on upgrading laptop memory

Just a few notes on my recent experience of upgrading the RAM memory on my mac laptop. 

My laptop is getting towards three years old now, and it has started to freeze from time to time. I am not the ideal laptop user, I tend to run with the hard drive almost completely full and tend to run far too many open programmes at the same time. However on checking with the Crucial website, it was apparent that I could upgrade the RAM memory in my laptop for around fifty pounds. My Applecare Warranty was near to expiry anyway so I reckoned that I did not have a huge amount to lose, so I gave it a go. 

By way of full disclosure, I completed an SHNC in Computing many years ago, so I have experience of opening up desktop computers and rearranging components. I have also installed memory in a few of my other computers before, so I am not a novice. 

Should I upgrade the RAM memory ?

Only if you are confident, your machine is sluggish or old and it is not the end of the world if you break it.

What is the RAM memory ?

RAM is the working memory that your computer uses to run open applications, rather than to store your old documents. My first laptop in the eighties had four megabytes of RAM and eighty megabytes of hard drive. My current laptop had four gigabytes of RAM and two hundred and fifty gigabytes of hard drive. 

How do I get more RAM memory ?

Other suppliers are available, but I would recommend Crucial, they provide an app that you can download and run to provide a quote for suitable compatible memory. You may need to go into System Preferences to ensure you can run the app after download if you have set your Systems Preferences to restrict the apps that you can download and run. Go to the Apple Menu, Systems Preferences, Security and Privacy, General tab, and amend to allow you to download apps from anywhere. You should then be able to open up the app and run it. If you like the price, just order online from there. The upside of Crucial is that they are cheap, reliable and well regarded. The downside, they do not install. If you went to Apple for a RAM memory upgrade it would be a lot more expensive. I am not aware of any problems with Crucial memory.

When to do it ?

There are risks, so best to only upgrade memory when you need to, your machine is sluggish, or when you have little to lose. If you are out of warranty then it is worthwhile to extend the useful life of your machine. Having said that, RAM memory is not the ‘be all and end all’ of performance that it used to be, for many users it is pretty irrelevant.

Can I do it ?

If you have some training in IT hardware then you should be okay, there are instructions on line, so if you are willing to be careful, then it is straightforward. It is fiddly and you do need to be methodical, so if this is not you, then give it a miss.

What else could I do ?

Nowadays I would not bother defragmenting my hard drive, but if performance is getting poor, then remove unwanted applications, reduce the amount of stuff on your hard drive, reduce the stuff on your desktop, remove any unwanted applications that run at login, just generally give your machine a springclean. Remember that there are plenty of ways to store material in the cloud and reduce the work that your computer is doing.

What could possibly go wrong ?

You could easily break your computer and invalidate your warranty. Apple might turn a blind eye to successfully installed non-Apple memory, but if you break the slot for the chips then you have a very expensive paperweight.

What could possibly go right ?

You could end up with a machine that runs quicker, and stick a good few extra years of life onto your computer. Having said that, more RAM does not make the screen any bigger or expand your hard drive.

So talk me through it -

1 getting fed up with my laptop freezing

2 went onto Crucial website, downloaded their app, amended Systems Preferences to run it 

3 checked the expiry date for my Applecare

4 ordered online additional RAM from Crucial, along with an anti static wrist strap

5 reset Systems Preferences to only download and run Apps from the App Store and identified developers.

6 waited patiently for the delivery

7 chose a quiet afternoon

8 cleared the table

9 spread out a towel on the table, 

10 printed off the instructions on the Apple website 

11 switched off the laptop and let it cool for ten minutes

11 touched the kitchen taps to earth myself

12 put on wrist strap and taped it to the computer 

13 the laptop was face down on the towel, unscrewed the screws on the back, they are mostly minute, those around the battery were longer. I have freckles that are larger than the small screws. They are absolutely tiny! They seem to be screwed in at a slight angle, so it is tricky returning the back of your laptop to the smooth feel of well aligned screw heads that it had before. 

14 unclipped the RAM memory, eek, the two chips are on top of each other!

15 removed both chips and put them onto the open box with the new chips

16 pushed the first chip into the bottom slot, making sure to line up the side notches and notch in the gold connector at the front

17 pushed in the second chip above it, lining it up too

18 fired up laptop 

19 checked for installed memory under the Apple About this Mac options, showing only four Gigabytes, should be eight, More Info told me that only one four Gig chip was installed, so shut down,

20 left to cool for ten minutes

21 went through the whole process again, giving the chips an even firmer shove in

22 booted up, and all now running

23 breathed considerable sigh of relief. 

