New drive

My 750GB Seagate FreeAgent decided to die this weekend and take my MacBook Pro crashing along with it. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, since the logs didn’t have much to offer. Turns out two of the several crashes happened when backupd was running, so that tipped me off. I ran TechTool Pro surface scan on the drive overnight and in the morning it was still only about 25% compete. I tried both USB 2.0 and eSATA, but neither made any difference.

Today I decided to check out Tiger Direct and pickup a 1.5T Seagate Baracuda and an active cooled eSATA enclosure. It’s a 7200 RPM drive with 32 MB of cache. I have it connected to my MBP via eSATA and it’s chugging along on a Time Machine backup quite nicely. It only started a full backup a few minutes ago and it has already completed over 10GB. 

Here is a look at the capacity:

>df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   298Gi  133Gi  164Gi    45%    /
devfs          109Ki  109Ki    0Bi   100%    /dev
fdesc          1.0Ki  1.0Ki    0Bi   100%    /dev
map -hosts       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%    /net
map auto_home    0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%    /home
/dev/disk1s2   1.4Ti  330Mi  1.4Ti     1%    /Volumes/Backup

Gilead Cafe

Just came back from a very intersting lunch at Gilead Cafe, in the King St. East area of Toronto.  It is owned by Jamie Kennedy and has a lot of freshly made lunch offerings, including fresh baked goods. The one item none of us could turn down was the Oxtail Poutine. It had a rather light taste for a poutine, but everything was fresh. The place is a bit far from the downtown core, but worth the trip for a good lunch.  Here is a pic of my poutine:

Hamster on a Piano

Not sure what to say about this, so I figured I would just post the video. Just a small warning though.. This song will probably get stuck in your head. You decide if that’s a good thing or not.

Because I Can

I read a post earlier on Gizmodo about how Microsoft had finally ended licensing for Windows 3.x. This left me feeling nostalgic for a few minutes, then excited. The excitement came from the fact that I remembered I’m running VMware Fusion on my Mac and could actually go back to Windows 3.x for some retro fun.

You know I did it.. I “found” iso’s for both DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. After some fun of mounting images to swap install disks and setting up NIC drivers and TCP/IP it was all running with networking. I even managed to install an old version of Netscape 4 for some web browsing and even IMAP e-mail. It was then I realized the only sites that archaic version of Netscape could view were mobile formatted pages. Still quite a bit of fun for messing around with.

And of course, the screenshot:

3G Wireless card

I just picked up an unlocked Merlin XU870 Expresscard 3G/HSDPA card from Ebay. Installing on Mac OS X didn’t even require a driver or any additional software. Just plug in the card, enter the carrier APN and it works. I used the SIM card from my iPhone, and within a few minutes I was up and running on Rogers 3G network on my MacBook Pro.

I did a few test downloads and was seeing about 180 - 200 KB/sec which was quite impressive. The latency was around the 200 - 300ms range for destinations that are usually within ~20ms range from Rogers cable network, but that’s fine. I still have yet to try a few different apps on it, but for web browsing, IM, e-mail, etc. it was almost indistinguishable from regular high speed.

Here are some pictures of the card being tested:

My new toy

I caved. I thought I was going to wait longer, but I couldn’t. I bought the new 15″ MacBook Pro. I also upgraded the HD and RAM myself to 320 GB 7200 RPM, 4 GB DDR3 RAM.

I used the migration assistant in Leopard to restore everything from my previous MacBook. When it was done, everything was exactly the way I had it before. Can’t be much easier than that.

Here are a few pics of my new best friend:

Back from LA

I just got back from LA on Thursday night from attending Nanog 44. It was a good time, even had the time to make an afternoon trip up to Santa Barbara.

Here are some random, captionless pics I took, so you’ll have to use your imagination:

The Great Turkey Fry

It’s that time of year, the air is colder, the jackets are heavier, the leaves are falling, and Cliff hosts his annual Turkey Fry.

Another awesome event with some amazing food. Here are a few pics I shot:

Nuit Blanche

Just got back from walking all over downtown Toronto and checking out some of the things Nuit Blanche had to offer. Overall it was interesting, although not everything meant much to me. It was cool to wander around the city and see so many people. At times it was difficult to walk on the sidewalk on Queen St due to the number of people, and this was well after midnight.

Here are some random pictures I managed to grab while walking around. I haven’t added any titles or captions to them, so you’ll have to use your imagination for now:

And here is a bunch of video clips I put together also:

Here is another video of just the Stereoscope display at Toronto City Hall that I shot in my iPhone:

SIP on the iPhone

Finally a legit app store app that supports VoIP and SIP specifically. There were a few issues getting it to connect, but after that it was smooth dialing. The app, Fring is now available in the app store and no longer requires a jailbroken phone. Check below for some screenshots:

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