ID:29050
 
Keywords: apple, computers, photos
No, not the NBA. This one's no April Fool.

I've been going over to Tom's house most weekends lately to work on BYOND. I bring my Macbook so I can work on the website and/or on Windows stuff using Parallels. Works nicely.

Except that my wife has been complaining that I never leave her with a laptop to use when I'm gone. She's forced to sit and use the desktop machine if she needs the internet while I'm gone, and who wants to be chained to a desk to use a computer? That's so 1990s.

Our old iBook died exactly one year ago (to the day!) due to the Logic Board Failure. It was 3.5 years old, out of warranty, and also no longer eligible for the repair program. Junk. It's sat on the floor in the office for the last year. I've been meaning to harvest the hard drive out of it for use as an external backup drive, and maybe sell the RAM on eBay. Too lazy, and good thing!

Today I decided to search and see if there was any do-it-yourself remedy for the logic board problem. And I was in luck! It turns out the failure is due to cracking in the solder joints between the graphics card and the main board. People had good success if they opened up the machine and inserted some kind of shim between the outer plastic casing and the metal shell protecting the internal components, just under where the graphics card is. I did this, sticking a couple of rectangular metal washers right there, and it worked!



That makes 3 total repairs I've done myself on that machine:
  • Replaced bad hard drive (major surgery)
  • Replaced cracked display bezel (even more major surgery)
  • Inserted shim to fix logic board (outpatient procedure)

Nice. Time to head down to Tom's.
Good job with the fix, and I probably haven't said this before, but your pictures on your blog look neat. They remind me of when I was little, those cameras that print the picture directly after you take them.

Anyways, now you can hang out with Tom without having the wife complain. That's always a good thing.
Why am I tempted to make a song designed to be played on two laptops simultaneously?
I thought "It's fixed!" applied directly to BYOND; way to get my hopes up.
How spoiled you guys are. =( I've got but a single desktop computer, and you guys are tossing around a desktop and multiple laptops. Poo on you.

Mikau wrote:
They remind me of when I was little, those cameras that print the picture directly after you take them.

Yeah, I miss my poor old Polaroid my dad gave me one year. =( Was a neat little piece of trash that lasted about half of a year.
I thought it was supposed to resemble a flat-panel iMac. (That's more or less what they look like; the screen where the image is, and a white border that's thicker down the bottom than it as at the top and sides.)

It's missing the Apple logo and the webcam though. =)
Mikau wrote:
Good job with the fix, and I probably haven't said this before, but your pictures on your blog look neat. They remind me of when I was little, those cameras that print the picture directly after you take them.

Polaroids. If you view source, you'll notice I have a CSS class called "polaroid" for this purpose. Though when I got my Canon camera, it uses a slightly different aspect ratio, so I had to make a clone of that style called "canon".

Hiead wrote:
How spoiled you guys are. =( I've got but a single desktop computer, and you guys are tossing around a desktop and multiple laptops. Poo on you.

Not spoiled, just got an edjumacation and a decent job with money to spend on a laptop every 3-4 years. ;) The iBook is quite old by today's standards, 4.5 years and counting, running at a blazing 600 MHz. We could buy bigger and better but choose to be more frugal.

Crispy wrote:
I thought it was supposed to resemble a flat-panel iMac. (That's more or less what they look like; the screen where the image is, and a white border that's thicker down the bottom than it as at the top and sides.)

Err, huh, what? Except for the first fruity-flavored generation, iBooks have always looked like mine does. The flat-panel iMac is a completely different beast.

It's missing the Apple logo and the webcam though. =)

Like all Apple laptops, the logo is in the back of the screen so it glows from the backlight. And yes, no built in webcams until about 18 months ago.
No, no... I meant the CSS polaroid image thing. They slightly resemble flat-panel iMacs, except without the Mac logo and stuff (and the proportions are slightly wrong now that I look at them side-by-side). I guess I see more iMacs than I do polaroid photos. =)

Of course the subject of the photo is an iBook (well, an iBook and a Macbook), that was never in question...
Crispy wrote:
No, no... I meant the CSS polaroid image thing.

Well, that makes a heck of a lot more sense. That's what the Reply button is for - clarifying just what you're responding to. ;)
Yeah, but then I have to wait for the comments box to appear. =) The one that's right on the page is so much more convenient.