Monica

Dear Brain Trust,

Years ago I bought the iWorks office suite for my Mac. This consists of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. When I got a new Mac, the applications didn't transfer correctly; they're there, but they crash on startup. I don't know if this was because of the new machine itself or because of the OS change. (The old machine ran 10.6. The new one ran 10.8.5 when I migrated, and I've now upgraded it to Sierra.)

I had assumed that I would just have to buy the suite again (or replace it), though today I found a two-year-old article that said that it comes with new Macs. Not mine, it didn't. I looked in the App Store and I don't see the bundle any more, though I can buy the applications individually for $20 each.

I'm not heavily invested in these particular tools, but I need some way to occasionally edit Word documents and spreadsheets. (I've never edited a slide deck on my Mac.) I don't want to spend a lot on this because it's in that aggravating niche of "occasional need, but important when it happens". The old Mac is still on the network because my very-rarely-needed scanner doesn't work with the new Mac either (drivers, I assume), and also the old one has a CD drive, but I'd rather edit documents locally than via remote desktop.

Any recommendations?

Day 0: Receive newer machine (yay!), discover it needs a video connector I don't have. Oops; should have noticed that in the specs.

Day 1: Get cable, start Migration Assistant. It announces this will take 16+ hours because, despite being plugged into the LAN and wireless being turned off on the other machine, it's using wifi. Oh well.

Day 2: Migration hangs; aborted around the 24-hour mark. Connect the two machines directly via ethernet and make sure wifi is turned off on both. This time Migration Assistant says 1.5 hours.

Day 3: Hung at "4 minutes remaining" for 12 hours. Since the previous day I've been attempting to get support online; at this point I wait through the support phone queue, spend an hour or so with a first-level technician who can tell me nothing new, and finally get escalated to the next level, where we spend another hour debugging. He convinces me to try again even though we've changed no settings ("but isn't it deterministic?", I asked) and I wait up for the completion -- or, rather, the hang at 3 minutes remaining. By the time this happens that second-level support person has gone home for the night. I leave voice mail, to which he never responds.

Day 4: It always hangs when migrating apps. What happens if I migrate everything except apps, and I'll try to solve that separately? That works. Migrating apps by themselves still hangs (but it only takes about 15 minutes to get to that point now). I ask a question on Ask Different which, like my previous attempt to go to the elves for counsel, has not gotten much traction. (Actually, that's not fair; last time my question was completely ignored; this time somebody answered to say "it depends". Progress.)

Later in the day I try to copy individual files in the Applications folder directly (using a network share). The copy operation says no to Firefox, claiming the file is corrupted (err, works just fine on the source machine); upon trying to do a fresh installation I learn that Firefox has dropped support for my OSs (both). Huh, Chrome gave me notifications when that got close; Firefox never breathed a word. I will be upgrading the OS on the new machine, but I'm not going to do that mid-move. I find a Firefox download that's still available and, oh glorious day, when I start it up it has my state from the other machine! I didn't have to use sync or anything! So I still don't know where user application data is stored on a Mac, but apparently the migration got it. Yay.

Most applications can be copied but a few fail, claiming permission problems (even though the permissions are fine). The iWork suite copies fine but does not run; might be an OS incompatibility. Shabbat arrives.

Day 5: Shabbat. After, I learn that the files that couldn't be copied across a network share can be copied just fine using a USB drive. No idea why that makes a difference. I begin testing whether applications actually run. Spend way too long finding an activation code from the original CD packaging for one of them. Note to self: add activation codes to the file of important information you'd be sad to lose.

Why are printer drivers so difficult? Apparently that's something that didn't come over in the migration. Spend an hour or so hunting the driver I need online after failing to find it on the source machine. (It's a driver. That means it's a file. That means I should be able to find and copy it, right?) Just as I reach the "it'd be less frustrating to buy a new printer even though this one works fine and meets my needs" point, I find the driver and print something.

Day 6 (today): Still haven't tested all applications, and I'm not touching the scanner before Rosh Hashana. Spend lots of time tuning video. I initially set up the new machine with a different monitor (so I could retain easy access to the old machine); when I couldn't get it tuned to a good balance of brightness, contrast, and color temperature I swapped monitors. And the old monitor is wacky too. So it's something in the OS, I presume. I spend lots of time in advanced calibration settings and reach a point that seems workable. It's not the same as the old one (Stack Exchange and LJ colors are slightly off, but not in a way I can fix in hardware or calibration), but presumably I'll get used to it. I now realize that I have no idea what the true colors of any web site I use are, because they look a little different on every device I use, including ones where I've never adjusted any display settings. Some day I should line up the two Macs, my work (Windows) laptop, my tablet, and my phone and have a show-down. (I used some photos to sanity-check all this.)

