Where Anna the Piper geeks out
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Found a fix for putting those buttons back in the configuration that EVERY OTHER MAC PROGRAM STILL USES, with a quick Google. Open up a Terminal window and type in the following line:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean YES
Then restart iTunes and the Close/Minimize/Zoom buttons should be back in their previous arrangement. Yay!
Wonder no more!
Winnowill's Heart is a Scary Place
My laptop had been making these weird rattly noises for a while now, as well as running periodically far hotter than it seemed like it should. Replacing the hard drive didn’t help (although it did double my hard drive capacity, which of course was awesome). Neither did taking a can of electronics cleaner to the interior of the machine. So finally I decided, due to the location of the weird rattly noises I kept hearing (i.e., pretty much smack center under the keyboard), that I probably needed a new fan.
There are three places locally I found that I could have taken the box to to have a new fan installed: the actual Apple store, an unrelated chain called The Mac Store in the U-district, and a place in Shoreline that does Mac repairs. In all three cases, though, I’d have had to pay for the cost of the part as well as probably $80-100 in labor. Screw that, I decided; I’ve taken apart plenty of computers in my time, and I was pretty sure I could just install the damn fan myself.
This proved pretty much trivial thanks to ifixit.com. They’re a site specializing in repair manuals and parts for Macs and iPods, and I gotta say, the site was incredibly helpful. Not only do they have a variety of step by step manuals on how to take your Mac apart and how to install different parts, they also sell those parts for you to order. And since the new fan I ordered for Winnowill arrived today, I settled in tonight with Dara’s help to get that put in. It went very simply and without aggravation!
So I highly, highly recommend this site to any of my fellow Mac geeks out there. If you’re up for fixing anything wrong with your own computer and saving yourself the cost of paying somebody else to do it for you, check this site out. They can probably help you get the job done.
I’d been aware for some time that a lot of libraries had embraced the ability to check out ebooks, but not until this weekend did I get around to actually trying it. I was quite pleased to discover that both of our local libraries, the Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, provide the ability to do electronic checkouts.
Since KCLS is the one I have a card with, I gave that a shot over the weekend and succeeded in checking out both Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Justin Cronin’s The Passage. I selected both of these novels because they were specifically available in Adobe Digital Editions ePUB format, and therefore were friendly to my nook.
The process of getting the books onto my nook was less friendly than it should have been, and pretty much went like this:
I’ve been working on reading the Atwood and it looks just lovely on the nook, just like all the other ebooks I’ve read. And I honestly am fine with the DRM in this case, since if you’re going to do electronic library checkout, there needs to be some way of keeping track of how long the library patron is allowed to keep the content. I have no problems whatsoever with DRM in this case telling me “HEY YOU HAVE 18 DAYS LEFT ON THIS KTHX” and then making the book magically go away if I run out of time.
There are still issues here of device compatibility, though. I cannot check out ebooks to my iPhone just because Adobe Digital Editions does not like the iPhone; as I understand it, it’s a matter of ADE being a Flash app and iOS doesn’t do Flash. Or something to that effect. I can however check out to the computer, and from there, as described above, I can copy down to the nook. So that’s all fine.
Less fine is the question of file format. ADE does PDFs as well as ePUBs, and while the nook in theory talks PDF, in actual practice so far PDFs I’ve looked at on my nook come across sloppily formatted. They’re still readable, but it’s a clumsy reading experience and just not as pleasant as reading an ePUB, or a PDF on a device that’s capable of showing it to me as it was actually formatted. This is the nook’s fault, though, not ADE’s. (I suspect that Kindle owners would have a better time with an ADE PDF but I have no firsthand experience with that.)
Anyway, though, once I got the books checked out, that was awesome and I plan to make use of this ability more in the future. I expect it will help a great deal in whittling down my Enormous Reading List of Enormousness.
As a general FYI to Seattle-area folks, here are the pertinent links if you’d like to try out this shiny ebook checkout thing for yourselves:
You do of course need a library card for either system, but hey, library cards are Awesome Things and should be had regardless. :) Enjoy!
Tags: books, free books are awesome, geekery, nook nook nookity nook
Is that too much to ask? Grf.
Case in point: my computer surgery from yesterday. Winnowill’s hard drive had started making disturbing, unusually loud noises when spinning up out of hibernation. This concerned me, especially given that everybody I mentioned this to said “yep, time to get a new hard drive”.
