Category: Apple

Apple has issued a recall for selected first-generation MacBook Pro batteries, like mine. For once, the issue isn’t fire, but “underperformance” (whatever that means). I put in for the recall today and they indicated I should get the new battery in about 4-5 working days, so I hope to be able to report some information by the end of the week.

On another note, or rather high-pitched whine, it looks like Apple may be finally acknowledging the noisy MacBook Pro problem. For the uninitiated, MacBooks Pro frequently exhibit a high-pitched noise when running on battery power, though disabling one of the two processor cores stops the noise for some reason (as does doing something that forces the second core to be used, like opening a webcam window). The one sentence note on the support site says “If your 15-inch MacBook Pro emits a high-pitched buzzing sound, please contact AppleCare for service.” Well, OK. I’ll do that later this week and see what the actual response is.

I alluded a few days ago to the fact that the Project has been stalled for a while because of a lack of disk space. Well, things may be about to get a little kick start. I ordered a 500 GB drive and a miniStack case from Other World Computing. In fact, I like the look of the case so much, I ordered a second one to swap my existing 300 GB drive into, so I can stack the two together. And the multiple FireWire and USB hubs that it will provide will be manna; right now I have to swap the old drive from FireWire to USB when I want to sync my iPod because the FireWire port on the external drive isn’t powered.

And the RAID part? Well, I’m considering combining the two drives together so that they form a single logical disk. Mac OS X provides the capability to create three types of RAID arrays: mirrored, striped, and concatenated. I’m thinking concatenated. A lot of the commentary on this option says that it doesn’t make sense: none of the security of mirrored and none of the speed of striped. I think the commentary misses a point: sometimes it’s just awfully convenient to not have to worry about accessing two separate volumes, for instance when trying to share music across a network or manage a large volume of digital music. Plus having the ability to add additional disks to the array without blowing it is really helpful.

Of course, making the RAID array without wiping out the data on the drive is tricky. I’ve identified two ways to do it:

1. Create a concatenated RAID array with just one disk—the new disk, copy everything from the old disk to it, then add the second disk to the array.
2. Use the command line version of diskutil to turn the existing disk into a RAID array without destroying the data, then add the second disk. This option is riskier—I don’t know for sure if the command will destroy the data, but this post on AFP548.com, which gave me the idea in the first place, suggests it should work.

The drives should be here in a week, then we’ll give it the old college try.

I haven’t finished The Project yet (latest stats: 12031 songs, 996 artists, 882 albums; 265.99 GB of lossless audio; 36 days, 13 hours, 22 minutes, and 17 seconds running time), but another audio project beckons: the Great Record Rip. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the recent owner of a Denon DP-45F turntable, and with an iMic I’ll have the capability to take audio from the record player and digitize it.

Except, like every other project, the devil is in the details. So while the Denon is at the shop getting tuned up after twelve years in a box, I’m trying to put the software pieces in place so that I’ll be ready to start ripping some audio (in addition to my never-released on CD David Byrne record, the Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, and other oddments, the Lucadamos have let me at their stash of vinyl as well) when it comes back.

So what do I need to rip records? The following links suggest some help:

• TidBITS: Why Go Pro (Audio Hijack Pro, That Is)
• Final Vinyl, which comes from Griffin and is supposed to be less capable than Audio Hijack but is at least free with the iMic
• About This Particular Mac, Got Vinyl? part 1, 2, and 3
• And, for something a little different, how to rip audio from a DVD into a format that can be played by iTunes

Number one: free 65-watt power adapters. I think I speak for PowerBook owners everywhere when I say it’s too bad that this courtesy doesn’t extend to all PowerBook G3 and G4 owners; certainly my experience with the dreaded M7332 adapter suggests that many of us might have benefited, not just the Mighty Woz.

I don’t begrudge him his power adapters, though. Since every home computer that I’ve ever owned (//c, SE/30, 7200/90, Pismo, TiBook, MacBook Pro) and a few my friends had on which I learned computers (][e (and IIe platinum!), //gs, PowerBook 170) has benefited from his work (and in the case of my friend’s //gs, actually been signed by him!), he probably deserves free Apple hardware for life.

NY Times: Apple Allows Windows On Its Machines. Apparently Apple pays attention to its user community. Following the hack contest to get Windows running on the new Intel Macs that ended with a $13,000 prize and a successful hack, Apple has announced beta availability of Boot Camp, a free download that enables installing Windows XP on Mac OS X and switch-booting.

