Screwed and unscrewed

So, it looked like I should upgrade the poor old eMac in hopes of getting somewhat better performance and facilitate the conversion/preservation of my brother's genealogy files. Adding RAM is a simple process, illustrated in the User's Manual. The eMac has two slots, each of which can take up to a 512MB chip. I decided to add 512MB to the second slot, leaving the original 128MB in place. 640MB would be plenty for OS X 10.4, which is as high as you can go on an eMac.

I found the chip I needed on Other World Computing for a grand $14.95 (back in 2002, when this computer was made, a 512MB chip was $99, which probably explains why my brother didn't upgrade it back then), and while I was at it I ordered a new backup battery ($4.95) for the PRAM. Might as well replace that while I had the case open – it's in the same compartment. In a few days, I had my RAM and battery, and set out to install them. Should be, oh, a 15-minute job, right?

My favorite version of Murphy's Laws comes to mind here:

• Anything that can go wrong, will.
• First corollary: Nothing is as simple as it seems.
• Second corollary: Everything takes longer than it should.

I made it through the first two steps of the procedure before Murphy raised his ugly head, and then the main law and both corollaries came into play.

1. Turn your computer off... Disconnect all cables except the power cord from your computer. [That amounts to the keyboard and mouse. Think I can handle it.]
2. Place a soft, clean towel... on the desk... Slowly lift up and turn the computer so the screen is facing down on the cloth. [Not quite as easy, given the weight of the monster, but doable.]
3. Use a Phillips screwdriver to loosen the captive screw on the memory access panel.

Hah. Easy for them to say. Since it didn't specify what size Phillips screwdriver to use, I tried every size in my considerable arsenal. While a plain old #2 seemed to be the best fit overall, nothing would budge that damned screw, which promptly stripped its head. I tried every trick I could dredge up on Google for loosening stripped screws, from placing a rubber band over the slots to give the screwdriver something to grip, to covering the screwdriver with duct tape, to wedging a straight-head driver in the stripped slots. The screw has a very thin flat head that recesses into the cover, so it was impossible to grip it with Vise-Grips. And it's too small for any readily-available screw-removal tool to work, even if I had one, which I don't. "Captive" screw, indeed – I was almost convinced that it had been super-glued in place.

After about three hours or so of screwing around, or, more accurately, not screwing around, I decided the only remaining option was the brute-force method of cutting a straight slot across the screw head that would take a large straight-head screwdriver. That left only the problem of what to use to cut the slot. As far as I know, I don't possess a hacksaw, and even if I did, the recessed screwhead meant I couldn't get at it with a hacksaw. I do, however, have a Dremel rotary tool, which could simply cut into the plastic surrounding the screw. A quick check of the kit revealed that it did not contain any cutting wheels. A road trip was in order.

A short time later I was in the tool aisle of the closest orange big-box home-improvement store. I did peruse the drill-bit section for screw-removal tools, but as I feared, there was nothing intended for small electronics screws. So I moved on to the Dremel display, where I snapped up a package of 10 cutting wheels.

Back home, I installed a wheel on the Dremel and carefully started cutting a slot in the screwhead. It took longer than I expected, given how soft the metal appeared to be to strip the head so easily, but finally I got enough of a slot to give a screwdriver some purchase. (The screwhead was so thin, I was worried about cutting straight through the outer edges.) I inserted my large straight-head screwdriver, applied pressure – and it started to move! At last, I removed the screw (which was not, it seems, "captive" after all) and pulled off the user access panel.

In short order, I completed the remaining steps for installing the RAM, and replaced the PRAM backup battery. I briefly got hung up in step 7 of the latter procedure, which was "Locate the PMU reset button inside the computer." The drawing clearly shows the button below the RAM slots on the right side of the opening. There was no button in evidence in my eMac... until I noticed a small button in the corresponding location on the left side, which I duly pressed for one second as instructed. (At least, I assumed that was the PMU reset button, and so far the eMac hasn't shown any signs that the PMU isn't operating correctly.)

I reinstalled the access panel – tightening the screw barely enough to keep it in place – set the Mac upright, plugged it in, and booted it. It recognized the RAM, and I reset the system date/time once more.

The next step was to upgrade the OS. I put that off to another day, seeing as how I just killed an entire day completing a 15-minute RAM upgrade. But, as of now, I have an eMac with adequate RAM and OS X 10.4.11, with Word: Mac 2004 and iWork '09 installed. It remains to be seen what I have to do to get those documents converted, but at least the memory and the OS shouldn't bog down in the process.

Lost in translation

OK, so I now have my brother's electronic genealogy writings. But they're not much good if I can't read them. And this where I ran smack into the issue of technological obsolescence.

