Most technology reviews happen shortly after the hardware or software is released, and the reviewer has had only a limited time to tinker with the product. Publishing is not without a sense of one-upsmanship, and getting your review to press first is the only way to win that game.
Here at Zanshin.net World Headquarters, I’ve been using the same Titanium skinned Powerbook for over five years now, and I think it’s time for a recap of this excellent machine.
My Powerbook began life in November 2001 and was purchased in January 2002 at the Apple Store in Des Peres, outside of St. Louis Missouri. Out of the box it had a 867 MHz PPC processor, 256 MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, and a Combo-drive (CD-RW/DVD).
The Combo-drive started refusing to access compact disks about a month after purchase, and I was able, under warranty, to get it replaced at no charge to me. The replacement has worked flawlessly every since.
I replaced the 40 GB drive with a 100 GB about three years ago, and created a 40 GB portable drive using a USB/Firewire enclosure from Other World Software. Both drives are still working with no errors or issues.
One of the first upgrades was additional memory; I added 512 MB soon after getting the Powerbook, and it has had 768 MB of RAM ever since.
Apple-History.com has a complete rundown of the original specifications.
Originally my Powerbook came with Jaguar. After upgrading through all the iterations of that OS, it has also iterated through all the Panther dot releases, and finally all the Tiger releases. I haven’t upgraded to Leopard yet for two reasons: performance and cost. More on that in a bit.
The case has held up surprising well, considering this machine travels with me to work every day, and has right from the beginning. The screen has no dead pixels and, while some of the key caps are shiny from use, the keyboard is still tactilely satisfying.
The only blemish on the case is some missing paint on the hinge edge of the lid. This was caused by carrying the laptop while wearing a ring on one finger. Speaking of the hinge, I did have to replace the factory installed rubber stops with ones from an after market kit. Initially I set out to loosen the hinge as opening the machine took two hands, but the directions were just daunting enough that I’ve never completed the exercise.
The clearance between the LCD screen and the key caps is tight enough that I almost immediately developed faint smudges on the screen, caused by oil from my fingertips on the keys and trackpad. A micro-fiber cloth from RAD Tech now rests on the keyboard when the Powerbook is closed, and has eliminated the marks for the most part.
Just in the last few days the sleep light has started being flaky. Normally when the machine is asleep the light breathes (surprisingly bright in a dark room at night); it still does that when the machine is asleep on the desk. Closing the lid and picking it up however, interrupts the light, but doesn’t wake the machine. If one glowing LED is the only malfunction in five plus years of daily use, I’m happy.
In addition to the plethora of applications for Macs that I have used, there are several lesser know, more utility oriented programs that I couldn’t live without.
Growl - system wide notification framework. I get my Twitter tweets via growl, along with new mail and NetNewWire notifications. iTunes announces the next song here and Adium events are also routed through growl. Sidetrack - My Mac is old enough that it doesn’t support the newer scrolling gestures on the trackpad. However, with Sidetrack I have hot spots (primarily for right- and center-button clicks, as well as Exposé) and vertical and horizontal scrolling.
GeekTool - GeekTool is a bit harder to explain. It allows you to embed just about any log or process output, into your desktop. I have the uptime command output tucked away in the upper left corner of my screen via this tool.
Quicksilver - From Blacktree, every ones favorite “act without doing” interface.
Even though my machine is older and slower than today’s machines, I am still quite pleased with its overall performance. My other laptop, a two-year-old IBM ThinkPad Z60m, has a 1.83 GHz CPU and 2 GB of RAM, and even with all the startup processes disabled, the Powerbook smokes the ThinkPad in cold or warm boot situations.
I rarely, if ever, turn the Powerbook off, preferring instead to just shut the lid to sleep the machine and open it again when I am ready to work once more. There are some applications I use on a regular basis that tax the now aging specifications. Eclipse Europa with the MyEclipse IDE installed being the primary example. That particular software platform is rather doggy on the XP ThinkPad as well.
Having read that Leopard wasn’t designed for the G4 PPC chip, I have been reluctant to upgrade my OS. If I had a second 100GB hard drive I would use SuperDuper! to clone my 10.4.11 startup drive, and upgrade. If the performance was unacceptable, I could then easily revert. Until that drive happens, I’ll happily say, “mine goes to eleven.”
My Powerbook G4 is simply the best computer I have ever owned or used. The form factor, the operating system, the performance, …; everything about it, is perfect for me. That I have a much newer and seemingly more powerful laptop in the Z60m and still choose to carry the Powerbook nearly everywhere I go, says it all.
Great Googly Moogly!
Yesterday I put up a short posting about wistful thinking, wondering what it would be like to have more than a handful of visitors to my site in a day (or week, or month). Today I know what that feels like thanks to the generosity and kindness of one man.
This morning, as usual, I clicked refresh on the Mint tab to see what my total was for yesterday. I nearly fell off my chair when the number was nearly a hundred visits higher than normal. I did fall off my chair when I realized those visits had all happened between 10 pm and midnight. And I was beside myself when I saw that today’s visits, hour by hour, are greater than I normally get in 24 hours.