Looking at the Boot Camp page, it’s a little bit fiddlier than the average grandmother would want to mess with, but still really straightforward for a utility of this kind. The utility helps you to partition the hard disk (which is required for this kind of switch boot) and burns a CD with Windows drivers for the appropriate Mac hardware. Interesting note, though, that the Windows XP install might not find the right partition and could accidentally delete your Mac partition… After that, the switch-boot mechanism appears to be exactly the same one that enabled booting into OS X or OS 9 back in the early days of Mac OS X Public Beta and 10.0: hold down the option key at start time and choose the appropriate partition.

And I think it will perform the same function for new Mac OS X users: it will provide them with a safety net so they can gradually transition off Windows and onto their new machines. The question is, will it be good for Microsoft, good for Apple, or good for both? For Microsoft, it probably means that Virtual PC will never be ported to Intel Macs—though running multiple virtual machines is a very different usage scenario from switch booting, it may not be a common enough scenario to justify the investment. But Microsoft may get a lift in Windows XP license sales. And Apple should see a few more Windows users buying their hardware, lured by the prospect of totally cool, totally compatible hardware.

Via MacOSXHints, a great article about Cocoa’s text bindings and the Amazingly Cool Things you can do with them—like, implement a standard keystroke to wrap a piece of text in some HTML formatting in every Cocoa text field in your whole system. Also a list of default bindings as shipped in Mac OS X, and a list of all the usable selectors that you can combine with keystrokes to get some really cool things to happen.

I have a very brief report on the quality of the PowerPC emulation layer (Rosetta) built into the new Intel based Macs, like the MacBook Pro. It’s good—it’s very good. I haven’t found any native Mac OS X apps that didn’t run correctly with it.

Except. There is a small catch, which is that plug-ins that are not written to support Intel based Macs won’t load if an application is started in Intel native mode. Apparently the Rosetta functionality only applies to the main process, not plug-ins. This means that productivity plug-ins like Keyword Assistant in iPhoto and (apparently) Sogudi, the search enabler for Safari, won’t work until new Intel versions are released.

Ah well. This has been a small price to pay. There have been Universal binary versions of other important Mac applications, such as MarsEdit 1.1.2 (with which I’m blogging this) and the public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1 that was released today. Now all I need is Office and I’m good to go.

Honestly, though, there have been enough pleasant surprises with the machine that I’m not going to complain at all. For one thing, Spotlight and the Dashboard work and are really fast. For another, so does Quicksilver. I finally see why Merlin thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It was unbearably slow to invoke or operate on my 1GHz, 512 MB PowerBook G4. Amazing what an extra half-gig of memory, 0.83 GHz of processor, plus a new processor architecture will do.

Ars Technica: Windows XP on Intel iMac: confirmed. Yeah, thanks but no thanks. Still, interesting to note that the level of effort involved is fairly low and involves modifications of only a few files.

While I’m on tenterhooks about my new Mac hardware waiting at home, a quick shout to System7Today, a site about using your pre-G3 Apple hardware to its fullest extent. (Pointer via the Cult of Mac blog at Wired.)

The site makes the cogent point that nothing much useful happened in the Mac OS world between System 7.6.1 and Mac OS X (with, of course, the major exception of early Mozilla builds). I mean, if I recall correctly, the only reason they moved to Mac OS 8 rather than System 7.7 was a marketing decision that Apple needed to put the years of vaporware around Copland behind them. But at the time there was such hype for all the new features as they were released: QuickDraw GX! OpenDoc! Cyberdog! Open Transport! The Control Strip! All of which of course are deader than doornails now.

But I grew up with that OS. My first computer related job involved managing some Macs at NASA Langley, which I upgraded to System 7. I was so thrilled when I could run System 7 on my first Mac, an SE/30. I made the PowerPC jump in 1995 to a PowerPC 7200/90, which ran systems 7 through 9, and held onto it for five years until I got my PowerBook G3 (FireWire) The G3 ran Mac OS 9, dual-booted the Mac OS X public beta, and then ran Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.2. The G3 lasted three years until I got the 1GHz G4 TiBook that is my main machine today, and has so far been the only Mac on which I have never booted into Classic. Of course that won’t be an option at all with the MacBook Pro.

I got a phone call from Lisa a few minutes ago that my MacBook Pro arrived this morning, one day ahead of the promised ship schedule and six days ahead of the originally projected delivery schedule. I’d love to be really excited about it but I can’t right now—my head is so stopped up that I can’t really think about it until I get home.

I’m also doing everything I can to keep my expectations realistic about how the experience will be with this machine, so I’m linking without comment to varying user reports at Macintouch about extra noise and possible display and networking issues. But there appear to be many more positive than negative reports about the machine, so I’ll throw out a gratuitous link to a set of MacBookPro unboxing pictures, for those of you that enjoy that sort of thing.

…than “Apple Store Shipment Notification”? I don’t think so. As I predicted, Apple is jumping the gun on my anticipated ship date by a good five days. My MacBook Pro is currently in FedEx’s system (though not picked up yet) and scheduled to arrive by Thursday.

Of course, Thursday is the busiest day of my week, so I probably won’t be able to do a detailed unboxing report until the weekend. But still… yay.

Update: Apparently new MacBook Pros (MacBooks Pro?) come from Shanghai, China (at least according to FedEx’s pickup records). Who knew?

Well, the Intel-powered Mac mini is out, released as part of a home-focused set of Apple product announcements yesterday. And my only criticism is that they’ve eliminated the current PowerPC based models from the channel. I understand the reasoning—pricing them at a discount, as has been done with the PowerPC powered iMacs, would lower the price point too far to allow the channel any margin. But I still want one of the original series of Mac minis, even after our purchase of a MacBook Pro (anticipated arrival date still March 22).

Why? It comes down to Classic. At first I didn’t cavil too much at the thought of losing access to programs that run under Mac OS Classic aka Mac OS 9. There is nothing that I run on a daily basis that requires Classic, and that’s been the case ever since the release of Microsoft Office for Mac OS X.

But I’ve been a Mac user for 16 years, and there are quite a few programs that I ran in the first 10 of those years that require Classic that I’ll miss an awful lot if I can’t access them again. Some, like the Talking Moose, have made the jump to Mac OS X versions; for others, like most multimedia CD-ROMs (e.g. the Laurie Anderson Puppet Motel or Peter Gabriel’s media titles), it’s already too late. But there are a host of programs, including the LucasArts Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, Crystal Quest, and even the Mac version of MORE that will be inaccessible to me after this platform transition.

So it’s impractical, but I think that having continued access to the Classic environment in a small form factor machine would be really useful. It appears that Amazon still sells the original Mac minis; I may have to decide about putting my money where my mouth is.

Jason O’Grady gives us Macophiliacs the equivalent of a striptease by posting detailed shots of the unboxing and maiden boot of his new MacBook Pro. Sigh. 29 days and counting.

I was trying to configure my Mac’s built in Remote Desktop sharing last night through the command line. The RDC client, which is built into every Tiger Mac, was prompting me for a password when I attempted to connect using an open source VNC (screen sharing) client from my PC. So I did some research and found some very interesting information about configuring Mac OS X’s Remote Desktop (ARD) client from the command line. The kickstart command line tool referenced in the Apple KB article is included in the Remote Desktop Client and is therefore in every 10.4 Mac as well as some earlier systems.

The cool thing about it is that kickstart enables you to remotely activate and deactivate ARD connections. So as long as you leave SSH enabled and you have administrative privileges, you can tunnel into an SSH command line session on your Mac, sudo kickstart with the appropriate settings, and turn ARD on, then get the screen of your Mac and do your thing. As the discussion thread points out, this works even for Macs that have no physical screen attached, like a PowerBook with a broken LCD or a headless Mac Mini.

You can do even more with two more command line utilities included in ARD, networksetup and systemsetup, which allow you to do things like configuring the network settings and other “control panel” level settings.

I like this so much that, in combination with a dynamic DNS solution, I might throw out the rapidly aging Timbuktu client we bought to help my mother in law troubleshoot her system.

Following up on my earlier note, the elapsed time to delivery of my new MacBook Pro will be close to 5 weeks. Ordered on February 16, it’s currently scheduled to ship on March 17 and arrive on March 22, even with 2-day shipping. So we’re one month out. The only comfort is that the Apple Store seems to habitually pad delivery dates so as to deliver only positive surprises, so I’ll probably get it sooner.

Frustrating, especially since the battery isn’t getting better on my current PowerBook. It falls off a cliff and shuts down with 58-60% remaining now, meaning effective battery life is only 1-2 hours.