The email archives actually were easy. Both the older ones, in an ancient version of Eudora, and the more recent ones (i.e., circa 2002-2005), in early Apple Mail.app, were in a standard mailbox format that I could import directly into a more recent version of Apple mail. So they're readily readable.

The word-processing files, apparently a mix of AppleWorks 5 and Appleworks 6 formats, are another matter. When Apple declared "end of life" status for AppleWorks in 2007, they intended that the new iWork suite would replace AppleWorks, and iWork Pages was supposed to be able to open/convert AppleWorks Word docs. Furthermore, AW is supposed to be able to save files in Microsoft Word format. Finally, some versions of Microsoft Word are supposed to be able to open AppleWorks Word docs.

That's an awful lot of "supposed tos". The reality, I have found, is that there is no simple way to convert an AppleWorks Word doc into a modern word-processing file – at least, not with formatting retained. And, in the case of my brother's files, formatting can be pretty important; they tend to include embedded images; differing paragraph styles/font sizes/bold and italic styles to distinguish generations and types of information (formal and informal); footnotes; and even heavy use of a glyph font (WingDings) as a shorthand code for genealogical terms (born, died, married, divorced...). Poor translation of formatting can have results ranging from confusing to incomprehensible.

Let's start with iWork.Turns out the latest version (iWork 2013) won't have anything to do with AppleWorks. Fortunately, I have a trial version of iWork '09, which is the last version that can read AppleWorks. I copied one of the AW Word files (definitely AW6, per the tell-tale "[v6.0]" that AW inserts in the file name when it converts an earler file) to my MacBook Pro and attempted to open it in Pages. No dice. Whether I went through the File>Open menu or Ctrl-clicked on the file and told it to open in Pages, all Pages would do was give me the remarkably unhelpful message that "The file could not be opened."

OK, maybe it had something to do with the MacBook Pro running Mavericks. It wouldn't be the first time some process went totally wonky with an updated OS. I fired up my long-dormant MacBook – still comfortably running 10.6 Snow Leopard – installed the iWork '09 trial, and tried again. Same result. Can't install iWork on the old eMac; it requires at minimum 10.4.11 (Tiger), and probably more RAM than the old beast has.

How about Microsoft Word? Well, Word 2011 certainly doesn't recognize AW, but Word 2004 is supposed to, and that's still installed on the MacBook. Sure enough, it had an AppleWorks 6 file selection in the Open menu. Unfortunately, it seemed to believe that my file was not an AppleWorks file, and refused to open it.

Maybe I needed to go back even further with Word – I still have the install disc for Office: Mac 2001. It's only for PowerPC, so I couldn't install it on the MacBook, but I could install it on the eMac. Unfortunately, it turned out to have an import translater only for AppleWorks 5, not 6. I could scarcely believe I had a version of Word too old for my purpose! And I couldn't try Word 2004 directly on the eMac, because it needed 256MB of RAM.

(I should note that Word can in fact "Retrieve text from any document", including AppleWorks docs, but that strips all formatting and images, converts all special characters and fonts to plain text, and leaves a considerable amount of garbage at the beginning and end of the file. It's a method of last resort.)

Maybe I should try this from the AppleWorks end and export in .doc format. Since I didn't have Word on the eMac to open an exported document, I copied the AppleWorks app to the MacBook (AW won't run on anything higher than Snow Leopard) and opened my test document. The result? Pure gibberish, mostly consisting of the little boxes that signify unprintable characters. I suspect that AppleWorks, unlike most modern Mac applications, may require actual installation rather than just dropping it into the App folder. I was probably missing some crucial components that the installer package would have provided. I do not, unfortunately, have the eMac's install discs.

Exporting a .doc from AppleWorks on the eMac and transferring it to the MacBook, I opened it in Word 2004. Well, the text was there, but the formatting was dreadful, most of the images were missing, and the fonts were... erratic, to put it mildly. Some of the WingDings symbols appeared as they should; others were converted to symbols such as ≠; and still others to accented Roman letters. I even downloaded a demo version of an application that purported to convert AppleWorks documents to RTF, and opened the RTF in Word. No images, dreadful formatting, and more erratic translation of WingDings.

Some additional Googling suggests that the WingDings issues stems from differences between the Microsoft, Macintosh pre-OS X, and Unicode character maps; in brief, when the modern version of the font is used on a modern Mac, it doesn't necessarily display the same characters as the original. Which leads me to believe that, in order to correctly display (and possibly print) these documents, I need to do it using AppleWorks, on the old eMac. And I may even need to edit them in AppleWorks to change anything in the WingDings font to the plain text equivalent of my brother's "code", before converting them to Word docs.

The trouble is, the eMac's measly 128MB of RAM and elderly OS make it both sluggish and erratic; the system froze and had to be either Force Quit or hard-booted several times in the course of backing up the files, subsequent attempts at conversion, and installation of Word. So it seemed like my best bet might be to upgrade the RAM and the OS.