So yesterday I went out and got one, along with a new 2G RAM chip so that I could bring Sweet Winnie’s total memory up to a shiny 4G. The new hard drive was a very shiny 320G, twice the capacity of the old one.
Brought these things home, and went to work on doing the restore from my last Time Machine backup. Taking apart the machine and putting in the new RAM and drive was the easy part. As per 
solarbird
It went swimmingly, up until the part where I rebooted and didn’t get any further than a blue screen and a little spinning progress wheel that came and went every few seconds. To wit, um.
Tried a second pass through the entire procedure, with the same results.
Turned out I had to totally re-install Snow Leopard on the drive. Which fortunately didn’t overwrite any of my old data, but it did mean I had to re-download all of the software updates that Apple has dropped since Snow Leopard came out. Which was vexing. (And which, tangentially, led me to repro a bug in one of our games that I’ll have to be chatting with folks about at work tomorrow.)
Now the computer seems happy enough. Which is of course a perfect time for WordPress plugins to start going blooey on me. YAY! And by yay, I mean, AUGH!
Tags: geekery
For those of you who didn’t see me say this on Facebook or Twitter:
There’s a Harry Potter exhibit coming to the Pacific Science Center on October 23rd!
And, AND, the very same weekend, a Battlestar Galactica exhibit arrives at the Sci-Fi Museum! Including full-sized prop ships!
In short: GEEK WEEKEND OF AWESOME. Tix for the Potter exhibit go on sale on the 14th, and I’m keeping an eye out for when the BSG ones are available. Chances of the Murkworks descending en masse upon both of these exhibits at once are very, very high. If you’d like to be in on that geekery, let me know! This is your advance warning!
Tags: bsg, geekery, harry potter, zomg
Standing down from silent running for this, because I gotta admit, I’m intrigued by this problem. This is how you tell I’m a QA engineer, people: I’m intrigued by the problem to solve, rather than pissed off that a product I’ve purchased is not behaving as it should. ;)
Here’s the backstory. The other day, as y’all may remember from my (endless, I know) reports of what books I buy, I grabbed an ebook copy of Jessica Andersen’s Nightkeepers. When I pulled it down from B&N, though, I noticed that when I tried to open it up in my Mac-side eReader app, I was prompted as per usual for my name and credit card # to unlock it, and then the program immediately crashed. All subsequent attempts to open the book failed, showing me nothing but a blank page 0, and not prompting me anymore to unlock it. I noted as well that three other books purchased on the same day worked correctly.
Note also that this very same book worked absolutely correctly when I tried to open it in three other places: on my Nook, on my iPhone in the B&N app, and when I pulled it into Windows to open it on the PC version of the B&N reader program. This told me, okay, the book itself is not corrupted, it’s readable by other programs. So something about the wrapping on the book just happens to be confusing the hell out of the Mac version of the reader.
I was able to repro the problem again tonight, on three different purchases. Two of them came from the same publisher as Nightkeepers (since the first book I tried tonight was book 2 of that series, Dawnkeepers), which was Penguin. The third, Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald, was from Pyr.
Barnes and Noble is using the same eReader app, essentially, that Fictionwise uses and which Fictionwise in turn acquired from eReader.com. The main change that B&N has made to it, at least on the Mac side, is to make it able to load epub format books. The version I’ve got is 1.1, the latest version, and the Mac version hasn’t been updated in months. So I’m quite sure that isn’t the problem.
What HAS changed with B&N lately, though, is that they’ve started making all of their downloads be epub format, whereas before they were predominantly using PDB format. So this made me think, “hrmm, so what if I go back and re-download one of my earlier PDB purchases, see if it comes down in epub, and if I can load it correctly?” I was in fact able to do that with my ebook copy of mizkit
So at this point I’m wondering a few things. One, who does the DRM wrapping? If that’s on B&N to do, it sounds like for some reason, some subset of the DRM wrapping they’re doing is breaking their version of the eReader. Two, what might have changed lately that this problem has only recently cropped up? If it’s because of the shift over to epub files, are there potentially different types of epub files they could be working with that could be breaking the reader app for some books, but not all?
