Bad Apple

Four friends have experienced computer failure in the last fortnight and the reason that this blog hasn't been updated recently is because a once relied-upon brand has started to rot from the core:

At the start of the year I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro, after the PowerBook I'd been using for years started having kernel panics and threatening to die: I'd taken it to a friend for attention and reinstalled the OS, but in the end I daren't turn it off in case it wouldn't boot again and I had to resort to leaving it in sleep mode. The display had packed in some time before and would have been prohibitively expensive to replace, but I'd got used to running it with an external monitor until I could afford or was forced to upgrade.

The second-hand A1226 MacBookPro appeared to be in very good condition for a three or four year old model and importantly, came with a shedload of creative software (the software for the old PowerBook wouldn't run on the newer Intel Mac with Mac OS Lion). I'd bought a PowerMac from the same reseller thirteen years before which had served me well, also pre-installed with software, and although his prices were higher than those charged for reconditioned models I could buy elsewhere, installed with nothing more than the system software, it was worth it.

The transition to Mac OS Lion wasn't particularly advantageous as it doesn't support old USB audio hardware and various bits of trusted software were no longer available. Annoyingly, the Mail email software wouldn't work properly and couldn't recognise the outgoing mail server: Emails are received but can't be sent. Many handy features of the older OS are hidden or unavailable with Lion.

Peculiarly, the old PowerBook started behaving better and although I still daren't shut it down or risk restarting it unnecessarily, I continued to rely on it for months before getting into to the MacBook Pro.

Once upon a time, towards the end of the last century, Atari computers were arguably the best practical choice if you wanted to produce and play live electronic music on a modest budget, superceding the Alesis sequencer (which Orbital used to use eight of). When Apple computers became affordable, they proved as stable, reliable and long-lasting as their predecessors and had the added bonus of being ideal for photo and video manipulation too.

In the meantime, the internet had come along and Microsoft and PCs had taken over the home market, although they were still fairly useless for creative digital media manipulation, but slowly, once the soundcards were sorted out, it became possible to have a reliable and powerful setup that wasn't a Mac. Those entering the game on a budget were probably more likely to go for a PC, whereas those with years of good experience of Macs would upgrade to better models, or stick with existing and refurbished machines that carried on doing what they were supposed to do for years.

Then the worm got into the apple. Apple went off into the world of iPods, iPhones and iPads, started making computers in a similar way to PCs and in around 2007, so rumour has it, began using a different lead-free solder on the logic board, as a result of which the graphics chip is liable to become detached: This is what happened to mine and as I tried to boot it up, ten minutes after it had been working fine; despite a hopeful chime all it produced was the dreaded black screen of death.

Far from being a case of simply soldering it back on yourself, the solution that Apple offer is a replacement logic board for £390, which some believe is susceptible to the same problem. Some repairers offer to reflow or bake the chip back onto the board for half that price, although there's every chance that the same fault might reoccur after a few months, especially if the processor's busy and getting hot.

Some lucky people have managed to get Apple to replace the logic board for free, if the model is less than four years old: This was the first course of action recommended to me by the reseller I'd bought it from. After a painful and fruitless visit to my nearest 'genius bar', my model / logic board was deemed to be over four years old, despite trying to plead the case that being refurbished, the serial number on the case may not have related to the rest of the machine.

If that encounter was disappointing, the following phone call to the reseller was a kick in the teeth: Not only could he not offer a repaired or replacement logic board, but all he would pay for scrap value was £40. I stopped listening as he started to try to sell me another model for the same price of the original and tried to work out a way to reach through the phone to strangle him.

Thankfully, a friend took pity on me and offered a generous part-exchange, persuading me to buy an older refurbished A1211 model from him, which preceded the A1226 and doesn't have the graphics chip and solder issue. The hard drive from the faulty machine was easily swapped, giving me all the files and software back.

Much time and money, to return to where you were before. Built-in obsolescence?
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/technology/2012/06/does-apple-build-obsolescence

Intermittent glitch

Other people's computer problems are a little like other people's dreams. For the person who experiences them they can be frustrating, absorbing, difficult and time consuming to resolve, if not ultimately impossible, with the best option being to move on and look for the next one. People who want to hear about them are few and far between and some of those who don't glaze over or leave the room might attempt to make helpful suggestions but interpretations and solutions are varied, multiple and confusing.

