CraigGrocott.com

This is my serious face:

August 25th, 2008. Published under 365, Photography, Photos. No Comments.

I’ve been at home for the long weekend, and the kick-ass light in my parents house kind of inspired me to be a bit more creative than usual…

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Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.2 Update

August 13th, 2008. Published under Apple, Tech, The Bad, The Ugly. No Comments.

So it turns out that Microsoft’s latest patch for Office 2008 refuses to install if you’ve used a program such as Monolingual to strip out some of the bloat…

The installer performs some kind of checksum on the files and if it doesn’t match what it was expecting then it refuses to acknowledge that you have Office installed.

A bit of digging turned up a solution though, and with a BIG nod to JasonD on the AppleInder Forums, here’s what I did, step by step:

Disclaimer: This worked really well for me, but I accept no reponsibility or liability if it does something nasty to your computer.

Download the update manually from here.
Mount the image.
Right-click on the mounted image and click “Duplicate”
Open the duplicate.
Unmount the Original image.
Right-click on the file inside here and “Show Package Contents”
Navigate to “Contents -> Resources”
Right-click and “Get Info” on the file named “package_updatable”
Click the ‘lock’ in the bottom-left of the “Get Info” window.
Enter your password.
Change your access permissions to “Read & Write”
Close “Get Info” window
Open “package_updatable” with TextEdit or similar
Remove the 2 lines

if not found_valid_version:
sys.exit(48)

Save and close.
Go back to the duplicate image and run “Office 2008 12.1.2 Update”.
Follow the prompts in the installer.
Sit back and relax.

SILENCE!!!

July 7th, 2008. Published under Life, The Bad, The Ugly. 1 Comment.

Silence isn’t always golden!

I’ve got no ‘net connection, or bed for that matter… It sucks.

Question of the day / week / month: 3G iPhone or Nokia N95?

The case of the invisible Hard Drive

June 13th, 2008. Published under Apple, Tech, The Bad. No Comments.

My OS X volume disappeared from my Finder and my desktop today. Which was slightly annoying.

There is a quick* fix though: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305402 (Note: The article neglects to mention that you need to append this command with sudo for it to work.)

*I say quick fix, Xcode is a 1.1GB download. So, it’s only quick if you already have Xcode installed or have a crazy fast Internet connection.

Old meets New

May 26th, 2008. Published under Life. No Comments.

Snapped this when I was sat outside the Bullring drinking my Starbucks, waiting for my Mac to be fixed.

Primed

May 26th, 2008. Published under Life, The Good. 2 Comments.

I signed up for Amazon Prime about a month ago. I’d avoided it for a while, there was just something about the idea of paying £49 a year just for ‘free’ 1-day delivery that sounded alarm bells. But I finally caved when I found myself placing an order for something that I needed, now, like, right the hell now, yesterday if possible. It also happened to be my third order in the space of a week. So I caved.

One month on, I’ve placed a further 5 orders. Admittedly, one was for my housemate, because, what’s the point in him paying for delivery when I can get it for free? But it’s started me thinking…

Would I have bought these items, from Amazon or elsewhere, if I had to pay for delivery? And the only answer that I could come up with was: Maybe. But, I’d have thought a lot harder about it.

Tonight I ordered a pocket Moleskine because I decided that I needed a small notebook by next weekend. I knew that I didn’t have time to go searching for one during the week, so I went to Amazon. I’d never have done this in the past if I had to pay what equates to half the cost of the product in delivery charges.

I think that Amazon are onto a winner here!

The Genius and I

May 15th, 2008. Published under Apple, Tech, The Bad, The Good, The Ugly. No Comments.

Six months, two MacBook Pros, some misery, and one trip to the Apple Store…

On Monday I made my first visit to the Genius Bar at my ‘local’ Apple Store in the hope of leaving with a working MacBook Pro. Leon, one of the store’s mac ‘Geniuses’ didn’t like the sound of my problem…

The prognosis: hardware failure.

The solution: new topcase.

The reality: 5 - 10 days without my computer, and another trip to Birmingham to collect it.

The result: Sad Craig.

My reaction: “Can I speak to your manger then please?”

Just to stress the point: this is my second MBP in the 6 months since I made my original purchase, the first warped so badly within the first week that it was pretty much unusable.

I expressed my displeasure with the build quality of the MBPs to the store manger. One hardware problem in the first 6 months would usually be enough to piss me off. Two put me in a foul mood. And then the manager started to read from his script…

“I’m very sorry that you had to come to the Apple Store today. What can I do for you?”

Anyway, to cut a long story short, his solution to my displeasure about being without my second MBP for an extended period was to use a USB keyboard and mouse. WHAT! THE! FUCK!?!

I wasn’t happy, and I pretty much ignored him after this because a) I was pretty mad, and b) he went back to the script, which made me even angrier.

The story does have a happy ending though, because, despite the useless manager, Leon came through for me! He phoned upstairs and found out that they had 3 topcases and not much of a workload… Two hours later, I had my MBP back with a working keyboard and trackpad.

——

Leon: You’re a legend! Thank you!

Mr Manager: Thanks for nothing!

Apple: Sort your shit out!

MacBook Pro : FAIL!

May 11th, 2008. Published under Apple, Life, Tech, The Bad. 1 Comment.

To all those people who I’ve been raving about my Mac experience, I take it back!

At least for a short while…

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mac, and as I sit here writing this post on a Windows machine, I morn the loss of my lovely OS X working environment. But, I’m now at the stage where my SECOND MacBook Pro in six months is ready to be taken to the doctors, the first went back within a week of purchase after the case started to warp to the point where it rocked on any flat surface, when I tried to type.

What’s wrong this time then?

I’ve been having an intermittent problem where the built-in keyboard and trackpad stop working for a short period of time. On Saturday morning I suffered 3 kernel panics in a very short period of time, and all were related to a module with a name along the lines of IOHID (Human Input Device!?!?).

I tried to do a clean install of Leopard, hoping that the problem might be software related. I suffered a further KP during the install process however whilst using the keyboard and from then on both the keyboard and trackpad were unresponsive.

So, now I’ve got an appointment at my nearest Genius Bar. (Which I’m going to have to take an afternoon off work to go to..)

Has anybody else experienced anything like this? I know that there have been a number of cases where people have lost the built in k/b and trackpad. My friend has had it happen twice to the same machine* two different machines this year! *(Tom tells me that it’s actually the same / a similar problem on two different MBPs as opposed to a re-occurrence on the same machine… I’m not sure what’s worse…)

Oh yeah, I think that this case is starting to warp too…

UPDATE:

I’ve just noticed something even stranger!

I’ve been using a USB keyboard and mouse to try and make sure that I’ve got Windows friendly copies of all my data and I accidentally started to use the built-in keyboard… It worked!

But then it stopped!

It turns out that both the keyboard and trackpad work if I keep one finger on the trackpad. As soon as I release the trackpad the keyboard stops working fairly quickly, and if I happen to be holding down a key (e.g. changing the volume or brightness) I get a KP!

UPDATE 2:

Curious about people’s woes with swollen batteries on the MacBook Pros, I decided to remove the battery to see if the problem went away… well, something happened… not even the ‘one finger’ trick works when the battery isn’t there! The battery looks fine, but it must be exerting some pressure for it to have an effect.