hardware: April 2006 archives
On Mac, Windows, and Storage
[ rakaur on Thu Apr 13 at 01:29 AM // category: apple, hardware, microsoft, software, technology ]
(If you haven’t noticed, I’ve given up on witty titles late at night).
I dunno what’s up with my laptop. Well, nothing, really, it works fine. It seems that after installing WinXP with Boot Camp it’s been a little flakey. When I boot it from power-off (which is rare, and I’ll mention that later) I get a question mark, then the Apple logo. It also takes longer for some reason.
I think the culprit is that when Boot Camp partitions it seems to be into a logical partition instead of primary (which is dumb, ‘cause I mean, they know it’s only two partitions anyhow). When you have Boot Camp revert back to one volume, I don’t think this undoes the logical-ness. Then again, it should only be the second partition, so I dunno. Google isn’t my friend in this case.
Also, when I was forced to reinstall the other day, I noticed it installs a lot of shit I don’t need. Like, a lot of shit. Like, a bajillion languages that no one even speaks anymore. I think there’s a Latin.lproj file somewhere. I found some program that removes everything but American English from all installed programs, but I think the files for the stuff on OS X is still there. It’s a big deal because this shit is huge. It’s not gzipped or anything. I don’t know the format of the .lproj files, but it sucks. I freed up over five gigs of space by zapping these from my applications. How sad is that?
I’m thinking about reinstalling from scratch (backing up /Users/ and /Applications/ somewhere else, of course) and customizing my install. Also, I’ve installed and removed just about every piece of software for OS X out there, so I have a mind-blowingly huge amount of little application turds laying around in /Library/ and shit. I’m a filesystem clean freak, so I’d like to get rid of all that stuff.
“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyway” is usually a good policy. One of the few things ESR has uttered that I happen to agree with.
This doesn’t really fit here, but I said I’ll mention it so I will. Evidently, my MBP uses two watts of power while powered off, and two watts of power while in sleep. It has a 60 watt-hour battery. I’m not sure on the math here, how long can it go powered off or asleep at that rate? System Profiler says the full charge is 5846mAh. So, right, my point was I almost never turn it off, I just close the lid and it goes to sleep. If it draws the same amount of power, then who cares?
I’m also thinking I’m giving a great big “fuck you” to Gentoo and killing it and installing WinXP on my desktop, mostly for games. I’m really fucking sick of having to edit ten files just to do anything in Portage. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about all my shit though. I’d hate to squander a 200 gig drive on Windows. I store all my stuff on it, and I’d like to keep it on something other than NTFS. Maybe I should swap it with my backup drive in cyndane or something. I’m not sure on this. I don’t want my stuff on some MS filesystem, that’s for sure. Hopefully soon enough most of it will be gone though, since burning DVDs from AVIs actually works on my laptop (as opposed to Nero Vision) I plan to just burn all my video to disc, and delete the AVIs. Just about 60% of my stuff on that drive is video. The rest is mostly music, and that’s on iTunes anyway.
Good luck finding time to do this stuff though.
-- rakaur // 2006.04.13 @ 01:29 AM
More Drama Than an Episode of Montel
[ rakaur on Wed Apr 05 at 04:43 PM // category: apple, hardware, microsoft, software, technology ]
So, as I’m sure you all know, Apple released Boot Camp this morning, which is software that allows you to install XP natively on an Intel Mac. To be more precise, the firmware update they released just prior allows the BIOS emulation XP needs (in fact, the XP cd will boot and run fine without even touching Boot Camp). Boot Camp serves to make drivers and partitions for XP. First, it burns you a CD with (almost) all of the drivers Windows needs to operate on Apple hardware. Everything works, excluding the Apple Remote, ambient light sensor, sudden motion detector, and other minor things such as this. All the big stuff works: Airport, Bluetooth, the eject button, the trackpad (though I have yet to figure out how to right click in XP with just the trackpad on my MacBook Pro). Well, the trackpad kind of works. Scrolling, acceleration, etc do not.
So of course, I had to try it. Pictures (and a movie of it booting) are here. It’s the fastest XP’s ever been for me, but then I haven’t used it in ages. I installed it, and it got around to nagging me about antivirus and 38 Windows Updates and blah blah, so I promptly booted back into OS X and haven’t touched it again. I’ll probably delete it soon, as on an 80G drive I need those 10G back.
-- rakaur // 2006.04.05 @ 04:43 PM
MacBook Woe
[ rakaur on Mon Apr 03 at 12:38 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]
Apparently Apple has acknowledged most of the MacBook Pro issues, and is actually silently fixing them with new hardware revisions straight from the factory, but didn’t bother to tell anyone. The latest revisions have serial numbers that start with W8612, and apparently shouldn’t have any of the reported problems.
But there’s a problem: my MBP serial starts with W8612, and I still have issues. Thankfully, none of them are issues that bother me enough to drive into St. Louis, sit at an Apple store, have some condescending guy tell me what I already know, and just give me a new one. A new one that probably has the identical problems. The only reported problems I have is that a) it gets really fucking hot, and; b) the CPU whine, which has been acknowledged by Apple as “normal” for now, but will probably be fixed with a Software Update. The heat issue is a non-issue because it was probably my fault for putting it on my bed (“do not rest on a soft unstable surface”). It’s barely warm on my desk.
So how about them Apples.
-- rakaur // 2006.04.03 @ 12:38 PM
On Computers I Don't Know What to Do With
[ rakaur on Mon Apr 03 at 01:02 AM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]
So, I have too many computers.
