Public Service Announcement: I ran into this flaw when trying to help Jack and Shannon do some recording for their podcast radio plays. It’s apparently well-known, but you have to fiddle a bit with Google to get it to tell you about the problem, since no-one who’s posted about the solution has included verbatim error messages.
The problem appears to be that the power harness used in the Digi 002 is defective. (References: here and here). DigiDesigns will replace the harness for free, but the user has to install it themselves. This isn’t particularly tricky, since they send you complete and easy-to-follow instructions. The tricky part is working out what’s wrong, since there’s no sensible error messages from their software and no clear indication of a hardware error. Even worse, the hardware error is often intermittent, seeming to go away for long periods before returning.
Hardware Symptoms:
- When the IEEE1394 interface cable is connected, the green link light (on the back of the case, right between the IEEE1394 ports) briefly turns on then immediately turns off again.
- The Mute light on the front of the case remains lit. No other lights are on. The device is unresponsive.
- When attempting to establish a connection, the link light blinks on, a click is heard, then the light immediately turns off again. This repeats several times.
Software Symptoms:
- When starting ProTools LE, the following error message is seen: “Unable to locate Digidesign hardware. Make sure your hardware is connected and turned on. Click “Ok” when the hardware is ready.”
Getting a Replacement Part:
The replacement part is user-serviceable. Call the technical support line (free if you’re under warranty, $3/minute up to $75 or so if you’re not) and describe the problem to them. They should e-mail you a waiver of liability for the user-installed parts. Once you read and agree to that, they’ll mail you a replacement part and instructions for installing it. The part should arrive inside of a week.
Hopefully, this post will be useful to anyone else who runs into this problem.
Based on the advice of Gavin and the encouragement of Danielle, I’ve been reading The Great Good Place. For the most part, it’s an excellent examination of the disappearance of avenues for casual socialization from modern culture. Except for one thing. Sexism.
Oldenburg places part of the blame on the disappearance of the third place on feminism. While he doesn’t say so directly, he devotes an entire chapter (ironically titled “The Sexes and the Third Place”) to waxing loquacious about traditional male bonding rituals and men’s places, and indirectly condemning feminism and the idea that men and women should associate freely for the disappearance of “third places”. He devotes considerable time to praising the traditional institution of marriage, and men’s third places as an escape from the demands of the work of their second places and the domineering women of their first places. Women, when they’re mentioned at all, are described as “stealing” the traditional male bonding experience for their sisterhood while conspiring to keep men emotionally dependent on them to secure their marriages.
Oldenburg, unfortunately, misses several vital points here, which I’ll deal with in turn behind the fold. Overall, Oldenburg prescribes more sexism as the cure for problems caused by sexism, which is entirely hypocritical as he condemns this very approach in other domains.
Continue reading ‘Sexism and the Third Place’
One of the oddities of my computer use style is that I don’t like to have my system go into screensaver or lock automatically very quickly. When I leave the keyboard, I like to be able to activate the screensaver/lock manually. Since I’m also not a fan of active screen corners, I want to be able to do so by keystroke.
Annoyingly, OS X doesn’t let me bind a key to activate the screensaver. There used to be a couple utilities that enabled this, but they haven’t been updated since 10.3. The screensaver engine itself is an application, but we still need a convenient way to activate it. Enter Quicksilver. Quicksilver’s Triggers let us bind Quicksilver actions (including, conveniently, opening Applications) to keypresses.
So, to create a key to activate your screensaver or lock your system with Quicksilver, follow these simple steps:
- Create a Quicksilver trigger to open the screensaver engine. The engine is
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/
Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app
- Bring up the Trigger’s info pane.
- Set a key shortcut for the trigger. The combination of options I’ve got selected mean that the trigger only goes off if I hold the keys down for three seconds, and Quicksilver brings up a display window to let me know that I’m activating a trigger. Very handy! (Due to what I think is a Quicksilver/Leopard bug, the hotkey field is incomplete. Mine’s set to cmd-alt-ctrl-L)
- Enjoy!
This is what used to be Runes There. It’s still the personal homepage of Nick Pilon, but I’ve reorganized it into a blog instead of a boring old static webpage. Thanks again to Gavin Carothers, who did the cool banner image up at the top and handled the heavy lifting of getting WordPress installed and set up.
