Lyle Schofield's Technical Journal

In the move from the old Mac Book Pro to the new Mac Book Pro, the Firewire 400 port was eliminated as part of the normal technology progress of Apple products.  This creates the problem of having two Firewire 400 external hard drives I use for music files that I can’t plug into the new computer.  As I was shopping around for a new drive I found out that Firewire 800 is electrically compatible with Firewire 400, just a different signal down the wire.  So, turns out there are cheap adapters for plugging FW400 devices into FW800 ports.

Moshi Firewire 800 to 400 Adapter

Purchased the one pictured on the right from the manufacturer Moshi on Amazon, not based on any real input other than it seemed to be the middle price – the primary logic being the cheap ones would be junk, and the expensive ones would be overpriced.

Product is no fuss – plugged it into the 800 port, plugged the 400 cable into the other end, drive instantly mounted and was used without incident or detectable performance differences.  You do need to make sure all the 400 devices are at the end of the Firewire chain, otherwise the 800 devices will be throttled down to the 400 speed.  But, I only have 400 devices now, so no need to worry about this yet.

Way cheaper than replacing the devices, and since I didn’t realize the missing 400 port on the new device it would have created some hassles to drag the data around anyway.  Besides, those drives will probably last for a few more years anyway, why waste them?

This was definitely a good $15 purchase.

Came across a very cool Tree Map generator for your disk space for OS X, called “Disk Inventory X“.  Distributed free with GPL.  A very fast way to figure out where all your disk space went (and then to see the obvious collection of MP3 files at the end).  Downloaded, installed, and ran in about two minutes and answered the question.

My work computer was switched yesterday. The Mac Book Pro 17 inch was replaced with a Mac Book Pro 15 inch. The new one is current MBP specs; 4 G RAM, Intel i5 chip running at 2.4 GHz, 500 G hard drive, “matte” LCD/PED display. The old one was backlit LCD, Intel 1.8 GHz Duo chip, 160 G hard drive, 2.5 M RAM.

I used the old one for more than 4 years. The MBP 17 inch is a premium product, and priced that way, but when you consider the long life compared to other manufacturer products it is not overpriced. The machine ran reliably for 4 years with hardly any crashes (none hardware wise). I didn’t encounter the spinning beach ball of death until I started running larger Java programs, and it ran cool unless I was on a Adobe Flash site. Frankly, if it had more RAM and if I replaced the keyboard (the keyboard had some noticeably worn out keys) I could have squeezed another year out of it I imagine.

It will take more time to provide a detailed comparison. The initial impressions are:

Not real crazy about the screen. I know this is a better screen any way you measure it, and the lighting is absolutely completely even from end to end with a larger viewing angle. But, it seems to have a blue-ish cast to it compared to the 17 inch which could completely be my brain after staring at the other one for four years.

Keyboard is louder. Im used to the more chicklet style keys from my desktop keyboard, but typing on this is much louder. There seems to be a drum type resonance from the case construction. Feel of the keys is positive and not stiff.

Miss the mouse button. Or, hate the giant track pad. The press on the track pad requires a lot of pressure, and doesn’t allow the glancing click that the large mouse button on the old laptop had. I see that there are a whole lot of multi-finger gestures, and everyone says I’ll get used to it. Don’t like it so far. The click and drag gesture is especially awkward for me.

Better Case. Runs cooler, stiffer construction, lighter. The “billet” approach is clearly superior to any other laptop I’ve had my hands on.  The 17 inch case actually warped a bit over time due to some weak points in the case.  There was a noticeable bend where the CD slot was.

Super Battery Life. Runs for hours on a charge. No wonder I was the only one carrying around a power supply to meetings lately.

Seems Snappier. I would hope so – two generation of chips later and more RAM.

Fits on a Plane Easier. The old one was great for my aging eyes and for a more desktop experience on the road. Really challenging to use on an airplane though.

The experience with Mac Journal was very positive, and ended up purchasing a license. It greatly centralizes personal journaling/writing, and is a lightweight word processor which saves resource cycles waiting for programs to launch and do their thing. Also found out there is an escape function to allow HTML to be inserted into documents, which seemed like a limitation when I last explored this.

I’ve been using Mac Journal for a little more than a week now.

The basic editing and management features are very good. I’m very happy with this as a basic journalling tool. I’ve also figured out all the server configuration issues, successfully posting articles to both WordPress as well as Blogger/BlogSpot.

The editor is weak in its support of HTML. I’ve been using a lot of HTML paste-in from Google Maps, Urbanspoon, and others, and this really doesn’t work. I thought a nice workaround would be to add a link to an image, but you don’t seem to be able to do this. A link only seems to work for text, primarily because images don’t seem to go along for the ride with posting a journal entry. This might be a setting, since the images need to go somewhere else but haven’t figured this out yet (or didn’t receive any errors on posting which would tip me off something wasn’t going well).

So, all in all pretty satisfied, with some small nits I think I can live without. Might be a purchase.

With dozens of journals spread all over the place I’m looking for a way to simplify management of them. I’ve considered writing a database myself for this purpose, but would want to avoid this if possible.

I came across “MacJournal” (from http://www.marinersoftware.com/products/macjournal/, and maybe http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/), which has very positive marks from MacWorld and CNET. Simple word processing (good), effective document tagging (good), and automatically posts to blogs if you have the right services (which I do). The full screen edit option seems interesting as well. The downloading of blog entries into the tool is quite excellent.

We’ll see how this goes.

Nice concise review from Information Week on this new browser.  I’ll be sure to check it out when they release their OS X or Linux version.

Review: IE 9 Is Microsoft’s Best Browser Yet — InformationWeek.

PC Mag reviews the new 15 inch Mac Book Pro.  Tremendous specs, but at a premium price point as expected.

Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (Thunderbolt) Review & Rating | PCMag.com.

Nice review of upcoming OS X features.  Since new hardware seems to be on the horizon (the home computer past the 6 year mark, and the work one is pushing 4) it’s nice to see some of the features.  Mission Control is the one that caught my eye most – the Expose and Dashboard are often a little hard to use for someone like me that keeps dozens of apps and documents open at a time.

Screenshot and Feature Tour of Mac OS 10.7 Lion.

My always reliable line is not so much anymore. Can’t get any upload speed.

Speed Test with Poor Results