I have l a problem with social networking sites. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and so on all encourage me to trust them with all of the data regarding myself and my friends/associates. In return, they provide a service to me for “free”.
If there is one thing that can make me giddy when I’m working on a computer upgrade project, it is a well-designed case or chassis. Well-designed means:
My favorite case manufacturer to date has been Antec. Their cases generally meet or exceed all the items on my list of requirements. My most recent full computer chassis from them was the P180: it’s a fantastic case, and I’m very happy with it.
Choosing a hard drive enclosure early this year seemed like a no brainer since I like Antec cases so much. I bought Antec’s MX-1 “actively cooled” enclosure. It looked like typical Antec: well made, easy to open, all screws easily accessible and nicely sized, with excellent cooling. Unfortunately, after just a bit over six months of use it died…rather completely. And finding a replacement wasn’t a picnic…
Continue reading I like boxen…so why are hard drive enclosures so bad?
I was starting to think that the tide might be turning away from ATI + AMD: my favoured platform for the last four years or so. Both Intel and NVidia have been ahead of ATI/AMD now for about a year in terms of top-end video card and CPU performance.
I have a deep, dark secret to admit: I often send email using HTML/rich text features. I know, it is shocking: but I fear the seductive features of things like fonts, bold facing, and colour have turned me from the true path of pure text.
Continue reading “Send your email as HTML” just a *suggestion* on the Mac
I came across this comic on xkcd today…and it seemed so true to what happens during my upgrades that I felt compelled to share it
I stumbled across this video which gives a stop-action view of someone using the least impressive of computer tools to perform some rather impressive illustrating magic…
In computers, bugs are a fact of life. No matter how much someone might claim that an application or operating system is “perfect”, the truth is always quite different.
Take the Macintosh, for example. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro for a while, and am pretty impressed with its behavior. But “bug free? Heck no. Here are a few recent examples of “unexplained” behavior:
I find the failure of a computer’s power supply to be one of the most difficult failures to diagnose. And earlier this week I had that perception reinforced.
The second computer in my office, the “guest” gaming PC, has become my wife Irene’s primary EverQuest II machine. It is built out of parts replaced by my most recent upgrades: basically, it is a two year old “bleeding edge” computer, which means it is still pretty decent for playing EverQuest.
A few weeks ago, Irene experienced a couple of odd events while using this machine. On one occasion when I was watching, the screen suddenly became “corrupted”, with garbage characters appearing amongst the graphics. A screen refresh cleaned things up. Then there was the “crackle” the machine emitted one day just before rebooting. I decided this week that it was time to give that computer some TLC.
My thinking initially was that the machine was probably a dust clogged nightmare. I could see globs of dusty fur sticking out of the drive bay, so I imagined discovering a huge mat of fur and dust inside. When I cracked the case, however, it actually wasn’t too bad: yes, it definitely needed cleaning, but the dust/hair build up had mostly been stopped from entering the chassis by the air filter on the case. The innards were in need of a few blasts of compressed air, and the corners of the case benefited from some vacuuming.
The whole cleaning process took an hour or two. When I reassembled everything and turned the box on, I got…nothing. No POST dialog, no Windows start up, no beeps. The fans started, the machine *seemed* to power up, but it didn’t seem to actually get into the boot process at all. My initial assumption was that dust was causing a short, or that I had damaged a component while performing the cleanup. But that wasn’t it….
I’ve been hearing about how the various instant messaging platforms are going to interoperate“any day now” for several years. But it always seems that the various players involved never quite get it together. Windows Messenger connects with Yahoo! Messenger, but not AIM. iChat connects with AIM, but not Messenger. Jabber connects with everything, but not enough people use it.
I can never leave well enough alone. If 2 GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro is good, 4 GB of RAM would be better, right? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. So I set out to expand the memory of my new Macintosh, and have a few tidbits to share.
Can your MacBook Pro be expanded?
As I understand it, there have been a total of two “releases” of Intel-based MacBook Pro. The first came out late in 2006 and was in distribution until approximately June of 2007. That version used a version of the Intel chipset that, for reasons that remain unclear to me, could only address 3 GB of RAM. Note that you could *install* 4 GB, but that the machine itself wouldn’t actually use the memory above the 3 GB boundary due to mapping conflicts. I believe this first version of the MacBook Pro came with 1 GB of RAM standard.
Apple quietly updated the MacBook Pro during the June time frame of 2007. The new models use the Intel “Santa Rosa” chipset, and can now support up to 4 GB of RAM. These newer MacBook Pros come standard with 2 GB of RAM, with of the two slots in the machine filled (I.E.: two 1 GB SODIMM chips).