Utah Open Source Planet

I've had mixed feelings about whether to upgrade my iPhone to the new 3G model. Ultimately, I get three things: 3G, GPS, and 8G more RAM than I have now. None of those alone were enough to tip me and together, they were marginal. Consequently I wasn't all in a tizzy over today's iPhone availability. Still, since I had a few friends who were excited to get one and were coming up to the Apple store in Salt Lake to get one, I figured I'd tag along and maybe pick on up. What I wasn't ready for was 7 or 8 hour lines.

I figured that iPhones would be plentiful. Beside, it wasn't the launch of a 1.0 product (and hence less excitement). On top of all that, after the doors opened last June the lines went so fast that I figured you'd be able to show up anytime today and waltz in and get one. Wrong.

What changed between last year and this one was the in-store activation. Last year, you bought your phone and took it home to activate it. Yeah! That was a heavenly experience. This year--to curb people buying phones so and then unlocking them--in-store activation is required. It's taking, according to some of the Apple Store employees working the line, 20-30 minutes.

That's when the activation system is working at all. There have been, according to reports, frequent break downs. Consequently, the line moves in fits and starts; lurching toward the door.

The whole experience, as a result, has been much more frustrating than last year. People waited in line last year and this year. But that's where the similarity ends. People aren't anxiously waiting for the doors to open and then rushing in to buy the product they've been lusting for. Instead, the doors have been open for 7 hours and hundreds of people are still lined up waiting for the machine to serve them because of IT problems. Big difference Apple.

Tags: iphone apple gear

For the last three weeks I've been riding my bike to work when occasion permits. Unfortunately, that usually only works out to a few times per week. I live in Lindon and work at Thanksgiving Point, about 17 miles one way. One of the first things I discovered was that I needed a good way to carry my laptop.

I have a backpack and a messenger bag. I immediately dispensed with the backpack since it's up high and made me too hot. The messenger bag keeps the weight low, but after 17 miles, it's a boat anchor around you neck.

What I needed was a pannier big enough to carry a laptop. I used to commute by bike regularly but that was 15 years ago. My panniers from that time are small and not nearly big or sturdy enough to carry a 15 inch Macbook Pro.

After a week or so of searching and reading message boards I came across the Arkel Commuter. This is, as far as can tell, the best commuter pannier around.

At $159, it's not cheap, but after using it a few times, I think it's well worth it. The load is low and the bike is doing the work. The bag is well made and the laptop is secure. I especially like the cams that lock it to the rack--the last thing I need is my laptop flying off the bike on a bump.

Tags: biking gear

Almost two weeks ago, I wrote that I suspected that a memory issue was causing my MacBook Pro stability issues. I bought a new 2Gb memory stick ($70) and haven't a single problem with my MBP freezing. Maybe the old memory was bad, maybe it just wasn't working well with the MBP (memory can be finicky), or maybe it was running hot and causing a thermal problem. I don't know. But for now, replacing a single memory stick seems to have solved the problem.

Tags: osx gear

Well, maybe not completely innocent. Here's the story: A little bit ago, I claimed that uninstalling Parallels from my system had solved some instability problems I was having. Not so fast. I'd gone five days when I wrote that post without seeing any evidence of the instability after removing the drivers. The next day they came back.

What did change was that my erratic mouse problem went a way permanently, so I still believe that vmmain.kext was the cause of that. But it wasn't causing the freezing. As I said, that returned and kept happening.

I began to suspect that it was a memory issue since there were no third party kernel extensions left to uninstall and the visible behavior was not something I'd attribute to a application (overall system hanging with frequent accompanying high CPU load). It felt like a tight loop in privileged code.

So, my latest theory is that it's related to memory. I've now gone a week without a problem after pulling the memory and replacing it with new DIMMs. The only problem is that I only had 3Gb of replacement RAM so I went from 4 to 3Gb. If this really does solve my instability problem, then I will have to determine whether the memory is really bad or if it's something to do with having 4Gb in my machine. Another option is that it's thermal and having 4Gb of memory pushes it over the top on temperature. Isn't this fun?