Right now I’m writing from my desktop, daedalus, which I pretty much haven’t touched since I got my MBP, praxis. I’ve been trying to reason out where I should go from here. There’s several possibilities.
I could ditch Gentoo, and put Windows on daedalus, and use it for gaming or Windows-critical stuff, and just use my laptop for desktopping. The good thing about this is I would have an OS that 95% of shit is designed to work with. The bad thing about this is that 95% of shit is designed to work with Windows. Another thing is, well, do I even need Windows? I’ve been using Gentoo without any access to Windows (excluding the once-a-month trip to my mother’s computer) and not really had major problems, so, I don’t know. Games, yeah, but honestly, what games do I play that need Windows? I mostly play UT and Quake, both of which run on Linux. It’d be nice to be able to play DirectX games like Homeworld 2 and Starcraft again, though. There’s details to be worked out though. If I’m going to be using my laptop for desktop stuff, where am I going to stash the 200+ gigabytes of crap I have? I have a ton of video content (mostly downloaded TV shows that I rewatch a lot) that I don’t have room for on the laptop. It only has an 80G hard drive, and I have more than that in video alone. All of my music is already over there on iTunes, and I sync it back to daedalus to play on real speakers. It’s all in the details, but this is the likely story.
Option two is to replace cyndane, my server, with daedalus, and just plug my laptop into my monitor/etc when I need to use it as a desktop. Kind of a pain in the ass, unless I get some kind of dock (which there doesn’t seem to be for MBPs yet). Might be worth it though. Requires me to disgard one of my computers, which is kind of silly, as it’s perfectly good at what it does. I could even put X on it, but I’d never use it. I have a KVM switching to it now, and I never switch over unless daedalus has died for some reason. Though, another form of this idea takes hold in the next option.
Option three is to sell daedalus. Option three point one is to sell it and put the profit into my loan, and use my laptop as a desktop a la option two. Option three point two is to sell it and save the profit, and slowly save until I can afford an iMac. This would be kind of cool, but it’s not very realisitic, and I can’t honestly do something that irresponsible.
Both option two and three leave me without a gaming system. Well, sort of. My laptop has a card that’s pretty much on par with daedalus (laptop has a radeon x1600, daedalus has a geforce 6600gt), but how many games are seriously ever ported to Mac? A fair amount, but any that I’d want to play? Any that are popular enough to show up on, ahem, alternate distribution methods?
Update: After actually looking, it seems as though I could run Quake, UT2004, and HW2 on OS X. UT2004 is Universal, but I don’t know about the rest. None of them would be playable under Rosetta. Update Update: Turns out UT2004, and all the Quakes are Universal. HW2 is not, and probably never will be since it’s thoroughly dead.
A bad thing about the “plug laptop into desktop stuff” options is that my laptop’s monitor is widescreen, and my desktop’s isn’t. Dual screening would be kind of hard, seeing as how they’re on different playing fields. I could always enable mirroring, which is fine, but I have to switch resolutions from 1440x900 on my laptop to 1280x1024 on my monitor, which is “down” a bit. After using my laptop for days, everything on this computer seems huge and ugly. I’m sure some of it is Linux vs OS X rather than resolution, though.
The big problem with using my laptop for desktopage is, again, storage. I have 260GiB on daedalus. I have 80 on the laptop (for some reason I have issues just calling it anything other than “the laptop” in words, even though its name is praxis), and 40 on cyndane, plus a 40 for a backup drive in cyndane. I could always throw the 200 in cyndane and use NFS or something. That’s kind of crappy though, ‘cause I’d constantly be transferring files over wireless, which sucks. I could try to find the biggest laptop SATA drive I could, and stick that in, but I’d have to reinstall OS X and everything (not that big of a deal, but man, I just got it how I like it). [Update: Turns out that’d be a 160G, and it’s $300, so that’s a no.]
If anyone actually bothers reading anything I write these days, please let me know what you think.
Also, I’ll hopefully be getting around to cleaning my room tomorrow so I’ll try to post new pictures and update the toys stuff.
-- rakaur // 2006.04.03 @ 01:02 AM
Hot Hot Heat
[ rakaur on Sun Apr 02 at 10:12 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]
My MBP gets hot when running off the battery. I mean, really, really hot. I’m sitting here in my bed, under a comforter, heavy blanket, a sheet, and I can still feel it pretty hardcore.
It’s really, really hot. I can’t imagine it’d be comfortable to sit with this thing on your lap with just shorts or something on. It definitely wouldn’t be touching bare skin. Just for fun I tried resting it on my palms, and I could only stand it for about ten seconds before it started burning my skin.
It’s harsh. I haven’t really used any other laptops to compare it to, so I don’t know what the norm is.
I do know that it’s really, fucking, hot.
-- rakaur // 2006.04.02 @ 10:12 PM
For What it's Worth
[ rakaur on Sun Apr 02 at 08:46 PM // category: apple, hardware, software, technology, unix ]
So, since receiving my MacBook Pro, I’ve touched my Linux desktop about twice. And, in that time frame, two packages stopped working, direct hardware acceleration stopped working, BMPx randomly jumps around in mp3s, Azureus crashes, and forget IM.
So, for what it’s worth, I wish I had the money to just fuck it and buy an iMac. Maybe I should see if anyone wants to buy daedalus for $900. That’s about $300 less than what I paid for it. I’m thinking of saying to hell with Linux and just wipping it and putting XP on it for games, and have my laptop for everything else.
You know how many things I’ve had to fix on OS X because they just stopped working and weren’t a result of my prodding?
Zero.
-- rakaur // 2006.04.02 @ 08:46 PM
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