Eva’s mystique with the iBook

The girls have this uncanny ability to undermine Chey’s iBook.

A few months ago, Lila was “working” on Chey’s computer while I was reading a book. When she was done working, she had managed to move the Library directory from /Users/cheygranroth/ to /Users/cheygranroth/Documents. The tricky part was neither Chey nor I realized what had happened until later on, when Mail wouldn’t give her her messages and was acting like it was freshly installed. That, and her settings for the desktop seemed completely wrong.

Anyway, I’m typing this on her laptop in monochrome. Yes, that’s right. Eva managed to take all the color out of the display, with some arcane keyboard command combination. It’s like ^+option+command+* or something, but I haven’t been able to get the “toggle monochrome” to actually toggle.

That said, it’s kind of cool to work like this. Very retro, with a modern edge. OS X’s GUI doesn’t look all that bad in black and white. I tried to take a screen snap shot, we’ll see if it is really in monocrhome or if somehow the snapshot managed to hold color. I’ll post it at some point (Chey’s computer doesn’t have any decent image editing program that I can use to switch it out of PDF format).

Trackpad button fix on clamshell iBook

A couple months ago I installed new hard drive in Chey’s laptop, a tangerine iBook of the clamshell variety. In the process I managed (why does this sound like a confession to me?) to fracture the ribbon between the trackpad and the mainboard, disabling the trackpad button.

So, after trying to fix it and failing, I went to eBay and acquired a new palmrest/trackpad unit for the computer.

She got an airport card today, so I installed both the new trackpad and the card at the same time.

Well, it turns out that while the new trackpad button does work, I’ve managed to mess something up so that when you depress the button, it doesn’t pop back up. So, it stays in a clicked position. Exceedingly irritating.

Anyway, it turns out that in OS 10.3, which is what she has installed on her computer, there is a menu to control how to use the trackpad. You can enable clicking on the trackpad itself. So, I did that, and I think I might even like that a little better then the button option. Well, especially because it works and the button is sticky. Now I just wish there was a setting to turn the button off, because now occassionally the button depresses, and have to pop it back up by pressing on the bottom of the case.

Were we wealthy, I’d have a new iBook on her lap, pronto. Old computers are very frustrating as they slowly fall to pieces.

Why, Apple? Why?

So, it’s cool to be able to say that you have a former Vice President of the United States on your Board, but the news that Apple voted in Al Gore caused my stomach to turn, just a little anway. At least Apple is easier to spell than, ah, potato.

I am, by the way, a die hard Apple fan. I do nearly all of my web production work on one. I also use it to manage my business. The Windows computer I have I use for cross platform testing of web pages as well as for connecting to the occasional remote MS SQL database.

And, Chey is finishing her Masters thesis with the help of her Apple iBook.