be a Mac Genius

braved the monsters under the bed and actually did things in terminal.
Irrational fear of accidentally disabling the world’s computing systems: conquered.
39.7gb .trashes file discovered and deleted. Deletion into root user folder carefully avoided; disk space increased by 40GB.

Computer, I fear ye not!

Lessons learnt:

1. You can’t let the battery on a macbook run down completely, to 0%, because then it becomes impossible to recharge it. You end up with a cross through your battery and a message saying “no batteries available”. This makes you sad.

2. The people on the mac forums, the ones saying that there is nothing you can do other than take it to an apple store and get a new battery, are not, it turns out, always correct.

3. The people at the mac support centre who second this advice are also not always correct.

4. If you refuse to believe that your battery could be utterly and totally dead, forever, and resolve to trust the person who told you to take it out and leave it in the fridge for a few hours, because lowering the temperatures of things helps “heal” them _{for want of a more technical word} if they have crashed, then, when you put your newly cooled battery back into the macbook, it is not only working, but also fully charged!

Ha ha! No new and expensive battery for me, thank you very much!

Three cheers for the lone voice who said “put it in the fridge!”

From now on, I shall be doing this with all misbehaving equipment!

While cleaning out my harddrive I downloaded a copy of whatsize, which goes through your computer and tells you exactly what size all the different files on it are, so you can see at a glance where all that memory has gone. I noticed that there was one file, just labelled data, deep in the bowels of the applications support folder, which seemed to be taking up an inordinate amount of space. I went to investigate and lo, all those vanished photos from months ago were there, plus two folders which I hadn’t even remembered taking, from when D and I were camping up and down the coast in back in June. I don’t know why it pleased me so much to get them back, but it did.

It reminded me of summers and smiles that will come again, one way or another.
‘Tis but a temporary winter, my friends.

Know what one of those is? No, neither do I.
But I have downloaded one so that I can finally play audio on .avi files using Quicktime. Hurray!

the cd-dvd drive is still not working. Am going to sapporo for the weekend so have booked an appointment at the “GENIUS BAR”, thanking my lucky stars that my warranty remains in tact as I do so.
I am excedingly not looking forward to explaining in broken Japanese exactly what is wrong with it. My only hope is that most of the technology words are derived from English and that they might be able to understand them if I pronounce the katakana very slowly and patiently, and/or write it all down.
sigh sigh sigh.
But yes, let’s look on the bright side and be grateful for that warranty!

that time when I spent positively DAYS sorting my photo library and uploading it all onto picasa for my granddad’s viewing pleasure? Vindication, my friends, is mine.

For some reason I couldn’t log into my main account today, only my secondary one, using which I surfed the apple forums until someone kindly advised me to repair the startup disk.

Disk repaired, log in achieved, photo library awol.

But I am not as devastated as I should be in the curcumstances. Because I’ve actually only lost about 30 photos or so, rather than the 2000 or so I would have lost had I not seen “organise my photos” on someone else’s 43 things list and got round to backing them all up on-line.

Hurrah for me and that 43 thinger.

My dvd player does not like dvds. It tells me that I have inserted a blank disk when it is not a blank disk.
This distresses me.
I tried a few CDs and it read some songs as being 15 hours long and the rest it just refused to play.
This also distresses me.
On the rbight side, the fact that both are buggered might mean that all that needs doing is a quick clean up of the disk drive? Though how one goes about this I have no idea…

I don’t want to just go and buy a compressed air thing and try to figure it out myself since I doubt my Japaese would stretch to reading the instructions, and I don’t want to risk making things worse.

Any thoughts on how to use one?

what’s the point in having one?

Today I finally found out how to play FLAC files in i-tunes by converting them to Apple lossless. Huzzah!

As you can see, my starting knowledge is, ahem, rather minimal.

But at least now I can listen to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots as I stumble blindly onwards. Yosch!

All together now…. The name is Yoshimi, she’s a black belt in karate…she knows that it’s demanding to defeat those evil machines…