But, all that said, it sure is nice having a newer machine! I had not previously appreciated solid-state hard drives, and now I'm not resource-starved. I wish Apple had updated the product (they haven't since 2014), but I couldn't wait any longer and this used machine will do just fine.

Tonight begins Rosh Hashana. I will pick this up in a few days.

For the past couple weeks -- but not before then -- both Firefox and Chrome have been randomly seizing up on me on my Mac at home (running Snow Leopard). When this happens, first that application and then (about 10-15 seconds later) the entire machine become unresponsive, presenting the spinning beachball of doom. After a minute or so, but occasionally longer, things go back to normal. Sometimes I see a Chrome pop-up about an unresponsive site flash by. When this happens and I can watch in the Activity Monitor, neither CPU nor memory is pegged. Sometimes this happens once a day; sometimes it happens a couple times in an hour. It's becoming a pretty big usability problem.

All browsers are up to date (and not beta versions). This doesn't happen on my work machine (Win7). Dani says this happens to him on his brand-new iMac with maxed-out memory, but only with Firefox. (So he uses Chrome -- problem solved.) For me on my dusty old Mac Mini, it's happening with both browsers. I can't figure out what changed -- why is this happening now?

Googling told me that disabling the Flash player extension/addon/plugin/whatever could fix this, but it didn't. I've also looked through extensions and disabled anything I'm not actively using; it's pretty bare-bones. I do have several userscripts, none written by me, but I don't see anything glaringly suspicious in their code. I've already disabled the ones I can live without at least for a while, but a couple of them really are critical. I'm not finding any help on the Apple forums.

I've been thinking about upgrading my hardware anyway, as even before this started my Mac was starting to get sluggish sometimes. I bought it in something like 2009, so that's not too surprising. But the Mini hasn't been updated since October 2014, so this is the wrong time to buy -- something better should be coming before too much longer.

Meanwhile, I'd like to diagnose and fix this problem. But I'm out of ideas. :-(

Tonight I popped a DVD into my Mac Mini (Trope Trainer, because I needed to print something from it) and the machine declined to read it. On several tries with multiple discs I got either "can't read this; wanna eject?" or "hey, you gave me a blank disc" (um, no). Dani's iMac could read the original DVD just fine. Rebooting didn't change anything. So, off to the Internet for guidance.

I don't have a can of compressed air at home and advice was mixed about CD cleaning kits. One answer sounded unlikely, but it also seemed harmless so I gave it a shot.

And that is how I successfully cleaned my DVD drive with a microfiber cloth and a credit card. I should still get myself a can of air, though, because I probably only moved some dust particles around (and off the optic scanner). Nothing came out on the cloth, so whatever the problem was, it's still in there -- just, apparently, brushed aside.

Bad news: the furnace's pump is dead. Good news: it's under warranty. (Questionable news: it was that young and died anyway...) Bad news: the repair guy didn't have a replacement; try again tomorrow. Good news: we found this out now, so with luck it'll be fixed before the predicted lows in the lower 30s mid-week.

This afternoon the network hub in my office just up and died. I wasn't doing anything particularly taxing at the time -- not even streaming video. :-) There one moment, gone the next. For now I've moved the incoming network cable directly to my Mac; I rarely use the legacy PC anyway and no longer have a laptop that would benefit from being plugged in, but I'll probably get another small hub anyway just so I can use the PC if I need to. (The PC doesn't have a monitor and keyboard; when I use it I connect using VNC.)

While changing the cable on the Mac I knocked the video cable loose; it's one of those mini connectors that some Macs use, with an adapter to support a regular connector. When I plugged it back in, making sure everything was tight, the colors on my monitor were slightly off -- brighter and a little yellower. No amount of adjusting would fix it, but after a reboot it was fine. (I had a vague memory of that happening once before.) I do not have a mental model for this failure mode yet; why would anything software-side care about that cable being unplugged and replugged, and why would a reboot (with no further adjustment of the cable) make a difference?

My trusty iBook has died and the Apple Genius declared a hard-drive failure. Apple no longer sells those, though I could go looking for a third-party solution and that's not off the table yet. But maybe it's time to move to a machine that can support an OS newer than 10.4 and a Firefox newer than 3.6, so I'm considering other options too.

