Hal O'Brien

From Kottke (omitting the snark):

*^*^*

If you've got a Mac, the "droid" sound that Android phones make -- yep, the one from the commercials -- can be produced in the following manner:

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Type say -v "Cellos" "droid" at the prompt

*^*^*

I can attest this works on my MacMini. And it doesn't even generate a mac snow crash.

Speaking of which... A cow-orker turned me on to the electric sheep screensaver, which is fairly cool. The way it ties into the mac's monthly-or-so snow crashes is, running it seems to defeat the power saving. So it might inhibit whatever it is the mac is screwing up on the sleep/wake cycles that induces snow crashes.

(NB: the electric sheep screensaver should not be confused with Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep Comix, or with Farley's awesome story, The Spiders. Because, cool as the screen saver may be, it doesn't hold a candle to Farley.)

EDITED TO ADD: Regarding the snow crash, that would be no. I just came to the machine to find a) it had blanked the screen in power-save, and b) a snow crash upon wake.

Minimax just did a another snow crash.

It still does that about every 4-6 weeks, so nothing new there.

What was new this time was, it did it progressively while I was working on the machine. I saw what looked like transparent horizontal bands of the TV-like snow; then the whole desktop was mildly transparently "snowy" while the band of most snow continued to jump around the screen; then the whole thing went to flat-out snow.

JWMA.

After giving me a window of 3-5 days to get Minimax back, the Southcenter Apple Store called last night and said it was ready. I've picked it up, and everything appears to be doing well. 1 day turnaround is pretty good.

In an interesting way of setting what the marketing jargon calls a "reference price," they printed up a receipt to let me know this Main Logic Board replacement would have cost $617.81 had the machine not been under warranty. That's about as much as it cost new. No, nobody's trying to sell an Applecare extension, why do you ask?

Now comes the most difficult part of trying to fix an intermittent problem like this: Waiting to see if it goes wrong again, while realizing early success may only be a Black Swan.

Oddest side effect found so far: My serial number isn't in System Profiler any more. It only says,

"Serial Number (system): System Serial#"

Having kept all my receipts, though, I think that'll be OK.

So I've been told many times from the Apple faithful about the snow crash issue, "Hey, just take it in to Apple. You're under warranty. No problem."

Since moving the Mac by the kitchen window (and thus, using the Mac more) I've been seeing snow crashes more often. So I finally went and made an appointment for the Southcenter Genius Bar for Thursday.

One of the things they have as part of the form is a Comment section. "Tell us why you're coming in." So I start writing, with a pointer to the YouTube video of the Mac snow crash, and I begin saying how I've observed it only when waking up from "sleep," and not "live" while an app is running, and...

...and suddenly the screen refreshes. Apparently I'd reached the character limit for the Comments field. Did they tell me of such a limit? No. Did it just stop and say I'd hit the limit? No. Did I have a chance to give a full report, and maybe help the poor schlub whom I'm going to be venting on come the appointment do his or her job? Nope, nope, all that would be too respectful of both the customer's time and the employee's time. Plus, when I go to Apple's site and look at "My Reservations" (as in, "My Reservations: Let me tell you them."), guess what doesn't show my comments nor a link to same? So, odds are, I'm going to end up having to explain it all again.

"Just Works My Ass."