Cracked palm rest on Macbook Core2Duo

Back in April my Macbook developed a problem with its screen, requiring a visit to the Genius Bar to have it repaired.

Yesterday I discovered a crack in the palm rest of my Macbook. It seems to have happened where the lid presses against the palm rest. It also seems I’m not the only person to have this problem, as this forum post shows.

I’m off again to Meadowhall again then next weekend to take my Macbook off to the Genius Bar again. Fortunately my Mac is still in warranty. I’m a bit worried about the warranty running out in January and something else breaking. Problem is AppleCare costs £199 for a Macbook, which is quite expensive. I’ve been bitten with extended warranties before on an old laptop.

It’s pretty foggy out there. I’ve just been ‘over the border’ (between Yorkshire and Lancashire) along the M62 to visit Steve to sort out some things we’re doing. The weather wasn’t so bad when I left, just the usual drizzle and rain, but over the tops it’s a near whiteout. Coming back in the dark was a slow and difficult affair, playing the game of ’spot the red lights’ and avoiding the trucks.

Steve’s local pub has wifi, and also a rather poorly chosen password on the router. We did the slightly poncy thing of installing Visual Studio on my Macbook in VirtualBox while eating our tea.

Printed out the example Space Invaders clone, scribbled all over it to make sense of it. Turns out the old method of learning how to program still works pretty well. I guess I’m a visual learner since the simple act of printing the code onto sheets of paper so I could draw on them caused the code to make sense. I sat on my settee and by cross-referencing the code to the Javadocs was able to work out the boilerplate code from the actual game logic.

I also found the possibly dead, but handy Pixen pixel art package for my Mac.

I’m experimenting with some woolly psychobabble ideas too. My PC is in my office and I do work on it. The work is quite interesting and motivating. I also have my Macbook which I could do work on, if I bought the VMWare Fusion key that I need. My Mac has Eclipse installed though, and the SlickSet stuff all set up. It’s turning into a portable devkit quite nicely, and is currently being my “fun” coding environment.

Sure, I could sit at my PC with its twin 19″ monitors, a mouse and a clacky IBM Model M keyboard and run Eclipse. But my Mac lets me sit in my bedroom and code, or do it downstairs in front of the telly. This portability lets me code when I want to, where I want to. Personal coding is supposed to be fun and amusing, rather than something rigid that you’re paid to do. So anything that makes it more fun is going to help with motivation.

I’ll install Eclipse on my PC at some point, just to check the code runs OK in Windows and Linux. I’ll also commandeer Amy’s PPC iBook to see what it’s like on that too She doesn’t know this yet though

On Friday I ordered a Gelaskin from UrbanRetro. What is a Gelaskin you’re probably thinking? Well, to put it bluntly it’s a giant sticker that is applied to the back of a laptop’s screen. They’re supposedly to protect it from scratches and damage, but their main purpose is to make your laptop look really really cool

They’re fairly pain free to stick on since the glue on the back is scored with lots of little lines allowing trapped air to escape. The glue doesn’t leave any residue when peeled off should you want to remove your Gelaskin (which would be an absurd thing to do).

When sticking mine on I had to peel the Gelaskin off a few times before it looked straight and wasn’t crinkled in the middle. My advice is to gently stick one edge on, peel off the backing and carefully smooth it over the rest of the lid. Don’t fret if it all goes wrong and the thing needs taking off, just gently start pulling and try to avoid touching the sticky side or letting it stick to itself. The vinyl is a bit stretchy so apply even force over an entire edge rather than just a corner or it might stretch out of shape.

They make them for iPods and normal laptops too, so go buy one

Tired of pushing my finger across the trackpad on my Mac laptop I bought a mouse yesterday. It’s a Genius Traveler 525 Laser Mouse. The main feature that made me buy it was the £12.99 price tag and its insanely high 1600dpi resolution - supposedly caused by the laser in the mouse. If there is a laser it’s not a visible light laser since I can’t see anything out the bottom.

The mouse is quite good really. There is a “4D” scroll area on the top that senses the direction my finger is moving, allowing documents to be scrolled horizontally and vertically. There are two special buttons on the top of the mouse that switch applications and do something Internet Explorer specific.

Genius, makers of the Laser Mouse have evidently seen an Apple Mighty Mouse. The top of the Laser Mouse has no left or right buttons. Instead the whole shell tilts either left or right depending on which mouse button is desired. This means you can either click with a finger, as usual, or tilt your entire hand, or use any finger that’s on the correct side.

The mouse isn’t very large, and the cable is quite long and thin, and the blue light on the 4D touch pad is somewhat distracting. However, for £12.99 I can’t really complain.

My Macbook is back from being repaired in the Apple Store. The LVDS cable has been replaced and the screen doesn’t do any random pixel errors any more. When I booted it in the Apple Store the screen had a large sticky line across it which looked like they’d stuck a label or something to it. The man behind the counter gave it a clean, but I hope he doesn’t use glasses from the amount of smear left on it.

Me and Amy then wandered around the Meadowhall Centre for a while looking at random stuff. I needed to get my hair cut so went into one place, and promptly walked out when they said “Our haircuts start at £29…”. £29 to get my hair cut? What planet do you think I come from? I went for a £16 SuperCuts job instead, it took 45 minutes of waiting before I could be processed, and I am unsure about just how much hair they have chopped off. Still, it was cheap.

