Vinpok Bolt "MagSafe" Power Cord for MacBook Pro

If there's one thing I hate about the most recent MacBook Pros, it's that Apple replaced the MagSafe power connector with USB-C AKA Thunderbolt 3 ports.

My MBP sits on my coffee table when not in use, and I've been worried that eventually someone would trip over the power cord. It happened with my previous machine but because of the MagSafe connector, it wasn't damaged.

About a week ago I went looking for a MagSafe-analogue that supports the 87W power supply of the 15" MBPs and found a couple. I ordered a Vinpok Bolt USB-C Magnetic Cable on July 15th and it arrived yesterday the 27th, from China.

The magnetic adapter that plugs into one of the USB-C ports:

It adds virtually no bulk. The matching cord that replaces the factory USB-C cable from the Apple power brick:

My first impressions are generally positive. However, it should be noted that the magnets in the Vinpok Bolt are much weaker than those found on the Apple MagSafe connectors. Moving the laptop is frequently enough to dislodge the Vinpok Bolt. The overall size of the Bolt is smaller than the MagSafe connector, so that's to be expected.

That said, as long as it continues to work as advertised, it's worth it IMO to regain the safety feature of the Apple MagSafe connector.

New Personal MacBook Pro

Last weekend I broke down and finally did my income taxes. I used Turbo Tax on my old mid-2009 MacBook Pro. When I installed the software, it warned that unless I upgrade to macOS High Sierra, I won't be able to use it again next year. That Mac is too old to be upgraded beyond Sierra. I've been thinking of getting a new personal laptop and this pushed me to finally do so.

Therefore, on the way home from work last night I stopped in the Apple Store in King of Prussia and bought a 2017-model 15" MBP (MacBookPro14,3). The specs are impressive:

• CPU: 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7 with 4 cores
• RAM: 16 GB
• SSD: 512 GB (I was running low on space on the old machine's 256 GB SSD.)
• Graphics: Onboard Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB AND a 4G AMD Radeon Pro 560 GPU.

It has the Touch Bar (yawn) and 4 Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C 3.1 ports and a headphone jack.

I got it in silver to clearly differentiate it from the work-provided Space Grey 15" MBP.

Since I use Google Drive and Dropbox for documents, migrating them over was as simple as installing the clients and letting them sync. To move over my videos, pictures, and music, I went old school and sneaker-netted them using a 64 GB SanDisk USB stick with both USB-A and USB-C connectors.

This machine is very similar to my company-provided work laptop so I knew what I was getting. To partially reiterate from my post last Spring after I got that one:

• Replacing the MagSafe 2 power connector with USB-C sucks.
• On the other hand, with the right cable I should be able to charge the battery from something like a cell phone power bank or my Harbor Freight jump pack/12V power source.
• I am underwhelmed with the Touch Bar. At work I rarely use it because 90% of the time the lid is closed while the machine is connected to an external keyboard, mouse, and dual displays. Since I use the machine at home as a laptop, I expect the Touch Bar will see more use.
• It's fast as hell.
• The screen is great.
• Battery life is good.
• The keyboard is OK.
• For me, macOS 10.13 High Sierra has been very stable. I expect the new machine to be even more so, because it won't have corporate IT management crap like the Eracent agent installed.

Since last night I've installed the following software:

• MS Office 2016.
• TextWrangler (in which I'm writing this.)
• Truecrypt 7.1a, which requires some tweaking to install.
• ZOC 7 for telnet and SSH. I don't use it much at home but at work for managing Linux servers or network devices, it's awesome.
• LibreOffice for some old OpenOffice files I have. Even on this machine, LibreOffice is a bloated, slow POS. Amazing.
• 1Password.
• Mozilla Thunderbird.
• Google Chrome.

I still need to install a few ham radio apps, including Fldigi, CHIRP, and WSJT. Using them with my radios will require a Thunderbolt 3 to USB-A adapter, and maybe an external sound card.

One thing I need to pick up is a 1 TB Thunderbolt 3-compatible hard disk, to use for Time Machine backups. MicroCenter appears to have several suitable models in stock.