Tags: virtualization osx gear

An article in the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog reports on research that James Anderson conducted for NEC. The research found:

someone using a larger monitor could save 2.5 hours a day. But James Anderson, the professor in charge of the study, tells the Business Technology Blog to take that result with a grain of salt: It assumes that someone will work non-stop for eight hours, which no one will, and that the tasks they perform will all benefit from a larger screen, which isn't always the case. But things like moving data between files are ideally suited to bigger or multiple screens. Anderson, who uses a computer with two 20-inch screens and one 24-inch one, recommends that businesses take the time to match employees with the proper size screen based on job requirements.

From Business Technology : Bigger Computer Monitors = More Productivity
Referenced Wed Mar 12 2008 18:48:39 GMT-0600 (MDT)

I interested that they found no benefit from monitors larger than 24 inches. Task related I'd suppose. I've gotta say, I love 30 inch monitors. Love them.

I'd love to see a similar study on programmers. I'd bet the results are the same.

Tags: gear productivity

Abilene Christian University has a program to give all students an iPhone. They've also got a video that shows how the iPhone might be used on campus (the video is conceptual, not factual). I found some of the ideas to be pretty interesting, but wonder how much IT support would be needed to pull them off. For example, in one sequence the students type things into an application running on the iPhone and a tag cloud is built on the projected screen in real time. Slick.

The current standard in teaching IT support is Blackboard and anyone who watches this video and then thinks about what Blackboard can do will be sorely disappointed that our capabilities are so thoroughly limited by this dinosaur from the 90's. Schools pay a lot of money for Blackboard and its one of the worst Web applications you can imagine. If I worked there, I'd be embarrassed to admit it.

All this just goes to show that there's still plenty of blue ocean in the educational and instructional software market if someone were willing to crack that nut.

Tags: academics byu apple gear iphone

A few weeks ago, I wrote about forcing Time Machine drives to unmount. From a comment to that post by bil_kleb, I learned about Bernhard Baehr's SleepWatcher program that provided a way to create a complete solution. Here's what I did.

Download and install SleepWatcher. There are two installs that have to be done in the right order (StartupItem last). Now whenever you restart SleepWatcher will start as well.

Modifiy your sudoers list. This allows umount to run as the superuser without a password (otherwise you have to type the superuser password everytime you put your Mac to sleep). Use the command sudo visudo to edit the sudoers file. If you don't know vi, get someone to help with this step. You want to add the following line to the end of the sudoers file:

%admin  ALL= NOPASSWD: /sbin/umount

This tells the sudo program to allow everyone in the %admin group to execute the umount command as the superuser without a password.

Create a .sleep file. This is where you actually unmount the drive. Put the following in a .sleep account in your home directory (you'll have to create this file)

#/bin/bash

# always unmount the drive before sleep
sudo /sbin/umount -f /Volumes/Phil\ Backup

You'll want to change /Volumes/Phil\ Backup to whatever the name of your backup drive is (look in /Volumes to find it). Make sure you make the .sleep file executable:

chmod u+x $HOME/.sleep

You can test it by executing the .sleep file from the command line. Your disk should unmount without asking for a password if you've done these steps correctly.

That's it. Now when you sleep your machine the Time Machine drive will unmount automatically. You can add other things to the .sleep file if you like to accomplish anything else you'd like done before the machine sleeps. SleepWatcher will also execute a .wakeup file for things you want done when the machine wakes up.

I've been using this for a few weeks now and it seems to work fine. Every time I sleep my machine, the drive unmounts cleanly as part of the sleeping process.

Anyone have good ideas for other things to do automatically on sleeping and waking? Now that I've got a new hammer, I've looking for new nails!

Tags: osx gear lifehacks

I have a suspicion that the most recent OS X (10.5.2) update caused a spate of problems with MacBook Pro's refusing to wake up after sleeping. I base this on two pieces of evidence:

• I've experienced this after months of not having any problem at all.
• An earlier article I wrote on Fixing MacBook pro sleep problems is the number one hit on Google for that search right now and I'm seeing that page referenced at 3 to 4 times the rate is was a few weeks ago.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Tags: osx gear

Have you wondered what it takes to take a MacBook Air apart and what it looks like when you do? Look no further. Here's a step-by-step with high-res photos from iFixIt. The battery isn't trivial to replace, but it's definitely easier than replacing the hard drive on an iMac. I'd do it.

