Mokka mit Schlag

I got the sad news yesterday that David Lerner has passed. I think I first met him at NYMUG in the early 90s, even before he started Tekserve. I still remember the permathread on the NYMUG BBS that inspired him to start a small shop specializing in component level repairs on compact Macs that official shops didn’t do at the time. It’s been a while, but I think something called a flyback transformer was involved.

A little later he printed and distributed some FAQ lists I was posting on Usenet. In exchange, he kept my SE/30 running for about 5 years when I was in grad school and couldn’t afford a new computer. And of course like everyone else with a Mac in New York, I brought him all the repair work I or anyone I knew had. Tekserve was also a reliable source for accessories and Macs before the Apple Store or even online shopping was a thing.

Tekserve was the sort of personal small business we don’t see a lot of any more. It wasn’t always the cheapest, but the prices were fair and the service was reliable. Every time I brought in yet another broken Mac and pulled a ticket out of the ticket machine, I knew that if it could be fixed they would fix it. They were completely competent and absolutely trustworthy, and that sort of attitude came straight from David. Everyone who used them loved them.

For the Mac community in the dark years of the 1990s, Tekserve wasn’t just a breath of fresh air. It was oxygen. Other retailers at the time, all fortunately now defunct, would have made used car salesman embarrassed. If you were a retail customer, buying or worse yet getting repairs done on a Mac was like navigating the US medical billing system. Once Tekserve opened, there was finally a friendly place you could go with your problem or purchase, have a honest chat with someone who knew what they were talking about, and get the thing you actually needed instead of the product with the biggest commission.

At the time a frequent question in the Mac groups on Usenet went like this: “My Mac needs to be repaired, and I’m in Los Angeles. Where can I go that’s like Tekserve?” The answer, unfortunately, was 23rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenue in Manhattan. There really was nowhere else like it. Even once Apple stores started popping up in suburban malls, it was still Tekserve smart New Yorkers trusted for repairs.

I was sorry when Tekserve closed in 2016, and even sorrier to hear that now David is gone too. The world is a little poorer place.

I’m about to start week 3 of my Spanish course. My subjective impressions is that I’m learning a lot faster than when I learned (for a loose definition of “learned”) French a number of years ago. Even accounting for spending a lot more hours per week on the course, I still seem to be developing some comfort with the language more quickly. Some of that might be that Spanish is simply easier than French for an Anglophone to pick up. It might also help that learning is a lot more concentrated and there’s less time to forget between lessons. And it most definitely helps than I’m in the middle of a city where few people speak English, and even those who do are generally happy to put up with my pidgin Spanish.

One thing I have noticed is that it’s really helpful to start with speaking and listening, and completely omit reading and writing. This is something my first French course did that my Spanish course is not doing, and it shows. Reading text, even in a very predictably pronounced language like Spanish, tends to distract from the actual sounds of the language. Using pictures and sounds, but no letters, really helps to associate the words in my brain. Reading and writing is the easy part. I can almost do that on my own. Speaking and especially comprehending spoken language is much more difficult. In French I eventually achieved a comfortable B2 level of reading and writing, but in spoken communication I’m more like an A1, if I’m generous. So with Spanish I’m trying to prioritize real audio comprehension and natural fluency.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in week 2 of my Spanish course in Costa Rica. I’m past “¿Que hora es?” and roughly at the level of pre-school videos on YouTube. And it’s really, really annoying that when a video is marked as for kids, I can’t save it to a playlist. I really wanted to make a playlist of shows I can actually understand, and YouTube says Nope. NetFlix allows me to add children’s shows to my own playlist. I really don’t understand why YouTube won’t. I’ve encountered this before when some local Audubon chapter marked all their videos as “Safe for Kids” (which they totally were) but like most nature videos the primary audience was adults.

Watching Season 2 of Wednesday on Netflix, and I finally see why this series doesn’t connect the way the movies did, despite an excellent cast, sets, characters, directing, budget, dialog, dancing, costumes, and everything else. At a deep level they are telling the wrong story.
Read the rest of this entry »

Apple has a well deserved reputation for overcharging for simple things: $500 for a set of wheels, another $500 for a height adjustable stand for the Studio Display, $79 for an iPad cover, $1200 to upgrade a MacBook Pro to a 4TB SSD. Some of this added cost is because Apple doesn’t sell crap, or really anything less than the top of the line. The Mac Studio $1200 4TB SSD is several times faster than the $200 4TB SSD you picked up in the bargain bin at MicroCenter. The Apple $79 iPad case actually holds up an iPad, unlike the $20 knockoffs on AliExpress. The Apple Pencil lasts more than a month, unlike the $27 Vistaike I stupidly bought from Amazon.

Nowhere is Apple excoriated for overpricing more than in RAM upgrades on Macs. But when you compare Apples to, well, not Apples, then it rapidly becomes apparent that Apple’s RAM isn’t just more expensive. It is a *lot* better than third party alternatives on PCs and Linux computers in ways that really matter. And when you look at why that’s so, getting anywhere near RAM that performs as well as Apple’s does will cost you more than buying a Mac, and you still don’t get as much.

Read the rest of this entry »

No, this isn’t yet another LLM generated, SEO-optimized “Best 10 Refrigerators/Electric Cars/Laptops” listicle of badly written English designed to collect affiliate revenues. This was written by an actual human being with a real opinion, and contains no affiliate links. If you want to buy one of the monitors I mention here, you know how to use Google, right?

I decided to write this because the answer is actually relatively simple (unlike for PCs). There simply aren’t many choices, and it’s fairly straight-forward to pick the one that fits your needs, not that you’d know that if you just went to Amazon or Best Buy and started browsing.

I’ll order them from least to most expensive, which not coincidentally is also worst to best quality.
Read the rest of this entry »