Just over a month ago my old trusty HP 770c printer died. It just didn’t want to print anymore. It lasted more than 5 years, so the printer served me well. But I really wanted to be able to print, so below is a story of how I have naively gone through three all-in-one machines in the course of about six weeks.
I have been following the Tao of Mac for some time now and Rui can really hit the nail on the head sometimes. And this is especially so with his analysis of the MacBook.
While I think it is one sexy machine that I would like to get my hands on to try out, I would not want to use it as my main system. There are too big a chances that it simply won’t work right (even later generation PowerBooks don’t work quite right).
As for 10.4.4, I couldn’t agree more. There have been so few notable changes that I wonder why it’s not called 10.4.3.1 or 10.4.2.2 for that matter.
It turns out that the problem with waking is a hardware issue after all. My PowerBook has been back to the shop in October when it had the same problem and often could not boot past the initial grey screen. I hoped this time it wouldn’t be hardware, because of the log messages, but although they appeared often, it was not always the case.
At first I had not noticed the booting problems (shows you how often I turn my PowerBook off). So I hoped it was a software issue that I could track down. I thought I had on one occasion, erroneously blaming Adium (I really could reproduce it several times then, but anymore not the next morning). But as matters got worse (having to wait 20 minutes for a PowerBook to wake up is no fun), I searched the Apple discussion forums and found some references to the same problem there.
Now, the previous repair was finished on November 11th, and my warranty ran out on November 18th. But I thought that wouldn’t be a problem, since it was exactly the same problem and it showed up about a month or so after the repair. Imagine my surprise when the store told me that this kind of thing was not covered under warranty, I had to contact Apple myself, and ask them whether they would be so kind to cover this.
So, I called Apple, braced myself to be mad and furious, but I didn’t need to be. I explained the situation and after waiting about 10 minutes or so, they got back to me and told me they would cover it. Just like that. Maybe it is because I called at 5pm on a Friday ;).
Now you might ask, “Why didn’t you buy AppleCare on your machine?”. Well, simple: AppleCare in Europe costs almost 1.5 times as much as in the US (US: €289 ($349), EU: €439 ($530)). Add to that the fact that the machines also cost about a quarter more (15″PB: US €1650($1999), EU €2070($2500)). Then you’re not feeling very happy. And if your colleagues all use Dells and the same protection plan costs about €200, then your boss is not very likely to chip in on this.
Update: The waking problems are probably caused by hardware issues.
I am currently experiencing some issues with waking my PowerBook. Sometimes it happens instantly, other times, I have to wait up to a minute before a password dialog appears, and sometimes I have to wait after I have entered my password.
The following log entries appear in the system log:
Dec 20 20:46:50 Doc lookupd[14561]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local Dec 20 20:46:58 Doc configd[35]: SecKeychainFindGenericPassword err= -25308 ( =0xffff9d24, secErrStr=User interaction is not allowed. ) (current= je-ju.net) Dec 20 20:47:00 Doc /Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager.app/Contents/MacOS/NetInfo Manager: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
After some Googling I ran into this changeset of Adium. I did some testing and sure enough, it only seemed to occur when Adium was running, so I filed a ticket. But despite my thorough testing, it only seemed to be the case. So Adium is not to blame.
After some more searching in man pages and Apple support knowledge base, I think that this may be an issue of the Keychain. I currently have two keychains, an old one I exported from my previous install and a new one, to which I plan to export all the things I use, so that I can do a bit of cleaning. But I forgot to move the password for my wireless network to the new keychain and since it’s locked by default, it might be trying to get a password and fail, because interaction is not allowed.
I sincerely hope that that is the problem and that I have solved it now…I’ll post some updates as soon as I know more.
So the video iPod is out there now finally. People have been rumoring about one appearing for quite some time now.
I can’t see what all the fuss is about, it really is just a small feature. If you think about it, it pretty much sucks to watch video on your ipod: