Reading About 99 Titles and 40-GB Copy Protection
Just doing some reading about the 99 title and 40-GB copy protection on DVDs. Interesting ways to stymie copying of discs.
tech
What I Learned About My MacBook Pro
So I have an older MacBook Pro, and only recently learned a thing or two about this trusty workhorse. This MBP is the first unibody design, designated “Late 2008.”
First the good news. When it shipped, this model supported 4GB of RAM. Then it was discovered that the machine was still stable with 6GB of addressable memory. This meant one 4-GB module paired with one 2-GB module, giving a total of 6 GB. Not bad, but when Apple released Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, they also supplied a firmware update for some machines. This firmware update had an undocumented change which consequently raised the RAM ceiling to a full 8 GB.
To replace the internal hard drive is easy since the drive is very accessible. The Late 2008 MBP can handle SATA2-speed drive throughput. But… don’t try to future proof the purchase of a replacement drive, especially if you’re looking at the newer Solid State Drives (SSD). Some SSD drives that operate at SATA3 speeds (6Gb/s) are not fully compatible with this MBP and instead of downspeeding to SATA2 speeds, these fast SATA3 drives run at SATA1 speeds! That’s a big waste of a fast SSD, so don’t do it. Go with the slightly cheaper SATA2 drives.
Besides the unfortunate SATA compatibility, the Late 2008 MBP has a well-known but unacknowledged hardware issue based on its graphics chip set. The problem manifests itself in random blinking of the top third of the built-in display. While not destructive, this bug is very irritating, and there’s no clear fix. On the Apple Support Communities, replacing the logic board is the usual course of action but that doesn’t always lead to a fix. In fact, several board replacements is sometimes followed by a whole computer swapout. I haven’t reached that extreme yet, but it’s sad there is no clear way to solve this.
Still Migrating to Aperture
My migration to Aperture 3 from iPhoto 11 is still underway. I decided to make the move to take advantage of Aperture’s advanced organization and photo library management.
Some background. I’ve been an iPhoto fan since its introduction. It served me well more or less over the years. I did encounter a corrupt library or two but managed to recover using its own utilities or the great iPhoto Library Manager (IPLM). Over the years, I had created several libraries to manage each library size. The biggest problem with this is having to switch libraries to find old pictures. Wanting to have access to all my pictures, I used IPLM to consolidate all my libraries into one. This consolidation along with high resolution images from my DSLR was too much for iPhoto 11. It would take minutes to launch and several seconds to do basic tasks like viewing pictures. Yes, I could delete pictures but with the hard drive capacities getting bigger and bigger, why should I?
So I decided to switch to Aperture 3 (which was on sale during the launch of the Mac App Store). Following the instructional video, I did the iPhoto Library import using the “in their current location” option. That import process on a 316 GB iPhoto library took nearly a day.
After the import, Aperture begins working on behind-the-scenes tasks like identifying faces and processing each image. This process takes a long time.
As of yet, I can’t comment about Aperture’s performance since it’s still chugging away. So far, it’s created a 8+ GB library file based on my 316-GB iPhoto library.
More to come later…
Useful Links
Just listing some useful links that I’ve referenced.
- iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder. When you want to move your iTunes files to another hard drive.
- Time Machine backup error: Too big for backup volume. When Time Machine acts up and refuses to backup your files.
- Drobo and Lion Mac OS X 10.7 compatibility.
- How to safely shutdown your Drobo.
- Configure Drobo to work with Lion’s Time Machine.
Trying the Ubiquity Fix
After upgrading to 10.7.2, I’ve noticed system slowdowns at random times. Not sure what triggers it, but my system bogs down and eventually becomes unusable. I came across this tip related to iCloud and hopefully, this fixes the slowdown.
Test Post Now with More Memory
After pruning of plugins and removing some javascript code, I still couldn’t stabilize Pulpconnection. I bumped the the allocated RAM even more as suggested by DreamHost techs.
Now to see if more memory (and a higher monthly bill) helps solve these site outages.
Still Fighting Site Stability
I’ve been trying to improve the stability of Pulpconnection, but it’s still suffering downtime more or less every time I publish a post. Usually a restart of the server fixes the problem, but that really isn’t a satisfactory solution.
So I disabled a few more plugins (which were supposed to improve performance) and am removing the Hello Bar javascript code.
Focusing on Pulp Stability
After another rash of stability issues with Pulpconnection, I hopefully made some changes for the better. First, I deleted unused and deactivated plugins. Then I installed more plugins that address WordPress performance issues. I know, I know, installing more plugins…
Here’s what I added:
- WP Widget Cache. Seemed harmless enough to eek out some improvements in the sidebar area.
- Revision Control. To reduce the number of drafts WP saves for each post and thereby reducing database bloat.
- WP DBManager. An easy interface to the underlying mySQL database behind WordPress. Allows for database backups and optimizations.
- Hypercache. I was content with Quick Cache, but it was difficult to tell if it was working. So I’m trying out Hypercache.
I also bumped up the RAM allocation to my virtual server by just a tad and increased the memory allocated to WP to 96 MB. Hope this brings some stability and better site performance.
An Irritating Lion Bug
If you upgraded to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, you might have noticed an irritating bug, especially if you’re a mobile user. While on the go, you may see this error message pop up quite often.
It reads “There was a problem connecting to the server. URLs with the type “file:” are not supported”. Not too helpful for troubleshooting, right? Seems like the culprit is Time Machine in Lion, and this issue has been captured in several Apple Support Communities:
- Since updating I keep receiving “URLs with the type “file:” are not supported” error message…
- Why do I keep getting “There was a problem connecting to the server”?
One fix is to reset Time Machine following these basic steps. Or this doesn’t irritate you that much, you can wait for an update to Lion and hope Apple squashes this bug.
Software Updates Aplenty
After being on vacation for a bit, I come back and have lots of software updates to do.
- Mac App Store
- Sparrow Lite
- Microsoft Office
- Adium
- Software Update
- iTunes
- AirPort Utility
- Adobe Flash Player
- WordPress Plugins
My iMac Is Almost 4
Wow, my iMac is almost four years old. Didn’t think it’s been that long and while the screen has gotten bigger in newer iMac models, the overall design has remained the same. I wonder if Apple will unveil a new iMac look this year after the Back to School summer promotion?
If so, I wonder if it’s time to refresh? Everything’s going good but apps like iPhoto are really becoming unresponsive. And the potential for Thunderbolt is alluring.