Even though I have no real use for portable video, I want one of the new 80GB iPods. Or maybe I want an iPod nano, because it’s small and has no moving parts. I don’t think I want an iPod shuffle, though it is awfully cute.
I’m glad I don’t have to pick out my own present.
I didn’t have to dig out the other 3.5″ enclosure after all — I switched to a USB connection, and suddenly the Mac can see the hard disk. I can’t boot from it, though, so I’ve had to rerun all of the updates I’d made since I switched. But my data is back. For now, anyway. With luck, I’ll have some time this weekend to do some better diagnosis.
I wanted to check some stuff on my Mac mini, but when I turned on the display, I was greeted by a black screen, and nothing I could do would provoke any activity. I also couldn’t ping it, so I decided it had died.
After hunting for the power button, which I hadn’t used in a long time, I rebooted…to no avail. So I dug out my copy of “The Missing Manual” and tried some of the exciting power-on keystrokes. Apple-V gave me a very short bootup console log, ending with something about being unable to find something on /sbin. So I tried again, this time with the Option keystroke to let me choose my boot device.
When I chose the built-in disk, all was well — it was even able to mount the disk in my expansion unit. But I didn’t leave well enough alone, since I really wanted to boot my new disk; instead, I powered off, and then powered off the expansion unit.
When I tried to turn the unit back on, I didn’t see the blue power light. But by wiggling the power cables, I got it to come up again…but not enough to boot. So I went back to the built-in disk, and this time around, nothing I could do would mount the external disk. I could, however, see a USB flash drive that I connected to the expansion unit, so it’s not completely dead.
At least there’s no unrecoverable data on the external disk (or, for that matter, the internal disk) — I hadn’t gotten around to moving anything critical to the Mac, just lots of media which would be tedious to recover.
I guess the next step is to dig out the 3.5-inch USB enclosure I decided not to put on craigslist and see if the disk is the culprit. Feh.
I’m going to turn over my blog to Jeff for his thoughts about 9/11.
I was very conflicted about whether to write about 9/11. When I was debating whether or not to [continue my] blog, one of the considerations was that I’d be writing today. It came down to whether I had anything about 9/11 that I wanted to tell people. I did.
I didn’t lose any friends or family members that day. I don’t know anyone who was near Ground Zero. I didn’t sing God Bless America on the steps of Capital Hill. Yet, the Attacks did change much of my outlook on the world. Before, I didn’t care much about the rest of the globe, outside of Israel. And why should I? I was only 11. My largest priority was surviving my first month of Middle School.
Somehow though, 9/11 changed that forever. Suddenly for me and perhaps the whole country in general, what mattered in the middle of Asia meant a great deal. The entire world slowly became important to me, whether each country had anything to do with 9/11 or not. I don’t know why: perhaps when I suddenly realized that I was interested in Afghanistan, I became interested in Italy. And here I am today, naming the capitals of countries many people know nothing about.
I suppose this led to my interest in American politics too. Oh, it didn’t exactly spring from nowhere. Even at the age of six I had hoped Clinton would be reelected; when I was ten on Election Day a few of my friends and I screamed “Bush sucks!” on the playground, only to be answered with “Gore sucks!” But after 9/11, I actually knew why I thought this way, aside from my parents thinking that.
One more way the 9/11 Attacks changed my outlook: my determination not to stereotype ethnicities. When we invaded Afghanistan, I decided that I would not judge Afghans based on the actions of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. I don’t know what brought this on, but it carried over to Arabs and Muslims in general. I guess I have to thank my history teachers in 6th and 7th grades for making clear the difference between the terrorists and all the other Muslims and Arabs. Perhaps I should even thank President Bush: he made it clear in a speech nine days after 9/11 that most Afghans and Muslims were just regular people, not murderers or people who wanted us wiped off the globe.
Whatever the case, 9/11 affected me. The impact it had on me can’t be compared to that on the people who lost loved ones, but still, it affected me. For better or worse, much of who I am today is because of 9/11 and what happened afterwards, globally and personally.
This is going to be one of those postings that my mother wouldn’t have understood. But I thought I should save what I’ve learned today about setting up printers on Mac OSX 10.4 so I’ll have them next time around.
I was trying to solve two problems when printing from the Mac:
I could, of course, print just fine from my Windows XP systems.
For the Samsung, I suspected I had a bad driver. The system showed three different drivers which claimed to be for the ML-2150 family, two of which had the same name. So I went to linuxprinting.org, which pointed me to the new Gutenprint drivers. I tried installing them, but trying to print failed. I suspect the problem was that I didn’t have a proper level of Ghostscript, but while reading the site, I eventually found a claim that there was a good Mac OSX driver on Samsung’s German site. After some searching, I found this page, which contained an archive of new PPD drivers.
I uncompressed it and tried to install the English-language file. It didn’t ask for permission to run as root, so the install failed; I tried again, this time just “installing” to my desktop. Then I dug into the file to find the actual PPD file at
~/Desktop/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/Samsung ML-2150 Series.gz
I needed to copy it somewhere the system could find it, and I also wanted to get rid of the bad drivers, so I went hunting, and discovered I had Samsung printer drivers in two different locations on the system:
I deleted the ML21xx drivers in both locations, then copied my new driver to the first location, since that’s where the installer wanted to put it.
And it worked — I can now print to the printer at something approaching full speed.
The MFC-7820N turned out to be much easier; Brother had posted a driver on this page. The page shows a PPD file and a CUPS driver, but they both link to the same package, which expands into a self-installer, which worked just fine (although it required a system restart, which probably shouldn’t have been necessary). I also found a firmware update, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet.
And in the meantime, I’ve also installed a new version of Ghostscript, just in case.
I remember when I thought I was going to treat the Mac as an appliance. *sigh*