This is very much a secondary machine, for traveling, going to a class or meeting where I want computing power and not just paper, using in parts of the house other than my desk, and occasionally for taking to work if I need access to personal computing during the work day. I don't do a lot of that last, but it's happened. The iBook was also useful to me during a multi-day DSL outage; I could at least take the laptop to the library or bookstore for access. So I use the machine sporadically, but when I do use it it's important enough that I don't want to do without.

Apple's current laptop offerings are too pricy for me -- I'm sure they'd be great machines if I used my laptop all the time, but that's not my use case. It looks like used or refurbished Macbooks (just plain Macbook, the laptop Apple sold until 2010) could be an option; if you have experience with those, please tell me what gotchas lurk there.

I'm talking about Macs because that's what I have on my desk at home and some consistency of user experience (and software) is useful. (Among things, having the Soncino talmud/etc collection on my hard disk is useful. I bought that for Mac; I don't want to rebuy for Windows.) I'm willing to consider Windows options but I don't know that space yet.

Alternatively, tablets are appealing -- more portable and "instant-on" and just generally more convenient. I've used Dani's iPad and it's very nice. Just one problem: they don't seem to be designed for composing text documents and that's an important use case for me. For example, I often compose blog posts or other documents offline and then post/email/share them later. This calls for a text editor and access to the file system. If one is internet-connected then solutions might exist (SSH to a Unix shell was suggested to me recently), but we can't assume a network connection. (I actually don't know if there's an SSH application for the iPad.)

(The other problem with tablets is the keyboard, but there exist add-ons for that. And ok, a third problem is that everything these days seems to have a glossy display and I much prefer matte, but I think I'm doomed there.)

Dani commented that what I really want is a Linux tablet. Yeah, now that you mention it... is anybody working on that? Can Android tablets meet my needs? Which ones should I be paying attention to? (~10" screen rather than 7" required.)

So I'll be doing my Google research, but I'm also interested in hearing opinions from y'all. Thanks.

I got a Magic Mouse to use with my Mac Mini a few weeks ago. This is a Bluetooth multi-touch mouse, so it's a touch-sensitive mouse but not a trackpad. This is my first experience with multi-touch (beyond having used iPhones or iPads for perhaps five minutes total).

The mouse is physically shallow; while part of my hand rests on a normal mouse (leading me to be finicky about the size and shape of such mice), if you did that with a multi-touch mouse you'd get all sorts of unwanted behavior. While on a regular mouse the only relevant interfaces are the buttons (and scroll wheel if present), with this mouse the entire surface is responsive to taps and sweeps. Lay your hand across this and you might find yourself inadvertantly scrolling, perhaps at high speed.

At first, and not having thought through all that, the low profile seemed like it would be a problem. However, it is low enough, and otherwise sized appropriately enough for my hand, that to move it I just put my thumb on one side and last two fingers on the other and go. I wouldn't have expected this, but it feels pretty natural.

Even with the touch interface it does support conventional left- and right-clicks (with actual motion and a clicking sound). It does not have buttons; you just press on one side or the other near the end (where buttons would be). Occasionally my attempts to right-click have mis-fired as left-clicks, but that's been decreasing over time so I guess I've learned to get past whatever problem I was having.

The main use of the multi-touch interface (out of the box) is scrolling. I can just sweep a finger along the mouse to zoom whatever web page or document I have open at the time. In fact, I don't have to keep my finger on the mouse; I can touch, give a quick swipe, and lift my finger and the zoom will go an appropriate amount (past when I lifted my finger) and slow down to a stop about when I expected it to. Somebody put some significant thought into that behavior (velocity modeling seems like it would be hard) and it's pretty cool. The faster you move your finger, the faster the scrolling. No documentation told me this, but before too long I learned that I could stop a scroll in progress by just tapping my finger; otherwise this would be too hard to control and I'd stick with paging. And, unlike a scroll wheel, finger-based scrolling works horizontally. Since web pages with horizontal scroll bars are the bane of my existence (accessibility rant redacted), this is a big win for me. But I bet it'll be useful in fundamentally-horizontal applications (editing audio files comes to mind); haven't tried yet.

One surprise from the scrolling: it applies to whatever window the mouse is currently over, rather than the active application. That's a little weird and I hope there's a preference I can set for that.