Holy mackerel.
Thank you Mr. Blanc. Your random act of kindness has pasted a smile on my face that won’t soon go away. Domo arigato gozaimasu.
Last Friday, after work, I returned to the vision center, ostensibly to have my eyes measured for bifocals. In the time between making the appointment Thursday morning, and arriving there Friday afternoon, I had changed my mind - I wanted trifocals instead.
When I spoke to the technician on the phone Thursday morning, I complained about the blurriness caused by the edges of the lenses. The portions outside of the three focal zones on the progressive lenses were giving me fits. She warned me that going to bifocals would be at the expense of losing the intermediate range, which is ideal for computer use.
Typically you hold a book or document closer to your face to read, than the distance you site from your computer’s monitor or screen. With only two focal ranges, distance and near, in a bifocal, the computer screen could fall into neither range, forcing me to squint or sit much closer than normally comfortable.
After talking it over with the technician Friday afternoon we agreed that trifocals were my best choice. They provide all three distances, like the progressive lens, but without the distortion artifacts that were bothering me. Apparently many people adjust to the progressive lens and aren’t bothered by the distortion, but I was uncomfortable enough with it that I wanted to switch lens styles. Having lines on my lenses won’t bother me a bit. My last pair of glasses, before the LASIK surgery, were lined bifocals, and I adapted to them in no time.
My new lenses should be delivered by mid-week. I’ll have lined trifocals and, given the shape of my frames, the enhanced area of the lens (both intermediate and near) will be approximately 35 mm wide - or nearly the full width of the lens surface.
Even with the distortion I was able to notice an immediate improvement in reading books, my cell phone display, and my computer screen, so I am looking forward to the trifocals.
Like any self-respecting nerd with a website, I have a statistics package that tracks visits and page views on my site, and produces graphs and tables and other suitably nerdy artifacts for me to drool over. My package of choice is Mint, from Shaun Inman. (Check out the excellent review by Shawn Blanc.)
My visit numbers are amazingly consistent and, not too amazingly, small. My site is about me and pretty much for me. There are a few informational postings that have garnered visits, but the vast majority of the postings are about me as a person, or the events in my life. Still, I average five or six hundred visits a month, and have for the two years I’ve been using Mint.
Since the beginning of this year, and the adoption of Wordpress as my CMS, I have had a slight bump in these numbers. While I can’t find a logical correlation between switching frameworks and increased visits, I am pleased that I am getting more daily visits, and higher numbers overall.
All of which brings me to my point today. Every time I refresh my Mint page (always open in a tab of its own) I wonder the same thing briefly in the back of my mind, “Will this be the day that my site takes off?” And for a few seconds while the page reloads I can imagine what it would be like to see several hundred visits for the day instead of a couple dozen.
After dipping our toes into the tai chi pool last summer, Sibylle and I have been looking for some physical exercise to improve our overall body tone and fitness. Quite by accident, during a conversation with a work acquaintance, I discovered the name of a personal trainer and fitness professional, who teaches hatha flow yoga from her home studio. Both Sibylle and I were impressed with her web site, and decided to attend a class or two to see what we thought about yoga.
Neither of us has done yoga before so we didn’t quite know what to expect. There were five other people in the class, plus the instructor. Hatha yoga, as it turns out, is about gentle postures, breathing, and relaxing. While some of the poses were strenuous in terms of twisting th spine or stretching unused muscles, the overall workout wasn’t difficult. As with any new activity there was some trepidation about “not doing it correctly.” We are both detail oriented people and want to know all the tiny nuances right from the start. One of the reasons we discontinued tai chi was the lack of individual instruction, which left us guessing as to the correctness of our postures or gestures, et cetera. Fortunately, given the small class size, we got more hands on or individual instruction last Monday evening, in our first yoga class, than we did in a month of tai chi.
The mother of one of Sibylle’s students told Sibylle about the health club she belongs to. Sibylle looked it up, and found a location near to us. After reading about their offerings, including tai chi, goju-ryu karate-do, and yoga, we decided to visit the club and take a tour. The manager who led us around answered all of our questions openly and honestly, and left us with three guest passes, so we could try the club ourselves.
On Saturday morning we went in time for the nine am yoga class, and ended up staying long enough to walk the indoor track several times, try out a treadmill and the rowing machine, and lift a few weights. We both enjoyed the atmosphere and facilities very much. At the end of our workout we took time to relax in the sauna before showering.
We are going to continue for a month at the first yoga studio, and we are going to sign up for a membership at the health club. We are both committed to improving our overall fitness, and are looking forward to utilizing the club’s facilities to reach that goal.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “lens.jpg” }} As the image to the right shows, the layout of the different focal areas on a progressive lens introduce some interesting geometry into the lenses structure. In an effort to produce a lens that mimics natural, un-corrected vision, without lines, the optimal corridor of vision can be rather small. Not to mention the size of the near vision portion at the bottom of the lens. When I ordered my new lenses we had the lens upsized to the largest lens the frame would support; I cannot believe that I would be able to wear glasses with a smaller progressive lens at all.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “lens.jpg” }} The portion of the lens that I believe is giving me trouble is the unlabeled portion on the image; the part to the left and right of the intermediate vision corridor. What I want in my lenses are what is known as an executive, or Franklin, bifocal.