Crash and burn

There's been a castastrophic failure in the computer room at Green Lung Towers, following the kernel panic back in September. Almost all of the creative software is now unusable and the browsing and email applications are hanging on by their fingertips to a computer which is itself teetering on the brink. Unfortunately, the series of musical sketches posted below will have to be put on hold until a replacement computer and software are found.

At this time of year the allotment's on ice, or rather, there's ice on the allotment, as the first frosts arrive and heavy rainfall waterlogs the predominantly clay soil. There's still plenty to harvest (kale, winter greens, leeks, parsnips) but now that the onion sets and garlic cloves are in the ground, nothing left to plant or sow for several months.

Just time for a small bonfire before the rain soaked everything, after a mild and dry autumn: Sunflower stalks release a useful amount of potash when burned but there's no point in burning everything in sight and incinerating or rendering homeless all the wee beasties.

Kernel Panic

The uninitiated might be forgiven for thinking that a kernel panic occurs when a squirrel forgets where it's put its nuts. Then again, perhaps it should be Colonel Panic, a rather jittery army officer.

Neither are in fact true. It turns out that what the Mac Powerbook has been suffering from is 'an action taken by an operating system upon detecting an internal fatal error from which it cannot safely recover.'

Bother.

Living on borrowed time ...

Flash Geek Talk

Couldn't get the BBC iPlayer to work today, after having to reinstall Mac OSX on my PowerBook, a shaggy dog story in itself, made all the more challenging by not having a working CD drive at the time.

Although some things are back to normal, I lost all my email addresses, despite backing up the Address Book, which now refuses to be imported into the new system. So if you haven't heard from me in a while, drop me an email so I can get your address back.

The physical installation of a new CD/DVD drive, with which to attempt to reset the unrecognised administrator password with a system disk, having tried and failed to do this by entering commands in the terminal window on startup, appears to have resulted in a mishap on the logic or motherboard, causing the Level 3 Cache to fail: Only one of the two 512MB memory cards are now recognised, which at first I thought just meant that one had come loose during the operation, but having swapped them both around, it's evident that the problem's deeper. I bore you with all this, because for a while, I wondered if this was why I couldn't watch telly on my iPlayer.

After some poking around I found that the minimum version of the Flash plugin required for the iPlayer is 9.0.115 and I only had 9.0.46. (There are a few handy sites that can tell you what version you're using, like this one at Adobe)

Except of course there are always weird exceptions and somehow, I got some of the large screen version of the iPlayer working in 9.0.46, which made me erroneously think for a while that it was iPlayer's fault, not mine.

It was tempting to follow the links and try to install the latest version 10.2, which is what Channel 4/4OD requires now (even though last week, like the iPlayer it worked fine with 9.0.46 or whatever I had installed then) but on closer inspection, that doesn't work on older PPC Macs. Instead, you have to download a whole collection of old versions from Adobe and select and install the relevant one, but before you install a new version of Flash it's recommended that you uninstall the old version, which requires an uninstaller that you have to download from Adobe too.

Half a dozen restarts and a few hours later, most of the iPlayer functionality is back, but along with the other pre-Intel Mac users out there, I'm now excluded from watching 4OD.

Synth Britannia

I remember watching Tubeway Army on Top Of The Pops in 1979 and telling my friend that we were watching the future of music. He disagreed, being more in awe of Rush, Boston and Lynyrd Skynyrd, though quite how they related to growing up in Croydon I couldn't work out.

Meanwhile, up in Sheffield, the Human League and to a lesser extent Cabaret Voltaire, were wondering who this upstart Gary Numan was and how come he was selling loads more records than they were. The rock press hated him even more - it was all very well for Kraftwerk, as a bunch of Germans, to play like crisp, sterile machines, but it wasn't really music was it? After all, as Andy McCluskey from OMD was tired of being told, anyone could make music with machines couldn't they? They just played by themselves, didn't they?

