The RoggBlog

Last night, I restarted my iMac, poured a coffee, and nearly scalded myself when the computer started shrieking hysterically at me. After cleaning up and trying it again, just to confirm I wasn’t having some kind of seizure, a little Googling revealed the source of my woes: a faulty memory module.

Luckily, after forcing it to assume the position (face down on the bed and crying, ladies) and having at it with a trusty Philips screwdriver, I pulled the dodgy one and had it rebooting as normal, albeit short of 2GB RAM.

So what now? I’m not particularly fond of carting it off to Apple for the next week, since they will undoubtedly wipe my hard drive as a matter of course and erase my treasured collection of midget porn university documents. I also tried ringing the Apple store, only to be told its not as easy as just bringing the duff RAM down there and getting a new one.

I’m almost tempted to just write it off and buy a spanking new RAM kit from Crucial: I’ve had good luck with them in the past, I won’t have any downtime, and it’s going to be a damn sight better than the crap from Hynix that comes in the box.

Not happy.

I’ve had my iMac less than a month, so I was understandably pissed when I found a stuck pixel this morning. Red, of all colours, and of course after I realized it was there I couldn’t focus on anything else.

Fortunately for me - Apple has a pretty arbitrary definition of what constitutes a warranty-covered pixel spooging - I came across this little bad boy. JScreenFix opens a window which cycles every pixel inside it; when placed over the offending pixel, it should dislodge it lickety-split. Instructions say 20 minutes, mine was gone in 5.

Incidentally, a stuck pixel is any pixel displaying a fixed colour. If it’s black, it’s dead, and you’re out of luck.

Dammit. I was all geared up for a whine about how Apple’s Mighty Mouse is one of the wankiest peripherals I’ve ever got my dabs on - no small claim for someone who grew up during Saitek’s heyday - then I saw this by Dave Shea, which rendered it all a a bit pointless.

Part of the iMac’s attraction for me was the GeForce 8800 GS, which, while not the beefiest graphics card out there, I reckoned should be more than enough to indulge myself in a bit of gaming.

So I was more than happily surprised by the fact that, like a properly disciplined subbie, it was able to handle almost anything Team Fortress 2 threw at it, even at a widescreen 1900×1280 with most of the settings turned up to max (I left anti-aliasing on 4x).

The one blood-encrusted band-aid in my swimming pool of newly-found gaming bliss was that bastard Mighty Mouse sullying the innocent joy of taking a human life by spunking the build menu in my face, when all I want to do is ram my Engineer’s wrench up that wisecracking Scout’s posterior and twist his guts off.

*breathes*

I bought a Razer DeathAdder today after flicking through Bit-Tech. And I’m much better now.

I just wish they could’ve done something about the name. :/