Tag Archives: refurbished

Refurbished iMac

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This morning I am aware of how much joy I enjoy, as light begins to filter into the sky that is visible through the silhouette of the tree, that I see when I gaze out of the living room window in the mornings. I feel wealthy, because I have the comfortable chair, in the warm dwelling, with a lovely window, and a tree I can see.

What a beautiful morning!

We are expecting snow by this afternoon, so I am determined to get out there for my walk early. After I wrote that last sentence, I headed out for my walk, it was sunny when I set out, and had clouded over by the time I returned home. Snow on the way.

My Mom knit me a second knee warmer for Christmas, so now when I go out for a walk both knees are dressed for the weather!

The refurbished iMac arrived on Tuesday. I tend to install everything anew, rather than transfer from the old iMac, and I’ve been busy setting up the new computer. And of course the joy of getting sidetracked has been mine to savour. I have collected quite a few images of art that I love to look at, and I display the images with their file names as a screensaver on the computer. This gives us a steady stream of art images, in high definition, to gaze at when we are sitting quietly contemplating life, the universe and everything.

The file names were haphazard, saved as is when the file was downloaded. The file names needed work. Luckily, I had been offered the software “Renamer” by the company as a gift, based on my long ago purchase of their discontinued recipe software. It came in very, very handy in renaming the files, there are over 600 of them. I name them thus: artist last name; artist first name; year created; title of work if any. This project took hours to complete. What a luxury to spend hours creating this decorative yet educational screen saver. Now the images rotate, and each one displays the the file name, which is the information about the image. My favourites are Klimt and Van Gogh.

The new iMac is light years faster than the 2007 iMac. I have moved my book working files onto a removable drive, and am now working on my genealogy book on the new computer. It is a modest screen size, by modern standards, 21.5″, and is a much better work space than the small screen of my MacBook Air. The book is going slowly, as I am now dealing with images, and captions, and references for the images. Each image has to be imported separately, resized and positioned on the page, manually captioned, and then manually referenced. There are hundreds of images, this is going to take some time.

We decided recently to discontinue Acorn TV for a little while, as we had watched all the programming they had that was interesting to us. A lot of their interesting stuff was not available in Canada. Instead we signed on for Amazon Prime Video, and we anticipate that they have such a limited offering that it won’t take long to watch everything they have that we find interesting. However, they also offer free shipping from Amazon.ca as part of the deal, so we can make the annual fee work for us. Our taste runs to programs that offer a good degree of character development, sophisticated story line, and no violence or manipulative power jockeying. Slim pickings these days, but there are still some programs that meet our criteria being created.

My blood pressure has been within normal readings for the last two readings. This is exciting! I have my fingers crossed that it isn’t just a fluke. Right now I am on the original dosage of the medication that had stopped working. Could it be that the low-sodium, low-sugar, pre-meal Apple Cider Vinegar, diet has at last kicked in to bring my high blood pressure down? Or is the lower level of stress, after a horrendous summer, allowing my blood pressure to lower? Well, I am not about to give up either the new diet, or the low stress levels, so I may never know!

Two of my heart tests will be conducted next week. No injections or pills, so I don’t have to worry about anaphylaxis. I have been trying to figure out the parking, it is going to be tricky, street parking with meters, I can’t arrive too early or I will get a ticket if the appointment takes too long. The woman at the parking office said that if I am delayed at a medical appointment and I get a ticket, to bring it in and they will take care of it for me. There are bureaucracies in this world that are mediated by good people!

Today I will be busy baking orange oatmeal muffins, and getting the old 2007 iMac ready to donate to someone. No takers in my circle, but I am hoping to find someone who wants a computer to do email and light surfing on the internet, it would be perfect for that.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

-6°C
Date: 9:00 AM EST Thursday 5 January 2017
Condition: Partly Cloudy
Pressure: 100.9 kPa
Tendency: Rising
Temperature: -5.6°C
Dew point: -12.2°C
Humidity: 60%
Wind: W 36 gust 53 km/h
Wind Chill: -15
Visibility: 24 km

Quote

“First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.”
Epictetus
55 AD – 135 AD

A Couple of Days

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December 21, 2016

I guess the longest night in the last 500 years occurred last night. I didn’t notice!