(Images are from All About Vision.)
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It seems the Google searches for candidate names leading up to the recent primaries and caucuses, accurate predict the winner. Via Advertising Lab.
This afternoon, after two weeks of anticipation, I picked up my new glasses. The frames and lens shape and size fit my face perfectly. Both Sibylle and I are very pleased with how they look. Unfortunately i am finding it hard to see through them.
Because I needed astigmatism correction as well as help with my near vision, my lenses are progressive, or “no line,” bi-focals. Little did I know when I agreed to this style of lens what I was getting myself into. When I first put them on I was delighted to suddenly have near focus again. The sample text at the fitting desk, which I could only read at arm’s length, was clear and crisp through the glasses. I was too giddy with the sensation to notice that the progression in the lens, from top to bottom, and from the outside edges inward, caused significant distortion of the periphery of my corrected vision.
After I got home and started using the glasses to work on the computer I immediately noticed some odd visual artifacts. The area of greatest magnification in the lens is tiny, perhaps only as wide as the tip of my forefinger. Reading a sentence, whether on screen or in a book, requires that I turn my head - I have to continually move the spot of focus along the line. As I turn my head the area of vision defined by the outer rim of the lens distorts, wripples like someone was twisting the screen or book. Imagine the funhouse mirror and you’ll have an idea what I am seeing evertime I turn my head.
I called my Dad to see if he had progressive lenses in his glasses. Nope. Just old fashioned tri-focals, complete with lines. Next I called Ted, who it turns out, does have progessive lenses. Has had for nearly a year and is “still getting used to them.” He takes them off to read (not an option for me) and is considering getting lined bi-focals on his next trip to the optomitrist. Not encouraging.
Sibylle did some web searches and together we found several articles about the challenges of adapting to progressive lenses, including this one. All indicated that it could take two or three weeks for the wearer to adapt. They also indicated that great care had to be taken in selecting the right type of progressive lenses, based on the wearer’s activities. Heavy computer use or reading would require a different lens structure than non-hevy use might.
Finally I got out my old lined-bi-focals and wore them to see if the fun-house mirror problem existed there as well, and I had forgotten about it. No distortion whatsoever. Tomorrow I am going to return to the vision center and initiate an exchange to get lined bi-focals. Spending as much as 10 or 12 hours a day using a computer or reading will be miserable if I have to wear glasses that make me dizzy when I turn my head.
There seem to be two schools of thought regarding comments on personal blogs. Prominent sites like Daring Fireball don’t allow comments, and moreover, explain why. Other equally prominent sites have huge comment threads on nearly every post published.
Zanshin.net is by no means prominent. After nearly eight years of having a blog I have only a handful of comments. For several years, prior to switching to Wordpress, I had comments completely disabled on my site to avoid dealing with comment spam. I eventually renamed the functions that supported comments and trackback pings, as my referer logs were full of crap, and my commnets were all link bait for stuff you’d expect to get from a guy wearing a trench coat in the alleyway, who starts his patter with, “Psst! Hey, buddy….”
Since the widely available themes for Wordpress all seem to include the comment form, and since Wordpress provides the Askimet spam plugin, I decided to enable comments once again. Part of my daily routine now is to periodically visit the administration pages for my site and check to see if there are any comments waiting for moderation and if there are any commnets caught in the Askimet spam filter. Mostly I get spam comments in the filter.
The caught comments are usually obviously spam; links to prescription drugs or male member enhancement products, or online gambling. However, once in a while there is a borderline comment, like this:
What if I kept the comment but removed the objectionable link? The site is mine after all. I don’t have much of a comment or privacy policy here, and to me that is now the problem. If I had a page that outlined what was and wasn’t acceptible, and the consequence of violating those terms, then I would feel perfectly justified in editing the comment to remove the link. Without the terms already in place, however, I can’t justify altering the comment author’s thoughts. I wouldn’t like it if someone copied my thoughts and then took them out of context (i.e., changed the copy in some fashion), so I don’t think I should engage in that behavior.
As much as I’d like to accept the comment quoted above, I can’t without altering it through the removal of it’s associated link. (Yes, I recognize by using it as an example in this posting I have in effect, published the comment. Some hairs are easier to split than others.) In order to avoid this problem in the future I have crafted a privacy policy and some terms of use for zanshin.net, that includes a section on trackback pings and comments.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “obamastandardicon.jpg” }} If your state has already held it’s primary or caucus, I hope you participated. If you are part of the enormous collection of states casting votes tomorrow, please exercise your franchise. The future of America will be decided by those who show up. If you don’t participate then you can’t complain about the results. And if your opportunity is yet to come, please find out all you can about all the candidates, and cast your vote when your turns comes around.