dirtystylus

HDD Upgrade

I replaced the hard drive in my Macbook, upgrading to a 250GB drive. The process is quite easy: pop the battery, unscrew the metal L-bracket that shields the RAM slots and the hard drive, and pull the hard drive carrier out by a flexible tab. The one wrinkle in this process was that I didn’t have a Torx screwdriver on my first attempt, and the drive is screwed to the carrier with those star-shaped Torx screws. Apple’s documentation made no mention of this, so I had to close everything up and wait till the next day when I could run down to the hardware store and get the proper (T8 or T9) screwdriver. I found out Joseph had the exact same experience replacing the drive on Kristen’s Macbook. You’d think Apple would have the best documentation, but apparently not. A good run-through on the whole process can be found here. I had cloned my old internal drive to an external drive, so once the new one was installed I booted off the external, formatted the new drive, and then copied the clone from the external using SuperDuper.

I also picked up a USB-powered enclosure to house my old internal drive. I’ll probably use that as a backup drive for Jordan’s machine, and shift the 250GB USB drive that used to hold backups for both our machines to being a dedicated backup for mine. I briefly thought about using my old drive and placing it in the PS3, but that would leave Jordan without a backup.

Streaming from Mac to PS3

Took a stab at setting up media streaming from the Mac to the PS3 and found it to be relatively straightforward. There’s a few options for doing this, the first being Elgato’s EyeConnect and the other being Twonky Vision. EyeConnect appeared to be a little more polished and installs as a System Preference Pane, so I tried that one first. Unfortunately, while I could browse my media just fine, playing the media usually didn’t work. Occasionally I would get a song to play or mp3 to load, but most of the time I ended up with a generic network error message. I’ve noted a few online forum messages that imply that the latest firmware update (v2.0) to the PS3 seems to have broken things for EyeConnect, so hopefully this is just classic blip in the relatively new space of media streaming and they’ll have that patched up quickly.

In the meantime, I’ve installed the Twonky Vision media server, which runs quite well. Management is done via a web panel, and so far playback has been pretty solid aside from the occasional hiccup. Resetting the media server’s client table usually solves those issues. The drawback is that for some reason AAC files (even unprotected ones) don’t play – they’re listed as “Unsupported Data” in menu listings. Thankfully most of my music is in regular old mp3 files, but it’s still a bit disappointing given that the PS3 actually can play AAC files just fine. EyeConnect supports unprotected AAC, but of course getting it to actually play the files without constant network errors was impossible.So this solution works ok for now, and I’m going to ride out the 30-day demo on the Twonky Vision software while keeping an eye out for EyeConnect updates before plunking down for one of them. It’s nice to be able to route my media to the home system without using an iPod dock (or an AppleTV).

Toggling Between Main Window and Drawer in TextMate

Sometimes it pays to read the Key Bindings listing. Today I found out that ⌥⌘` (or ⌥⌘~) toggles between the main editor window and the project drawer. Since I use the Subversion bundle heavily while in TextMate, being able to switch back and forth between the two contexts is great.

Another tip that I never knew about was the “Edit in TextMate” command (installed via the TextMate bundle) that works with most programs on OS X (I use it mainly in Mail.app, although I tried it on the Wordpress editing window in Safari to write this post). I clicked in the form field, hit ⌃⌘E (Control+Command+E), and it launched an editor window in Textmate. Probably not worth the hassle for short posts/emails, but for longer writing stretches it’s nice to work in the environment in which I spend the most time. Saving in TextMate dumped the text back to the input form in Safari (although only when that window is in focus). This is all very geek-tastic.

Google Apps

I’m now hosting my email via Google Apps, switching over from the default hosting with my webhost. I switched mostly to get a better handle on spam, since Google’s spam filtering on the server level is really good. I’d been using Spam Sieve to do client-side spam filtering, and it does a great job there. But I found that accessing my email via the web was a mess, unless I left my home machine on to filter email during the day.

I didn’t think seriously about a switch until Domani moved over to Google Apps — I had a GMail address, but really wanted to keep my own domain email. I don’t know how much else I’ll be using from the Google Apps suite, but the email functionality alone was worth the half-hour I spent this morning switching everything over.

Google’s decision to make IMAP available was the other factor – even with Google email for my personal domain, I was still hesitant to switch because I’d grown used to the convenience of IMAP. Once I saw IMAP was available, I rolled up the sleeves and got it done this morning.

The other not-so-minor effect of all this is that an iPhone just got more attractive. I had previously deemed the Mail app on the iPhone to be a bit problematic, since I was doing all my spam filtering on the client side, and of course there’s no Spam Sieve (or equivalent) for the Mail app yet (the developer SDK next year may change that). Now that Google’s doing the heavy spam filtering on the server side, however, the whole equation has changed. I’ll be keeping an eye out in the Spring for the expected first iPhone revision.

iPod Touch

(Photo courtesy of Apple)

The iPod Touch was finally announced yesterday (along with a revamp of the entire iPod line). It’s been rumored for a while, and when the iPhone was released everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the touchscreen technology made its way into a new iPod. We’re definitely going to get one to replace Jordan’s old mini with the busted clickwheel. As for me, I’m not too sure I’ll be getting one on release day. It’s pretty much what I expected/wanted, but why the curious omission of the Mail/Maps applications? I guess they were left off so that AT&T doesn’t jump off a bridge, but the Maps app was the one I would’ve used extensively. Obviously they’re just one software update away from being added, but it irks me nonetheless.

My real problem is that my commute is too short to really listen to music/watch video (especially when I’m on the bike), which is the main reason I’ve survived without an iPod since mine got stolen last year. There’s also that price drop on the iPhone to muddy the picture a little bit, but I feel like Apple will give the iPhone a capacity bump/3G update early next year so waiting makes sense. Plus while I hate Sprint, I’m not sure that going to AT&T would be an upgrade.

The bottom line is that I’m glad they weren’t available immediately, because I’d have rushed out and bought one. At least now I can weigh it against other things (league fees for ice hockey at Chelsea Piers + a new helmet/gloves, for instance).