Obviously whenever the back is off your computer do not eat, smoke, cough, drink, etc. Do not touch anything you don’t need to. Shoving the RAM in does require a fair bit of force. I preferred when there were two slots beside each other, that way you could take out one chip, and put in the replacement to the same depth as the remaining one. The slots on top of each other are a lot more fiddly and demanding. 

Overall, I would do this again, but I am not rushing to do it, and I would have reservations about doing it for someone else, just in case I broke their machine. 

Rambling, scrivener, stuff and pensions

After a few days of good weather, the weekend has arrived, along with the rain. Accordingly pottering indoors. At work doing lawyer’s hours trying to finish off a major project before taking any decent leave.

I recently bought Scrivener, basically it is a word processor, but it also has a lot of the document management functionality of products like DevonThink or even Voodoopad. I am fond of these meta word processors that allow you to manipulate and organise text. 

The particular angle for Scrivener is that it is designed for writers, mainly fiction writers, but it also has plenty to offer other writers, though they might find other products that are more specifically tailored to their needs. I downloaded the trial, and although the learning curve is pretty steep, it was immediately apparent that if I could master the App then it had a lot a contribute. Although there is a thirty day working trial, I just bought it, and started importing all my various writings into it. 

If you are serious about writing, then Scrivener is as serious as you are, and has plenty to offer. Currently I have got a file for the evolving set of short stories that is Losing Definition, one for my old novel The Garbageman, and importing all my blog postings into another file. There is still a novel lurking in a bundle of reporter’s notebooks that I will have to type out. Not sure whether it is any good, but probably worth typing out just to see what I was writing twenty years ago. 

Now for some other random jottings, intriguing to see the growing coverage of hoarders being rescued from homes choked with stuff that is usually pretty much worthless. I wonder what it actually says about us, the impulse to compulsive hoarding and clutter is common to us all, are we adrift in a sea of information and strangeness and is keeping familiar items close by a means to try and keep the strangeness at bay? 

At the other extreme, for many people material possessions are now being stripped of any sentiment and meaning at all. We do not bother with the dusty shoebox full of photos, the music and dvds are all digital nowadays. The younger generation seem to travel pretty light, they are attached to their technology, but no one would keep an obsolete phone out of sentimental value. There are a few collectors of antique computers and the like, check out the System Folder Blog

http://systemfolder.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/classic-ailments/

I am even considering putting in a bid for an old Braun Calculator. 

But this is just a generalised nostalgia for old technology and design, as with my fondness for old Letterpress items and the like. They have no personal history for me, I just like the look of them. 

I am not sure that people cherish their IKEA furniture and impart it with great sentimental value. I suppose that there are a few things that I have that remind me of my parents, or relatives, that are of sentimental value to me, but I am not sure how much, if any, of this would transfer down to my children. There are a couple of wind up clocks, I suspect that that will be one for each daughter, but I don’t imagine them filling their house with our old IKEA furniture, Habitat lamps, eighties CDs and redundant videos. 

The only people I can think of where there is an intergenerational transfer of material is where father and son are in the same trade, or where it is all attached to a house, some stately pile somewhere. 

Otherwise it is all going digital and disposable. With the safety belt that if you miss something from your childhood, or that you wish your father had given you, you can just fire up eBay and order that pocket watch or set of old fishing rods. 

Rambling on, there does seem to be a constant nip nip nip at pensions these days. After the debacle of all those endowment policies that turned out to be hopelessly incapable of paying off mortgages, are pensions likewise heading towards being a huge mis-selling scandal or at least a colossal waste of money. There is only so much that you can postpone retirement age before people quite rightly start to think that by the time I am ready to collect I will most likely have died, or be so doddery that frankly it would be pointless stinting today just so that my savings can pay for my care home, when the government is hardly likely to have me put down anyway. 

The image for this week is an old ‘footlight’ that I bought on eBay because it is a really funky shape. 

I love modernist architecture

I love modernist architecture, I love modernist writing, at heart I am probably more of a modernist than anything else. Post modernism and semiotics left me cold. 

But why does no one live in a modernist house, and why doesn't anyone much want to. The bulk of architecture books, blogs and magazines focus on houses and buildings that are very much in the modernist vein, more curvy perhaps, more layered, but far more akin to Le Corbusier than to Georgian or vernacular. 