My employer has a purchase plan negotiated with Apple which saved me a couple hundred bucks on the laptop and AppleCare. It still came out to about $3,100 after tax. That's a ton of money but it's worth it to me to have a top-quality machine that I fully expect to be able to use for nearly a decade.

Not dead yet, and an update on my newest Mac

Tonight I pulled ye olde blog and realized that I haven't posted anything here since February. Yikes. I have posted over on Survival and Emergency Preparedness, which if you don't read you should check it out. (I might be a bit biased in that regard.)

Anyhoo, in my last post I mentioned that I had a new 15" MacBook Pro on the way. I've been living with it now for several months so I thought I'd offer some subjective impressions:

• It's fast as hell, even with several large applications open, e.g., Excel, Outlook, Chrome, Slack, and Skype for Business.
• The screen is beautiful.
• The keyboard is different from earlier Macs but I got used to it quickly.
• I love the huge trackpad when I'm not connected to an external keyboard and mouse.
• With 16 GB of RAM I am able to allocate 8 GB to a Windows 10 VM running in Parallels, and have decent performance in the VM. I most commonly use Windows to run the vSphere Client (still a better UI than VMware's web client) or Visio 2013.
• Having only USB-C AKA Thunderbolt 3 ports is a pain in the ass. I have to use an adapter to connect to my 27" Thunderbolt display, or connect most common USB drives, or to Ethernet if I'm not using the Thunderbolt display with its integrated Gig-E port.
• I got one of these Anker USB C to USB 3.0 and Gig-E hubs. It has worked well for me although I haven't tried pounding on an external USB drive with it, just flash drives and Ethernet.
• The Anker hub worked with my FTDI chipset USB to Cisco console cable. (And of course the point of buying the latter was to minimize the number of dongles attached to my laptop. Grr.)
• The Touch Bar is a gimmick. Most of the time I don't even see it because I run an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard, so the machine's lid is closed anyway.
• Battery life is very good.
• It's super thin and not too heavy.
• Apple no longer includes the power cord extension with the machine. Just the wall wart and a single USB C cable. The older power cord extensions are compatible with the new power supply, however.
• I fucking hate that it doesn't have a MagSafe power connection. The MagSafe connection on my other Mac laptops, and my daughters' MacBook Airs, has prevented damage more times than I can count. This is a massive step back.

Overall I am happy with it but would have preferred the retention of at least one USB 3.0 port and I want my damn MagSafe connector back. (Griffin sells a USB C to MagSafe adapter but it's rated for only up to about 60W. The 15" MBP uses an 87W power supply.)

Solution for Broken Time Machine Backups and a New Laptop on the Way

At work I use a late 2013 13" MacBook Pro with Retina display. Most of my files are kept in our corporate Box.com account, which is a handy way to ensure that they are backed up. However, I was using Time Machine to ensure application settings were also backed up, and in general for a "belt and suspenders" approach.

Unfortunately, Time Machine stopped functioning back in October. I kept running into this problem.

I tried all sorts of fixes, including disabling application throttling for it, to no avail.

I have a new 15" MacBook Pro on the way and want to be able to move all my old settings over to it, so I revisited the issue yesterday. After trying several of the fixes I found online, again with no positive results, I decided to upgrade from OS 10.11 El Capitan to 10.12 Sierra. That fixed it.

My laptop is bound to our NT domain and I found that after the upgrade my NT account was locked. It turns out that there was a known bug with Sierra causing this. Applying the OS 10.12.3 update fixed that. I also had to upgrade to the later versions of the Symantec VIP soft token app and the Pulse Secure VPN client. The older versions I had weren't compatible with Sierra.

Other than fixing my Time Machine backup and requiring a couple application updates, Sierra isn't dramatically different from El Capitan. I deleted the Siri icon from my dock -- I don't use it even on my iPhone.

Hopefully, I'll have the new MBP by the end of the week, but at the rate our IT department is working it may not be until next week.

MacBook Pro Upgrades

Three years ago I bought my wife a 13" MacBook Pro (mid-2012, MacBook Pro 9,2). For the time it was an excellent system, with an i5 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB hard drive. However, she's been complaining lately that it runs slowly.

