A new problem that is looking for solutions: Computers are worth replacing while they are still work fine.
Interesting is the theme that the OS is often the reason to kick it to the curb: It is outdated (OS9), just got slower and slower (windows used to do that, does it still? Luckily I have no idea) or it just filled with malware (That WOULD be a windows feature). The hardware might do some good. I am always surprised how little harddrives have been. “Back in the day”.
? Saas ? Never had heard of it. Till Today. And then it showed up everywhere. SaaS seems to be a fancy acronym for Software as a Service. Turns out that’s what I am doing with Interdubs. Maybe if I would hang out in the Silicon Valley more or spend more time with VC types I would know this kind of language. But actually, I rather not. I just like to go ahead and write software. No need to call it fancy names. I rather check if people can use it for what they would like to do. Chances are they don’t know -or care- about SaaS either. They just have work to do.
When getting an error like ‘Unexpected signal: 10’ when launching vmware on OS X it could be that you ran a 3rd Memory Manager like iFreeMem. Quitting it did not fix the issue. I had to reboot, and then vmware was happy again. It might even be that running iFreeMem first and then VMware would work. My solution is just not to use ‘iFreeMem’ any longer. It feels snake-oilish anyway: why should a 15 dollar application do a better job in managing my memory than the OS itself? It’s one of these things that the OS should be really good at. It’s not about having ‘green’ in your pie chart.
The other day I rented a car since mine was in the shop. The rate was reasonable. Actually a Chevy whatever it’s called is pretty quiet for what it is. National was just accross the street from the shop that my car was in. They really wanted my phone number. I should have known why: They called twice wanted to know how the service was. Thanks for caring. Service had been good, until they started to ask about it. Same with GoDaddy. Their SSL certificates cost 40 while others want 150. It’s still a rip off since it is just a simple script and a tiny little bit of administration to weed out the evil people. Of course they called. And then called again. At 7am. Made me feel real good about filling out the form where you indicate when you like to get called.
And then on the other side of the spectrum there is AT&T. Or actually what appears to be a rather obscure business division of theirs. I picked AT&t as a vendor for my 800 number, thinking that they would be a bit more expensive but easy to deal with. The 800 number is just a little aspect of what I am doing, so why waste much time on it. So I thought. The division provides the service. But is otherwise basically unreachable. They don’t even have a phone number. Nor can I reach them via the internet: Their web forms stopped working. And there is no way that feedback would get to them. Amazing.
Looks like the people have made their mind up on the decider. Now would be the perfect time to find Osama Bin Laden. Whatever happened to that project Mr. B? Will taking my shoes when getting on an airplane help with that? Or maybe he surrenders himself if we add another really vivid colored threat level? “Hyper Mauve” or something?
Warners must feel pretty powerful today. Just a couple of weeks after they threw their hat in the ring it’s all over. Once the stalemate was tilting it took surprising little time for everybody to jump on the winning side. I wonder how quickly one can start reading that Blu-Ray was in any way better than HD-DVD. Of course it was not. Both formats were identical. My theory is that now folklore will be created that Blu-Ray was better, and therefor won. Truth is -and shall remain- that Sony “just” did the better maneuvering and somehow got Warners on board in the right moment. Good that this part of media technology history is over. Now comes the real uphill battle: Blu-Ray vs DVD and the fact that people have more choices to entertain themselves than there seems to be Plastics around.
“Plastics. Benjamin, Plastics”
In the past gmail has been good with spam filtering. Just now I checked up on a prospect. It turned out that he felt I was interested in his business, since I did not reply to his emails. They were in the gmail spam folder. Nothing special about them. Sadly you can not search the spam folder. Spammers never made a single cent with me. But they cost me and everybody else money. When I was looking at the last 3,000 spam mails I got (2 days) it seems that they peddle only a few items. I am sure that most of the spam tries to benefit just a couple of business. How about somebody going over there to these people and kind of make then reconsider the business attitude?
The SX 70 was an amazingly nice device. And the Eames’s sure knew how to explain technology. Too bad that Polaroid is really serious about giving up on making those little chemical mircale boxes. I once bought a slide scanner that was crap. Since Samy’s camera only wanted to return it against store credit I had allot of money to burn for Polaroids. And it was allot of fun.
Since a while I have a very early MacBook Pro. Overall I got used to it, love it as much as I did the PowerBook. Funny how you get used to everything. I am sure it still gets how etc etc. Back then I got it with the biggest drive that was possible: 120GB. Of course that one has been above 95% full for the last year or so. Finally I got around to put a 250GB drive in the machine and, surprisingly, it even worked. I did probably not to these things in the smartest way, but in the end it worked:
I got a 250 GB drive from Amazon that let’s you end up with 232 GB formatted capacity in real bytes. The Western Digital WD2500BEVS Scorpio 250 GB 2.5-inch SATA Hard Drive is 129$ right now.
I got a Macally B-S250U USB 2.0 2.5-Inch SATA Hard Drive Enclosure for 25$. Putting the drive into the enclosure was easier than I thought. Funny enough the enclosure needs a 2 USB connections to work. One for data the other one for power. Even more strange is that with just one cable the LED will light up and the drive will click repeatedly. I was convinced that the drive was DOA at that point.
So then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of my internal drive to the newer bigger one. It took more than a minute to copy all the Adobe Acrobat crap. I really need to delete that. Adobe Acrobat is ‘near-malware’. Anyway. I let the copy finish over night.
There are lots of screws to get into the MacBook Pro. The internet seems to agree ont he fact that the MacBook Pro is much easier to get into than the PowerBook. I found the instructions at iFixit to be very helpful. The Torx T6 screw driver you need for 2 screws in the case and 4 on the drive I found at Sears. 2.49. They sell a set of 3 little screwdrivers for 10 dollars. Or you pay 7 buying them individually.
Gettting the upper part keyboard part off was a bit tricky. A little bit of careful jiggling around did the trick.
I also went ahead and disconnected the power light. It sit’s on top of the harddrive. I don’t need to see a room illuminated by my sleeping laptop while I am trying to sleep as well.
Still amazed that it did work.