The modernist aesthetic of people like Le Corbusier has formed the baseline for popular taste, we might osciallate round it, but we never venture terribly far. The designs of Dieter Rams, or Apple, they are modernists. There is other stuff about, steampunk, Kai Krause, even Archigram and Future Designs, but we never seem to be able to escape the sleek modernist lines of the early twentieth century design. We don't all wear their glasses, or early twentieth century clothes, or read their books, or listen to their music, but we will aspire to live in their sleek glass walled houses.

Look at the photos of Julius Shulman and you see the perfect modernist dream, the sun is shining, the perspectives are crisp, receding into the stunning horizon, attractive young people drape over angular furniture. There is something ageless about his photographs because the best of them are perfect abstract compositions. They are picture perfect, and we want to be part of that perfect picture. 

But deep down, we know that the sun seldom shines, our perspectives recede into a horizon of blocky housing estates and electricity pylons, we don't want to drape ourselves over uncomfortable angular furniture. Instead we want to be in warm rooms slouched on leather sofas, surrounded by screens and clutter.

We are hard wired to want space that is cozy and defensible, just like the hamster or the caveman. And the great modernist panes of glass feel neither cozy nor defensible. They were not practical to build either, our traditional vernacular architecture was largely a set of tricks and techniques to cover up lines that were not straight and edges that did not meet. Old style pitched roofs kept off the rain, ugly ventilation kept back the damp. 

Modernist architecture can make for fabulous photos, but in our hearts we do not want to live in glass walled rooms. Perhaps we need to find a more functional idea of beauty.

on restarting writing

Maybe it is the new year, or a lack of the usual more urgent pressures on my time, but I feel resolved to make more of an effort with my creative writing.

In the past I have always felt that I ought to be doing more creative writing, but have struggled to get round to doing anything constructive about it. Well I did write a couple of unpublished novels in the eighties, and there is the material on my blog/website and even the Amazon reviews, but it feels like a long time since I have been writing seriously.

Anyway, I have moved up creative writing to closer to the forefront of my noggin, and I am allocating more of my creative and practical thinking to it. Material evidence is probably thin on the ground, but I wrote the story Misericord a few weeks ago, I did some work on a draft cover and graphics, scans of the brochure for an Anchor Blocks leaflet that I own, and some cursory research on on-line publishing. I have also started to trawl through the half finished stuff that is lying about on the my drive, although it falls short of the work of Samuel Johnston, there is some stuff there that is, with a push, useable. There might also be some material sitting in my blogging and reviewing.

I am resigned not to being too precious about things, earlier drafts are not works of staggering genius, so I will feel free to butcher and rearrange.

Something that has had a surprising impact has been doing some work on a draft cover. Now that I have a draft cover, and draft title, it is easier to envisage what the eventual publication will look like. And now that I know what it will look like, it is easier to envisage what would fit into it, and what would not.

Another decision that has helped break the logjam, is my decision now to focus on writing a collection of short stories. I have been working on an idea for a novel, well it is an idea, and I am sure that it is good enough for a novel.

But, although I can write material for it, I really still have no idea how it will work as a novel. Just writing stuff, and hoping that it will take form, as it goes along, is resolutely not working for me at the moment. Maybe, for me, there is just not a novel in the idea for the moment. Anyway, it has gone to one side, and my focus is on my book of short stories.

Currently sitting at around ten thousand words, but they all need a bit of an edit and tidy up, and eight thousand need a lot of an edit and tidy up. Not sure how big a book of short stories ought to be. It might be as much as I can write in a year or two, or until I get bored, or it might find a natural length.

Another thing that seems to have helped break the logjam is telling people what I am doing. That way it is okay to just zone out and do some writing, or editing, without having to be evasive about what I am doing.

Another thing that seems to have helped break the logjam is making sure that I am not always so busy, that any time left over, when I am not working, I am so zonked out, that I am in no position to do anything constructive. It might be old age creeping up on me, but a long week is exhausting, and without taking breaks it does all get to be a bit of a hamster wheel.

A short story - Misericord

The scholar adjusted the anglepoise lamp. There was far too little space on the oak desk, he picked up the pile of books on medieval alabaster work and stained glass, moving them aside to place them on the windsor chair, already well laden with books. 

