Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: technology hates me

  • Random Life, Data Hoarding, Pictures

    The Random Life project is running out of steam, which is fine. I have posted 100 videos, and I’m about out of footage. They’re scheduled to come out one a day for the next month. 81 are live as of this second. I might get bored and post all of them in one big deluge. I’ve…

  • The Death of the Good Internet

    I’ve been meaning to write a post about this forever, but someone else at The Ringer did such a great job of it. Check it: The Day the Good Internet Died The one thing I find interesting about this article is the thought that maybe it wasn’t that the death of Google Reader killed off…

  • Ode to a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro

    My MacBook died yesterday. Shit. It wasn’t a full-on, catastrophic death, the kind with no backup and fire and smoke and no hope. It was more of a long goodbye. I replaced the battery last fall, the third battery in its almost five years of heavy use. It looked like the battery was holding a…

  • Ode to a busted cell processor

    God damn it. It is broken. Again. My PS3 is in a shop somewhere in Missouri, getting the yellow light of death beaten out of it. It went south in November and got all of the solder stripped away, the whole mess ultrasonically cleaned, then reflowed. Or something. Now it is dead again. I am…

  • Dropping computers

    My Mac is back in the shop.  It has TS4088.  When it switches GPUs to save power, if the computer is hot enough, it crashes.  It’s common on this specific make and vintage, and it’s the problem with buying a computer on the first day of a major revision.  I complained to the right person,…

  • No patience for technical support

    I had to go to Target at 8:30 last night and buy a new wireless router.  Okay, “had” is a strong word, but I got to the end of my patience, and was fortunate enough to recognize that and throw this stupid Netgear piece of shit I just bought a few months ago into the…

  • The Death of Emacs

    I’ve been too busy to do anything over here, too busy and slightly sick for a few days.  I’m trying to get caught up on 19 things today, and of course it’s a beautiful, sunny day out, and I think I’ve left the house once all week, so that’s beckoning me.  But I thought I’d…

  • XEmacs annoyances on the road

    Every time I rely on something on a new computer and take it on the road, said computer/system throws a pain-in-the-ass problem at me.  And the difficulty of said problem is inversely proportional to the availability of either time or internet access. Case in point: I do a lot of my writing on my home…

  • Shell scripting will eventually kill me

    I spent two hours the other night trying to hack out a shell script to import the archives into this thing. WordPress doesn’t have a simple way to just suck in a bunch of text files; you need to assemble them into something that resembles an RSS feed, and then import that. This brought up…

  • How to upgrade linux

    GOD DAMN IT I hate upgrading linux. Well, I hate it mostly because the easiest way to upgrade it is to throw your fucking computer out of the window and then hit your testicles about five or six times with the sharp end of a claw hammer and then pour everclear in the wound and…