Sunday 08/22/2021
Morning brought an email from the tech squad, would I help Barbara with a dead Macbook Air?
Around 9am, after I’d read the paper, watered the plants, and done the big crossword, I called her and we met in her lounge, the 10th floor. The Air was completely dead, unresponsive. She said when she plugged it in, the green light came on, indicating a full battery. It didn’t respond to the one trick I knew, to hold the power button down for a long count of 5, which if the CPU is doing anything, will force a power-down, and then you can hit the button again to start it booting up. Nope. So I advised her on where to take it.
Later in the morning Peter called, reminding me I had agreed to help him get a new printer online. So I went to his place and between us we managed to get it properly identified to the system and showed it would print and scan. So that was a success.
As I mentioned the other day I’ve been testing paint on the hood of the Chrysler, and found I need to use primer before the color. I stripped off the paint I’d put on, and sprayed it with a coat of primer. To do that I had to fiddle around with my airbrush, look at couple of YT videos. But got it all working.
Spent a couple hours on STIP. The next program to translate from Pascal to Python is the first really big one. It’ll end up a couple hundred lines of code, I bet. But thinking about how to do it revealed a problem in Kernighan’s design. Well, not so much of a problem in 1980, when things were simpler. I don’t feel like trying to explain it here, partly because I don’t fully grasp it myself yet.
Codgerville 