At last there was nearly enough space, he pushed back the paperwork and artifacts further out towards the edge of the desk, a few toppled precariously, but nothing toppled over. The circle of bright legible light fell on the middle of the desk now. He unpacked the manuscript, the edge was tattered, shreds about to detach forever, now part of the manuscript, the merest touch and they were on their way to being dust. 

The manuscript conformed to the broad description offered by the antiquarian bookseller, it was a handwritten manuscript of the medieval period. Very late, but certainly medieval. It smelt musty and old, foxed and splatted with spots and damage. At first he focussed on the damage, the random pattern that age had inflicted on it. Then he tried to fix his focus on what remained. Looking back in time to see what had been written on this yellowed parchment. The antiquarian bookseller had merely described it as medieval parchment, he had made not further attempt to describe it. With no illustrations or illuminated characters it was not the most prepossessing of items. Nevertheless he looked around his room, in the partial gloom he could see the same reassuring collection of artifacts that he always liked to look across at. Like a miser admiring his horde, his eye flicked between the items, a variety of misericords, the heavily decorated underside of church seats, designed to offer temporary respite during a long church service. They were decorated with mermen, centaurs, greenmen and courting couples. They were roughly rectangular, that was the beauty of the medieval, nothing was ever quite square or straight, it was always contorted in some cartoonish manner. There was a huge ceiling boss, a screaming green man sheaved in leaves. The boss would have covered the part of the ceiling where the stone reinforcing ribs cross. In use it would have been visible, but not legible, yet the detail was incredible. The leaves sprouted forth from his eyes and mouth. There were fragments of rood screen or jube, the wooden tracery that separated the medieval church chancel and nave. Figures being swallowed by reptilian mouths and swathed in looping oak leaves. The medieval wood carvers continued a tradition of working and venerating the living oak that stretched back to at least the druids that the Romans had encountered when they invaded. Back when an older faith pervaded these islands keeping and maintaining the people in a state of fear and awe. 

These wooden carvings were rare, rarer than just their antiquity would suggest, under the Tudor Reformation the state had destroyed the vast bulk of religious carvings, tearing them from their churches and burning them in great bonfires. 

He heard the faint rustling of leaves. He had probably paid too much for this piece of tattered parchment, he usually did. 

He scrunched up the brown wrapping paper and threw it aside. He pulled across the medieval dictionary and started to work through the text. If the text were actually of more than the usual very parochial interest then it might be of some value. 

“My name is John de _____ and this is my story. Although this story is scarcely credible, even to myself, I swear that it is true. As a young man, I was the faithful servant of Henry, to become the greatest king in all Christendom. He was a strong virile man, full of wisdom beyond his years and with the strength of many men. In the winter of 15__ I was dispatched in his service to the furtherest reaches of his kingdom. The kingdom was unruly. Henry had been chosen by God to lead us, but his lords and their serfs were not worthy of him. They were disputatious amongst themselves and unduly troubled by ungodly things. With a troop of soldiers I was to travel the lands of our King and instruct them in their rightful duties and allegiances. A good king will have obedient people and those that will not be obedient must be fearful, in fear for their lives. 

It was a hard winter, the wet ground solid with frost. We were unwelcome everywhere we went. We struggled our horses up endless tracks through oak woods that had never seen a cart. We fought off cur like wolves, and snarling wild pigs. The woods were full of brigands but they knew better than to attack us in the daylight. At night we heard their oaths and footsteps in the dark of ancient woods. The nighttime woods were always full of their noises around us. 

When we found a village we were scarcely more comfortable. The huts were low and mean, crowded round a church or pond, like hunters round a fire. Hungry dogs licked round us we entered each village, dark eyed children looked on. At each gathering I would say my story. I would tell them of their great king and their place in his kingdom. The lords would shift uneasily. They lived in comfort in service of their king, but had done so little so deserve his favour. 

I am pledged to the service of my King. After that I am pledged to the service of my Lord God. The churches were as dark and mean as the people. We were far away from the fashionable papistry and Latin of London. The churches were dark and crowded with their carvings. Dark oak figures of heathen things, mythical figures and conjoined couples, gargoyles pulling at their cheeks, twisting branches and oak leaves. On the Lord’s day we would go to the church. The services were long and stilted. 

