Last week I was bragging about the cleverness with which I avoided the Apple RAM tax by finding a really good third party deal. (Patriot 2x2GB PSA24GICDSK, sold by NewEgg and packaged by Patriot as "Mac Memory".) cypher386 mentioned to me that the new just-released (21/02/2008) version 2.01 of memtest86+ handles EFI. I ran memtest86+ and it turns out ( Read more... )

Friday: the plan was for gaping_asshole to work a half-day while I got my motorcycle ready for the trip with an oil change and chain replacement, then we'd start in the afternoon and ride through Sacramento to the foot of the Sierras. Unfortunately his half day turned into a full day and I messed up a master link on my replacement chain so we were finally ready ( Read more... )

This evening Sneery wanted to talk to his friends the japanese houseguests for a few minutes. He's got a MacBook Pro, I've got a new MacBook Regular. We couldn't get iChat AV to work, but Skype *did* work. Now at least we've got options when iChat AV doesn't work, which is frequently around here.

Of course it could be the router. I've got a ( Read more... )

My first-generation white MacBook started off being shiny and clean, but it's developed some grey-brown discoloration on the palmrests. I mentioned this to an Apple employee friend who told me "Oh. You've got the lung cancer ( Read more... )

Last night I was running out the door to catch gundam_sentinel. I was carrying my MacBook with an external mouse plugged in. The mouse cord snagged on the doorknob and jerked the (sleeping) laptop hard enough that I thought I'd broken something.

This evening matrushkaka pinged me on iChat. I started the session before I turned on a few extra lights in the room, and my ( Read more... )

My new MacBook's 120GB Seagate 5400.2 internal hard drive just died. Again. This time there were no warning signs: I set it up to run BitTorrent overnight, went to sleep, and this morning it was making the same slight clickity-click sound that my first dead drive made. Once again this isn't an AppleCare issue since I swapped out the stock 60GB ( Read more... )

iTunes 7 seems to have a few fairly severe problems in my experience. The Podcasts section of iTunes lets you see which podcasts you've already listened to: there's a blue marker for "unplayed" which disappears to indicate "played". Earlier versions of iTunes would sync my podcast listening point, so that if I listened to the first half of a ( Read more... )

I'm recovered from last night's hard drive crash. My last backup happened on or after July 27, 2006 11:24:46 PM PDT, so I've lost the last five days or so of email, MP3s, and random crap which is not as bad as it could have been. Fortunately I'd recently rsync'ed my seekrit web project to my server so I didn't lose any of the actual "work" that I ( Read more... )

My new MacBook's 120GB Seagate 5400.2 internal hard drive just died. In hindsight I probably should have seen it coming: it had been hanging sometimes when I woke it up, but I assumed this had something to do with the network at work. I can hear a slight clickity-click, the MacBook does not boot, and the BIOS EFI screen shows a gray folder with a ( Read more... )

Some combination of upgrading to OSX 10.4.7 and switching to Intel has broken my OSX backup strategy. Submitted as Problem ID 4611267, a few minutes after starting an rsync from my the rest of my system grinds to a halt. It feels like massive swapping, Activity Monitor indicates some sort of memory-eating issue, and the problem goes away when I ( Read more... )