by Suw on December 23, 2004
I was gutted earlier this evening when a bright green line appeared on my PowerBook's screen, about a fifth of the way over from the left, top to bottom, one pixel wide. I've done a number of restarts, advised by the Mac types in #joiito to hold down certain keys whilst doing so, but no dice. The line remains when I move the screen back and forth, but if I push on it just so, on the top left of the screen downwards towards the hinge, it vanishes temporarily, which makes me believe that the problem may actually be in the left-hand hinge. (This model, a G4 TiBook, has two hinges on either side, each with two screws in the back.)
Does anyone have any advice? Can anyone recommend a good Mac place in London that could look at this and won't charge me a small fortune to do so or take my Mac away for days? My life is on this Mac. I can't work without it, (not metaphorically but literally), and I can't afford not to be working right now. Because this Mac is both pretty old and second-hand – I was given it by a friend and have added a new battery, memory and an Airport card – I don't have AppleCare, so there's no chance of getting this fixed for free.
I am so sad, so disappointed. I mean, the thing's usable, but I can't really afford to get it mended, and I can't afford to buy a new one. If everyone who visited Chocolate and Vodka donated a single pound, then I could get a new PowerBook, but people don't. Someone once told me that it's easier to get one person to give you a million pounds than to get a million people to give you one pound. Scale that right back to two grand, and the principle is the same. A big thanks to those who have given me money for this, but if you have any spare right now, please give it to the Asian quake relief efforts instead.
I suppose I will get used to the line in due course and filter it out, but it's not nice and I worry that it'll just get worse and then the whole screen will go.
UPDATE: I plugged the laptop into my desktop monitor this morning to see if the green line is still there, and it's not. I presume this means that the problem lies between the video card and the screen and not with the video card itself, which may or may not be a good thing. I still think it's a connector. I just need to find someone to look at it and tell me for sure.
by Suw on December 23, 2004
Euan picks up on a meme from Liz Lawley where you type each letter of the alphabet into the address bar of your browser and see what it suggests. It creates a nice little snapshot of recent browsing history, and illustrates just how right Hugh MacLeod was when he called me 'probably the most blog-obsessed female in the UK' (most of the links that aren't actual blogs I found or use because of blogs).
a is for Amazon.co.uk
b is for the Blogware admin page for Chocolate and Vodka
c is for Chocolate and Vodka, a deeply unsurprising revelation
d is for Darren Barefoot
e is for Ensight
f is for Flickr
g is for Gmail
h is for Horst, although that's because his URI starts with an 'h' for 'homepage'
i is for the #suwcharman IRC channel stats which were prepared by Imajes and which no one should look at, particularly if they are clients of mine
j is for Just a Gwai Lo
k is for Kombinat
l is for AKMA's Last.fm page, which surprised me by including quite a few bands I rather like. Never thought I'd share musical taste with AKMA, but that just goes to show you should never judge an album by its cover
m is for My StatCounter page, which provides traffic stats for Strange Attractor
n is for Ninjafish, and oh, would I have been in trouble with crw if it had been any other page! (Even if he hasn't blogged much lately, hint hint.)
o is for oh god, not Orkut
p is for Plasticbag
q is for Qjump, for train timetables
r is for Richard Conolly, a new blogger whom I helped mentor the other day
s is for Scoble.com. Why on earth is S for Scoble.com? I don't remember visiting this site? Must have been after Robert Scoble instead.
t is for Technorati
u is for a page which used to link to a searchable version of the Oxford English Dictionary until the University of Oxford got snarky and started threatening people with legal action, the selfish gets
v is for VersionTracker (for Mac OS X, obviously)
w is for Webs and Wings, Ninjafish's mum (oh, gosh, that gives a lot away, doesn't it?)
x is for nothing at all. I have no sites in my recent history that begin with x
y is for Yahoo. Yawn
z is for Zoetrope
And just to extend the meme:
1 is for a Nominet whois query
2 is for the True Voice 20 Questions blog
3 is for Signal vs Noise
4 and 5 are for nothing
6 is for a client's webmail
7 is for nothing
8 is for Blogaholix
and finally, 9 is for nothing