There is one big problem with the Magic Mouse: tracking. I was finding that sometimes it would move freely in one direction but not another, or that it would suddenly slow down a lot, and was otherwise unpredictable. I had the tracking speed maxed (unlike with my previous mouse) and there was no problem with the batteries, yet this problem persisted, intermittently. That's unforgivable in a mouse, but the multi-touch was cool so I looked for a solution. Google led me to a two-part solution: first, if behavior is erratic, pick up the mouse and blow across the sensor because of dust or cat hair (!). And second, MagicPrefs is a software add-on that not only speeds up tracking quite nicely but also allows you to program all sorts of other multi-touch gestures (which I have not played with yet). With those two changes I am satisfied with the tracking.

Using this mouse is a different experience from what I was used to, but overall it's been pretty positive.

Via _subdivisions_:

1. What’s one thing that made you happy today?

After spending hours on porting item #1 to our new software version, item #2 took about 15 minutes. Yay for learning curves! (Ok, also bug fixes -- it's a pre-release version. :-) )

2. What’s one thing that drove you crazy today?

Having my Mac seize an audio CD and refuse to eject. 45 minutes and half a dozen reboots later it finally coughed up. Sheesh! For future reference, the trick is to hold down the left mouse button while booting, but it has to be a wired mouse. Um, what?

(Number 3 was redacted for complete irrelevance.)

4. Is there a TV show you never miss? What is it?

Historically, Babylon 5 and, later, LOST (the last 10 minutes of which does not exist in my world, thankyouverymuch). Of shows currently on the air, The Big Bang Theory. Though an important distinction: B5 always got watched on broadcast night; the others get/got watched within the week.

5. How do you get to work?

I drive via local roads (no parkway, yay).

6. Rake in the fall, or leave ‘em ‘til after the thaw?

Rake in the fall. I left them till spring once, thinking they would just turn into mulch and cease to be a problem. That didn't work so well.

7. What’s your favorite cheese?

I like rich, soft cheeses of the Brie/Camembert/etc family. I've had some excellent specimens that I can never find again (nor remember the names of) after the encounter. Oh well.

8. Who’s your favorite muppet?

I haven't watched any muppets since I was a kid, but I remember thinking that Oscar the Grouch got a bum rap and was clearly misunderstood. :-)

My congregation's talent show was last night, and I thought it went really well. We had 14 performers (some individuals, some groups), three of them kids (two piano players, one violinist). A trophy was awarded by audience vote, and the ten-year-old violinist, who played really well, got it. I'm glad. Populace-vote systems have all sorts of problems, but fortunately, no one was really treating this as a competition and the winner performed very well, so it wasn't just that he was a kid. I'd estimate that there were about 200 people there, which is more than they were expecting. This was announced as our "first annual" talent show and the organizer confirmed later that yes, she has been asked to do this again next year. Yay! Maybe next year I'll get that Rossi quartet together. Or compose another song. Or both.

Material covered a pretty broad range -- show tunes, Yiddish songs, blues, jazz piano, baroque, old-timey banjo, and original poetry. One performer is a pro (someone said he sings with the Pittsburgh opera) and it showed. He didn't do operatic style (which I loathe -- can't understand the words and the vocal qualities are grating, though less so with basses I guess). He sang a couple of Frank Sinatra songs, very well.

My performance was very well-received; lots of people praised my singing, and I got lots of positive feedback for composing the song myself. ("I didn't know you composed music, too!" "Well, it's been mostly renaissance dance music and the like until now." "Um, ok." :-) ) The pianist told me he would like to play this again. I said that he is much, much closer to the decisions about what music gets done for services than I am and I hope he understands that it would be awkward for me to push at all. So we'll see. I also made sure he knows that transposition is a matter of a few keystrokes. (I'm betting that our cantorial soloist would want a different key.) The pianist also agreed to (later) give me some feedback on a few parts he found a little awkward to play, which I would definitely like to get. I had sent the music in advance with an invitation to do that, but he and his wife had their first child a few months ago so I don't imagine he's had any cycles to spare for that. (I asked if he is getting to sleep through the night yet and he said heck no.)

The pianist described the style of the song as "American" and "Reform" (he didn't elaborate), while a fellow congregant thought it sounded "renaissance". I'm not sure what it is, but not that last. :-) I would enjoy doing renaissance-style Jewish music, but that pretty much means choral works, not soloist stuff, so there are additional hurdles there. (We have a choir, but would they do work written by a congregant, or would that be all kinds of awkward if people didn't like it?) I wrote a singable (not "artistic") piece for solo voice and piano because (1) I could perform that in this show (I wrote the piece for the show) and (2) it has the best chance of future adoption. If it never gets used again well that's life, but I wanted to at least have the chance. The opportunities for a regular congregant like me to sing on the bimah are practically nil, so writing material that others sing on the bimah is as close as I'm going to get to sharing my work beyond one-offs like this talent show.