Unfortunately, the 80Gb drive is the largest one that will fit. I wondered about that because often Apple's top choice is one size smaller than the current leader in terms of space. I regularly crack open my new MacBook Pros before I've even turned them on to replace the drive. Looks like Apple had to go state-of-the-art here to save the 3mm that the larger drives would have cost.

Tags: osx gear apple

One of the things that interested me about the Mac Book Air with the solid state drive was the hope that it might give better performance than a standard HDD and even better battery life.

According to this review from Ars Technica, the performance gains mixed:

[T]he summary is: the SSD does worse in sequential disk tests and writing in general, but spanks the HDD in random disk tests and reading from the disk.

From No spin: Ars reviews the MacBook Air with solid state drive
Referenced Wed Feb 06 2008 20:58:53 GMT-0700 (MST)

What does that translate into?

• Booting is no faster
• Exporting a Quicktime movie is slower
• Building software is faster
• Unzipping an archive is faster

Most applications won't seem much different. In short: don't spend the $1300 in hopes of getting increased performance. You won't see much.

Tags: apple osx gear

Over the weekend, I reloaded Leopard. If you remember, I was forced to upgrade to Leopard by a bad Tiger update a few months ago. My preferred method of upgrading is to wipe the disk, do a fresh install, and then restore my applications and personal files from backup. Due to the circumstances of the situation I was in, I didn't get to do that. I decided that the three day weekend presented the perfect opportunity.

The install and restore went fine and I was soon running a squeaky fresh copy of Leopard.

I'm in the habit of running Activity Monitor to see where the CPU and memory are being used and I noticed that mds, the utility that manages Spotlight, was taking almost 250Mb of RAM. Now, I don't use Spotlight enough to justify it taking one quarter of a Gig of memory, so I investigated. Here's what I did.

First, since I'd just reinstalled, I decided to blow away the old index and do a new one. I did this at the terminal:

bash> sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Windley

bash> sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Windley

bash> sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Windley

The first command turns indexing off for a given volume--in this case my boot volume. The last command turns it back on. The middle command erases the index for the named volume. As soon as I issued the last command, the system started rebuilding the index. That took a few hours.

Once the index was rebuilt, I restarted mds with the following commands:

bash> sudo launchctl unload \\
      /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

bash> sudo launchctl load \\
      /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

When mds restarted it didn't use much memory at all. Each call to Spotlight increased its memory usage, but it's no where near 250Mb. I've noticed that OSX applications tend to hold memory until another application needs it, so sometimes you can look full, but still have plenty of memory.

mds is fluctuating between 30 and 100Mb now. That's still a lot of memory for something I rarely use, but it's manageable. If you want to completely disable Spotlight in Leopard, add the -w switch to the launchctl unload command in the last code block to write the configuration back out to disk. Then don't run the launchctl load command. That turns off mds completely.

As an aside, the reason I don't use Spotlight much is because I love Quicksilver. Here's a brief tutorial on Quicksilver.

Tags: osx gear

A number of people have given various objections to the Macbook Air (MBA): small drive, no firewire, no ethernet port, and so on. I can live with all of those. I'd get one primarily for travel, so I don't mind the small drive. I've been using disks over 801.11N with my MBP for months and won't miss an ethernet or firewire port. Further, I'm intrigued by the solid state drive.

So, the MBA looks like the perfect travel machine with one exception: there's no 3G card. Huh!?! Further, because there's no Express/34 slot, I can't use the card I already have. I'd have to go get one of those USB soap-on-a-rope aircards. Ugh!

Now, if I could tether to my iPhone and use the network from there--I'd be OK. But, alas, you can't do that without jailbreaking the iPhone. So, for now, I'm passing on the MBA.

