It is a somewhat strange feeling to have recently replaced three of the everyday objects I interact with frequently: the water bottle/coffee mug I use for rowing practices, the laptop, and the pannier I transport it in.

I don't think I'm entirely finished with the predecessor to this laptop, nor with the predecessor to this new pannier. The new pannier, manufactured by a company called Po Campo, is designed to be a convertible pannier/backpack. I think I mentioned previously that I've been looking, on and off, for new panniers for a little while now. I have gotten so much use out of the 25-year-old Overland Equipment pair, and in general I like how they are designed, but at this point they are so very old and tired and it would take an unknown amount of time and expense to attempt to rehab them.

The Arkel shopper-pannier is now also probably about 10 years old or so, and also showing some wear-and-tear, and the whole system of keeping the 10+-year-old North Face backpack inside of it isn't doing a whole lot for me, from an organizational standpoint, anymore. In Texas and California I'd often pull out the backpack and fill up the shopper with shopping items, but out here I don't tend to swing by stores in the same fashion. Along with that, some of the zippers on the North Face backpack failed some time ago. Once again the backpack is an item that could potentially be repaired. If I still lived in California I would be tempted to bring these things to Narain's, but I don't know of any equivalent stores in this area and I suspect that even at Narain's they would look at everything, look at me, and just tell me to get replacements.

So I don't entirely know what I'll do with the worn-out items yet. I hate to send them to a landfill.

So far the new pannier has been pretty great. The magnetic rack buckle system is more cumbersome than the Arkel cam-lock system, but it is nice to be able to wear the pannier as a backpack, and its pockets are so nice and easy to put stuff in and keep organized. And it just looks good. I haven't yet used the integrated pannier cover, so it remains to be seen just how protective it is - a fairly important test.

Yesterday I was able to get started on the project of moving files over from Beryl, the Ubuntu-machine, to this new laptop, which I've named Jade. This is an interesting reunification of personal and professional files; when I got Beryl, I split off all of my work-related files onto the work desktop, keeping personal and rowing club files on Beryl. My conclusion from that experiment is that it is SO much more convenient and easier on my brain to just have everything in one place. I am not entirely finished with file migration, but I'm already starting to feel more like my head is all in one place, which is very helpful for being able to think straighter and get back to tackling academic work.

Now I just need those darned dongle adapters to show up, and then maybe I can take a break from the 'stuff and things' acquisition show.

So twoeleven asked a great question with regards to the work computer bait-and-switch: based on the storage differences, could I maybe just swap my old hard drive into the new computer?

I believe if I wanted to do so, I'd probably have to get someone from our IT department involved. But I got curious about what it would take, so I trotted over to iFixit for a quick minute. And the answer is: glue. These iMacs are glued together. I had to deal with Fruit Company glue when I replaced Amber's battery. It is not a pleasant experience. To some extent, I understand why they've gone with glue. However. This tells you so, so much about their broader manufacturing philosophy. They care not about anyone's interest in repairs or upgrades.

But I mean, maybe I should ask our IT department anyway, just to drive home the point that it's a pretty obnoxious thing to "upgrade" someone to a machine with that much less storage. Migrating is already annoying enough, without having to comb through files at the same time.

Most likely a lot of this has to do with people being enamoured with the various flavors of "cloud" storage. I need to put another of the "There Is No Cloud" stickers on the new incoming laptop.

So. Recording lecture videos from home on the Ubuntu-machine today because classes were canceled. When using Fruit Computers, I wound up paying for Movavi as my video editor, and got the Movavi screen recording software as well, which collectively allowed me to record a patch of my desk with a piece of paper on it that I could write on, my lecture slides, and a wee thumbnail video of myself (because studies show it's easier to follow along if there's a person in frame).

When getting the Ubuntu-machine set up, I found a forum that suggested vokoscreen for recording my computer screen. One can use cheese to fire up one's webcam that one has pointed at the desk, but to my dismay today I discovered that when you press 'record' in vokoscreen it causes cheese to freeze. It also looks like guvcview will only allow one to produce a thumbnail from a built-in webcam, not a thumbnail from a plugged-in one, so that didn't help.

Eventually after a bunch of casting about, I discovered that there's vokoscreenNG, the next-generation version of vokoscreen, which mercifully does NOT cause one's cheese to freeze. Whew.

But then, what about the video editing step? S had recommended avidemux, but when I last looked I'd settled on trying OpenShot.

