Sunday, March 29, 2009

Technical Difficulties

Greetings from Phoenix.  My beloved Macbook Pro has had a graphics failure and is pretty much out of commission (I think and hope it might be the known failure of the 8600M which would mean it's still covered under warranty).  This has happened before.  Last time it magically fixed itself on the morning I was to bring it in to the Genius Bar.  We shall see.  I have an appointment at the Apple Store in Tuscon tomorrow.

The computer is completely functional except that the internal and external displays don't work.  I'm actually typing this on it now, by screen sharing from Nick's laptop.  Like an idiot I had turned screen sharing off about a week ago, and had to do some Terminal hackery to enable it through SSH.  I don't know much about unix, so that made me feel pretty damn cool.

Anyway, as the only way I can access my computer is by borrowing someone else's, I'm pretty much restricted to necessary purposes, so I may not be blogging much for a while.  We are home in a week, so whatever happens, I'll have my PC and my poor Powerbook, which surely can't withstand another tour.  Or can it?

2 comments:

bobvis said...

Terminal hackery to enable it through SSH.

That is pretty damn cool. I used to use unix a lot in a prior life, but that may not have even occurred to me that I *could* do that.

Maybe you turned off screen sharing for security concerns or to save memory or something. Or it may have been off be default to begin with.

KP said...

What happened with screen sharing was that I always have it on (partially for unexpected situations like this) and about a week ago one of my colleagues was like, "you know you have a VNC server or something running." So I explained why I keep it on, and that it's password protected. But for some reason I let him make me momentarily paranoid and I turned it off.

I wasn't sure it could be turned back on through the terminal, but I hoped and suspected, and with a quick Google I found the command for it. That made my life so much easier.