On 1/12/14, 10:31 AM, Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 1/12/2014 9:57 AM, F.O.A.D. wrote:
In my absence, the gurus at Evasi0n and saurik of Cydia himself came up
with a working untethered jailbreak and ancillary programs for the
iPhone 5S and the latest OS, so, finally, I'm able to customize my
iPhone. The customizations are mainly "tweaks" that expand upon the
features of the phones, such as adding more controls to the Control
Center and deleting the ones Apple puts in there that you might never
use.

Exciting, eh?

Also, sent my 2003 vintage iPod off to a service center for a battery
replacement. 10 years off a single battery on an often-used device ain't
bad.

Update on the slighty used, holy boat shoe sale: bids are now up to
$2.73, leaving me only $3000 and change short of my goal of the purchase
price of a new Apple Mac Pro! I don't need such a powerful desktop, so
I'd only buy one with auction proceeds. Or maybe a raffle. I'm beginning
to think a raffle might work...hmmm. 1000 tickets at $5 per...hey now!


I am still going through the learning and discovery process with the new
iMac. Finally got enough courage to upgrade to Mavericks. No problems,
despite hearing of some horror stories on some of the Apple/Mac forums.

Starting to like it but still making adjustments. Got tired of having
to expand Safari (zoom) to fill the screen every time you opened it so I
downloaded and installed Chrome. Chrome keeps the zoom setting.

One thing that drove me nuts one night:

When I first got it I was fooling around with the settings and enabled
the voice time announcement for every 15 minutes. Thought that was fun
for a while but eventually got sick of hearing it. So, I went to the
time/date preference setting and unchecked the box for the voice
announcements.

10 minutes later, it announced the time again. Opened the time/date
preferences and confirmed that the box was unchecked. 15 minutes
later, another time announcement. So, I put the iMac to sleep.

The next day I was thinking about it and "awoke" it. Sure enough, it
started giving voice time announcements on the quarter hour. I went to
an Apple support forum to see if there was any history of this issue and
indeed there was. An Apple tech had posted the following to resolve it:

====================
You need to reset the NVRAM and/or PRAM.
Shut down your Mac.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (?), Option, P, and
R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup
sound for the second time.
Release the keys.

After resetting NVRAM or PRAM, you may need to reconfigure your settings
for speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, and time
zone information. If issues persist, your Mac's logic board battery (not
a portable Mac's rechargeable battery) may need to be replaced. The
logic board battery helps retain NVRAM/PRAM settings when your computer
is shut down. You can take your Mac to a Mac Genius or Apple Authorized
Service Provider to replace the battery on the logic board.
====================

So, I am thinking that this is BS. You shouldn't have to go through all
that just to reset a setting. So, I shut the computer down, rebooted it
(without doing all the above) and the voice announcements ceased.

I had also installed the latest and greatest Garage Band version that
requires Mavericks to run. After installing, I now had *two* GB icons
in the Launch window. I thought the new one was supposed to replace
the old version like what happens on a Windows machine. But, again
after the reboot one of the icons disappeared.


Mac computers are nice but they have their quirks. Being a long-time
Windows user, I think Microsoft has done a pretty decent job in ironing
out a lot of the issues that earlier Windows versions had. Also, I
think using Windows NT as the backbone on Vista, 7 and 8 computers has
helped.


I don't use Safari, and though I have tried Chrome a few times, the lack
of availability of certain add-ons for it keep me on Firefox.

I went through a NVRAM/PRAM reset a few years ago for a hard drive that
was misbehaving. Ended up taking the iMac to the Apple store where the
techs simply replaced the hard drive. End of problem.

Every computer system has its quirks. I don't use Windows for anything
anymore, though my wife does, and every so often I have to provide "tech
support." She's on Windows 7, and it seems a lot more robust than some
previous versions of that OS.