I checked it out yesterday morning and sure enough, it felt sluggish, even more so than my mid-2009 MBP with a Core 2 Duo CPU. However, my machine has 8 GB of RAM and, most importantly, an SSD. It was time to upgrade her laptop.

Based on my experience upgrading several older Macs and PCs, a solid state drive (SSD) is the single best performance-enhancing hardware upgrade for an older machine. SSD's have vastly better read/write times than spinning disk. In laptops, SSDs also improve battery life because they draw less electricity.

My plan was to first cleanup the hard disk, then upgrade the OS on the machine, clone the hard disk to an SSD, then upgrade the hardware.

To clean up the disk I ran OnyX. Next, I upgraded the machine from Yosemite to El Capitan. In my experience, Yosemite was a real turd, giving me a lot of grief on my work machine. When I was stuck with it I had a lot of instability issues that I didn't have with earlier versions of OS X. El Capitan seems to have fixed that.

While the upgrade to El Capitan was proceeding, I went to microcenter.com and ordered a few items for in-store pickup to complete the upgrade:

• An 8 GB RAM kit from Crucial
• A Crucial 480 GB BX200 SSD
• An external enclosure for the OEM hard disk, so that it can be repurposed as a Time Machine drive.
• A Kingwin USB 3.0-to-SATA or IDE adapter. I have an older adapter that supports USB 2.0, but since USB 3.0 is becoming more common (and is supported on my wife's laptop), I felt it was due for a replacement.

(The links go to Amazon. I bought them from my local Microcenter because I wanted to get this done in one day.)

I installed the RAM first and fired up the machine. It still felt a little slow so as expected, the spinning disk was the main reason.

To clone the OEM disk to the new SSD I downloaded and installed SuperDuper, which I have used previously to clone Mac disks. My wife had less than 150 GB used on her disk, but even using a USB 3.0 interface, cloning it took one hour and 16 minutes.

The physical swap was straightforward, although I had to grab my precision screwdriver set with Torx bits, because Apple used T6 screws to hold the hard disk in place.

The machine performs much, much better now. Cold boots are much faster and applications launch with very little lag. My wife should get several more years out of it.

MacBook Pro SSD Upgrade

This morning I drove down to MicroCenter and bought a Crucial MX100 256 GB SSD (Amazon link), which I used to upgrade my mid-2009 MacBook Pro. The machine has 8 GB of RAM and a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, so it was still useful, although before I replaced it with my current work MBP was starting to feel a bit pokey. My goal with the SSD was to improve performance, and especially battery life, for use with my ham radios while camping.

The SSD is smaller than the original Hitatchi disk (256 GB vs. 320 GB) but I don't plan on keeping multimedia files on the machine, so it should have enough space. While at MicroCenter I added a $5 USB 2.0 external enclosure to my cart, into which I put the old disk. I can bring it along for extra storage if need be.

The SSD went in easily and I did a clean install of OS 10.6 Snow Leopard onto it from a disc. I then had to update Snow Leopard to get the App Store, so I could then download and install OS 10.9.4 Mavericks. This all took a couple hours. After getting the OS configured like I wanted I installed the apps I need:

• CHIRP
• Fldigi
• USB drivers for my Baofeng programming cable and for my Icom 7200's USB interface
• LibreOffice
• MS Office for Mac 2011
• TextWrangler
• Skype
• Chrome and Firefox
• Evernote
• StatusClock (to display UTC time in my toolbar)
• Various other utilities

The laptop is noticeably faster in both boot time and how quickly applications open. Excel 2011 in particular opens much more quickly.

Next weekend I'll be taking the MBP into the field, so I tested that CHIRP works with my Baofeng UV5RA and that Fldigi can send and receive PSK31 when connected to my Icom 7200.

As an aside, OWC sells a larger capacity battery to fit this old MacBook Pro. If I find myself getting significant use out of the machine I may invest in one.

I should note that I had considered upgrading the hard disk in my MSI Wind U100 netbook instead. It's certainly handier to pack into the field for use with ham radio ops, but I chose to upgrade the Mac because (a) it's way faster, and (b) the larger keyboard and screen and much easier to use.

Performance and battery life are already noticeably better with the SSD. If you have a laptop that's a few years old changing out the old spinning disk for an SSD is a quick way to give it a new lease on life.