Tags: osx gear

1080i broadcast, KSL TV (local news) note: jaggies on collar (click to enlarge)

The picture to the right shows a close-up of the anchor in a local newscast from KSL-TV (channel 5 in Utah). The broadcast is advertised as 1080i (e.g. my TV claims it's a 1080i signal based on the info in the signal). If you look closely, you'll see that the collar (a nice, high-contrast diagonal line) has jaggies--stair-steps in the collar instead of a smooth line. You can see them very clearly.

1080i broadcast, KSL TV (national news) note: collar is smooth (click to enlarge)

The second picture shows another broadcast on KSL-TV a few minutes later. This broadcast, of the news anchor on the Today Show (NBC's national morning show) is also allegedly 1080i as reported by my TV. If you look closely at the collar on the anchor in that broadcast, you'll notice that there are no jaggies. In fact, the national broadcast is clear as a bell.

In both cases, I was viewing the program from an over-the-air HD signal directly into the back of the TV. Also, this isn't an artifact of the camera. These pictures accurately represent what can be seen with the naked eye.

This behavior is consistent. I can view any KSL local news cast and see the jaggies. I can view any NBC national news program on the same channel and they aren't present. The TV reports 1080i programming in both instances.

Here's my question: why? Is the local broadcast not really a 1080i signal or is the signal 1080i, but something in how it was captured or processed not as high definition as the broadcast itself? I'm leaning toward the latter explanation, but I don't know anything about it. For example, maybe they're shooting with lower resolution cameras? I'm just guessing. Anyone from KSL want to comment?

I guess the third possibility is that my TV is messed up, but I don't think so. Steve Fulling has a 52 inch version of the same TV and reports the exact same phenomenon.

Tags: tv hd gear

Apple iPhone (click to enlarge)

CIO magazine has a piece on the 10 Reasons IT Should Not Support the Apple iPhone from Forrester Research. I realize we all like lists with numbers and ten is our favorite since we have ten fingers, but only the first four in this list are real reason. The rest are stupid. Let's look at them.

1. The iPhone Doesn't Allow Data on the Device to be Encrypted - with all the problems businesses have with corporate data ending up on stolen or lost devices, I'd have to agree with this. Still, I'd bet the number of businesses using this feature effectively and consistently on Blackberrys and Treos is less than 20%. Maybe single digits.
2. The iPhone Does Not Natively Support "Push" Corporate E-mail or Wireless Calendar Syncing - This one I'll give to Forrester--even though to me, and most users, I suspect it's less important than people make it out to be. Push email ought to be SMS.
3. The iPhone Does Not Run Third-Party Applications Without Voiding Its Warranty - This one is a big one for some businesses who need to put special apps on the mobile device to enable proprietary business functions. This one won' go away with Apple's announced third party app strategy either.
4. The iPhone Cannot be Locked or Wiped Remotely - See (1)
5. The iPhone Lacks a Physical Keyboard - So? As I've mentioned earlier, this is a trade-off that many users might be willing to take: more screen real estate for a virtual keoyboards.
6. The iPhone Has Limited Carrier Support Outside the United States, It's Locked Into Carriers - Again, this isn't a universal problem but one that's likely to be business and even user specific. Most users never use their phones outside their own country.
7. The iPhone is (Very) Expensive - If I've got the budget why is it the CIO's business if I want an iPhone? I'm better qualified than the IT department to determine the best use of funds for me and my team.
8. The iPhone Is a First-Generation Device - Again, so? It's actually been updated twice already with another expected next week. I wager that the first-gen iPhone will seem pretty nice even a few years from now while most other mobile devices are dated 3 months after you get them. Caveat: 3G support won't be a software update and that is something worth having.
9. Apple Doesn't Offer Replacement Batteries for the iPhone - another red herring. Most users never change the battery on their phones. Ever.
10. There's No Proof That iPhones Are Suitable Business Devices - Huh? What would constitute proof? Lots of business users using them, I guess. But Forrester says IT Departments should resist even the CEO getting one. Anyone sense some circular logic here?

Apple really doesn't care, from what I can tell, whether businesses consider their products "business devices" or not. They're not aiming for that market. The very fact that business users are begging IT departments for them in testament to the power of their design. Supporting businesses is an ugly, expensive game. I hope Apple stays away and concentrates on me.

