Raible Designs

MacBook Pro

Thanks Steve. Much appreciated.

Purchased. Fully-loaded. Ships in February.

Steve, PLEASE announce Intel PowerBooks

I totally agree with Dion. For the love of God, pppplllllleeeeeeeaaaaaaasssssseeeee announce Intel-based ass-kicking PowerBooks tomorrow!! I love my PowerBook, but I hate the speed. It's extremely frustrating developing in Java on it, especially when I spend 60% of my time on a dual-core AMD 64. If Apple doesn't announce new PowerBooks tomorrow, it's likely I'll buy a Ferrari instead.

PowerBook won't boot after upgrading to 10.4.3

This morning, I began building a new user account for my demos tomorrow at NFJS. I'm doing this because the last time I did demos was a disaster. Since then, I've rebuilt my hard drive, and while things seem faster - a clean user account is the best way to get maximum efficiency. While building the new user, I was prompted by Software Update, and promptly installed Backup 3.0.1 and OS X 10.4.3.

After configuring a number of settings, I rebooted the machine. Now all I get is a gray screen with a dark gray apple on it. The damn thing won't boot. I rebuilt the disk with DiskWarrior, but no dice. Now I'm trying to repair permissions and all that jazz with Disk Utility.

Luckily, I can still boot off my iPod and I can always rebuild an external Firewire drive if I need to. However, I'd much rather get back to where I was this morning. There's nothing like hosing your machine the day before you really need it.

Update: I fixed the problem by reinstalling OS X with the "Archive and Reinstall" option. No data loss, time to backup.

What's a good DVI KVM?

I'm looking to get a KVM Switch for my home office. I used to have one when I had 2 19" Dell Monitors and it worked quite well. However, since I got a 23" Cinema Display, I haven't had one. This means that if I ever work on my PowerBook, I don't get to enjoy the comfort of a keyboard, mouse and huge monitor. This needs to change.

I bought a DVI KVM switch when I first got the monitor a year ago, and it didn't work. Apple's DVI connector was too big and didn't fit in the switch. So now I'm looking again - do you know of any that work well with a Cinema Display?

Starting from scratch on OS X and Windows

Last night I began my quest to get rid of "OS Rot" on both my PowerBook and my Windows box. I bought new hard drives for both, so I wouldn't have to worry about losing any data. For the Mac, I bought a Lacie d2 (250GB) and for Windows, I bought an internal Maxtor 120GB. Thanks to everyone who suggested the Lacie.

To start, I cloned my PowerBook's drive to the Lacie drive using the free version of SuperDuper. It took about two hours and worked flawlessly. I then proceeded to format the PowerBook drive and install OS X. For the most part, I just copied a bunch of files back into place. I've been trying to restore my settings by copying individual folders from ~/Library to the fresh install - but it's not working so well. I'm thinking of just restoring my whole home directory (cruft in ~/Library and all).

The Windows install wasn't nearly as easy. Rather than backing up to an empty drive, I just installed the new disk as the primary and old one as a slave. I tried installing Windows on the new one twice (once w/ the slave installed, once w/o). After installing, when I boot up, it just sits there will a dark grey screen. So I gave up and put my old hard drive in as the primary. I think the disk might be bad. Regardless, I'm going to try again tonight. This time I'm going to use a ghosting/cloning program to backup to the new hard drive - and essentially go through the same steps I did on the Mac. I'll probably use Norton Ghost or PartitionMagic - but I'm open to other suggestions.

What's a good external firewire drive?

I have a 60 GB firewire drive that we resurrected from Julie's dead PowerBook, but I'm interested in getting a bigger one to start regular backups. CNET recommends the Maxtor OneTouch II (300GB), but there's lots of bad reviews. 200 GB should be enough for the next year or two. Any recommendations? Is there one that can be used to backup OS X, Windows and Linux?

PowerBook Dent Redux

Continuing my PowerBook Dent story from last week...

I continued to work with my iPod as a hard drive on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, and took my laptop into the Apple Store on Thursday evening. The guys at the Genius Bar said that neither Apple Care nor a warranty covered accidental damage, and that it would be very expensive if I sent it in. Their suggestion was to take my dented, no-hard-drive-finding PowerBook to The Mac Outlet for a new case. They said if I got a new bottom case, I could bring it back and say "the hard drive can't be found" and Apple Care would likely fix it for free.

On Saturday, I took my machine into The Mac Outlet. They estimated $550 for a new bottom case, and suggested the cheaper new hard drive route for around $250. I agreed with the cheaper route, but told them I was very keen on trying to recover the existing hard drive. Yesterday, they called me at 5:30 and said "You're on of the lucky ones." The whole problem was due to a loose cable - plugging it back in fixed all the issues. Yeeee haawww, my laptop is as good as new!

Now it's time to buy some DVDs, do some backup, and buy one of those "spongy wetsuit material" type cases.

PowerBook Dent

A fair amount of PowerBook owners I know have corner dings in their laptops. It usually comes from dropping it in a parking lot or something similar. I've managed to escape this problem for a number of years now. Until today. I'm writing this post on my PowerBook, but my hard drive is currently my iPod because I can't boot up off the regular hard drive. I'm heading to the Apple Store in short order to see if they can fix the hard drive.

At least I have a decent story behind it. I was riding my bike downtown today, and while riding off the curb onto Larimer street - I popped a wheelie. I had too much oomph - and the front wheel started to head for the sky. Normally when this happens, you hop off the back of the bike and you're good to go. Not today, my shoes wouldn't snap out of my pedals - so WHAM, splat, boom. I hit the pavement like Whiley Coyote off a cliff. Right in the middle of the street too - good thing no cars were coming. Most of my left side hurt like a mother and my left elbow has some nice road rash - but nothing out of the ordinary from a bike wreck.

After riding off with stars in my eyes, I headed to Chipotle for lunch. After lunch, I broke out my laptop to work on Spring Live. When I pulled it out, I noticed the left-corner dent and thought, "Not bad, could have been a lot worse." Moments later, all my open applications froze up. When I tried to reboot, I got the blue Mac folder with the ? on it. In other words, "I can't find your hard drive." And so another PowerBook repair adventure begins...

What's the best way to synch iPhoto Libraries?

Having two 17" PowerBooks around the house has led to a problem. We've accidentally imported our photos onto both machines, and now we don't have a true master that contains all our pictures. To rectify the problem, I tried using rsync to update my ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library directory with the one from the 2nd machine. All the pictures were migrated successfully, but not the photo albums, nor the thumbnails in iPhoto. I even tried importing the new pictures, but it says the file is not a valid image (even though I can open it in Preview just fine). Any ideas for a better synchronization strategy?

Synching home directories on OS X

My old PowerBook is fixed, and I'm getting ready to send my new one off to the person that bought it. As part of this process, I wanted to synch up the home directories, since that's all that's changed b/w the two in the last 3 weeks. I figured rsync was the solution, but since I'm an rsync rookie - I searched around for a GUI tool. I found RsyncX, installed it, booted the newer PowerBook as a firewire drive and updated my old PowerBook. 20 minutes later and my old one looks like my new one. Very nice.