New MacBook Pro

The MacBook Pro I’ve been using at work since 2009 has been getting long in the tooth. It’s still usable but running apps like MS Office, it has noticeable lag. Since it’s out of warranty I was able to put in for a new machine.

Of the standard builds we can order one is a 13” MacBook Pro, non-Retina model, with a 750 GB hard disk, onboard Ethernet, and a SuperDrive (DVD burner). My old MBP has a 15” screen but I use a 24” external monitor at work, so I figured I’d save a little weight and go for the 13” model to make it nicer to schelp back and forth.

Well, a couple weeks passed and I got informed that my new machine was ready. Instead of ordering the machine I asked for, someone in the purchasing department ordered me the 13” MBP with Retina display, 2.9 GHz Core i7 CPU, and a 256 Gb SSD.

OK.

This model comes with two Thunderbolt ports, two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, and an SD card reader.s

There’s no SuperDrive or onboard Ethernet. I did get ahold of a Thunderbolt to Gig-E adapter, and we have a USB DVD burner at work, so I’m OK there. I’ll have to keep an eye on disk usage, but I had a Western Digital 640 GB USB drive laying around at home that I added to my bag, so that I can offload stuff I don’t use a lot.

The new machine is fast. Really fast. Redonculously fast. A cold boot to the login screen takes about 5 or 6 seconds. Word and Excel launch almost instantly. Outlook takes a bit longer but it’s bloated compared even to Word and Excel.

It was also setup with Parallels Desktop and a Windows 7 VM, which runs much faster than the Windows 7 VM in VirtualBox on my old machine. My primary uses for the Windows VM will be accessing MSDN and running Visio, which unfortunately isn’t available for Mac OS X.

Battery life is great. I haven’t really wrung it out but when fully charged it shows about 9 hours remaining. Depending on usage I could probably go all day if I happened to leave my power supply home.

I figure it’ll last me about four years.

Some Mac Consulting Today

This morning I went over to a client's home to do some work on his Macs.

He has an older Intel iMac which was still running OS 10.4 Tiger.  He was without a backup system for it, so the last time I was there I recommended he upgrade it to OS 10.6 Snow Leopard and getting a USB hard disk to setup as a Time Machine drive.

The first thing I did after arriving was to connect the Western Digital Elements 640 GB USB drive, copy over the Documents, Desktop, Pictures, and iTunes folders.  (It's a bad idea to upgrade an OS without first backing up all of your data.  Upgrades often go awry.)  Once everything copied over, which took about 40 minutes, I popped in the Snow Leopard disk and rebooted into the OS X installer.

After about 45 minutes the iMac was upgraded to OS 10.6.3, so I then ran Software Update and grabbed the 10.6.4 update, along with several other updates.  This took another 20 minutes or so.

With that squared away I reconnected the WD hard disk and configured Time Machine to use it as a backup disk.

While the iMac was getting backed up before the upgrade I took a look at his Mac Mini.

The Mini had been setup to do Time Machine backups to a Western Digital My Book external drive via FireWire 800.  It looks like the drive is toast, since when I was there a couple weeks ago I'd reformatted it.  Time Machine worked OK for about 4 days then started failing.  Today, it kept crashing the Finder when I connected it.  I even connected it to my MacBook Pro and reformatted it, but it still gave errors.  He's going to try to return it and get another USB or FireWire disk.

Finally, while there I also installed a hand-me-up 8 GB iPod Touch from his daughter to the Mini, and upgraded the firmware from 3.x to 4.1.

Not a bad way to spend a few hours and make some extra money.

iPod Hell

I spent a few hours over the past two nights in iPod Hell.

The other night, Judith decided she wanted to be able to run apps on her first-generation iPod Touch.  To do so she needed to upgrade the firmware since it was still on v1.x.  So, we hooked it up to her MacBook, went to the App Store in iTunes, and bought the v3.1.3 firmware upgrade for $4.95.

ITunes downloaded and installed the firmware but something went awry, and it bricked the iPod.  The iPod would apparently boot and was able to sync, but the display never reached the Home screen.  Also, it was unresponsive to pressing either the Home or power buttons.  I had Judith leave the iPod on overnight in the hopes that draining it, then connecting it to her Mac might allow it to boot.  No dice.

