=== 31 October 2014 === I'm backdating this, because having just the one entry for October would bother me. Besides, 2 November and 31 October are close enough as to make no difference, daylight savings time aside. I rather wish I had sent in my MBP during the period where Apple was fixing logic boards for free. I did so to have the sleep button on my iPhone fixed last week, and it was relatively painless. I got my phone back in about a week, and it's perfectly fine. Hell, it's also my phone -- I've heard some reports that people got replacement phones, but this is certainly mine! Then again, during that period I had a loaner phone -- I seriously don't have another working cellphone that takes a nano-sim, just a Nokia N75 -- and that was a pain in the ass. Ultimately, I determined that one issue was restoring my backup onto the loaner phone. Doing so would [sorta] work, but then as a result the goddamn thing would restart every two-to-five minutes. So obviously, that wasn't an option. So once I sorted that out and gave up on the idea of using my backup at all, things went slightly better. I managed to link my iTunes Store and iCloud accounts to the phone without any issues, so I could at least retrieve some Apps. That was fine, except for some reason, the battery meter didn't work. It really is pretty strange to say that the battery meter doesn't work on a cellphone. It isn't like the fuel guage on a car, where there's some degree of mechanical connection. This is entirely electronic, and isn't really measuring something physical, the way that a gas guage actually measures the level of fuel in the cell. Even if it's just a mental distinction, that distinction is what makes the situation completely absurd to me. Luckily, that broken battery meter on iOS 8 issue was /just/ with that phone, so it is quite thoroughly not my problem. I must say though, usually a loaner phone might be a bit dinged up, but having a broken battery meter is sorta unexpected. It also seems to just be a _thing_ with iOS 8, based on google. I am so very, very glad that I haven't had these issues with my own phone, especially now that I've actually experienced these various idiotic issues. ==== 14 October 2014 === It would be pretty shameful if I completely neglected to update my gopherspace, wouldn't it? Yes, so let's not do that! I've actually been on SDF, I just never thought to write anything! A fun little experiment I am doing is browsing gopher in OS X's fullscreen mode (via Terminal, since it's good enough for me). Of course, due to the hard limit on line length, it is something of an underwhelming experience, really. There's a whole mess of empty space just vomited out there on the right. Negative space is great and all, but not when it is just /there/. One of these days I should actually get around to mailing SDF my dollar. Gosh, I hope it doesn't make the US Postal Service mad that I am trying to send paper currency via the post. As it is, last time I tried sending a letter to a non-governmental person, I got an "address unknown." I think they did not like the way I wrote the ZIP code. I don't know; it's actu- ally been a very long time since I mailed a letter that wasn't just going across town (e.g. to a landlord). Since I don't know better, I'll assume that cross-town mail gets handed differently than those letters intended to cross state lines. Well, that's an issue for another day! For now, I will just hope that I have guessed where these lines should end correctly, and that I have not neglected to use two spaces after each period. This is a mono- width application, after all. Just like typing things up on the old Apple //e. Speaking of which, if it still works, I should find a modem and a tel- net program and try to telnet into SDF on it. I'm sure that'll be fun, at the blistering pace of [probably] 300baud. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how fast the available modems for a //e are. Hell, I don't even know if it's a regular //e or an enhanced one! Also, I'm sure it would be far more sensible to just rig up a null- modem setup, but that would require restoring a windows desktop so that I have something with a serial port, wouldn't it? Doing all of that via USB from one of these Macintoshes would just introduce a series of headaches I don't really need or want. I'm not quite that much of a masochist, after all.