These are the many noises a Mac makes put into a “song”….

Claire inserted her new Jonas Brothers CD into our iMac 20, and it would not show up nor would it eject. I tried all the tricks I could find on the internet to get it to eject: eject key, iTunes eject, reboot holding down mouse button, typing a terminal command. I could hear the disk spinning and even feel it with a driver’s license, but it would not come out.

Shut it down overnight to see if cooling would help, but that did nothing. Made an appointment with the Apple Store “Genius Bar” over the internet to take it in. Just before I packed it up in the original box, I pressed the eject button on the keyboard, and the Jonas Brothers popped out! (Or their CD, anyway.) I tried putting it and other CDs back in, but none would show up. I could at least eject them. Off to the Genius Bar.

Of course it worked fine as the Apple Genius tried CDs and DVDs in the Apple Store. So he decided to call it intermittent superdrive failure, and change it out for free. (Still under the 1 year warranty.) Kathy and I went to pick it up Saturday, having dinner at the food court.

It turns out replacing the superdrive did not solve the problem, so they replaced the entire logic board (which is basically the computer.) The whole tab was over $1,000 between parts and labor. The logic board alone is $650.

Looking at the system profile under “Disc Burning”, I got a message “No device is attached.” Ack! That was a symptom before the fix. But I put in a CD, it started playing, and looking back under system profile I saw what I expected. So who knows. I’ll probably end up buying an extended warranty, which I’ve never done.

MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-85J:

Firmware Revision: FM0S

Interconnect: ATAPI

Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)

Cache: 2048 KB

Reads DVD: Yes

CD-Write: -R, -RW

DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW

Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO

Media:

Type: CD-ROM

Blank: No

Erasable: No

Overwritable: No

Appendable: No

With the new iMac moving in, Claire and I worked on a project to clean the old iMac’s keyboard. After years of use by hair-losing dogs and people, oily fingers, and way too much snacking at the computer, the keyboard accumulated a lot of filth. Zoom in the “dirty” photo below to see what you can identify. (Hint: Can you find the staple?)

Carefully removing each key and letting them soak in some soapy water, Claire and I used a hand towel and q-tips to make the keyboard look almost new!

We followed the tips of this French web page auto-translated by Google. The translation is funny, but there were some good tips.

Several things “broke” when I migrated from our old iMac 17″ Flat Panel (Tiger) to our new iMac 20″ Aluminum (Leopard). Bound to happen with a double jump in technology: PowerPC to Intel and Tiger to Leopard.

One thing that broke was sharing an HP DeskJet 6500 USB printer attached to the Mac with a Windows 2000 laptop on the network. I had accomplished this in the past using CUPS and creating a secondary printer. This did not migrate across, and I had forgotten about setting up a secondary printer and, besides that, CUPS has changed.

And I had the same problem with my new Parallels setup (a migration of the Windows 2000 laptop.)

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Kelly and I are sitting in Best Buy as I type playing with the new iMacs on the new Leopard operating system. “They’re giant” says Kelly referring to the 20″ and 24″ screens. (She is on the 24″ right now.) After playing with it for a few minutes she said, “Our Mac is old. I don’t even know how to do most of the stuff in here.” Of course, she really does because she is over there building a Garage Band song right now.

Acquired Feb 10 2004:

Machine Name: iMac
Machine Model: PowerMac6,3
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (3.3)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1.25 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
Memory: 512 MB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.7.8f1
Serial Number: QP40601BQB8

Exploded diagram shows Airport Extreme (which is what I’m looking for today.)

The “Get A Mac” ads have become a form of mini-entertainment in our household. New ads are newsworthy enough to be announced on My Yahoo and so I end up seeing them over the internet before TV.

I’m pleased to report that one of the new ads mentions “checkbook” twice… even if it was the PC bringing it up.

Long live the Mac. Long live the checkbook.

While in my hotel room in Phoenix this past week, instead of turning on the TV, I ended up watching a presentation by Steve Jobs about the new iPods, iTunes, and a new thing coming called iTV. The presentation ended up being much more impressive that I thought as I saw how Apple is becoming a network for music, televisions shows, and movies. You will be able to watch and listen when you want either in the car, on the go, on your laptop or desktop, or in your living room on your big TV screen. The latter is possible with a $299 box that will talk wirelessly to the Mac in the next room to play music, TV shows, or movies. The box doesn’t store anything. It just hooks up to the big screen TV.

One of the new features of iTunes is “Cover Flow” which I’ve now been enjoying for two days. Apple will automatically update all of your music with any album cover art it can find. I went from about 2% to about 70% album art in one update. I’ve since been making some manual updates.

Cover Flow lets you “rediscover your music” as Steve said. Basically it lets you flip through albums as you would do physically with the added advantage of iTunes keeping everything sorted for you.

The funny thing was I watched half of Steve’s presentation, got called to dinner, and then finished it when I came back from dinner. I felt like I was already watching iTV.

Oh… one other thing about iTunes. The new “gapless album” feature is terrific. Now songs that were meant to flow into one another (Duke by Genesis, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd) play as intended with no interruption between songs. Not sure how this works, but iTunes auto-detects this and just seems to know. You can also manually tell iTunes to act gapless if it doesn’t guess right. So far it has guessed right on my albums.

I watched Steve Job’s keynote speech at Macworld. I always enjoy these presentations because Steve is simply one of the best presenters on earth. He talked about the amazing iPod sales, introduced the new Intel Macs, and showed off several of the new iLife applications that make photography, movie-editting, podcasting, and web building very simple.

(As I type, Claire and Kelly are giggling at the their podcast created in the new version of Garageband. They are using voice effects that make them sound like chipmunks and Will Farrell.)

In addition to iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, and iTunes, I was really impressed with a new member of the iLife suite called iWeb. It makes web page building easy. Including photos, movies, graphics, and text using fun templates can be done so quickly and easily, I couldn’t believe it.

So I bought iLife for $99. I can install it on up to five family Macs. There is nothing like this suite of software in the Windows world. Apple is so far ahead with integration between consumer-friendly applications, I don’t think Microsoft can ever catch up.

Here are two simple pages I created in a few minutes and then published to our home web server. I was happy to discover I did not have to pay for a .Mac account to publish these pages.

http://stonegate.fiveforks.com/iweb/Jeb/Stout.html

http://stonegate.fiveforks.com/iweb/Jeb/Turtle.html