El Capitan

I wrote El Crapitan but the spell checker changed it. Just wanted to keep the blog warm with another gripe about Apple. Since the upgrade, which I performed a couple of weeks ago, mail now crashes every few minutes (with a certain IMAP account enabled) and my Epson DX5000 scanner no longer works (no driver).

I’ve written before about how bad I think built-in obsolesence is, and this goes back to changing Pages so it would no longer open files from the previous version. Heck, I’ve got ClarisWorks files that my Dad wrote that I want to open. Compatibility should last a generation and not on the short (max years) timescales fashionable today.

So I will have to get the scanner working on Centos 7 or Windows 10.

Old dog, new tricks

My latest bit of tinkering involved re-purposing an old 1G Atom based Compaq laptop that came with and continued to run XP. It had a good innings but I didn’t want to connect an XP machine to my network for the kids to use so I backed it up and burnt a 32 bit Ubuntu 14.04 DVD (I would have preferred Centos 7 but I don’t think the 32 bit it available yet). It all worked very smoothly and it even gave me the option of keeping XP, turning the venerable laptop into a multi-boot machine. Son now uses it for homework (and I’m getting more and more impressed with Libre Office). Everything works well but it is a bit slow. Useable but slow, but we are talking an Atom with 1G here.

Next job is to buy a PSU for another bit of scrap and see if it will run Windows 10…