I eventually got OpenShot to work well enough for now, but ugh. Movavi has better built-in sound-editing capabilities, as best I can tell.

At this stage I feel like it would be helpful to go through some video tutorials on the basics for using Gimp, Inkscape, and OpenShot. Trying to learn how to use all these new tools while having certain looming deadlines has been stressful.

And don't even get me started on .rtf files right now. I have a lot of them from my Fruit Company days, now that I've learned more about the format I'm mad about them, and I want a piece of software that's in-between Notepad and LibreOffice but not sold by Microsoft.

Now that the case has arrived, I have learned that the 2012 MacBook Pro has an mSATA SSD, not an M.2 SSD, which was developed later.

So I won't be able to access its hard drive until I get the correct kind of case in, which is going to take several more days and another $20.

Last night I caused myself all kinds of headaches by trying to learn how to copy over files onto a Linux machine from a Time Machine backup. I had kind of known that Fruit Company played clever tricks with Time Machine, but hadn't suffered the consequences until now because I've always just gone from one Mac to another.

I'm sorta proud of how far I made it by using a script someone developed for this purpose, except that in my first attempt I made the mistake of trying to copy over the ENTIRE backup drive, and burned an hour of the early evening, making me anxious and tired. My second attempt partially worked, until I hit some kind of error.

It will probably be faster to throw stuff onto a USB drive via the work computer, then stick that into the Ubuntu-Machine.

There's a geographic struggle here. The Time Machine Backup and work computer are both at work. I don't really want to also leave the Ubuntu-Machine at work overnight to run anything that might take a long time. So then I'm somewhat stuck at work, not actually feeling like I'm getting anything done while just trying to rearrange files on the Titanic.

I was hoping to get class syllabi and course schedules finalized yesterday, and to get my research students set up for their Independent Study credits, but none of that happened.

Thursday morning rowing practice got switched to this morning because weather, but I couldn't get myself to go because of carryover effects from computer stress, which just compounds stress further. My shoulders are very unhappy right now.

I'm at home for the morning because I got word that Frodo is ready to be picked up, but the bike shop doesn't open until noon. Typing this on S's Mac Mini, which is running OS 10.6. I don't remember what OS my previous generation MacBook has, and its battery is currently dead with the charger at work, but of course now I'm curious.

It's amazing how much a computer death can mess up my sense of organization. I had a couple key braindump text files on the dead machine, and now I'm in one of those spaces of, "Do I try and work on my course schedule spreadsheet file using the Oogley's Cloud Spreadsheet doohickey, or just wait until I get to the office?" The Mac Mini doesn't contain any Windows software, and is outdated enough that I'm having issues accessing certain websites on it, including the Chrome Remote Desktop thingy.

It will be fine in the long run. It's just anxiety-producing in the short term as I feel the precious few days between now and the start of the semester slipping away.

At least the Mac Mini lets me type on a keyboard. I brought the work iPad home last night and that just confirmed that using it is like using an oversize smart-o-phone and I hate tappity tapping on glass screens. As a friend commented long ago, towards the beginning of the tablet computer era, tablets are designed as consumer devices, not creator/producer devices. Yes, one can eventually set them up for creator/producer functions, but that's a whole 'nother process and set of expenses.

Anyway, grump grump. This, too, shall pass.

It looks like as of this morning, my 10-year-old MacBook may have just gone to sleep, never to wake up again.

(I mean, I'll keep trying, but so far I can't get to the boot screen, yikes).

It's probably time to just suck it up and shop for a new computer. Before the new semester starts. It could just be that this one is physically wearing out again, especially given exposure to cold temperatures this week, plus the vibrations of bike commuting. From what I understand, many Apple parts aren't soldered together very well to begin with. And in this day and age, 10 years is a long lifespan for a computer.



I've been in the Abyss for a while now.

I bought Adobe CS5 about a year before they switched over to the no-disk annual license renewal business model. That's probably the biggest thing holding me back.

I maybe like Keynote too much.

But I should probably shop for a PC this time around.

I hate computer shopping.

Bleah.

Sometimes I hate Learning Management Systems. cough cough, Artist Painting Surface, ahem. Not that Chalk-Writing Surface was all that much better.

I have this set of writing and statistics resource files that I'll be using for my Animal Physiology course this spring, but after a while I really don't want to have to use the LMS's course export/import structure, nor do I want to add my materials to their Digital Learning Commons, as that reeks too much of, Yeah, just give us all your hard work, for free! You know, for exposure. Also, clickety-clickety-click. Too much mouse-clicking and futzing.