To be continued...

An antique computer and a digital legacy

Not my eMac, but it looks just like this.

When my younger brother passed away ten years ago, he bequeathed me all his genealogical research, including the contents of his 2002-vintage eMac. While the estate was settled long ago, the whole mess (I'm talking 30 years of research here, and "mess" is the operative word) had remained in the "custody" of my older brother, and had languished in a storage unit until two and a half years ago, when I finally had the time (i.e., had semi-retired) to make the 600-mile trip to New England to fetch it.

I filled the back of my (very spacious) Scion xB with boxes upon boxes of the most important-looking papers and reference books. I didn't come close to fitting everything in. The computer didn't make the cut. So a year later I made a second trip. (Neither of these trips were solely to pick up the research materials, but were just my last stop on vacation trips before returning home.) Once again I filled the back of the car with more papers and books. Once again, there was still plenty left over. Once again, the computer didn't make the cut.

Last year, I didn't have the time to make a trip north. But after sifting through much of the reams of paper I had hauled home, replete with marked-up drafts of various research reports, presentations, and possible journal articles, I had concluded that in most cases I did not have the final versions of these writings on paper. Ergo, they must be on the computer. Retrieving it became a priority.

This spring, when I decided to attend a genealogy conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I realized I would be close enough to my brother's house to make it feasible to stop by for the computer after the conference was over. The arrangements did not proceed without incident – he didn't know I was coming until I called him the night before (not one, but two, emails from me had inexplicably ended up in his spam folder), and Google Maps decided to to go AWOL from my phone just as I was leaving the hotel for my brother's – but eventually I found my way there. He had his visiting son lug it out to the car ("It's heavy," said my brother), where I wedged it in with a duffle bag full of dirty laundry, along with the keyboard, mouse, and power cord.

A couple of days later, I was home. When I unloaded the car, I discovered what a whopping understatement my brother had made about the weight of the eMac. I barely managed to get this behemoth into the garage and onto the folding table that I wasn't sure could take the weight for long. I've been using laptops and LCD monitors exclusively for so long I had completely forgotten just how much a CRT, even a fairly small one, weighs. (Later I looked up the specs online and found that it weighs an even 50 pounds.)

About a week later, I heaved it off the groaning table and staggered into the house with it, where I deposited it on the coffee table, which now has another dent in its top. I hooked up the keyboard and mouse, attached the power cord, plugged it in, held my breath, and pressed the power button. Look, this computer is thirteen years old, and hasn't been used for ten years (aside from my brother booting it up once some years ago just to see if it would). For all I knew, I might have just hauled home a 50-pound doorstop.

Lo and behold, it came on and booted up with no fuss whatsoever. OK, there was the minor fact that the computer firmly believed it was January 1, 1969, but what else can you expect with a thirteen-year-old onboard battery? Minor problem. I called up the System Profiler, and found that I was running Mac OS X 10.2, aka Jaguar. (For those of you who aren't Mac aficianados, the latest version of OS X is 10.10, aka Yosemite. Jaguar is, to put it mildly, ancient history.) More alarmingly, the beast possessed a grand total of 128 MB of RAM. Not what you would call expansive.

Still, it was running. And there, spread across the desktop (literally, every slot in the "grid" was occupied, with multiple files stacked in some locations), were a myriad of folders and loose files. (Evidently, my brother did not believe in the Documents folder concept.) With any luck at all, at least some of them would be the "final" versions of some of those research reports I was looking for. The first step would be to back up the files before the computer decided to, say, experience a catastrophic drive failure – which, given its geriatric status, was not at all far-fetched.

After resetting the system date and time, I started copying files onto a USB flash drive. The first problem I encountered was the glacial copying speed. In the time it took the bits to stroll through the USB 1.1 ports found on this very earliest of eMacs, I could almost have copied the files in longhand. On top of that, the OS apparently had allowed the creation of filenames containing characters like /, <, >, and & – and my brother had taken full advantage of this – but drew the line at copying said files. Every time it encountered one of these it would stop the copy operation dead. So I ended up going through directories and manually renaming all such files so they could be copied. In addition, the copied files all had their creation dates set to the current date instead of retaining their original date stamps. This seemed a bit ominous, but I figured I could always check the dates on the originals if I needed them.

Well, so far, so good. I finally had a copy of all my brother's files, including his email. But I still needed to be able to open, edit, and print these files. Did I mention that my brother's word processor of choice was AppleWorks, which was bundled with the system software (i.e., "free")? AppleWorks reached "end of life" status in 2007, and it won't run on anything higher than OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). My MacBook Pro is at 10.9 (Mavericks). I still had some work to do.