Anyone else sense that most of these reasons smack of unreasonable and unrealistic control of the business by IT departments. No wonder business users hate the IT department. If you listen to Forrester, don't complain when other divisions hate you. There are legitimate areas of control with legitimate business purposes (data security). Mandating physical keyboards (as an example) because "we know what will make you most productive--and you don't" is pure hubris.

Tags: iphone apple gear enterprise+computing

As I mentioned before, I bought a new HD TV for Christmas (a Sony 40 inch XBR4). That put me on the hunt for good sources of HD programming.

Something I overlooked for a while, and I'm sure I'm not alone, is over-the-air, free programming from local TV stations. We're so used to the "antenna == bad" school of thought that the cablecos dished out for the last twenty years that we don't even consider it.

There's no doubt that for analog television antennas almost always produced worse results than satellite or cable, but for digital, that's no longer true. In fact, I think the digital TV programming over an antenna is actually superior to the programming you get, for clarity anyway, over cable or satellite. Of course, you can't get ESPN or Discover, but that's another issue.

You might think you need a special antenna for HD programming, but that's not usually the case. It's just UHF TV. When I built my house, I had an antenna installed in the attic and a cable run down to my machine room. Turns out, that works fine. I get 30 digital channels or something with that.

Thirty is a little misleading since stations have decided to use their bandwidth differently. KSL, the local NBC affiliate, for example has one HD channel and two SD channels (all digital). KBYU, BYU's PBS affiliate, has four SD channels and no HD channel. KUED, Utah's PBS affiliate, has one HD channel and one with Spanish programming. It's all over the map.

I found one channel (30.1 if you live in Utah) that seemed to exercise some bug in my TV and caused the whole thing to lock up and turn unresponsive. I had to unplug the coax to get it back to block the channel. Now that you TV is a computer, you get bugs like that I suppose.

That said, the clarity is good and when you get a good 1080i signal, it's as good or better than anything else you can get. One thing's for sure, as more people buy TVs with higher resolution, the demand for more HD programming is going to go through the roof.

I bought an HD Tivo to decode and record digital over-the-air signals. My old Series 2 Tivo just didn't cut it anymore. The new Tivo works great for recording over-the-air programming although that's not something you'd understand very well from reading the Tivo Website. I got it 15% off at CompUSA, which is closing, if you're in the market.

One thing to keep in mind when you're shopping for an HD TV--something else I'd failed to appreciate until recently--is that just looking at the resolution (e.g. 1080p) isn't enough. Keep in mind that you're not just buying a display, you're also buying the computer that renders the picture. They are not all alike and the rendering engine makes a big difference in overall quality of the picture. Also, be sure to check out the contrast ration--higher is better--if you won't be watching it in a darkened room all the time.

As an aside, what's with Best Buy and Circuit City carrying $100 Monster HDMI cables exclusively? You can get perfectly good cables for a third of that or less other places. When I think of all the people who've been snookered by expensive HDMI cables, I cringe.

At any rate, if you haven't done it, hook a good UHF antenna up to your HD TV or Tivo and give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised.

Tags: tv gear video

salt 200x (click to enlarge)

Celestron will supposedly announce a sub-$300 dollar microscope with a built-in screen and a 2 megapixel camera. That's pretty cool, but it that's out of your price range, you can pick up an used IntelPlay QX3 microscope on eBay for $35. The specs aren't quite a sweet (200x, 1 megapixel), but it does hook to a USB port.

I've had one for many years. I found an OS X software package called macam that works with it pretty well. My son and I took some pictures with it a while back.

If you're looking for a little microscope fun and don't want to blow $300, this set up will suit you just fine.

Tags: gear

iMac as family information center (click to enlarge)

I have an old 17 inch iMac G5 that I'm not using. After I installed Leopard on it, it just didn't cut it anymore, so it had been retired. I decided it would be fun to experiment with it as a "special purpose computer." That is, one that has limited duty.

A while ago I read an article in Macworld on making a family message center from an old iMac and decided to give that a go. You can see from the picture how it turned out.