So. Time to dust off my html skills and update the ol' index.html over at http://www.acromyrmex.net .

I know my website is extremely old-fashioned and not even mobile-friendly (gasp!). But on the other hand, it's stable, has informative content, and it's my sandbox.

http://www.acromyrmex.net/TeachingWritingStats.html

So, for a goodly bit of time, I've been noticing some problems with this Samsung Galaxy S4 that I acquired towards the end of January - not just the problem of diddling around on the device excessively, either. Often, when I would plug it into my computer, it wouldn't register with the Android File Transfer software, or was flaky and required lots of plugging and unplugging, and eventually this devolved into a situation where the phone would tell me all kinds of interesting tales about being plugged into a dock whenever I tried to plug it into a charger to charge. Kind of problematic. Also, it wouldn't charge properly. For a little while, I could fool it into charging by turning it off, but last night when I tried to charge it, it appears I drained the battery instead, despite the appearance of the little charging icon.

Brief googling around the internet suggested that many of these phones have hardware problems with the USB connection failing, so as a preventative measure I ordered a used replacement USB board off of iFixit (they didn't have any brand-new ones available). While things might be a bit on the expensive side on that website, I see good reasons to help keep the site alive. I did not grow up taking apart computer bits and reassembling them, so their step-by-step guides are a huge comfort, and they've allowed me to do a whole bunch of basic computer repairs in recent times (thinking back to the previous laptop, where I had to replace the wifi card, for instance).

With the replacement USB board in place, things are looking better now, but I'm not holding my breath because it's a used USB board.

It sucks that any "convenience" associated with lumping various computing functionalities together (phone, GPS device, camera) is so easily offset by device failure. I wonder if there's a Panasonic Toughbook analogue in the smartphone universe.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Samsung+Galaxy+S4+USB+Board+Replacement/16542

My computer is on the fritz. Thankfully, it appears to be a relatively minor problem (fan that's part of the cooling system is defective in some way). Also thankfully, I decided to go with a 3-year "protection plan," so the machine's still under warranty for the defective part. However, it's going to be mid-day on Monday before I'll have my computer back, so I'll be AFK until then. It might actually be a nice break.

I had so much work to do on my compy this weekend, but instead, I guess I'll have to focus on the 649,400,305 other items on my to-do list.

My second group of students gave their presentations today. Somehow they had a rougher time than my other lab, perhaps because it's the end of the week and so it's hard to stay focused. A lot of them tried to use science to PROVE things, which I find impressive and depressing because one cannot actually prove anything using the scientific method. But one way or another, they have gotten through the presentations and can now go back to the usual, less intense methods of demonstrating what they have learned.

Many of you know about the tragic demise of my former computer, Roger2. It died last spring, right as I was in the middle of writing my first manuscript ever, and thus I was computer-less for approximately a month, before I rearranged my finances and purchased Sylvester, an Apple PowerBook.

At the time that Roger2 died, I received a lot of help from the IT guys in my department. Roger2's hard drive was perfectly okay, so the techies hooked it up to a device to rescue all of the files that I needed. The drive had about 11 GB of memory, so all of the necessary documents fit onto two DVD's. It's kind of humbling to see hours and hours of work reduced to such a small size, but there you have it. Nowadays there are lots of MP3 players that have a larger capacity than Roger2.

Anyway, I have recently been trying to decide which reference software to use on my new computer; I have hundreds and hundreds of papers and must rely on some sort of system to keep them organized. Roger2 had EndNote and about 350 references, and I am finally settling with EndNote (for better or for worse) for Sylvester. But I discovered not long ago that my EndNote library from Roger2 was not on one of the DVDs. This represents many hours of typing, so I had to briefly revive Roger2's hard drive today.

It was an odd event, like a seance or something of the sort. I was reminded of all of Roger2's quirks--Windows98, the bouncing sheep screensaver, the lack of USB compatability, and the security of having an operating system that was archaic enough to not be targeted by worms and viruses.

I bought Roger2 on eBay when I was a junior in college--it was my first internet-capable computer. The month between computers was extremely difficult and made me so aware of how much of my line of work (and my entertainment) is dependent on my computer. I can hardly imagine what it would be like to go back to having a shared computer. What a crazy world.