Wednesday 01/19/2022
Took a call for the tech squad, mostly reassured Grace about her iPhone. It isn’t behaving oddly after all. Then went out on my standard walk.
Worked on printing or re-printing some prints. I received the professional print, where I printed a picture on my Epson and also sent the same JPG to mpix.com. Their print was not better than mine in most respects: color saturation, sharpness, etc. However they had warmed it up quite a bit, when comparing their print to mine side by side, the whites in my print had a distinct blue or cyan cast. My bad; I should have seen that. I reprinted mine correcting for this, making sure that white highlights were white, not 7000Kelvin blue. Then comparing the prints, I don’t see any advantage in paying mpix.
On the other hand, their print is certainly as good as mine, and cost a reasonable $10 + shipping for a 10×15-inch print. Would I put $10 in labor in materials into any print? Probably; good photo print paper is expensive, also ink.
At 1pm it was time for the FOPAL volunteers monthly zoom meeting. No special news there. The meeting ended on a note of classic Zoom comedy. There’s a lot of unintentional comedy in zoom meetings. For example it always amazes me how few people pay any attention to how they actually look in their little thumbnail windows. They show as dark silhouettes with a bright window behind, or you see only their foreheads. Today there was a couple eating lunch, their kitchen table nicely framed. And there was one attendee who had dark and frizzy hair, and was sitting so that a ceiling fan was right behind her head. The out of focus spinning blades made it look as if she had a tornado on her head, or a swarm of bees.
Anyway, after all the business was done and the host was checking, “any more questions, well it’s been nice…” at this point some doddering fool accidentally (I think) shared his screen. That’s a two-step process, you click share screen (and the host should have set the switch so attendees could not do that, so her bad) and then you have to click on the window you want to share. So now we are all looking at a PowerPoint (I think) screen where this person is editing a presentation on something unrelated to FOPAL. You could see his mouse moving around. He was probably paying no attention to the meeting, completely unaware that all the others were now watching him edit his presentation. Everybody is yelling, “Ed, stop sharing your screen” to no effect. At which point I clicked Leave Meeting.
I noted that my calendar said I had a haircut appointment for 3pm, but I checked with the front desk, and of course the beauty parlor is closed during pandemic precautions.
At 2:30 I got a phone call from “unknown number” which I expected was someone warning me about my extended warrantee expiring (I always press 1 and when they come on, tell them they are lying pond scum and should die in a fire) but no, it was Apple calling to say that my MacBook was back! When I dropped it off Saturday I was told to expect 7-10 days so this was a pleasant surprise, so I went and got it.
When I got home I found that Apple had wiped the hard drive and reinstalled the OS. Now, they did ask me twice, is your data backed up? And I was sure it was backing up, so fine. Now I have a brand new MacBook, I have to choose my language and time zone, and then tell it where to recover saved file from and… it doesn’t recognize the backup drive.
The backup drive is attached to the desktop machine. Long story short, for some reason the backups for the MacBook are kept in a “sparsebundle” file, and the Migration app didn’t know what to do with that. I go to the internet and quickly find directions on how to proceed. I have to physically attach the drive to the MacBook, reboot it, do NOT go into the Migration assistant but continue to the default new system. Then mount the sparsebundle as a drive, and NOW start the Migration assistant and it will recognize it as a backup.
That all worked, restoring all my settings and data files. Now it’s 4pm. However, I had never backed up the /Applications folder. After all, the apps are all the same… no they are not. Turns out there are several apps important to my use of things, which are not in the base OS and now I need to download them individually. My two web browsers, Firefox and Brave. My Sudoku game. My Solitaire game. My RSS reader. So that was a busy hour up to 5pm, downloading and installing important things. Oh, I just thought of another one, Graphic Converter, the simple graphic tool I used for photos I put in the blog.
But everything is pretty much back to normal now, and it is so nice to be off that Chromebook.
Codgerville 