I then tried a factory reset and restore, with it connected to Judith's Mac.  Again, no difference.

Finally, I connected it to my Wind Netbook and did a factory reset and restore, which got me to the Home screen after it wiped and restored the v3.1.3 firmware.  Judith was then able to connect it to her Mac and resync all her music to it.  She was also able to download and install a bunch of free apps (games mostly) to the iPod.

Yesterday we let Amanda spend her birthday loot on her own 8 GB iPod Touch.  Aside from a game and music player, I'll rip some of her DVDs using Handbrake so she can bring it with her on long rides in the car instead of her POS portable DVD player.  I told J. to go ahead and connect it to her Mac but she wound up putting a bunch of her music on it, instead of Amanda's.  {sigh}  So, I factory reset it and will connect it to Amanda's MacBook Pro (my old machine) so that in the future playlists won't get mixed up.

What a PITA.

New MacBook Pro

After several years of using my personally owned Mac laptops for work, I decided recently to let my employer pay for wear and tear.  (An influencing factor is my increasing need to connect my machine to the company network, instead of just the lab network.)  My old company laptop is a 2004 vintage Dell Latitude D600, which was a good machine five years ago but after our IT folks implemented full-disk encryption, began running like crap.  Even with the RAM maxxed out at 2 GB, it is painfully slow to use.

Thankfully, getting approval for Mac laptops has gotten much easier in the past couple of years.  Most users in my company could use a Mac since the primary applications used are Word and Excel.  Our email system is MS Exchange with WebDAVS enabled, so Entourage works as an Exchange client.  The main office apps which don't run on OS X are Project and Visio.  I rarely need to view Project documents and when I do, ask for a copy in PDF or JPEG format.  When I need to work with Viso files I either use OmniGraffle Pro or run Visio on XP inside of a virtual machine.

My justification for a Mac instead of a Dell was twofold: (a) is required to run Apple's OS X Server Admin utilities, and (b) has a native implementation of X11.

It doesn't hurt that the Dell Latitudes we buy cost about as much as a MacBook Pro, so cost really isn't a factor.

Anyway, my new machine came in last week and I picked it up Thursday afternoon.  I finished moving my stuff over to it yesterday.  It's a mid-level unibody MacBook Pro with these specs:

* 15.4" glossy screen
* 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU
* 4 GB of RAM
* 320 GB hard disk
* SuperDrive
* 802.11n AirPort Extreme wifi card
* Gigabit Ethernet
* 2x USB 2.0 ports
* 1x FireWire 800 (IEEE-1394b) port, backward compatible with FW-400
* 1X card reader
* Mini-display port

Along with the laptop I got an Apple keyboard and a Mini-display to DVI adapter.  I need to get a Mini-display to VGA adapter.  I'm using a $15 Logitech mouse, since I don't like Apple mice.

The software load was OS 10.5.8 (the recovery discs have 10.5.7), MS Office 2008, Parallels Desktop v4 with an XP Pro virtual machine already setup and loaded with Office 2007, and Cisco VPN client.  IT is integrating our Macs with our Windows domain using the Directory Utility, and have also installed MacFuse, which I assume is to assist with accessing our Windows file servers.

Yesterday I upgraded the machine to Snow Leopard.  After using it on Rohan, there are a few features which I found I really liked and didn't want to be without.  For example, Expose works better in 10.6 than previous versions of OS X and overall, the system is a bit faster.  If the machine needs IT's attention they'll reimage it with Leopard, but I do not foresee this happening.

The hardware is beautiful and I've gotten used to the keyboard, though I think I still like Rohan's keyboard better. I LOVE the new clickable trackpad, and have configured it so that pressing the lower right hand corner is the same as a right-click.  Finally and Apple laptop with a right mouse button!

The screen is absolutely gorgeous.  Text is crisp and colors are really vibrant.  So far I haven't had any problems with glare under the flourescent lighting in our office or incandescents at home.

The new machine seems to run cooler than Rohan, judging both by the temperatures reported by iStat Menus and how it feels to the touch.