I already had a VESA mount adapter for the iMac that I'd bought when it was new. I got a small VESA mount from Circuit City. The biggest problem I had was that this doesn't tighten enough to keep the panel straight. I stripped the bolt trying. I put a small piece of metal in the tilt stop slot with a glue gun to fix it in the position I wanted.

The next problem was how to mount a keyboard and mouse platform. I originally was going to put one on the wall, but that seemed kludgy, so I bought some 1 inch strap metal at Home Depot and bent it into brackets that attach to the VESA mount and hold the keyboard tray.

I opted for a Bluetooth wireless keyboard because its small. I'd like to get a track ball to replace the mouse since it's awkward to moves around on the small inclined platform. I'd rather have a tethered keyboard so I'll keep looking for something small and wired.

Now that every computer I own has a built-in iSight camera, I also have a few spare cameras floating around, so I added that (not pictured). The VESA adapter offered some nice slots for tucking in the mouse and firewire cables for a neat installation. I also wrapped the power cord around the mount to keep it out of the way.

On the software side, I reinstalled 10.4 (Tiger) since it does everything I need and is much more responsive on this machine. I set up an account to launch Sticky Notes, iCal, iChat, and FlickrFan at launch. I also configured this account to autostart on boot.

I also made it so that Dashboard widgets can be kept on the screen. Here's how. Run this command on the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Dashboard devmode YES

Then log out and back in to restart Dashboard. Then use F12 to expose Dashboard, click and hold the widget you want on the desktop and press F12 again. I found I had to move the widget a little after click and before pressing F12 to get it to stick. This let me put the weather widget on the desktop permanently.

iCal is subscribed to everyone's calendars now, so there's one place that shows everyone's schedule. I already had a WebDAV server set up, so that wasn't an issue. You could use a .Mac account or something else if you don't have a WebDAV server handy.

I created an account on AIM for the computer and added myself and other family members to it so you can IM family members from the message center. I also added our cell numbers so you can SMS from iChat. To do this, add a new buddy and for the account, type the 10-digit cell number preceded by a +1.

I didn't put any phone features on it since I'm not anxious to spend $130 to get a voicemail box system like Phone Valet Message Center. If anyone knows of something simpler that works with the internal modem, I'd love to hear about it.

As I mentioned I installed FlickrFan to get FLickr pictures on the machine and then set up the screen saver to come on after 3 minutes, so the computer is constantly showing us interesting pictures. The kids have been mesmerized by it at times.

All in all, this was a fun, simple project. Now we'll see if the family will use it or if it is just an expensive electronic picture frame. Even at that, it's a nice use for an old flat iMac.

Tags: gear osx

For Christmas, I bought a Sony XBR4 40" LCD TV from Amazon. I was thinking I ought to get an Apple TV to go with it, but then thought that a Mac Mini might be more versatile. While in the midst of indecision, Dave Winer made up my mind for me and Scoble put the icing on the cake. I'll get a Mac Mini.

Dave's new product--not yet released--sounds like a fun convergence of a big, bright beautiful screen hanging on the wall and the Internet. The XBR4 already has a DVI input, so hooking up ought to be a breeze and getting good pictures on the thing would be wonderful.

There's a real culture war going on between the traditional open culture of computing--something that's survived 40 years of companies trying to build walled gardens--and the traditionally closed culture of TV, radio, and the whole broadcast industry. Thinking like Dave's will help keep the hounds at bay a little longer, I hope.

A word about the TV: the Sony XBR4 LCD flat screens are clearly the best on the market. This is a TV worth paying extra for.

Tags: gear tv flickr sony

One of the great things about blogging is that it gives you and outlet to vent when you get crappy customer service--heck, I think that drives blogging more than anything. Dave Winer got ripped off in an Apple store yesterday and told the tale on his blog.

I've owned, if you count the machines I buy for my students in my research lab, dozens of Apple machines in the last five years. Overall, I find them to be moderately reliable--but I have to admit most of the problems I've had have been on new-release machines.

I've never taken my machine in to get a hard drive replaced and I've done that more times than I'd care to count. Dave didn't do it himself--not because he can't, but because he already had it at the store and they'd diagnosed the problem--I'd probably do the same thing.