I understand that the show was being recorded; I hope to get a copy of that. Meanwhile, if anyone can point me to a summary "idiot's guide" to Garage Band or Logic Express toward the end of combining a MIDI piano track and my voice, I'll see what I can do. (I've played through the tutorial videos that Garage Band offers and worked through some Logic Express exercises from a book, but I'm not really getting it yet, and nothing has talked about real-time recording as opposed to just using samples.) I don't have good equipment, mind, but my USB headphones also have a mic that's at least Skype-grade. This would be so you could hear what it sounds like with the words as opposed to just MIDI instruments.

New odd printer behavior: when printing from Trope Trainer run under CrossOver, if I print a document it prints the first page and then the printer's orange lights go on. I wasted a chunk of last night trying to clear a jam that was clearly not present. I confirmed that suspicion by moving the printer cable to the PC, where things printed fine. Back to the Mac, and test pages wouldn't print. Hmm.

Tonight I was able to mostly characterize it, and it's weird: after the first page prints, the printer will stay in that state until I go to some other application (I used TextEdit) and initiate a print, at which point it becomes unstuck and gives me my next page. (I do not need to actually print from TextEdit; once the printer wakes up I can cancel.) Iterate until done. I'm 99% sure I've printed from this configuration of Trope Trainer before, though there's been an HP driver update since then. No other apps seem to be adversely affected.

Now that I have a workaround I can just chalk it up to random weirdness, at least until I get annoyed enough by HP-Mac incompatibilities to go buy another printer. But my hardware seems intent on keeping me on my toes.

It never occurred to me that after upgrading the Mac from Leopard to Snow Leopard, my printer (HP Laserjet 1020) might no longer work. I had to download a special driver to get it to work with Leopard, and I guess I assumed that driver would still work. Sigh. If I'd actually thought about it, I would have done some research before taking the OS upgrade.

My choices seem to be: (1) revert to Leopard (I don't even know if that's possible without doing damage), (2) wait for a fix (prognosis unclear), or (3) buy a new printer. I wasted a lot of time under Leopard trying (4), network the printer using my PC, so I probably won't try that again. (The Mac still needs a driver, whether the printer is local or remote, so that's not likely to help.) I'll continue with Google research tomorrow; so far the only solution I've found involves downloading a 750MB package, compiling code, and doing lots of fussing.

I realize that this is HP's fault, not Apple's. It's frustrating because I've been using HP printers for more than 15 years without issues and when I bought this one I never thought to check for Mac compatibility. (At the time I wasn't planning to buy a Mac.) It's a peripheral; at some level I expect it to just work.

On the other hand, it's worth noting how easy the OS upgrade was otherwise. Insert disc, confirm intent, leave for an hour, and there it was. I was never willing to attempt an OS change under Windows. This is the only major problem I've seen so far. (There's one minor one that I'll probably just have to get used to; they changed a color that I'd rather they not have, but there doesn't appear to be a user setting for it.)

This session was actually a few weeks ago (things have been hectic).

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Mac update: I can't connect the printer to one machine and print from the other (either direction), but at least they're close enough together that I can move the USB cable as needed. There's also a weird, loud chirping noise when it's in sleep mode; word on the net is that this happens sometimes when peripherals are plugged in, which seems weird. I normally have USB connections for keyboard, mouse, external hard drive, and printer, and am not really interested in changing any of that. A couple nights ago I left my iPod plugged in to charge and it didn't chirp; weird. I'm not sure plugging in the iPod every night is really good for its battery, though. But pulling the speaker cable and plugging it back in when using the machine is also a hassle.

Oh, and if anybody can get me Windows-style file sorting in Finder (directories then files, but alphabetically within those two groups), I'll be in your debt. "Sort by kind" violates the second part of that. The common motif on the net seems to be "this isn't Windows", which is true but unhelpful. My legacy file structure evolved the way it did in large part because of how it sorted.

My Mac Mini arrived Friday, faster than I expected. In an act of will I did not punt my congregation's Friday-evening services, attendance at which required starting Shabbat two hours early, to play with it (and go somewhere else later). I did verify that a VNC server is running on my PC and reachable from my laptop, so I can skip the dual-monitor/keyboard/mouse-on-one-desk setup. So now, off to rearrange bunches of hardware and load up a new machine.

If you've got favorite Mac tips & tricks, sites, software, etc, please feel free to share. I've used an iBook (running Tiger) casually, but as a main machine it's new to me.