One true thing: Life is an agent of planetary evolution, but not the only one.

A baking day, today it was squash muffins. The last batch of muffins weren’t as good as the squash muffins. In the last batch I substituted a banana and cooked mashed sweet potato for the pumpkin or squash, they were still good, but we like the squash muffins better. Our dinner is in the cast iron dutch oven, seared steak with carrots, potatoes, and onions, sprinkled with a little pepper and a ½ teaspoon of Garlic Plus, simmered all afternoon. It smells good at our house.

It was sunny and mild today, I did get out for my daily walk. The road was clear in the middle, so I walked in the middle, listening carefully for approaching vehicles, ready to dodge quickly to the side of the road should one happen down the road. The sidewalks are now impossible for walking, ice everywhere. It was lovely out there, the wind had the tops of the pine trees dancing, and there were numerous birds enjoying the sunshine.

The Christmas Cactus is blooming profusely now, four beautiful pink blooms.

I have completed digitizing the VHS home movies. All done, and they are gone. We no longer have to store them! I feel liberated!

December 23, 2016

The day is intermittently sunny then cloudy, there is a brisk wind running the show. Attila is enjoying his first day home for the holidays. Mostly we have been wrapping our gifts to one another, they are now gayly beckoning from beneath the pine scented branches of the Christmas tree. We have no shopping left to do, the turkey, the vegetables, are all waiting patiently in the freezer for preparation day.

Yesterday we made the decision to replace our 2007 iMac, which will no longer accept operating system updates. I found a refurbished model from 2015, the smallest one manufactured at the time it was manufactured, ordered it, and it will arrive in early January. We will need to decide what to do with the old one though, we certainly do not have enough room to store it for posterity! This expense will mean that there will be no major renovation projects this summer; it was a unanimous decision, we can’t do everything. It was only a matter of time before the 2007 model would not function adequately as our entertainment centre. We don’t have a television, or television cable service, all our entertainment comes to us on the iMac. The 2007 is painfully slow now, and the 2GB of RAM barely allows most of the programs we use to function. We have our fingers crossed that the iMac replacement lasts ten years too!

I don’t like using the migration programs that exist for switching computers. I will install all the pertinent software individually and manually, starting with the anti-virus/firewall packages. It will be a big job, but we will have a fairly stable system from the get go, even if it takes a bit of time to get going.

Back in 2008 I purchased a piece of software to handle my recipes. The company discontinued the software, and I moved on to use another software package. This morning I received an email message from the company that owned the discontinued software package, offering me a different piece of software free of charge, as a gift to a previous customer, me. I downloaded it and it seems it will be quite useful, it is called Renamer, by incrediblebee.com. The software will batch rename files according to chosen parameters, like adding characters or the date to the beginning or end of the file names. I will use this software to deal with file collections.

So time is quietly slipping into the shadow of a peaceful Christmas for us, here at Mist Cottage.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

1°C
Date: 6:00 PM EST Wednesday 21 December 2016
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.9 kPa
Tendency: Rising
Temperature: 1.1°C
Dew point: -1.6°C
Humidity: 82%
Wind: SW 22 km/h
Visibility: 19 km

Mostly Cloudy
3°C
Date: 3:00 PM EST Friday 23 December 2016
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 102.5 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: 3.4°C
Dew point: -0.4°C
Humidity: 76%
Wind: SW 20 km/h
Visibility: 24 km

Quote

“Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”
Eric Hoffer

I would add the word deliberate to this, deliberate rudeness. Because there are so many cultures and ways of seeing the world, the codes defining what is rude and what is not are not totally consistent. People can seem rude to others merely because they are different, or have experienced a different social environment.