To be continued...

Flat-out nuisance

So, last month I went on a road trip, my first in a year and a half. The genealogist in me had been wanting to dip a toe in the conference waters, and when I heard about the New England Regional Genealogy Consortium's biennial meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, I took the plunge and registered for it, beating the early-bird discount deadline by only an hour. In the ensuing weeks, I made hotel reservations, plotted my route, packed my bags, and checked the tires and fluids in my Scion xB. I was more than a bit taken aback to discover that the right-side tires, far from being underinflated, were pumped up to about 45 (front) and 50 (rear) psi. They should be about 35 psi. I hadn't touched those tires since I had the car inspected back in September! I bled off the excess and made a mental note to have some sharp words with my Scion service manager.

Finally, I set off for Rhode Island. The two-day trip out was relatively uneventful, aside from intermittent rain storms the first day and a bit of sticker shock at the gas pumps. I don't think I even got lost more than once or twice. Yes, I have GPS, using the Google Maps app on my iPhone. I don't think it likes me. But that's another story. This one is about tires.

I had picked a hotel a few miles out of downtown Providence (I'm allergic to $169/night hotels, and that's at the "special conference rate"!) and checked in on a Wednesday night. Thursday morning I found my way to the parking garage in downtown Providence, and with no idea how to get most expeditiously to the conference center, I picked a parking place at random, exited the garage, and eyeballed my way to the conference center. Come to find out, if I had just gone up the stairs one floor, there was an exit from the garage directly into the conference center!

Well, I enjoyed a number of presentations on Thursday, albeit with aching feet (the Food Court in the nearby Mall was a formidable hike away), and found my way out to the parking garage (this time without taking the "scenic route") and back to the hotel without getting lost. Friday was pretty much a repeat, apart from missing a turn going into Providence and having to go around a few blocks, and this time I knew enough not to go outside the garage to get to the conference center. I left at the end of the day, missed another turn and got that sorted out, and in due course arrived back at my hotel.

That's when everything went sort of pear-shaped. I nearly drove past the entrance and made a sharp right turn into the parking lot... but apparently, not sharp enough. I heard a loud bang, followed by a thup thup thup, and as I pulled into a parking space, I noticed a new and unfamiliar light shining on my dashboard, similar to the one at left. Astute readers will recognize this as the TPMS, or Tire Pressure Monitor System, warning light. I had never seen it before, but I did recognize trouble when I saw it.

My left front tire was quite, quite flat (about like the one at right). Apparently when I turned in, the tire went up on the edge of the curb and then dropped off, slicing the sidewall. I wish I had thought to take a photo of it, but I almost never do. Oh, yes, I've had flat tires before – in fact, the Tire Gods (I think the chief one is Vulcan) smote me with flats no less than four times between 2006 and 2009. The last was a brand new tire that had been on the car for exactly one week. That was the only time I thought to take a photo. All four flats were on my previous car, a 2002 PT Cruiser that I ditched in 2011 when the transmission decided to up and die. That explains why I hadn't seen a TPMS warning light before; I don't even know if it had been invented in 2002, but the Cruiser sure as heck didn't have one.

As it happens, all four of the previous flats had also occurred within five miles of home. Heck, the last one actually went flat sitting in my driveway. I do belong to a motor club (AARP's), and had made use of it all four times. But my car, like most these days, doesn't have a "real" spare tire, so even if I called them to put the "donut" spare on, I still had to get a new tire... in a strange city... with a conference I was still supposed to be at by 9 AM the next day. It was now around 7 PM.

I went into the hotel lobby and told the people at the desk what had happened. The young man looked up online and found a tire dealer that was less than a mile down the road from the hotel. Then he offered to put the "donut" spare on for me so I could go to the tire dealer first thing in the morning. Well, what the heck... it saved me from having to wait around the lobby for AARP to send someone out (that can take quite a while). I thanked him profusely and went up to my room.

The next morning I set off down the road to find that Firestone tire dealer. I had the street number, and it should have been on my right. I passed something where the signs said "Auto Parts" and "Mufflers", but I saw no trace of Firestone. When I realized I was well past the purported address, I looked for a place to turn around, and pulled off in the first likely-looking parking lot. I was about to back around and get back on the street, when it dawned on me that it was the parking lot of a car dealer. To be precise, a Scion dealer. And their service department was open... To hell with the phantom Firestone dealer; I parked the car and went in. Yes, they could replace my tire. Yes, they could do it right away. The whole thing took less than 30 minutes; I knew the sensor would be reset correctly; and they didn't even charge for labor. I was never so happy not to find the place I was looking for.

I missed the first session of the day, but made it through the rest of the day and the close of the conference. And when I went back to the hotel that night, I was very, very careful how I drove into the parking lot.