UPDATE: My laptop was actually fixed on February 6th. The reason I neglected to post any more updates is because very little else happened except for me realizing that portable and web-based apps are most definitely no replacement for your own laptop, at least not if you need stuff like Photoshop on a regular basis. While I’m sure if I was bored enough I could learn GIMP, that doesn’t solve the fact that portable apps have ridiculous RAM requirements, and that personal settings (like what clicking the middle mouse button does) still can’t be shoved on a USB stick. In conclusion, there is not yet a convenient way to be completely flexible about what computer you use. Original post follows, though, just so you can all laugh at my hopes and dreams which were shattered.
My MacBook Pro died. Well, okay, it still works, except for the graphics card. So if I could figure out the keyboard shortcut to turn on the screen reader, I’m sure I could pretend to be blind. Actually, no, I would really like a monitor, so it’s unusable for me. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t quite mass-producing parts for 2007 MacBook Pros anymore, so it’s on back order. The guy at CAVA told me to expect it by “the end of February”. Loooooovely.
Fortunately, a lot of my stuff is stored on the web and external drives, and I can still pull any essentials off my Mac with a convoluted process involving holding down the “T” key for a very long time. So it’s time, for at least a little while, to free myself from being dependent on one computer. I have a 2 gigabyte USB stick on my keychain for the bare essentials; for everything else, it’s time to live in the cloud.
Every day from now until I get my laptop back, I’ll be babbling about my experiences using any computer I can find, but with as much of my own settings and stuff as I can access. Hit the jump for day one…
In Which The Geeky Political Drama Regarding HTML5 Video is Explained By a Kindergarten Crayon Drawing
Okay, you see, there are some major advances to watching videos on the web that everyone would be able to experience right now, except all of the browser makers are fighting over what type of video standard to use. It may be confusing to you, so I drew you a picture to explain it in the distinctive art style of Zacqary Adam Green at age five:
You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.
There. Now you know.