The parking in Meadowhall was awful. Only livened up by two people trying to reverse into the same space at the same time, and by one moron blinding us with the lights on his giant 4×4… who as we passed a few minutes later had forgotten to turn his twin portable sun-lights off. Hopefully he’s stuck in the carpark with a car that won’t start.

Oh, and there was a trip into the Disney Store where I bought Amy an Eeyore plushie. She also bought some fairy stickers and has now stuck them all over her iBook.

I took my Macbook to the Apple Store in Meadowhall today to have it looked at by a Genius. The Apple Store was its usual shiny, white self with lots of hideously expensive stuff lining the walls. Who needs a 30 inch iMac… really… go on, give me a good, sane reason why someone needs 30 inches of screen on one machine. Two 19 inch screens makes sense, but one 30 inch screen is just willy waving. I loaded Word and it appeared as a tiny box in the corner of the screen, it’d be really irritating to use after the novelty has worn off. God help any apps that maximise to full screen!

I showed my Macbook to the person behind the Genius Bar and he identified that the LVDS cable is either faulty or the LCD is damaged. They can’t look at it until Wednesday, but hopefully it’ll be done by next weekend.

It was nice that by simply reading the serial number of my Mac they could read all my contact details (since I was good and registered my Mac when I bought it) and knew who I was and where I lived. All I had to do was confirm my home phone number and it was done. I think they’re doing the repair in the shop, rather than posting it off to Mars to be probed for a month.

I’m now reduced to using my work laptop and main PC. Life’s so hard with just two computers left

My Macbook has a slightly irritating fault somewhere in the screen or connecting cables. When pressure is applied to the back of the lid, or the screen’s angle is altered a pattern of “incorrect” pixels appears. It looks like the machine decides all the ‘red’ pixels should be ‘green’ for no obvious reason.

Given the choice between sending the machine to PC World who’d simply look confused, go “duh it’s a Mac… err…” and end up shipping it off to Apple and to finding a real Apple store, I chose the second option.

My Mac is now checked into the Genius Bar in the Meadowhall Centre on Saturday. I will show the fault, and hopefully something useful will happen afterwards. Go on Apple, give me a good customer experience. Don’t do a PC World and ship my laptop off to Holland for three weeks and not tell me much.

Spending the weekend at Amy’s. As usual I have my Macbook with me, and once again it’s being really rather useful. This time it isn’t remotely connecting me to a VPN, or anything special like that; this time it’s doing some video editing with iMovie.

Amy’s digital camera records video, but only in 1 minute segments. She’s recorded some video from a live music session in a local pub and wanted a way to stitch them back together to put onto YouTube. My first reaction was to use Windows Movie Maker since it comes free with XP and is fairly easy to use. However, after half an hour of faff we came to the conclusion it didn’t like her computer or camera’s video.

First we had to find the software which, unusually, wasn’t available by default on the machine. Then once it was installed, it happily complained that .mov files aren’t valid Windows Movie Maker files. Yeah nice one Microsoft!

iMovie, on the other hand allowed us to glue the videos together, add cheesy titles and render back to a video suitable for sending to YouTube.

My Mac seems to be developing a fault, or is just being strange. If I show a fairly complex image on the screen and twist the lid hinge (as though adjusting the screen so I can see it better) the display corrupts. It’s not major screen corruption, but the odd random pixel will display the ‘wrong’ colour. It’s as if the screen draws all pixels of one colour the inverse of what they should be. I have a feeling it’s a heat issue.

Here is Todd. Todd is a dog. See Todd run, run Todd, run!

From Random

Except earlier on today Todd couldn’t run in the sun, he had to wait, which was no fun. No fun at all. He was stuck in the kitchen with nothing to do.

OK, enough of that before it turns into a warped version of The Cat in the Hat

I’d been asked by my parents, who are off in Spain at the moment being rained on (the rain in Spain falls mainly on the tourists), to look after the dog for two days while my sister was at work doing long shifts. They’d agreed to leave me a key so I could get in. This suited me, I needed to visit Steve, who I used to work with and he lives down the road from my parents. So off I set.

I arrived at my parents and obtained the key. Then things went a bit pear-shaped as I discovered the back door was bolted from the inside, and I only had a back door key. Oh dear. The irony of this situation was not lost on me - here I was on the wrong side of a locked back door contemplating whether I could break in - not to steal laptops and Xbox 360s but to let out a by now rather wound up dog.

I texted my parents to let them know I was at home, but locked out. I also texted my sister asking where she worked so I could call her a moron in person, and maybe get the front door key. Making it fully clear that any dog mess found in the house was her problem to deal with.

She rang me back and gave me directions. We’ll skip the driving to her work and collecting the key, it was as boring as it sounds and contained no interesting drama. I came home and let myself in.

Wanting to get off to Steve’s to do some important stuff I let the dog out so it could have a crap. Only it wasn’t interested, and after five minutes of being prompted to go and pee, I put it back in the kitchen and said I’d be back later.

Off I went to Steve’s, I showed off my Macbook and we did some work. It got dark and I came home about six pm. It’s quite fun walking a black dog in the dark, it wanders off and waits for you to catch up. If you’re not paying attention it’ll remind you by nipping at your kneecaps.

I will take it out for a proper walk tomorrow to make up for being stuffed in the kitchen all day.