I don’t know enough about the epub format to make a really solid guess, but I thought one of its major advantages was its universality. Anybody out there able to enlighten me on potential gotchas on epubs files produced by different sources?
Now I’ve got four books all exhibiting the problem, but since I’m able to read them on my Nook and iPhone, I’m way more intrigued than I am annoyed that they’re unreadable right now on my computer. It helps as well that really, reading on my Mac is maybe 10 percent of the e-reading I do, at most, so it’s not really an inconvenience, more just an intriguing problem to solve. Yep folks, if books are involved, I can even wear the QA hat when I’m not at work!
Tags: books, geekery, nook nook nookity nook
I’ve been playing around with WordPress 3 for the last few days, as y’all might have guessed from a previous post. I am pleased to report that with some help from the folks on the wordpress.org support forums, I’ve successfully set up a mini-network of blogs all based off of annathepiper.org. More importantly, I’ve learned how to redirect domains to them. So once I figure out how to pull all the extra data in plugin tables from angelakorrati.com, I’ll be adding that blog to my network of blogs all running off the same install of WordPress 3. Yay!
If anyone is interested in how I did it, I’ll do a separate post detailing the steps.
Meanwhile, because I wouldn’t be me without periodic updates of Books Recently Purchased, here’s the latest roundup, all electronic:
And that makes 170. I have a whole LOT of things on the To Buy list for the Nook, although most of them are re-buys of things I’ve traded in print copies of, and quite a few are things I still actually do have print copies of. The latter therefore do not count as part of the To Read list. I just want ‘em electronically too.
Meanwhile, still left to do on the great WordPress 3 upgrade: figure out if I can adapt Tarski as a theme to support shiny new WordPress 3 menus. I’d like to have a proper menu bar.
Tags: books, geekery, gosh I have a lot of books
I would be remiss as an employee of Big Fish Games if I didn’t tell you all that we’re handing out our very first Mystery Case Files series game, Ravenhearst, for free until the end of August. All you need to do if you want to scarf the free game is to go right over here for the PC version, or here for the Mac version, click the Buy It button, and apply the coupon code FREERAVEN to the purchase before you complete it.
I can also cheerfully add that I am myself quite hooked on our Hidden Object games, and the Mystery Case Files series gets more interesting and complex the farther it goes. I actually played Return to Ravenhearst first, and liked it better, but you should totally play Ravenhearst before you go back for more.
Enjoy, all!
So Murkworks.net, my and solarbird
As you might guess, this is messy and inefficient.
There does however seem to be a solution available. WordPress 3 has now dropped, and one of the biggest features of this release is that it’s merged codebases with WordPress MU, the version used to run as many blogs as you like off of one install. Which sounds ideal for our purposes, except for a few problems.
Here’s what I would ideally like to do:
Given what I’ve described of our system here, can anyone tell me if my goal is feasible? Additionally, any tips and best practices you could recommend would be lovely. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide!
Tags: geekery
Anybody got a moment to doublecheck a problem for me?
If you have visited the Big Fish Games website before you may have noticed we have a feature called Tomorrow’s Game Today. We’ve had reports of the TGT vanishing for an hour on our Japanese site–and since as of 8am our time the TGT was supposed to show up, can anybody confirm whether you see it?
If you check our US site first and scroll down a bit, you should see a blue module with a yellow timer on its header on the left sidebar. This module contains the Tomorrow’s Game Today, and under it, today’s Daily Deal. Our US site is here.
Once you see what the module looks like, go to our JP site here and look for the same module in the same place. It should also have two games in it. If you don’t see the TGT, that’s the bug.
This module also appears on our New Releases page here. On that page the module is at the top of the right sidebar. Please check there too!
If you can repro the problem please drop a comment and let me know what browser you are using, including version number. Thanks in advance all!
ETA 9:25am: Thanks to everybody who’s looked so far! No need to look for the rest of today, since the 8am-9am Pacific time window is crucial. There will be another opportunity to check during that time frame tomorrow.
Hi, I'm Angela Korra'ti, a.k.a. Anna the Piper. I'm a geek and a writer, and this is annathepiper.org, my site for all the forms of my personal geekdom. Grab a chair and raise a jar, as we say in Great Big Sea fandom! And if you'd like to check out updates about my writing, please feel free to visit angelakorrati.com too.
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