Latest or all posts or last 15, 30, 90 or 180 days.
2024-03-28 08:56:48
Designed for the most demanding needs of photographers and videographers.
877-865-7002
Today’s Deal Zone Items... Handpicked deals...
$398 $328
SAVE $70

$3399 $2999
SAVE $400

$2997 $2997
SAVE $click

$348 $248
SAVE $100

$999 $699
SAVE $300

$5999 $4399
SAVE $1600

$1049 $879
SAVE $170

$4499 $3499
SAVE $1000

$999 $849
SAVE $150

$999 $799
SAVE $200

$5999 $4399
SAVE $1600

$799 $699
SAVE $100

$1199 $899
SAVE $300

$1099 $899
SAVE $200

$348 $248
SAVE $100

$1601 $998
SAVE $603

$3399 $2999
SAVE $400

$3997 $3697
SAVE $300

$5999 $4399
SAVE $1600

$1397 $997
SAVE $400

A bad computer day

Mac OS X or not, sometimes strange problems crop up—like yesterday—my day in computer hell, though thankfully only my toes were burned!

Of course, as soon as things go wrong, I back up my data just in case. And then I can afford to erase the boot disk (I never keep data on the boot disk (even mail), but backups are always a Good Idea). And I keep 3 or 4 rotating backups too, just in case I make a mistake.

First, the Epson driver for my R2400 crashes repeatedly (every time I print).

Second, Photoshop CS2 refuses to open various files, particularly JPEG files, citing a program error. No number of reboots or re-launches of Photoshop fixes this problem. Searching the Adobe site claims that deleting the various preference files will solve the problem, but that simply wasn’t true, and I tried multiple times and various ways.


Adobe Photoshop CS2—error opening a file*

*Programmer-speak for “Screw you—we were too lazy to produce a helpful error message”.

I decided to reinstall Photoshop—but there is no Uninstall. Multiple Adobe “help” documents blithely say to uninstall before reinstalling (since the installer refuses to install over an existing copy!), but it takes 30 minutes of searching the Adobe site to find an obscure note describing which files to manually delete (!). How is that an “uninstall”? And none of the documents provide any link from the word “uninstall” to the document saying how to do it. Thank you Adobe—and thanks for the headache of having to prove that I’m not a criminal by repeatedly having to authorize and de-authorize my copy of Photoshop CS2. You are hereby designated Software ShitHeads of the Year. Too bad there isn’t a competing product or you’d be history. But misery loves company, so there is always the bug-laden DreamWeaver 8.

Third, my 2-week-old 30" Apple Cinema Display develops what I’ll call the “green crawlies”. I can’t show a screen capture, because they don’t show up in a screen capture—which means something between the video card and the display, or the display itself. I had seen this problem with my dual 2.5GHz machine (not a Quad) and an older 30" display. This is with a brand-new 30" display, and my PowerMac G5 Quad. Since a screen capture won’t show it, I shot the image below with my Nikon D200. The greenish pixels are around everything on the screen, edges in particular. If you know what causes this, please email me. The problem comes and goes, though it first appeared yesterday.


“Green Crawlies”

Finally, Disk Utility reports problems that can’t be fixed, requiring a boot into single-user mode, and using the command line “fsck_hfs”. Eventually I fix the file system to be error-free, but neither Photoshop CS2, nor the 30" Cinema Display, nor the Epson R2400 driver consider that an improvement.

I resolved to reinstall system software. A clean slate, first verifying things on a spare drive, then erasing and reinstalling on my original boot drive.

So I try to boot off the Tiger install CD from my Mac OS X Family Pack (I misplaced my G5 Quad install disk). I lose again—it’s 10.4.0, which pre-dates the Quad, and so the boot sequence results in a kernel panic, making it impossible to reinstall system software. A friend with a Quad comes to the rescue—thank you!

But Apple deserves some praise—when booting up a newly-installed Mac OS X, it offers to copy your applications, data and preferences from another computer or disk. This worked beautifully, even keeping the nefarious Photoshop CS2 authorization scheme happy. The green crawlies remained, so this suggests it is not a software problem, though there is a non-zero chance that the copied data could be involved. And the green crawlies are now gone, but from past experience I know that they come and go.

I haven’t yet installed the Epson R2400 driver, but all else is well, and I’m back in business. At least it wasn’t Windows, though in this case it sure felt like it!


View all handpicked deals...

Sony WH-1000XM5 Noise-Canceling Wireless Over-Ear Headphones (Black)
$398 $328
SAVE $70

diglloyd Inc. | FTC Disclosure | PRIVACY POLICY | Trademarks | Terms of Use
Contact | About Lloyd Chambers | Consulting | Photo Tours
RSS Feeds | X.com/diglloyd
Copyright © 2022 diglloyd Inc, all rights reserved.