Zorin's blog

As an Apple fan I always get excited about this. Yes, call me a geek. But in any case, here's what I WANT to see:

- Mac mid-range desktop (somewhere between the Mac Mini and Mac Pro without a built-in display) OR improved Mac Mini (this is unlikely, but we can always dream)
- Super-compact Macbook (this is actually predicted by most)
- Ten Point Five Point Freaking Two (10.5.2) (also predicted by most)

Less important, but would be nice:

- iPod Touch that uses an actual hard drive and can store more than a meager amount of music (unlikely)
- iPhone/iPod Touch developer kit (predicted by many)
- 3G iPhone (probably not yet, but it'd be nice if they say they're working on it -- this is what I need to see before I even consider one)

Things I don't care about that have been hyped incessantly:

- AppleTV (I can build a Mythdora box if I wanted to that is 10 times as flexible)
- iTunes movie rentals (I don't believe in expiring DRM. It just feels wrong somehow)

Well, we shall see. Hopefully at least one insanely great thing comes out of this MacWorld. Apple has done a few things to annoy me lately and they need to make up for it!

EDIT: Oh well, maybe next time. It feels like Apple hasn't introduced anything truly awesome on the Mac side of things in a while. The Macbook Air is sorely looking for the price. :P

So a while back at work a coworker gave me an old Powerbook 520c he had lying around, since I was a "Mac guy" and might appreciate it.

It sat under my desk a few months unused because frankly, other things have been on my mind lately. But yesterday after 5 I had some extra time so I whipped it out and plugged it in.

It booted into Mac OS 7.6! The thing has a 68040 processor and 12MB of RAM. It also had a few random games installed on it and what looked like the previous owner's personal files from circa 1997 or so.

There wasn't anything juicy on it, but apparently this previous owner had quite an affinity for porn; his Netscape bookmarks were full of links to it and there was a folder on the hard drive full of the stuff.

This whole situation brought back a lot of memories. My SO from 1995 to around 1998 was a major Mac freak, and spent the three years we were together trying to convert me. She used System 7.5 so it brought back a ton of memories.

Being the nostalgic kitty I am, I connected the lil' laptop to the Internet (using MacTCP and PPP over the phone line), downloaded Muddweller (what she used) and connected to FurryMUCK.

Two things I noticed: 1) 14400bps is godawful slow to the point of pain, and 2) Muddweller is an incredibly crappy client! TinyFugue even in 1995 blew it away to the point of embarassment.

I then grew deeply disturbed at what I was doing and shut the darn thing off. Some things are better left in the past!

I'll probably post photos at some point; I just wanted to get home yesterday and didn't feel like lugging the thing with me. :)

*smirk*

This needs no further comment.

The carnage from a different angle, after more explosions. :)

Remember that new hard drive I put in my laptop a few weeks ago? Well, I've been noticing short pauses when doing certain things that require disk access, like sending IMs (writes to a log) or clicking a link in the web browser. The drive was also parking the heads a *LOT*, we're talking parking a half second after each disk access. I figured these two events might be related somehow.

So I did some research. The drive takes a whole 300ms to go from parked to reading data. That's a freaking *ETERNITY* in the world of computers. All this to save, get this: 0.2W when idle.

NOT WORTH IT!

So I downloaded ftool (Feature Tool) from the Hitachi website and selected the drive. Not only did it have the Low Power Idle, with its 300ms head unpark cost enabled, but it also had acoustic management turned on, which further reduces performance to be a tiny bit quieter. No way!

I turned Low Power Idle and Acoustic mode *OFF* and saved the settings to the drive as default.

There is no longer a delay when hitting the disk. There also also no more "kit-a-chunk" head parking sound every few seconds, AND the machine feels a good deal faster.

So if you have a Hiatchi drive in your laptop, you might want to look into it. The default power saving mode is needlessly aggressive, causing a major performance hit at the cost of only a tiny bit of battery savings.

This is the Disney Tails T-shirt that everyone always seems to love at cons.

Kitties!

It's gotten more attention than any T-shirt I've ever worn! At Anthrocon 2006 I was stopped about 20 times walking around by folks wanting to identify all the cats, and to a lesser extent the same at AC 2007 and MFF 2007.

