Category Archives: Computers

Whew! Random expenses averted!

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Yesterday I got a haircut. The young woman who cuts my hair wanted to see my pictures from Egypt, so I took my iPad along with me. Then I stopped by Wegmans on my way home.

I got the fabric shopping bag (aren’t I responsible) out and slung the shoulder bag with my iPad under the cart. When I checked out, I grabbed the shopping bag and left – and my shoulder bag (with iPad and camera!) was still under the cart.

I figured out what had happened at about 8:30 last night and called Wegmans. The young man on the Service Desk didn’t know anything. I activated Find My iPhone (which covers iPads, too) and put in a lock screen message with my name and phone number.

I went back to Weggies in person this morning and it turned out they’d locked it up in the accounting office as soon as they spotted the iPad. Sure enough, as soon as I touched it my phone pinged at me – my iPad was online! And the lock screen message was there. Even if someone had walked off with it instead of turning it in to the service desk (which in Geneva I would have found hard to believe), Find My iPhone would have prodded him or her to have called me!

I’m almost as glad to have gotten the Crumpler bag back as the iPad and camera (I was looking for an excuse to buy a new camera!) – it’s the perfect day bag for an iPad, a sketchbook, and the point and shoot camera. Especially since Crumpler no longer makes exactly this bag.

So – if you have Apple portable electronics, download Find My iPhone from the App Store and activate it on all your stuff! It certainly can’t hurt!

I am so happy!

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My laptop life is much improved! I was having all kinds of weirdness. Opening any application was very, very slow. Preview was barely working. If I tried to open a stack of photos (for instance, to choose which to delete and which to upload to Flickr) one photo would open and then the application would cease responding (Apple talk for freezing). Chrome and Safari would both randomly crash. The final blow – Disk Utility wouldn’t run Repair Disk Permissions. Or, rather, it looked like it started, but never actually did anything.

Finally, I stopped by campus I.T. They booted by laptop from an external drive (a thumb drive – isn’t progress amazing?), ran Repair Disk Permissions, and decided that the problem was the antivirus software they installed back in December when my hard drive had to be replaced and re-imaged.

Now everything is back to snappy and I’m much happier! Thanks, Wayne!

Chrome?

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Out of idle curiosity I’ve been trying Chrome (the browser) for the last few days. It seems very unstable on OSX 10.8 – it crashes constantly. Guess I’m sticking to Safari, even though I don’t much care for the way the current version (6.0.1) treats scroll bars. Everything else about it seems fine.

Britannica goes out of print

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Or utterly online. Wikipedia wins?

My childhood research tool was Worldbook, which I found perfectly adequate until high school (when I started using the Britannica in the school library and real research in books). Until I went to college, though, I enjoyed browsing in my mother’s childhood encyclopedia. Was it a Compton’s? a Collier’s? It had great black and white photographs and really nice maps. I occasionally cut pictures out of it for grammar school projects (I remember butchering out agricultural products to paste down on my poster size map of Alabama, once). It was endlessly interesting!

I still love looking stuff up and then browsing around in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Frankly, hyperlinks are not always the same as adjacency!