Raspberry Pi

Home
www.raspberrypi.org

Installation
http://www.raspbmc.com/wiki/user/os-x-linux-installation/

Installing and using XBMC on RPi
http://noelarlante.com/rasberry-pi-with-raspbmc-and-airplay-rocks/

Lego case!
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2366

Intelligence, Obsession and Social Ineptitude

I have been looking for this for a long, long, time. I have always said I was a geek, not a nerd, but I couldn't explain why. This is it.

Upgrading The MacBookPro

It's getting to that time again, when I get itchy with old technology. This time rather than rushing to the Mac Store with $2000 I am (probably) going to upgrade the old one, with a SSD and some more, faster RAM.

• Hard drive

I found some sound instructions on the how-to aspect of the HDD here: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/58220-upgrade-your-macbook-pros-hard-drive-2/10

Now I just have to choose a drive. I am going to look at a Solid State Drive, if I can convince myself it will work, and it is not going to cost close to the price of a brand new machine. First of all, will it work? OSX 10.6.8 included support for TRIM enabled drives which is a good thing, but it seems to be a bit of a black art to chosing a drive that will work with OSX TRIM support (if you buy a pre-installed drive from Apple, it'll work fine, but if you do it yourself, there's no telling). To help me remember what I found, here is a link.

TRIM support
http://osxdaily.com/2011/03/27/enable-trim-ssd-mac-os-x-10-6-7/

Next it was time to look at a SSD. I looked at various sources until I found this one, from a reputable supplier in the UK http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=90A9989AA5CA7304

A review of this drive was found here, and it seems to be pretty good, receiving both "Dam Good." and "Dam Good Value."
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/45718-crucial-m4-256gb-ssd-review-12.html

Having decided this was the right man for the jeorb I decided to check out the price of a bigger (at least 320GB) 7200 RPM drive, just to compare. Given that in the above review, even the worst performance in the most degraded, non-TRIM state resulted in speeds FASTER than the WD Velociraptor I know that this is not a cutting-edge technology, but would still represent an increase in speed and capacity from the stock drive. So a quick google search turned up that at major retailers the WD Black Scorpion 320 GB is going for about 60-90 GBP. Then I checked Amazon.co.uk and found a brand new one for 55 GPB plus shipping (about 5 pounds)!

So, for 20% of the price you get a 50% reduction in speed and 50% increase in capacity, without having to deal with TRIM issues... I think I might leave the SSD for the NEXT upgrade!

• RAM

Currently the book has 2 GB DDR3 1067 MHz so I'll have to check out what speed the machine can support and how much. I will probably aim for 4GB (of the fastest possible of course). A quick search at crucial.com shows that an 8GB kit is going for 36 pounds. Wow. That is NOT going to break the bank. Infact that's so good I am going to see how much it would be to upgrade the iMac as well...


Link to Apple support page for iMac.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1423?viewlocale=en_US#2


www.crucial.com supplied the RAM for both upgrades and, with free shipping, came out at very good value for a total of 12GB of RAM (8+4). The website also has a very easy way of finding which RAM you need for your computer and their database is pretty extensive. For a laugh I put in the details of my OLD Compaq TC1100 tablet and it found the right module, at a reasonable price, and even warned me that the second slot is not accessible by the end user. Nice.

Installing the RAM is very easy in both the iMac and the MacBook Pro. Instructions can be found at various places around the the Mac support pages. When I first did the laptop I didn't press one of the DIMMs in far enough so all I got was beeping when I turned it back on. That was easily fixed and after that I had no issues. I wouldn't mind getting in there with an anti-static vacuum cleaner though, there is A LOT of dust in there.

Next up is the HDD in the MacBook Pro. I still have my eye on this one, from WD. It seems to only be available on Amazon.co.uk, which is fine. Seems I might have missed the boat on the price though. Now up to 70-80 pounds, although that's only 10-15 more than 2 weeks ago, it's still annoying!

Some more useful links:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20080989-263/how-to-create-an-os-x-lion-installation-disc/
Disk Inventory X - It's like WinDirStat for Mac.

#12 The Real Book Club

This post has moved to its very own blog.

#11 Old tech and new

Yeah, so I've run out of old tech to talk about and since I don't have a huge fan base I'm not too disappointed about that to be honest. Instead, I am just going to write/rant about whatever tickles my fancy or grinds my gears....

Such as this classic gem

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7568881/

#10 What goes around...

Ok, so I may not be the best at celebrating the glories of old technology on this blog, as originally hoped, but I think you might like this one. I am writing this blog from my workplace, a secure cocoon of connectivity. There is no internet here. At least not that work lets me write blogs from... I am writing this post through a blutooth link to my cell phone (so it has to be quick, I have a 10MB limit).

What grinds my gears is that when I first started using this machine I had the Sony-Ericsson PC suite providing my internet connectivity. Today, it decided not to work. Now, I use the S-E PCS to connect the phone via bluetooth, then use the latest version of Vodafone mobile broadband to connect to the net. This is annoying. Why can the software that is made by the phone manufacturer not work and the software made by a giant multinational company works... well to be honest very well? Even through bluetooth (which if I am not mistaken, has been problematic for windows computers for a long, long time...)?

