.
It occurred to me in June that we really ought to do something about this, and in a discussion on Milliways, I suggested that we set up a website to gather as much of SUCS's history as we can find in backups, archive.org and peoples' brains.
On Friday, Arthur set up a new subdomain for the purpose, I installed PmWiki on it, and so we got the ball rolling. After quickly creating a skin for the site in keeping with my sucs.org design, I headed off in search of SUCS history.
The vast majority of it was from 1997 and later, which is hardly surprising, given that archive.org was set up in 1996 and had only indexed our site once that year.
Having assembled a basic time line for the society, I then spent yesterday looking through my old backups for old SUCS posters and so on. Interestingly, despite being nearly ten years old, I didn't have any problem reading my backup CD-Rs.
The results are now available for all to see at http://twenty.sucs.org/. Hopefully, we'll get some contributions from other people soon and the site will start to grow!
My sister has been without an Internet connection for the last few weeks and being the other side of the Thames from me, I have only been able to offer support by phone. The SpeedTouch ADSL Router I had bodged to act as just an internal router/wireless AP was apparently working fine and she assured me the Cable Modem was on. She wasn't getting a connection either wirelessly or using the great long ethernet cable supplied by Telewest when she got the connection, so I was rather stumped.
Today, my parents, great aunt and I have come to hers for lunch and so I had an opportunity to diagnose the problem first-hand. It turns out that the Cable Modem has a Standby button and it had been pressed. Another press later and it was working fine.
Why would you ever want a standby button on networking hardware?! You either want it on or off - there's just no point in having it in a power-consuming non-functional state.
Following recent thunderstorms we've decided to get a second ISP to improve the stability of our Internet connection. We already have ADSL with PlusNet, but every time there's a lightning strike (which has been rather too regularly over the last few weeks), the router loses sync.
Once the connection came back up for long enough, we had a look at what Virgin Media are offering and then ordered the >20Mbit "XL" package. We were going to do it online until we realised we'd be paying the £25 installation fee when we'd had a cable connection from Telewest previously - we changed from them to PlusNet because they didn't do static IPs.
So my dad phoned them up and not only avoided the installation charge but also had the TV package made free and a discount given on the Internet connection too!
This morning's post brought a parcel containing a new cable modem and, having installed a third NIC in my gateway yesterday, it took seconds to get an Internet connection through it once I'd phoned them up to activate it.
Now, I've got the job of setting up load balancing across the two links...
I've neglegted my blog for over a month but certainly not for a lack of things to write.
My parents successfully completed their tandem ride from Land's End to John o' Groats, despite some potentially ride-threatening damage to the rear hub. I suspect one of the reasons I've not been keeping my blog up to date is that I had been doing my dad's (at http://peter.chesspod.com/blog/) and didn't feel like doing even more typing. It's now finalised and includes photos.
While my parents were away, my grandad caused problems for the staff at his old peoples' home. He had been getting steadily weaker for quite a while and this wasn't helped by the fact that he was refusing to offer any assistance when getting out of chairs. Not only did this mean he wasn't using his muscles, causing them to deteriorate further, but it meant that the staff were having increasing difficulty in lifting him until one day one of them injured her back.
As a result of this, the home started using a hoist to get him in and out of bed and he spent all day in a wheelchair. He decided that this was cause to go on hunger strike and after this had been going on a couple of days, Agnes, who is the manager of the home, called me to ask if I could go and talk to him.
I went with Heather and spent a while talking to him. He seemed alright, and we didn't mention food until I took him back to the lounge to find that everyone else was in the dining room. He didn't want to go in, so we left him in the lounge and went home.
Agnes called again on the following Sunday asking for me to go again as apparently our visit earlier in the week had cheered him up. This time, I called Aunty Phyllis and invited her to lunch and she and I went to see him at about 2pm. After talking to Agnes for about 10 minutes, we went to see him in his room, where Sue and Phil were already with him. We spent about an hour there, but grandad was pretty miserable and wanted us to go. He was also quite cross that a doctor had been called - I'm not sure what he was expecting to happen as a result of stopping eating though...
According to the home, he spent the Tuesday shouting and screaming and a psychiatric doctor was called. He admitted him to Southend Hospital on the basis that he needed to be rehydrated before anything else could be done.
Mum and Dad arrived home on the morning of Thursday 26th April - Morphy and I met them at Southend Victoria as they wanted to avoid carrying the tandem up the steps at Prittlewell. In the afternoon, they, Phyllis and I went to see grandad on Stambridge Ward and it was a nasty shock. Grandad had deteriorated a great deal since Sunday. With a lot of effort, he was able to talk to us, but he was screaming in pain and gripping the rail on the side of his bed with both hands. Phyllis was very upset to see him like that and once dad arrived (he had spent about 10 minutes looking for somewhere to park the car), we left pretty quickly.
