Pastie << self

Vincent Munier fails the iPad test

I first heard of this photographer via a video with footage and photos from his Nikon D3S ...

I really wanted to check out his website, but it was not to be.

Obviously his talent lies in photography, not HTML5 and web standards. :-)

Western Digital, OS X, S.M.A.R.T, and Load Count

Not sure how helpful this will be for anyone, but I just learned way more than I wanted to know about how f#$%ed up hard drives can be. I just upgraded my 15" MBP with a brand new Western Digital 500gig Scorpio Blue drive and installed Snow Leopard. Previously my Leopard install had 9x% filled my previous 320gig drive and I'm sure it was fragmented to pieces. It was slow.

Now it's wonderful and fast... except sometimes it would randomly "lag".

• Beach ball for half a second while using Propane with no load
• Occasional strange lag after hitting enter or doing random stuff like scrolling a window in Safari (again with the system otherwise bored).
• Wesnoth would very briefly freeze randomly during gameplay.
• Right clicking an icon in the dock would take longer than it should.

Maybe I'm ultra sensitive to my responsiveness, but it was very frustrating. It "felt" a lot like the hard drive was spinning down and I was waiting for it to spin back up. Writing a quick Ruby script to keep the hard drive busy writing tiny bits of data seemed to help, but that was no solution.

Finally I took the bottom part of my case off to listen to the drive... and it was parking the heads every 5-10 seconds. It would get quiet, spin up, get quiet, spin up, turn off (sounded like it), spin up again... craziness.

I'll save you the rest of my research and just share what I've learned:

• You can measure load/unload (head parking?) counts via your S.M.A.R.T. drive's stats.
• A quick way to do this on OS X is SMART Utility.
• General consensus across the net seems to be that several hundred thousand load counts are bad. PDF specs for my new drive list 600,000 load/unload cycles.
• If you see a reason to tune this you can use hdapm (and set it to load on boot).
• Yes, I played with OS X's built in sleep settings. No, they had no effect.

Some people blame Mac OS X's built in power management, that it doesn't put all drives in the "right" APM mode... and claim that the same drive on Windows exhibits different behavior. I can't confirm or deny this, but if so it would be really annoying that OS X isn't doing the "right" thing here.

My 85 hour "New" Western Digital Drive

That's loading/unloading 162 times per hour! Or less than half a year to reach the drives rated spec of 600,000 load/unload cycles.

160gb Seagate Drive in my 2 year old 17" MBP

Loading/unloading 85 times per hour. One million load/unload cycles and counting. Funny thing is I've never noticed any performance problems on this system. Perhaps the half reduction makes a big difference in actual everyday use?

Summary

I'm just informing here. I'm not saying telling you to rush to check your drives (but if you do, share your findings!) or get all in a frenzy. I'm not saying that a load count of 1,000,000 is for sure beyond your drives capacity.

I found enough lunatics online raving about S.M.A.R.T. stats without ANY comprehension of them to join that crowd. I don't imagine that just because I already knew what SMART was and spent 30 minutes reading a few web pages that I'm now a SMART expert. However...

I had a performance problem with my new drive. I solved it by altering the power management settings with hdapm. I'm now much happier. :-)

If anyone knows more about this subject that I do and wants to share, it'd be greatly appreciated!

First Impressions: MacBook Pro 15" Uni-body

So I did it. I went out and bought a new MacBook Pro... the higher end model. And I love it. It's perfect in almost every way. Could also be that a bit of the new Apple product charm is rubbing off on me.

I thought I'd post some of my first impressions here for those of you considering getting one:

Likes

• Looks - It's totally sexy.
• Edges - The edge (which from just looking appears sharp) is actually very smooth to the touch and entirely comfortable to rest your hands on. This is in total contrast to my MacBook Air which I almost feel could slice my hand wide open if I moved it fast enough.
• Build Quality - The construction feels VERY solid... more so than my Air... and the LCD screen doesn't wobble once you place it... mine at home wobbles a fraction of an inch and it's very annoying. The Air's in the store also did the wobble to a lesser degree. The MBP's screen appears stuck in place much more firmly. This feels like the most solid Mac notebook I've ever owned.

Neither Here nor There

• Trackpad - Overall, it's not terrible. It works fairly well but I'm still getting used to it and you probably will to. If you wish Apple had never changed it the good news is you can click with the bottom and still move your finger just fine - it all "just works" Apple style. And I like the looks better without the button.
  • Clicking - The new whole button click is a little over-rated. It really clicks better at the bottom and progressively worse as you move to the top. I also found it hard (but got better with practice) clicking in the middle of the trackpad. Even though it was easy to get the sufficient pressure just pushing would actually slide my finger off of the thing I was trying to click.
  • Right side as right click - Works OK except when you're using one finger to move the pointer and that finger happens to be on the right side and then you click on the left side (pretending it's an old MBP with a button) with another finger. It sees your finger sitting there on the right and thinks it's a right click. This happened to me so much I turned the feature off and went back to two finger right clicking, which works fine.
  • Four finger gestures - I find the Expose gestures awesome and I'm only starting to use them. They aren't as hard to pull off as you might think. I just throw 4 fingers on there any which way and move them and it sorts it out.

Dislikes

• Black glass border on screen - I have this little white spec that looks like a defect in the glass or something... almost like a lit pixel (no it's not in the LCD)... kind of annoying and I wouldn't be noticing it probably if there wasn't a glass frame. Overall I like the frame but that spot is annoying. I wonder if it's worth taking a perfectly working laptop back for though.
• Keyboard - The feel is fine and the keys are responsive but the keys seem to quickly get oily... even if your hands are clean and you just washed them recently. Normally I might think I was just weird or something but I've never seen this before and someone else online is complaining about the exact same thing. No idea what's up with this.
• Feet - You have to make sure you hold it still if you're going to try and open it on a flat surface or it will slide. Probably true of any Mac laptop using slick feet instead of rubber though. I only mention this cause I don't remember noticing it with my MBA.
• Removable panel on the bottom - If I slide my hand along the bottom I can already feel that the right side of the panel isn't perfectly aligned with the rest of the frame... I wonder if this is something I can bend back into place.
• Mini Display Port - So I can't use my 30" Cinema for 4-5 weeks until the adapter is ready...? SUCKY.
• Glass screen - Yes, it's more annoying that matte. No it's not the end of the world some people say. I find that if I re-situate myself (pick a different table or switch sides, etc) and crank the brightness up to 50% or 60% that usually it doesn't bother me. No idea about direct sunlight outside. It definitely seems more shiny than my MBA. The reflection is flawless though where as the MBA reflection is kinda of wavy if you look at it (just something random I noticed).

This is just a really quick post about my thoughts... so don't weigh the pros and cons by counting bullet points. I bought this to replace both my MBA and my 17" MBP and that is still the plan - whenever I can buy my $100 MiniDisplay Port to Dual-link DVI adapter that is...

Anyone else have one yet? What are your thoughts?

Original Mighty Mouse making a come back?

Looks like potential trouble in Mighty Mouse land as Apple and CBS are sued for trademark infringement by Man and Machine who claims to have used the name since 2004 for their very own waterproof and chemically resistant Mighty Mouse.

Anyone ready for an Apple iMouse? Move over iMouse independent software (which actually looks kind of cool if you're still stuck in one button mouse land).

Man and Machine's Mighty Mouse

Personally I'm considering ordering the original... It would go great with a Black Macbook and I can't even count the number of times I've wanted to use my Apple Mighty Mouse under water and been unable! :-)

Those of us with an Apple Mighty Mouse also know what a pain in the ass they are to clean.