Ok, rant over. Now back to some good old tech success. I have recently resuscitated my iPaq rz series PDA. This has no connectivity other than USB (1.1!) and is essentially a music player with pocket office on it. So I now need to convert all my digital movies to windows media files and I will be able to watch them in 3.5" glory. Yeah right. Being made to hand back my blackberry at work though has prompted me to have a stab at it and to be honest, it's not too bad. I have to be careful about sync settings but the new Windows Mobile Center is actually good at managing the connection, making sure no duplicates are made and that the most recent version of each contact is synced to both devices etc. What it doesn't do, however, is sync media - indeed Windows Media Player cannot even recognise that there is a device connected. Oh dear.

So, next step is creating a master contacts list that can be reliably synced between PDA, PC, Gmail, and work. All using physical connections, not auto sync allowed! (I like to challenge myself...)

#9 Windows7 again (I'll stop going on about it soon I promise)

Ok, I know I don't update this very frequently, but let's face it, I don't have a massive readership anyway, so I don't think I'm disappointing anyone there really. But what I do find disappointing is the fact that I started attempting to install Windows 7 in April, and now, in June, it is working.

The installation process was identical to the RC. I followed my own instructions to install drivers etc, and I have to say that my original impressions based on the release candidate are ... identical to my initial impressions of the SP1 release. That has to be testament to the programmers at MS - they actually released a good product at sp1, but better than that, it was good before release, and they must have had to change very little.

After minimal frustration I was up an running with 7 on my HP TC1100. I even got access to my Apple Time Capsule disk from within windows, something I had previously been unable to do on any windows machine (contact the person who administers your network, fuck you I am the admin.). Greedily, I tried to combat the one remaining limitation that TC1100 users struggle with world-wide, the bios limitation that prevents Windows from using anything past 128gb of HD space.

This problem is old and as the TC1100 is also old, it suffers from this problem. What it means is that if your OS refers to a sector on the disk that is further than 137,000,000 kB from the boot sector, it reads the disk starting again from zero, and so fucks your shit up big time. Long story short, you MUST partition your HDD to a maximum size of 125GB before you install an OS or else the thing will shit the bed after you have been using it for a while. My problem was, I thought that having a 250gb HDD and only using 125GB of it was not acceptable (the officer of the watch shall not tolerate defects) and read somewhere that I could get around it by partitioning and formatting the other half of the drive using G-Parted, or Mac OSX or whatever.

Then the fun started. Yes, you can partition leaving the first part untouched. But it seems the TC100 won't boot if there is a partition affter the 137KKKB sector, so it shit the bed anyway and I couldn't boot into windows, not even safe mode. No worries, I thought. I'll just make an image of the partion and re-burn it after re-formatting.

Occaisionally in life you have these moments when you realise you have just done something really really dumb. Like COLOSOLLY dumb. Like, pick up an baking tray without an oven mit because the baking looks like it might burn if you leave it in there another second, dumb. Like, realising you should not have attempted that jump as you fall over the handle bars of your bike and land on your face, dumb.

As I clicked [Yes, I am sure I want to delete this partition] I realised that this was one of those moments.

Here are a few reasons why this was epically dumb:

1. I could have just deleted the new partition, leaving this old one untouched.
2. If you make an image in Mac OSX, you need to write it with the same,
3. Mac OSX cannot write to NTFS.
4. It was not broken, so why the fuck was I trying to fix it in the first place?

Anyway, having done this epically dumb thing, I went about trying different was of making Windows try to recognise the full size of the disk. and short of implanting a special kind of boot-kit from Western Digital, I realised it was useless. I gave in, reformatted, after nearly breaking the bus pins on the HDD because it had been taken out and re-installed so many times, and reinstalled windows.

I should add at this point that my copy of Win 7 is upgrade only, so you must install a previous version on Windows first before it will work. For me this meant installing XP Tablet edition with its thousand extra little packs and add-ons and generally taking about 4 hours to instal. Install AVG, install the ethernet driver, and then install windows 7 including downloading updates. Then another 4 hours to install Windows 7, install updates, AV, Office, etc etc etc. Each time (I did this three times) I would have to spread the process out over several days as I was working such long hours I could not attend my poor wee tablet during the process.

After realising that it wasn't going to work I went back to the way it was originally, nearly a month later by this stage, and now I am back where I started, except it's not connected to the Time Capsule disk, and I have for some very strange reason, decided that I will use every piece of MS software I can, AV, ie8, if it doesn't actually cost me anything, I am using it. And to be honest, I don't mind it too much.

So I will say it again, though I still consider myself a Mac user, I do like Windows 7. It is fast, good looking, easy to use, and when you are connected to the net its features like driver updates work really, really well. I have not had to scrounge an old cd to install drivers, not even for my weather station's usb>serial converter.

Nothing.

It all just works.

Now if I can just get the BIOS to recognise the full size of the disk...