Regensblog

We bought a cheapo laptop a couple years ago that has been…well…pretty good to us, I guess. We mostly use it around the house — it’s particularly handy in our test kitchen, given how many recipes we find online, and having our conversion tables hosted there, etc. Also, that’s the computer we take with us when traveling.

So anyway, over the last year or so, it’s gotten noticeably slower, and I had been hard-pressed to figure out why. We don’t make it work very hard:

• There’s rarely more than one person logged into it at a time.
• Although we could, there are no web or database servers running on it.
• I do a little light-weight photo editing via the GIMP from time to time
• We mostly use to connect to the web via WLAN, for the purpose of
  • general surfing
  • checking our mail
  • uploading pictures to flickr
  • plain text editing and uploading of web page files (like when I’m tinkering with the blog)

Nothing too taxing. This is a laptop running Kubuntu, a Linux distribution, which by reputation is great for older (cheaper!) hardware. So I was flummoxed by symptoms of dreadful slow-downs in performance after about 20-30 minutes of having the machine on. I could tell when it was going to happen because it would get pretty hot near the exhaust ports, and I could just hear the fan make a certain high-pitched noise at the top of my hearing range — sort of like how I can tell when the TV is on but muted without looking at it. When it starts making that sound, everything grinds to a halt.

I thought it was related to Firefox (which had/has a reputation for being a memory hog) and noticed that the slow-downs seem to come quicker when using Gmail — especially after leaving that page open for a long time. Using our Gmail accounts via IMAP/Thunderbird instead of through http://mail.google.com seemed like it helped, but didn’t completely relieve the symptoms. I’d even beefed up the RAM awhile ago and more recently taken the back off of the laptop to look for obvious problems or dust I could clean out…no dice.

So, I was just about to junk it and purchase a newer cheapo laptop from the little second-hand computer store in the Pustet Passage, next to the Ex-Faßl Döner shop. I armed myself with about 500 Euros (planning to spend between 350 and 450) I walked into the tiny shop early Saturday morning and described the problems I was having to Stash Komputerski (he seemed Eastern European). His first guess:

“Sie sind Raucher, oder?” Taken a bit aback, I told him no, we don’t smoke. Then he put his nose right up against the lappy’s exhaust port and took a big sniff.

“Hmm, tatsächlich.” (As if my word wasn’t good enough.)

“Prozessor? Celeron, 1.5GHz.

“Schauen wir mal…” So we fired it up and he whipped out a little digital keychain thermometer — 35°C right off the bat.

“30 Minuten. Das wird 30 Euro kosten. Gehen Sie einen Kaffee trinken.” I shrugged and headed home (we live around the corner; Sarah’s coffee’s the best.). When I came back exactly thirty minutes later, he looked up as I walked in and shouted “Fertig!”. He popped up from around his tiny workbench and whipped out his iPhone. I wasn’t really impressed; I’ve seen those before, and why was he encroaching on my personal space? I was sure I smelled bad, and he looked like he did too.

Then I clued in. He was showing me pictures he took of the work he did during those thirty minutes (I’ll post them here if he emails them to me — he seemed reluctant). He applied a heat paste and pulled a metric buttload of dust and hair out of the nooks and crannies of the heat sink, none of which was visible to me upon my cursory inspection. I asked why there was no heat paste on the processor to begin with and he told me Siemens Fujitsu expected me to throw that computer away after a few years, so they didn’t bother with that stuff. He also told me that the reason he asked whether we smoke was that tar gums up the heat sinks, reducing their effectiveness. We fired up the computer again and the thermometer showed 28° — a marked improvement.

I took it home, excited at the prospects of using that lappy for longer than a few minutes at a time, but was disappointed to find that Firefox was still pretty sluggish — with or without Gmail open. Bummer. Last ditch effort: complete, fresh, re-install. You should only have to do with that Windows, right? Apparently not, because it seems to working like a champ now. A few hurdles with the re-install:

• The proprietary drivers for the Broadcom 43xx series of WLAN chips still have to be downloaded separately (albeit more easily than before), so you’ll need a cable connection to get that working if your machine has that brand of WLAN chip.
• The X server couldn’t start for some weirdo reason. I remember how much trouble I had with that, getting it to work originally…there were many hours of tweaking involved (I suspect it has something to do with the lappy’s 1200×800 resolution). Fortunately I’d made a backup of my xorg.conf file as the absolute last thing before staring the reinstall and could fall back to that.

The lessons here:

1. Take it in before giving up hope. There may be something Stash can see that you can’t.
2. You might have to reinstall, even if that’s something only Windows users are supposed to have to do.
3. If you do have to reinstall, think about the hours you invested in tweaks (your network settings, your video settings, etc.) and back those files up for safekeeping!

So sue me.

I’m so begeistert of this Mac. I managed to rescue our iTunes music off of our dead Windows machine. I bought a cheapo webcam which works with Skype (thanks Tammy, Matthias, and Uncle Bernie for helping me test it) after installing a plug-in called macam.

