Passing clouds of inconsequential observations
My early morning ritual includes a look at the statistics for this site. There is usually a handful of visitors between midnight and 5am. Today there had been a steady stream each one had searched for “Steve Jobs”:
I did not need to read the news headlines to know why.
Some may have missed the historical significance of the picture of [wikipop]Steve Jobs[/wikipop] (allegedly) on a bicycle with Apple wheels created by Mike Joos for his bike series.
In the early 1980s [wikipop]Macintosh[/wikipop] was just a code name for the then unreleased new computer from Apple. It was thought that Bicycle would make a good name for the computer. A contemporary Apple advertisement had explained how humans were not as fast runners as many other species, but a human on a bicycle beat them all. Personal computers were “bicycles for the mind.”
Fortunately the team developing the Mac did not like the Bicycle moniker and just kept calling it the Macintosh and so that is what it became.
See: Folklore / Bicycle by [wikipop]Andy Hertzfeld[/wikipop]
After downloading the developers version of Windows 8 I installed it as a virtual machine with Virtual Box.
After a false start trying the Other Windows option:
I tried the 64Bit Windows 7 option and off it went:
It was mostly a case of clicking through the standard settings apart from the Advanced installation option for a completely fresh install:
We went for a walk in the Autumn sunshine while it whirled away and returned ready to go:
The iPad has created a whole range of new ways for music making from recreating traditional instruments:
to rethinking the way instruments work:
http://youtu.be/cad2iWNop9A
and Smule have a range of apps that cover both ends of the spectrum. The latest is the MadPad with which you record sound & video samples of any objects you happen upon. These are then laid out in a grid for you to drum on to create your masterpiece.
One of the default sets is a range of bicycle sounds. So following in the footsteps of a young [wikipop]Frank Zappa[/wikipop] on a 1963 edition of the [wikipop]Steve Allen Show[/wikipop]
and our very own Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra:
I banged away…
On Saturday the [wikipop]MacBook[/wikipop] was getting a bit clunky and on investigation the hard disc was found to be damaged and needed wiping/formatting. Just what those girls do to the poor thing, having previously destroyed the old [wikipop search=”iBook G4″]iBook[/wikipop]’s disc, remains a mystery.
After backing up to the [wikipop search=”Time Machine (Mac OS)”]Time Machine[/wikipop], downloading the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and installing that on an old USB hard disc we were ready to boot from the external disc and wipe the internal disc. The wiping did not affect the recovery partition that [wikipop search=”Mac OS X Lion”]Lion[/wikipop] creates and so that was used for the reinstallation.
The process seemed to go without a hitch until the point when the computer should have restarted which it failed to do:
It repeatedly downloaded the installer but then hung showing either 5+ Hours remaining or Around 0 seconds to go. The download was restarted half a dozen times each with the same inconclusive result. Fortunately [wikipop]Tim Minchin[/wikipop] was hosting the Comedy Prom on TV and his Lullaby helped to relieve the frustrations:
Having shut down the MacBook for the night I tried it one more time on Sunday morning. It seemed to stall yet again but while I perused the support forums for any advice there was a reassuring [wikipop]startup chime[/wikipop] and it leapt into life and started the installation process. Once installed Martine sat in bed retrieving the backed up stuff which, to her alarm, reinstalled thousands of old emails.
But in the end, albeit with a little frustration, the whole disc-less wire-less installation did not fail us.