2FatDads Approved
This week's Audible pick from Steve.
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By Steven McGurn • @mtl_steveLet’s get the 320 GB hard drive upgrade, it should be enough space for awhile…
…or not.
When we ordered the MacBook Pro in February ’09 our entry option for the hard drive was 250 GB, so upgrading to 320 GB wasn’t a huge upgrade, but it was roughly a 40% improvement in head room.
When I ordered the hard drives for the Drobo, I added a 500 GB, 7200 RPM with 32MB cache drive to the shopping cart, which in theory should provide some extra performance compared to the 5400 RPM drive that came stock with the MacBook Pro.
I used SuperDuper to create a bootable image of the original drive onto a firewire external hard drive. This process took roughly four hours to complete. With the image created, the next step was to swap out the drives.
Continue reading Upgrading Hard Drives – It’s Really This Easy
By Steven McGurn • @mtl_steveI’ve been wrestling with our home backup strategy for over a year now. A little background: We made the switch from PC to Mac in February 2008. Since then I have shed away my previous strategy of using SyncToy with an external USB hard drive, combined with a slew of 16GB thumb drives held at a top secret offsite location.
I now rely on Time Machine, working in tandem with a 1TB LaCie d2 Quadra hard drive. As hard rives go, this is a beauty. It comes with the following connections:
- Firewire 400
- Firewire 800
- USB 2
- eSATA
It also uses the aluminum chassis effectively as a heat sink, making for an fairly quiet running drive.
Most people would end it there. Continue reading Storage is Cheap
By Steven McGurn • @mtl_steveWhere did I see that the other day? Oh right, nowhere. Although….
When we bought our MacBook Pro last February the Apple experience was brand new to us (minus some iPod exposure). The battery lasted close to four hours on a charge and the majority of my time was spent in configuring the machine for both my setup and my wife’s preferences (those that know us are familiar with our gMail vs Yahoo! discussions). In doing so, I eventually set up two separate user profiles, and a couple of admin accounts. Soon after, I noticed that the battery life was diminishing, somewhere under the three hour mark, and eventually in the neighbourhood of two hours.
The balance of the year went by without much incident, if you don’t count the Blackberry syncing issues we had with my wife’s Pearl (see my post “Maybe now we can actually sync a Blackberry with a Mac?“). In the last few weeks, our laptop started to have random shutdowns. At first I thought it was a thermal issue, but it even happened while the Mac was sitting on a flat cool surface. This also never happened while plugged. So after some further analysis, I concluded that the shutdowns only happened when unplugged, and usually in or around the 40% charge mark.
Continue reading No Assembly Required, Battery Included
By Steven McGurn • @mtl_steveEvery Christmas I have a reading list made up of books piled up on my night stand, books I rush out to buy for the holidays and those I receive. Inevitably there are some that get benched for that mythical beach vacation we always talk about.
If I had to pick a few here’s what I’d read (or re-read):
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
This book, by the same author as No Country For Old Men, is one of my all time favourites. For all you dads out there, this is a brilliantly written father-son story (which are rare to begin with, and so infrequently tried). If your kids have outgrown Finding Nemo, this post-apocalytic story might be a little dark to read together, but it’s one that they will appreciate when they hit high school. This book is a must read by all dads, and should be part of any new dad’s utility belt.
Continue reading Steve’s Christmas Reading List
By Steven McGurn • @mtl_steve Get Snow Leopard from Amazon.ca The latest installment of Apple’s big cat OS is on its way (literally, at the time of starting this post it was leaving the sorting hub and on its way to a delivery truck). At first I was skeptical about buying a (.0) OS release, but rumors are rampant that 10.6.1 is in the pipeline and preparing for seeding to developer community for Beta (in fact this was confirmed by 9to5mac http://www.9to5mac.com/Snow-Leopard-10-6-1-10B503 on September 3, 2009).
SPOILER ALERT: Apple is apparently addressing the Flash vulnerability it re-exposed in the outdated Flash player rolled out in Snow Leopard 10.6.0.
UPDATE: Apple finally released 10.6.1 on September 10, 2009.
My reasons for wanting to upgrade are simple:
- Smaller footprint
- Grand Central Dispatch
- Dock Exposé
- Access to 64 bit mode
- New Quicktime
Continue reading Snow Leopard’s coming (oh wait, it’s here!)
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claurin : @JohnnyCanuck The Hymus will be added to the tour schedule.
JohnnyCanuck : @claurin lol Sure but we can't leave the Hymus off of the community centre tour. Maybe we can even get @scorbett22 to sit on a bouclier
schultzter : I just had to "break up a fight" between my daughter's two feet - she insists it was not her fault but they're keeping her awake!
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