On the Sunday evening, my uncle Chris phoned to let us know that aunty Kathleen - my grandad's sister - had been taken into hospital in Bath. He had been on the phone to her finalising arrangements to go and see her on the 1st May when she said "Ooh, I'm having a funny turn". Not hearing any more, he called the emergency services and after the police broke the door down, an ambulance crew took her to hospital. She told them not to treat her as she had throat cancer and wanted to die. It turned out that she had a pulmonary thrombosis and she died the following afternoon - the 30th April.
During the following week, my grandad continued to deteriorate. I went to see him with my dad on the Friday, by which time he was heavily sedated on morphine and clearly had no idea we were there. They had stopped treatment by that stage as he has wanted to die for a long time and because he had been dehydrated, had a kidney infection and pneumonia. He died the next day - 5th May.
On the following day, my sister and her husband came to lunch. She was applying for a promotion and wanted my help in preparing some laminated worksheets for a model lesson she had to give. She was going to use the spectacularly ugly Comic Sans font for these as she has to use a "dyslexic-friendly" font. Fortunately, though, a bit of googling revealed some much nicer choices and we settled for a much more elegant but very readable font called "Myriad". Her interview was two days later - on the Tuesday - and that evening, she phoned to tell us that she had got the job.
I had a renal clinic on 9th May, which went very well. I was seen quickly, my creatinine was 149 and they don't want to see me again at clinic until July - all good news. They hadn't got my tacrolimus result back though - it seems the bloods lab had been behind since the bank holiday. They would have called me if there'd been a problem with that though, so it looks like my transplant is finally settling down!
Ted (who died in 1990) and Kathleen
It was Kathleen's funeral on 16th May and we drove up to Bath that morning to attend. We arrived in plenty of time and found a pub - The Forester & Flower - where we had some sandwiches, before going to the crematorium.
Afterwards, we went to The Jubilee for some food and then back to 'Abertawe', Kathleen's house in Tunley - so-called because she had lived in Swansea prior to that. Emptying a dead relative's house of its contents is, as one might expect, a rather strange experience. Having previously done a lot of work on the family tree, I was given the title of "Family Archivist" by Tricia that afternoon and so came away with all of Kathleen's photo albums and diaries.
On Thursday, I started the mammoth task of digitising some of this. The first thing that caught my eye was a photo album and typed account of a holiday to Tremezzo that she took with her husband Ted and sister Phyllis in 1961. I have created a web version of this, trying to make it look as much like the original as possible. I'm pretty pleased with the results.
Since then, I have scanned most of the family photos in her albums, including one of my great great uncles Hector and George. Hector was killed in a mine in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1932 - something my grandad had mentioned occasionally.
This evening, I started work on Kathleen's diaries - modifying the SUCS Blogs system to allow the date to be set on entries rather than taking it as the current time. At some point, I should improve that code and add it to the SUCS version. We could also do with a new calendar-style view for the archive.
My parents are currently six days into their 1000-mile tandem ride from Land's End to John O'Groats. They are raising money for the National Kidney Federation, to whom you can make a donation here.
My dad is writing daily blog entries, which I am putting online when he phones them through to me each evening.
I've just listened to "My life in Serious Organised Crime" on Radio 4. Mark Thomas is always entertaining, but this was absolutely fantastic.
Listen again at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/markthomas.shtml
So yet again, I find myself sitting in reception in Renal Outpatients at the Royal London waiting for blood results.
I had expected my appointment on Tuesday to be the last one here, but I had a call from Vicky yesterday informing me that my creatinine was 177 on Tuesday and so they wanted me to come back and have my bloods done again today.
The bloods were taken at 11:30 and I was told to expect the results at 1. Needless to say, that was 20 minutes ago and I'm still waiting.
Every other time but one that I've been called back for repeat bloods has meant another stay in hospital and the one that didn't should have as the kidney was being rejected at the time. As a result, I have come prepared this time - with all my drugs, some spare clothes and my palm and phone chargers.
After I got the results:
At about 1:30, they got my blood results back and my creatinine was 161, which they decided was enough of a drop to let me go home. They will have a meeting tomorrow to decide what to do next.
I took my dad's D70 out into the garden last night and got photos of the moon throughout the eclipse. The results can be seen in my gallery.
I've blogged before about my GP's inability to create repeat prescriptions for me without errors. I took a repeat prescription request in on Monday and went to collect the prescription this morning, expecting to find that they'd done it all wrong again.
To my surprise, when I got it I found that everything seemed to be in order. I suppose he had to get it right eventually! The doctor had put down every item I'd asked for (even the one his computer said wasn't due until April) and prescribed an 84-day supply of each.
I then cycled straight to the Pharmacy to get the prescription filled (having remembered to take my HC2 certificate with me, so I wouldn't have to pay).
When I handed the prescription over, I told the pharmacist that the GP seemed to have managed to get it right first time, but she soon found an error - he hadn't specified the type of Aspirin.