Battery life seems good, but I am still not thrilled with the idea of a laptop battery that is not easily user replaceable.  However, if it comes to the point where the battery needs replacement, I get to pawn the job off on someone else.

New MacBook

Another item of note over the past week was my purchase of a new MacBook for Judith.  She's been using a G4 iBook which she's had since 2005.  It's been a great machine but it's feeling its age.  Aside from the fact that the battery is mostly shot, it really bogs down on Web 2.0 sites like Facebook.  So, I've been looking at replacements.

Last week Microcenter was advertising last-generation MacBooks for $849.  The specs of the machine include a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 120 GB hard disk.  Judith's primary uses of the machine involves web-based apps and some light word processing.  So, the specs of this machine should be just fine for a few years.

One very nice feature of the Intel Apple laptops is the built-in iSight webcam.  Judith's brother lives overseas and our main means of communication is Skype.  We also use Skype or iChatAV when I'm away on business.  I'd bought and installed a Macally Icecam for her iBook, but it was always flaky so she eventually stopped using it.  (Even when it worked the picture quality was rather bad.)  In contrast, the iSights pretty much just work, in my experience, and the quality is image quite good.

The iBook was issued to her by her school, so when she goes back in the Fall she'll take it back and keep it in her classroom, providing another machine for her students to use. The MacBook will stay at home.

Upgrade Complete

The hard disk and enclosure which I ordered on Wednsday for my laptop from NewEgg arrive yesterday.  (NewEgg has a warehouse in NJ so when I order from them I frequently get my stuff the next day, even when I select UPS Ground shipping.)

Rather than installing Leopard on the new disk then importing all my apps and data, or doing a restore from Time Machine, I cloned the original disk using SuperDuper.  It worked fine and the machine now has plenty of free drive space.  Cloning the original disk over a FireWire 400 connection took about 2 hours, then it took me another hour or so to take apart and reassemble the machine.

One of the things I noticed immediately about the Western Digital disk is how quiet it is.  The original drive, a Hitachi, wasn't loud, but it was audible.  The new disk is virtually silent.  It's also a bit faster than the Hitachi, but it remains to be seen if or how it'll affect battery life.

This morning I took advantage of my now-mostly empty disk by upgrading VirtualBox to v3.0.0, and creating VMs with Solaris 10 and XP Pro SP3.   Even with my Win7RC VM, I still have about 358 GB free.

Upgrading the Hard Disk in Rohan

This afternoon I bit the bullet and ordered a new hard disk for Rohan, the MacBook Pro which I bought in January 2007.

Rohan came with a 120 GB hard disk and I'm currently down to about 10.5 GB free space.  This leaves me little room to experiment with virtual machines, plus as I take more high resolution pictures with the Nikon S560 I bought back in May, that space is dwindling.

So, I went to the online geek toy Mecca, AKA NewEgg, and ordered a Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500 GB disk, which should last me until Rohan eventually gets replaced in a couple of years.  I also ordered a MacAlly external FireWire/USB enclosure for the old disk.

There are a few ways I can do the disk swap and get my system back:

1. Make a backup in Time Machine, swap the disks, then do a restore.
2. Install the new disk in the enclosure, clone it using SuperDuper!, then swap them.
3. Install the new disk in Rohan, install the old disk in the enclosure, then with the enclosure connected to Rohan, install Leopard on the new drive and use OS X's Migration Assistant to import all my apps, data, and settings from the old disk.

When I upgraded the drive in my old G4 iBook I used option #2.  When I upgraded the drive in my parents' MacBook, I did #3.   I'm leaning towards using SuperDuper!, since it avoids the whole backup and restore thing, and it worked fine the first time I used it.  Doing so should result in a perfect clone of my existing system, but with more disk space.

To do the physical swap, I will follow the excellent instructions available from iFixit.

New MacBook Pros

Today at WWDC, Apple introduced the latest MacBook Pros.  It appears that Apple has gone to the same non-user-replaceable battery design with the 13" and 15" MBPs that was introduced with the 17" unibody MBP.

I am very disappointed that the 13" and 15" MBPs will have the non-user replaceable batteries. Let me rephrase that: I'm pissed about it and may prevent me from ever buying another Apple laptop.