It was in the darkest month of the year when we came to the village of F_____ after days of riding through the tightest of forests. As we approached our path was bordered by oaks on either side, huge twisted trees that were too broad for a man to put his arms around. Trees that were so ancient as to be near useless for anything but firewood. The houses were set low in the ground, turf walls and roofs of scattered brash. It was Sunday and there was no one to be seen. The village circled its church. I led my men to the church, stooped low to enter. The church was dark, but full of people. There was the sweaty warmth of many people together. The place smelt of wood and damp, like the woods that we had been marching through. No one turned to face us. We sat at the back of the church, there was empty space and we genuflected before sitting back on the misericords. I took my right hand off the pommel of my sword and placed it on the side of the pew. It was carved with their usual pagan heathenery. The service was unfamiliar, the dialect here too thick to understand. 

The church was a long low building, the row of pillars were like the oak trees that led up to the village. It was entirely covered in carvings. Green men and wild hairy men of the woods, oak leaves and ivy spread across every surface. 

The people of the village stood and knelt, their hands pressed together in prayer. At the front of the church there was an ornate rood screen, atop it a rood, a figure of our Lord Christ, upon the cross. This Christ was entangled in oak and ivy leaves. The people roared as one, their prayer becoming more feverish, in the faltering winter light the endless carvings seemed to fidget and settle, flicking like the tail of a lizard. 

Their chanting grew louder, the Christ rood grew brighter in the dark, the chanting was like shouting, the rood Christ stepped forward, the leaves started to swallow up the Christ until they consumed him, the figure was now a green man, the screaming green man, walking through the air towards us. My men jumped to their feet, their swords and axes at the ready, the wooden leaves were flickering and twisting, grabbing at my men as they chopped to save themselves. I watched as my men were swallowed up and torn apart by this dark wooden undergrowth, I myself felt the pew twist and grasp at my wrist. 

I pray for forgiveness from my King and my Lord. I ran to the horses, climbing atop the strongest of them. The heavy horse galloped as our lives depended on it, the very avenue of oak trees bending and grasping at us. My King is the wisest King in Christendom. He knew my testimony to be true and together we set out to rid the country of its paganry.”

The scholar rocked back in his chair feeling sick. The light was getting dimmer and the sound of rustling leaves was getting louder and louder, but it was winter and there was not a tree for miles.

E H Gombrich

The E H Gombrich book 'The History of Art' opens with the quote "There is no such thing as art. There are only artists."

While this is probably a good dictum for art critics faced with mountains of potential works to look at, just sort out the pile by the recognised artists and feel free to ignore the rest. It is probably not such a good dictum for creative people. If you adhere to the Gombrich dictum then if you are an artist then everything you do is of merit no matter how insubstantial or just plain bad, and if you are not an 'artist' then no level of technical accomplishment or effort will elevate what you have done.

For the practitioner it is probably better to focus on the 'craft' rather than the 'art'. Simply try to make what you do as good as you can, and leave it to others to determine whether what you are doing is actually art. If it has a unique voice, that enough people want to listen to, then it is likely to be called art, if not then at least it is as good as you can make it.

Art and blobs

the advent of 3D printers elevates the possible shapes that can easily be manufactured. This has the potential to combine with the growing taste for organic architecture, the work of such architects and designers such as Future Systems [now sadly defunct], Asymptote, Ross Lovegrove etc. We have traditionally relied on rigid cartesian straight lines and right angles, because they are easiest to manufacture and to work with. As soon as you introduce a non-level surface or an angle other than 90 degrees any work rapidly becomes incredibly difficult. Not only do you need to custom fit every piece of material, it is no longer as simple as running a plane over a piece of wood to take a mil off of it.

This taste for straight lines and right angles is not born out of any innate compatibility with human kind. We are not inherently straight or right angled, our reach does not extent across the full limit of a rectangular desk. Where space and ergonomics are of pressing concern, for example in aeroplane cockpits or car interiors, things are moulded and crafted, curved and tactile. Our furniture is starting to become more akin to the seats in cars. And why should it not. What is so different about sitting in a car, from sitting on a sofa.

We are perhaps on the point of tipping over from a world of straight lines and right angles, where a material can easily cover a regular shape, to a world where furniture is shaped into organic blobs made from material that slowly evaporates, or degrades, the way the fresh aluminium will automatically anodise in air. A world where furniture melds into building into function into lifestyle. Where we are surrounded by multifunctional surfaces, kitchen worktops that can equally be screens or heating elements or lights, changing colour with a couple of gestures. A world where you can sit on anything, or pinch and pull to make it into a hard working surface.