===
31 October 2014
===
I'm backdating this, because having just the one entry for October would
bother me. Besides, 2 November and 31 October are close enough as to make
no difference, daylight savings time aside. I rather wish I had sent in
my MBP during the period where Apple was fixing logic boards for free. I
did so to have the sleep button on my iPhone fixed last week, and it was
relatively painless. I got my phone back in about a week, and it's
perfectly fine. Hell, it's also my phone -- I've heard some reports that
people got replacement phones, but this is certainly mine!
Then again, during that period I had a loaner phone -- I seriously don't
have another working cellphone that takes a nano-sim, just a Nokia N75 --
and that was a pain in the ass. Ultimately, I determined that one issue
was restoring my backup onto the loaner phone. Doing so would [sorta]
work, but then as a result the goddamn thing would restart every
two-to-five minutes. So obviously, that wasn't an option. So once I
sorted that out and gave up on the idea of using my backup at all, things
went slightly better. I managed to link my iTunes Store and iCloud
accounts to the phone without any issues, so I could at least retrieve
some Apps. That was fine, except for some reason, the battery meter
didn't work.
It really is pretty strange to say that the battery meter doesn't work on
a cellphone. It isn't like the fuel guage on a car, where there's some
degree of mechanical connection. This is entirely electronic, and isn't
really measuring something physical, the way that a gas guage actually
measures the level of fuel in the cell. Even if it's just a mental
distinction, that distinction is what makes the situation completely
absurd to me.
Luckily, that broken battery meter on iOS 8 issue was /just/ with that
phone, so it is quite thoroughly not my problem. I must say though,
usually a loaner phone might be a bit dinged up, but having a broken
battery meter is sorta unexpected. It also seems to just be a _thing_
with iOS 8, based on google. I am so very, very glad that I haven't had
these issues with my own phone, especially now that I've actually
experienced these various idiotic issues.
====
14 October 2014
===
It would be pretty shameful if I completely neglected to update
my gopherspace, wouldn't it? Yes, so let's not do that! I've
actually been on SDF, I just never thought to write anything!
A fun little experiment I am doing is browsing gopher in
OS X's fullscreen mode (via Terminal, since it's good enough for
me). Of course, due to the hard limit on line length, it is something
of an underwhelming experience, really. There's a whole mess of empty
space just vomited out there on the right. Negative space is great and
all, but not when it is just /there/.
One of these days I should actually get around to mailing SDF my dollar.
Gosh, I hope it doesn't make the US Postal Service mad that I am trying to
send paper currency via the post. As it is, last time I tried sending a
letter to a non-governmental person, I got an "address unknown." I think
they did not like the way I wrote the ZIP code. I don't know; it's actu-
ally been a very long time since I mailed a letter that wasn't just going
across town (e.g. to a landlord). Since I don't know better, I'll assume
that cross-town mail gets handed differently than those letters intended
to cross state lines.
Well, that's an issue for another day! For now, I will just hope that
I have guessed where these lines should end correctly, and that I have
not neglected to use two spaces after each period. This is a mono-
width application, after all. Just like typing things up on the
old Apple //e.
Speaking of which, if it still works, I should find a modem and a tel-
net program and try to telnet into SDF on it. I'm sure that'll be fun,
at the blistering pace of [probably] 300baud. To be perfectly honest,
I have no idea how fast the available modems for a //e are. Hell, I
don't even know if it's a regular //e or an enhanced one!
Also, I'm sure it would be far more sensible to just rig up a null-
modem setup, but that would require restoring a windows desktop so
that I have something with a serial port, wouldn't it? Doing all of
that via USB from one of these Macintoshes would just introduce a
series of headaches I don't really need or want. I'm not quite that
much of a masochist, after all.