I've owned two Mac laptops since Dec. 2004, a G4 iBook and a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.  The iBook battery was recalled but I was able to replace it myself.  So far, I'm on my THIRD battery in the MBP; the first two lasted about a year each before battery life went to hell and Apple replaced them.  Both replacements were overnighted to me and since the battery simply pops out when you release a catch, it's easily user-serviced.

With the new design, if the new batteries need to be replaced and are covered by Apple, I'll still have to take the machine into one of the local Apple stores, which is a major waste of my time for something I should be able to fix myself.  This is a shitty design feature.

The next laptop I buy may wind up being a Thinkpad running Linux, or even Windows 7.  OS X and the apps that run on it are great but I am proficient with the other OSes, and the Thinkpad will be more serviceable.

This damn head cold is hanging on.  I did make it into the office today but wound up bailing out early at 15:00.  I did manage to get one of the SMC DOCSIS 3.0 commercial gateways provisioned and hooked up this morning to start evaluating.  It's currently connected in lieu of the SMC8014 which I've had at my desk since last year.

The SMC D3 gateway is physically larger than the 8014 and has four Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports in place of the the Fast Ethernet ports of the older, D2 model.  The web GUI is the same custom one that SMC loads for us on the 8014, with the addition of 1000BaseT in the LAN switch config screen.  Some work was being done on our lab infrastructure today so I haven't been able to do serious performance comparisons yet.

I also reinstalled Virtualbox on Rohan, and installed Windows 7 RC into a VM.  With only a gig of RAM allocated to it it's a little pokey.  Changing to the Classic theme helped but it looks like 2 GB will be a realistic minimum to run W7.

After I got home I saw the UPS had dropped off the 2 GB stick of Crucial RAM I ordered through Amazon.com last week.  It's for Rohan, my MacBook Pro.  MBP's of Rohan's vintage accept a maximum of 3 GB of system RAM, I'd been running it with 2 GB.  (Current Apple laptops take up to 4 GB of RAM.)  With the goal of maximizing the machine's useful life I decided to max out the RAM.  I'm hoping it'll improve performance when running a virtual machine.

The next thing I may do to upgrade Rohan is a bigger hard disk.  It has the original 120 GB hard disk, which is on the small side.  With a larger disk I wouldn't mind allocating 20 or 30 GB to a Windows partition, for which I'm now lacking space.  Unfortunately, the pre-unibody MacBook Pros are not designed for easy hard disk replacements.  I'll basically have to take the thing apart, which based on the experience I had when upgrading the disk in my G4 iBook, will be a PITA.

Odd MacBook Pro Audio Issue

This morning I ran into an odd issue with Rohan, my MacBook Pro which I purchased new in January 2007.

Last night I had Rohan setup in my home office, connected to an external monitor, keyboard, mouse, USB hub, FireWire 800 drive, and speakers.  When I shutdown for the night all the peripherals were attached.

This morning after getting into work I started Rohan as usual, including connecting a pair of external speakers.  However, the machine kept muting the audio itself.  I'd adjust the volume back up but within a minute it would mute itself again.

Searching on Google revealed some other users with this problem.  Apparently, if you have external speakers connected when you shutdown, then start the machine without speakers attached, the box will sometimes start this auto-mute behavior.

The fix was to connect external speakers and reboot.  After logging in again I haven't experienced the problem.  To prevent it from recurring, disconnect external speakers before shutting the machine off.

Update to The Missing Sync

When I got my Verizon Blackberry 8330 back in October, I first tried to use the free Pocketmac software from RIM to accomplish syncing it with my MacBook Pro.  That worked a couple of times then blew up, taking my calendar and address book with it. (Luckily, I had backups.)  Shortly thereafter, I bought The Missing Sync for Blackberry from Mark/Space and it's worked OK for the most part.

Yesterday I tried to sync and there apparently was a corrupted record in iCal and on the Blackberry, which kept causing the process to hang.  Eventually, I downloaded the Blackberry Desktop Manager software for Windows on my Dell PC at work and used it to clear out the calendar on the Blackberry.  (The Missing Sync cannot do this, which is a PITA.)  I also made the mistake of clearing my work calendar which syncs to Entourage, which wiped out my work calendar.  After an OH SHIT moment, I was able to restore my calendar entries by going through my Entourage folders and reaccepting meeting invites and manually readding some events.  Not ideal but I'd been lax in backing up my Entourage identity, something I subsequently fixed.