If they did, nobody told Vince Clarke, who would gladly have spent 24 hrs a day working in the studio if he could have. "Like a kid in a sweetshop," he told us on last night's magnificent Synth Britannia on BBC Four, which took us from Kraftwerk and Daniel Miller, founder of Mute Records, who recorded "Warm Leatherette" as The Normal in 1978, up to New Order's "Blue Monday" (1983) and Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder's "Together in Electric Dreams" in 1984. Thankfully, we only got a few seconds of Howard Jones and The Thompson Twins, by which time the synth had gone well and truly mainstream and a bit naff.

Arguably, we'd have to wait for 808 State later in the decade, to reignite the electronic fire, although as a producer, Trevor Horn was responsible for setting a few benchmarks. Somewhere in the house, I've got a nice letter from Richard Norris, who with Dave Ball of Soft Cell, played together in The Grid and invited us - Earth Beat Synphonic - to play a gig with 808 State, which never happened.

That's quite enough name dropping.

Old Skool

So, after much pfaffing around with other music software, such as Garage Band and Ableton Live, I've reverted to using old MIDI Cubase software from the last century, versions of which I've been using since 1991, running on a 1997 Powerbook 3400c that had a friend of my daughter's in fits of giggles, as she'd never seen such an antique piece of functioning technology. I didn't introduce her to 25 year old Roland.

It brings the Akai S2000, Novation Supernova and aforementioned Roland out of retirement too, leaving plugins out of the mix until the mastering stage.



Not forgetting the old Joanna too, which sometimes gets forsaken for all the knob twiddling of digital audio.

Amphibian

I was going to blog about accidentally deleting some important preference files and losing my internet connection, email, trackpad and whole set up, which required half the night to rectify, but then I thought I'd post a photo of this frog, who hopped out of the strawberry bed this morning, instead.

Przeczytać Podręcznik

I've been reading my friend Yaro's blog with the aid of an online translator, which sometimes gives it quite a surreal and unpenetrable twist. The last one was about reading manuals, which, clever chap that he is, he's able to do in English. He's well familiar with the acronym RTFM (Read The Fecking Manual) which doesn't seem to translate into Polish.

I'm not very good at reading manuals myself, although I do often refer to them. I remember photocopying 100 pages of a manual for Cubase for my Atari for £10 and taking them to Poland 18 years ago. I still find pages of that manual floating around today.

Recently I've been getting into Ableton Live, but I haven't glimpsed a manual yet. Instead, the marvels of YouTube provide a load of professional and amateur video tutorials, which help me bumble around.



Despite sticking to the manual / recipe, this banana cake didn't quite turn out right first time and was uncooked in the middle although looking fine from the outside. Trouble is, I don't have the manual for the oven and without it, I don't know how much the fan assistance contributes to overall cooking time, or whether cooking time stays the same and the temperature should be reduced. A handy YouTube video about Phillips ovens would help - or more cake practice.

Technobabel

For once eBay wasn't the cheapest option when deciding what external hard drive to get. Maplin's are selling a 160 GB Trekstor for £34.99 so I trekked to the store (geddit) by bicycle, to get one - not before ringing up first to make sure they had some in stock and I wasn't going to waste a visit in sub zero temperature.

My PowerBook's only USB 1.1 and this is USB 2.0 so it's taking its time to have a dump. Still, it'll be good to have lots of space again and not have to compromise. I know I should only use it as a backup really, but I'm not going to go out and buy another one. I've already bought a different one for my daughter, which unbeknown to me, required two USB ports - hence I had to buy one of these ...



... a Pluscom 4 Port USB (though I actually got 2) on eBay for £3.50 each including postage, which a frozen postman brought this morning and as I write, doesn't seem to be working. It's supposed to be Mac OS X and USB 1.1 compatible and yet ? I'm hoping the other one will work on my daughter's old PC laptop, in combination with her external drive.

