Ram upgrade
As it turns out, the dead external drive I mentioned in my previous post was not causing the crashing. I don’t know what caused this string of bad luck, but I ended up having a bad stick of RAM. I originally bought the first sticks of DDR3 SODIMM’s I could find so that I could upgrade my MacBook Pro to 4GB when I got it. Unfortunately I chose Patriot brand. I only had the 2x 2GB sticks installed for a few weeks when one/both of them went bad. Bad RAM is a very frustrating thing to troubleshoot if you haven’t had the pleasure before. You get all kinds of random weirdness and crashing with no logical pattern. I tried to rely on log entries after every crash, but every time was a different app that seemed to cause the crash.
I ended up running memtest in single user mode, and finally found the problem. Tech Tool Pro couldn’t find the memory problems after several scans.
Yesterday afternoon I ordered another 4GB of RAM from OWC and it arrived at work this morning around 9:30am. I installed the new RAM this evening and took a few pics of the inside of the MacBook Pro. Pic below, click on it for the rest of the pics:
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.Â
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
![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.mikesdotcom.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this-small.png)
Tweet This
Gilead Cafe
Just came back from a very intersting lunch at Gilead Cafe, in the King St. East area of Toronto. Â 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. Â 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.
Tweet This
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:
Tweet This
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:
Tweet This