Anyway, last night I went to Mark/Space's website and noticed that they had a free upgrade from v1 to v2 for folks who bought TMS between 11/1/08 and 2/9/09 available.  I installed it this morning and was able to sync pretty smoothly.  One nice feature that v2 added was syncronization via Bluetooth.  Previously, it was USB-only.

What I'd really like to see would be for Apple to add Blackberry support directly to iSync, which is part of OS X and which some apps, including TMS, rely upon.  I was able to use iSync to maintain the contacts on my Motorola RAZR V3m and it worked pretty well.

Received my new battery

I received the replacement battery for Rohan yesterday.  Apple FedExed it to me, even though they informed me the other day that it would take 7 to 10 business days.  To condition it I charged it last night, while today I'm running it down to about 10% remaining charge before plugging Rohan into A/C power.

Hopefully I'll get more than a year out of this one.

Replacing Rohan's Battery. Again.

A little while ago I got off the phone with Apple support.  Once again I am in need of a replacement battery for Rohan, my MacBook Pro.  Rohan's current battery is a replacement for the original one.  I got it last February.  According to the OS X System Profiler, it has a cycle count of only 35, and is in "Check Battery" condition.

The call to AppleCare was pretty painless.  Having gone through this before I had the System Profiler up before I dialed.  Once I gave the tech information about the current battery's state, he put it in for a return.

Last time I did this the replacement was sent to me overnight.  This time I was given a 7 to 10 business day time frame.  I let him know that I'm not happy about that but didn't make a stink.

While I had the AppleCare rep on the line I also told him that if Apple adopts the non-user replaceable battery model of the new 17" MBP for the 15" MBP or the MBs, I won't be buying one.  My G4 iBook's battery was recalled.  My MBP is now going to be getting its third battery.  If I need to replace the battery in my next laptop I do not want to have to schlep it to an Apple Store or ship it overnight somewhere, losing the use of my computer for however long it takes for Apple to repair it and return it to me.  Depriving a customer of the use of his laptop for something that should be user-replaceable is inexcusable.  If it comes to that, my next laptop will be either a Lenovo Thinkpad or Dell Latitude running Linux.

Apple Store Visit

Yesterday I went over to the Apple Store in King of Prussia, PA with a friend, mainly to check out the new MacBooks and MB Pros.  The new machines are nice, though IMHO the deletion of the FireWire 400 port from the MacBooks was a mistake.  I also would like to see two FireWire ports on the MacBook Pros (Rohan, my almost two year-old MBP has FW 800 and FW 400 ports).  The MBs have two USB 2.0 ports but IME, FW400 provides better sustained throughput than the supposedly faster USB 2.0.

The new trackpads are nice and address one problem (IMHO) that Apple needed to.  Namely, the lack of a two button mouse.  The entire trackpad acts like a mouse button, even down to the click.  But if you go into System Preferences > Trackpad, you can configure either the lower left or right corner as a secondary mouse button.  Voila, you now have a two button mouse.  Sweet.

The other reason for taking a trip to the KoP store was to get a new power supply for my wife's G4 iBook.  The iBook was issued to her by the School District of Philadelphia about 2.5 - 3 years ago and it's been great.  A few days ago she noticed it wasn't charging and Friday night, I discovered that this was because the cord was frayed near where it plugs into the iBook.  It was delivering enough juice to slowly charge the machine when it was off, but not nearly enough when the box was powered on.  Worse, it's a fire hazard.

Luckily, I was able to use the power supply from the G4 iBook I used as my primary machine before buying Rohan.  That box gets occasional use by my daughters, and the Apple power supply design could be more robust, so I didn't want to share it between the two iBooks.

Unfortunately, the school district is strapped for cash and the odds of getting a replacement power supply through it are about nil, so I reluctantly coughed up the cash for a new one.  If and when Judith has to return the iBook to the school district, I'll keep the new power supply as a spare.