(UPDATE: Oh no ! This is turning into one of those lengthy, frustrating climbs up the learning curve - as I realise that USB 1.1 is hopelessly inadequate for both of us and I need to get a couple of USB 2.0 PCI Cardbuses, one for a Mac, one for a PC, both compatible with their respective machines and operating systems and both independently powered. There are cheaper unpowered ones around which still wouldn't power more than one USB device at a time. In the meantime, backing up stuff is painfully, ridiculously slow and I'm limited to one USB device at a time. There is another USB 1.1 port or this machine, but it's never worked. It has Firewire, which is capable of very zippy transfer rates, but the external hard drive doesn't. I should have known all this before I bought things.)

My Mum's been trying to get the hang of her USB radio / mp3 player, which is definitely working, but needs taming. My Dad, who was carrying radio valves around Normandy in 1944, has just started to take an interest in uploading digital photos to my Mum's laptop and editing them with free software.

Yet lots of people of my generation and older, some younger, still don't have a computer, or don't like them or know or want to learn anything about the basics, or don't see the advantage of the internet. My daughter's primary school was like that and I fully approved - there was plenty of time for that at home, or later on. As I've demonstrated, even for a part time geek like me it's a real struggle to keep up with technological progress, though most of the headaches occur because I can't afford to buy a new computer every couple of years - which is what you're expected to do and avoids problems with obsolete peripherals, while introducing new ones with untested bugs and gremlins in new software and hardware.

Perhaps the CD industry should be very grateful to those who, for whatever reason, don't really 'do' computers, for they are possibly the only ones left buying them, as everyone decamps to mp3 land. I wonder how long they'll stay around. I have about five CD players / burners in varying states of repair, most of which are obsolete and should be thrown 'out' / recycled somehow - along with a dead PowerMac and another very old one.

Lest I start to go on like Lord Stephen Fry (man can he rant about technology !! - and afford it all).

Shutdown.

Woodshedding

All those buttons, sliders and blinking lights ! Some days my poor brain gets confused.

Like the day last month, when, eager to use my new USB audio/MIDI interface, I spent a couple of hours recording my ode to man-of-the-moment, Robert Peston.

It turns out, that I hadn't recorded my dulcit vocal tones via the new box, but through the computer's built in microphone. I thought that the rather poor quality was due to my haste and low spec microphone, but in fact, to my shame, I hadn't downloaded and installed the driver !

Those of you, like me, who have spent a considerable time in darkened rooms fiddling with knobs, may either scoff or have some sympathy. Those who haven't, and the luddites, may also sympathise, not know what I'm on about, or tell me that I've only myself to blame.

Anyway - that learning curve scaled, on with the woodshedding....

Edirol UA-20

Snapped up one of these at the last minute on eBay for £38 today, to stumble forward in the musical technological race and confuse my studio set up further / increase possibilities. (Delete as appropriate in one month)

Sad Mac : (

Unbelievable ! In the same week that the studio amp dies and there's a lengthy powercut, the screen on the Powermac 5500 dies.

I know it's had 8 years of service - and was a few years old when I bought it second hand for £600 - but I was starting to believe it would live forever. The screen's been flickering on start up for a couple of years or more and as soon as that started happening, I got prepared for it to die. However, slowly I got used to the occasional flicker, when it would sometimes warp back to front for a few seconds, which was quite spectacular !

This evening, I was resurrecting the latest track, editing sounds in the sampler, when the screen went to sleep. Foolishly, I immediately woke it up, which it didn't like at all : It blinked and then went black, dragging all the software and data with it into a deep, probably eternal slumber.

Just as well I've got the Powerbook 3400 for immediate SCSI and MIDI needs, though even the transition to that will take getting used to. Don't have a USB scanner or MIDI/audio interface for this Mac or the PC - but the time is fast approaching.

Blown Amp

Kenwood amplifier has stopped working : ( Don't think it was being overloaded. Strange thing was, after it stopped working a display light was still lit, albeit not showing what it should have, but when I turned it off and turned it back on half an hour later, there was no display light.

There was a smell of burning bakelite, or similar. I checked the fuse in the plug and googled for some help. After a while, I dug out a spare amp and got on with some work. Hope I can repair it, especially if it turns out to be something fairly simple, like an internal fuse, but as it's around ten years old it might be difficult to get spares.

Reasonably good replacements are fairly cheap - but I'd like to avoid being a consumer.

What's more, it belonged to a good friend and has sentimental value.