Apple doesn't make machines particularly easy to work on. My recent experience taking an iMac apart is a case in point. Over the normal life of any laptop, chances are you'll want to replace the harddrive. That's especially true with the number of large media files that I find myself accumulating. External drives just don't cut it.

Frankly, it would be nice if Apple would make drives as easy to replace as RAM. I'll gladly trade some case esthetic for easier upgrades.

If you do upgrade the harddrive in your Mac, the best resource I've found is iFixIt. They have instructions for cracking the case on just about every Mac model around. Very handy.

Back to Dave, he clearly go ripped off. If this had been a warranty repair, then the Apple would have claim on the drive unless he paid a "own the drive" fee like Dell offers. But this wasn't. He paid to get the machine repaired and the drive should belong to him.

Dave's concerns over the data on his drive are valid. I'd have them too. When I replace a drive on my machine, I always do a security erase on it before giving it to someone else. With a broken drive, I'd like to destroy them, but so far just accumulate them on a shelf. You can buy a service. Anyone have any experience destroying old drives?

Tags: apple gear repair vrm customer+service

I wanted a bigger hard drive in an Intel (Core Duo) 20 inch iMac than the one it had and took advantage of CompUSA's clearance sale to pick up a 750Gb drive. I'd taken the cover off of my G5 iMac plenty of times and it's dirt simple, so I thought I was in for an easy time. I was very wrong.

My first clue should have been the separate RAM bay door on the bottom of the machine. No one puts a RAM bay door on a machine that's easy to crack open. Where the back simple lifts off the G5 iMac after loosening 4 captured screws, removing the screws from the Intel iMac didn't loosen the back at all, rather, it allows the front to be taken off.

After that, to get to the drive, you have to remove the LCD screen, which requires pealing away some black sticky stuff that I assume is shielding and removing four torx screws that are recessed about an inch below the surface. Ugh. I didn't even try to remove the whole panel, just took the screws out and had my son hold it up while I changed out the drive. These instructions were helpful in knowing what to expect, but my unit was slightly different.

After I put it all together, it still worked. I was glad--I didn't want to have to take it apart. After seeing how hard it is, I'm glad I got the 750Gb drive--I almost got the 500Gb thinking it would be easy to upgrade later. Whew! I can tell you I'm glad there's a RAM bay door. I want to upgrade the RAM with a spare stick I've got and if I had to remove the LCD panel again, I'd just say "forget it."

Tags: gear osx apple

For Christmas, I bought a Sony XBR4 40" LCD TV from Amazon. I was thinking I ought to get an Apple TV to go with it, but then thought that a Mac Mini might be more versatile. While in the midst of indecision, Dave Winer made up my mind for me and Scoble put the icing on the cake. I'll get a Mac Mini.

Dave's new product--not yet released--sounds like a fun convergence of a big, bright beautiful screen hanging on the wall and the Internet. The XBR4 already has a DVI input, so hooking up ought to be a breeze and getting good pictures on the thing would be wonderful.

There's a real culture war going on between the traditional open culture of computing--something that's survived 40 years of companies trying to build walled gardens--and the traditionally closed culture of TV, radio, and the whole broadcast industry. Thinking like Dave's will help keep the hounds at bay a little longer, I hope.

A word about the TV: the Sony XBR4 LCD flat screens are clearly the best on the market. This is a TV worth paying extra for.

Tags: gear tv flickr sony

One of the great things about blogging is that it gives you and outlet to vent when you get crappy customer service--heck, I think that drives blogging more than anything. Dave Winer got ripped off in an Apple store yesterday and told the tale on his blog.

I've owned, if you count the machines I buy for my students in my research lab, dozens of Apple machines in the last five years. Overall, I find them to be moderately reliable--but I have to admit most of the problems I've had have been on new-release machines.

I've never taken my machine in to get a hard drive replaced and I've done that more times than I'd care to count. Dave didn't do it himself--not because he can't, but because he already had it at the store and they'd diagnosed the problem--I'd probably do the same thing.

Apple doesn't make machines particularly easy to work on. My recent experience taking an iMac apart is a case in point. Over the normal life of any laptop, chances are you'll want to replace the harddrive. That's especially true with the number of large media files that I find myself accumulating. External drives just don't cut it.