I thought it was awesome when I got it but never expected that. :)

So my new hard drive and external enclosure arrived today on schedule. I had a fun time getting it going.

The first step was to clone Mac OS X from the laptop to the new drive. I put the new drive into the USB hard drive enclosure (which is intended for the old one after the swap but worked out great for this) and used Disk Utility to do a full filesystem restore from the Macbook Pro's internal hard drive to the external disk.

This took a good three and a half hours! I suspect the slowness of USB disk access is mostly to blame for the long wait. It eventually completed, though, then it was hard drive swapping time.

Apple made changing the disk on the Macbook Pro difficult, but not impossible. I had to:

- Remove about 15 screws around the perimeter of the machine and in the battery compartment,
- *Carefully* lift the keyboard portion of the case up, and undo some snaps holding it down in the front,
- Disconnect the cable from the keyboard to the motherboard,
- Disconnect two very fragile looking cables that are in the way of extracting the old hard drive,
- Remove two screws holding down the disk,
- Lift the disk up precariously and disconnect the SATA/power cable from it (much easier than the old parallel ATA cables at least),
- Replace the components in reverse order, carefully reconnecting all the cables and putting the dozen and a half screws back in.

The result? A perfectly booting Macbook Pro, with about 130GB of free space, along with an external 100GB USB hard drive after I put the old disk in the enclosure. Not to mention the machine *flies* now with the 7200 RPM drive.

Next step will be to resize the disk for boot camp so I can install Windows, then check out Portal, which I've been wanting to try for a few days now but haven't had space on the old disk. Wheee!

Space on my laptop is very constrained, so I ordered a Hitachi 7K200 200GB, 7200RPM hard drive. Not only will I have twice the space on the laptop itself, but this drive is MUCH faster than the one it's replacing.

The replaced drive will go into an external enclosure, bringing my total on-the-go storage capacity from 140GB to 300GB... 340GB if I keep carrying around the old 40GB.

My new toys should arrive Friday. Woot!

Verizon has a 5GB "soft limit" (in that they can go after you if you exceed it routinely) per month on their "unlimited" evdo broadband cards. Sprint doesn't have such a limit, but can still disconnect or warn you for "excessive" usage. Neither company wants you to use their wireless evdo cards as a substitute for a landline DSL/cable modem or for p2p downloading, watching internet television for long periods, and so on.

Is their bandwidth really that constrained? Or is this just an attempt to extort more money from "power users"? It seems odd that they would spend $billions building such an advanced data network, only to cripple it with so many restrictions. 5GB a month? I can go through that in a *week*. Not to mention the connection is $60 a *month*, which is much more than most land-line based connections.

These wireless cards must be a total godsend to those who travel a lot or are living in an area without cable or DSL; it's sad that the wireless providers cripple what you can do with them.

As some of you know, the first X1900XT that came with my Mac Pro bit it and I had to get a replacement. It just started becoming unreliable and generating artifacts, crashing the machine, etc.

The new one has been rock solid, but in the past few weeks I've noticed the fan on it has started spinning very fast and loud. So I opened up the machine tonight and...

There's a big cake of dust clogging the intake! There was hardly any airflow through the card. The fan had to run nearly full speed to keep it cool.

The old card's fan never sped up to compensate for the heatsink getting clogged up, so the card fried itself. This one spins faster and faster as it can't cool itself. Must be newer firmware.

In any case... I dusted the machine out nicely and the fan is now nice and quiet again. Yay!

I love open source. Freedom, you can do whatever you want with the code, and so on. However, open source development is generally lacking in one important area: User interface design.

After using Macs for the past few years, the problems inherent in open source software become that much more obvious to me. I think all open source programmers who can afford it should get a Macbook and play around with it for a while as an example of good design, so they can see all the niggling issues in open source desktops that can drive users slowly insane.

I made a short video that points out a very good example of bad UI design. I wrote "part 1" because I may create more such videos in the future as I continue to come across these issues. Many users of open source are quick to forgive these little problems; this is a bad attitude to take because the problems start to add up, making the user experience poor overall.