The gripes: that camera together with macam and iChat don’t all play nice together. But it works with Skype, and I’d rather pay 15€ at a local Saturn store than 80€ at the German Apple online store for a Logitech QuickCam thingie.

That might be the only gripe, surprisingly. Or not?

For Christmas and our birthdays, Sarah and I got ourselves a cute little Mac mini. As previously noted, our main Windows machine recently refused to start (I suspect power supply failure), and even trying Cristi’s approach to trick the BIOS didn’t work.

So, really, we were forced into this.

It sure is easy on the eyes — all aspects of this computer scream “nice design!” at me. Assimilating myself mac-wise is going pretty smoothly. Here’s what I’ve learned along the way:

• I was about to gent bent out of shape due to firing it up and finding OS X Tiger installed — didn’t notice the extra OS X Leopard DVD in the package, which I appreciated.
• Keyboard things are a little weird when you’re coming from Windows hardware (that’s what the mini is — just the case and some components and an operating system. You’re on your own for keyboard and mouse and a monitor). I’ve learned pretty quickly how to do these characters on my German keyboard aimed at the Windows market:
  • ~ (Alt Gr +n, then a deadkey space) - need that all the time in a unix derivative, don’t we?
  • | (Alt Gr + 7)
  • ^ (thankfully, just the caret key followed by a deadkey space)
  • the control key (strng on a German keyboard) doesn’t work like I expect it to — but the superfluous Windows does behaves like the control key
  • emacs keystrokes for cursor positioning seems to work using the real control keys in a lot of applications (^A to take you to the beginning of a line, ^E to take you to the end). Learning those keystrokes back in the day for PINE on vela.acs.oakland.edu seems to have paid off (of course, some of them work in vim too).
  • [ and ] are on the 5 and 6 keys when used with Alt Gr
  • { and } are misleadingly on the 7 and 8 keys when used with Alt Gr — the keyboard has labels that indicate those characters should be on the 7 and 0 keys
  • € and µ (does anyone ever really use that outside of The Even Dorkier, out there measuring µFarads or masking µProcessors? I mean, c’mon).
  • I still need to find some way to get used to not having keyboard commands for selecting or jumping to/past whole words at a time, or find a way to actually do it under Mac OS X. School me?
• OS X Tiger was frustrating as I tried to set up the wireless network here in the apartment. The simple setup wizard just wasn’t cutting it. I had to go into the network diagnostics wizard and specify a 40-bit ASCII or hex key for it to work. Not sure if that’s related to my network or the OS, but after erasing and installing OS X Leopard from scratch this evening, the simple setup under *Leopard* worked just fine.
• I have *got* to remember to look for application menus always way up at the top of the screen, and not at the top of the application window. In desperation, I right-click, hoping to be able to unhide some critical menu item, like “File” or “Edit.” That usually doesn’t help me much. That is killing me at the moment. For the truly dorky, I’m sure this clearly explains to why I picked KDE over Gnome on Linux.

You might think I’m all jazzed up about this new computer, staying up late and whatnot. Well, it is late, and I am jazzed up, but I think it’s really the jet lag that’s done it to me. At least the only thing on the docket for tomorrow is cleaning up my desk and making some stuffed peppers using the sauce from this recipe. That’s OK. By the way: tomorrow’s the last day of the Christmas market on Neupfarrplatz. Here’s what we did today for lunch:

Ugh. Our desktop PC running windows won’t turn on. I turned it off normally last night, and this morning, it just won’t come on. I suspect a blown fuse or something in the power supply. I really don’t want to have to deal with that loud Aldi-branded hunk. But I *do* really want to make further use of at least some of its components; not the least of which are its twin 250GB SATA hard disks. I found a nifty-looking housing for taking two SATA drives and making them into one big or two separate external USB drives.

If it weren’t for our iTunes investments over the past few years, I would probably have finally been able to completely forgo licensed operating systems (except at work, where I don’t have that option). We’ve already got a Linux-based laptop and desktop here (the desktop box serves as a…uh, server). But iTunes, our dealer of habit-forming audio narcotics, doesn’t offer to hawk its wares to those would turn their noses up at paying for software (note well: I’m not advocating piracy!).

So, I’m thinking really hard about how to proceed here. The cheapest way to go (especially if that hunk is still under warranty) is to get the PC fixed. But it’s big and clunky and especially loud. Hate that. Also hate all the dust its multiple fans collect (uh, perhaps that had something to do with its untimely demise?). I can’t just build a new computer, cannibalizing the old one, and downloading an open source OS like Linux or one of the BSDs and expect it to play the music we bought through iTunes. So we’re still going to have to rely on Windows or Mac OS X (row row, row!)…at least until I slowly and painfully record each track purchased from iTunes into Audacity and re-code it back into plain-old-MP3 or some other non-DRM’d format. And that’s not going to happen any time soon.

Any opinions out there on the Mac Mini, particularly as a home desktop system in use mostly for multi-media applications (iTunes, Skype, general surfiness)? I’m looking at one for 700€. And then getting far away from iTunes.