Frankly, it would be nice if Apple would make drives as easy to replace as RAM. I'll gladly trade some case esthetic for easier upgrades.

If you do upgrade the harddrive in your Mac, the best resource I've found is iFixIt. They have instructions for cracking the case on just about every Mac model around. Very handy.

Back to Dave, he clearly go ripped off. If this had been a warranty repair, then the Apple would have claim on the drive unless he paid a "own the drive" fee like Dell offers. But this wasn't. He paid to get the machine repaired and the drive should belong to him.

Dave's concerns over the data on his drive are valid. I'd have them too. When I replace a drive on my machine, I always do a security erase on it before giving it to someone else. With a broken drive, I'd like to destroy them, but so far just accumulate them on a shelf. You can buy a service. Anyone have any experience destroying old drives?

Tags: apple gear repair vrm customer+service

I wanted a bigger hard drive in an Intel (Core Duo) 20 inch iMac than the one it had and took advantage of CompUSA's clearance sale to pick up a 750Gb drive. I'd taken the cover off of my G5 iMac plenty of times and it's dirt simple, so I thought I was in for an easy time. I was very wrong.

My first clue should have been the separate RAM bay door on the bottom of the machine. No one puts a RAM bay door on a machine that's easy to crack open. Where the back simple lifts off the G5 iMac after loosening 4 captured screws, removing the screws from the Intel iMac didn't loosen the back at all, rather, it allows the front to be taken off.

After that, to get to the drive, you have to remove the LCD screen, which requires pealing away some black sticky stuff that I assume is shielding and removing four torx screws that are recessed about an inch below the surface. Ugh. I didn't even try to remove the whole panel, just took the screws out and had my son hold it up while I changed out the drive. These instructions were helpful in knowing what to expect, but my unit was slightly different.

After I put it all together, it still worked. I was glad--I didn't want to have to take it apart. After seeing how hard it is, I'm glad I got the 750Gb drive--I almost got the 500Gb thinking it would be easy to upgrade later. Whew! I can tell you I'm glad there's a RAM bay door. I want to upgrade the RAM with a spare stick I've got and if I had to remove the LCD panel again, I'd just say "forget it."

Tags: gear osx apple

My recent travels had me wishing for a lighter bag--that implies a smaller laptop--or no laptop. I'm not ready for the latter, but I'd be happy to give up the optical drive on my laptop to get it. I never use it on the road. I'm willing to plug one in for the rare cases where I use it. I'm ready to jettison optical drives on all portable computers.

Tags: apple gear osx

I've got two Apple 30: displays--one at home and one in my office at BYU. They're lovely. I can't imagine programming without one. All that real estate makes a huge difference in productivity.

Last week I picked up three Dell 3007WFP 30 inch monitors. They're a steal; Dell has them priced less than $1200 (compare that to the Apple educational price of $1600). A c|net head to head review puts them neck and neck. I'm sure the esthetics won't be the same, but I can live with that.

Why the price drop? Dell's got a new 30 inch display on the way. The chief benefit is better connectivity which isn't something I've cared about--I'm not going to use these for TVs.

If you've always wanted a huge display, this may be your chance.

Tags: gear

A few weeks ago I reported that I'd put together a PC with my kids and it failed to start up. After trying a variety of things, I came to the conclusion it was the motherboard, the CPU, or RAM. A friend sent a note to say he had a couple of sticks of extra RAM I could try in it, so after a week of forgetting about it, I finally did and it solved the problem!

The new RAM was from Silicon Mountain. The RAM that wasn't working in the motherboard was Kensington. Various forum postings indicated that the RAM settings in the ASUS motherboard could be problematic. I tried changing them to the recommended settings with the Silicon Mountain RAM in place (so I could even run the BIOS) and then using the Kensington RAM, but that made no difference.

Interesting that they're playing it so close to the edge on timings, but I guess that's the name of the game in high performance systems. In any event, I just bought some Silicon Mountain RAM and gave the Kensington RAM to a friend. Hopefully it can be put to good use somewhere else.

Tags: gear debugging