Life in Kjell

My poor lappy is on its last legs.

It’s an old Macbook pro. One of the fans has quit, so I run with the other one cranked to the max (via smcFanControl) until I can find a replacement. Lately, though, it just hasn’t been enough.

Apparently, I have a few uncompleted downloads in my filesystem, which drives the Spotlight indexing system crazy. The end result is that the mdworder system process pegs the CPU, which promptly sends my machine into a heat death. I see north of 90 degrees with the remaining fan pegged to 6000rpm.

My first try at a fix was to disable Spotlight, at least to the degree which that is possible. But despite unchecking everything I could see in the System Preferences pane, it still runs constantly.

My next workaround was fairly brute force—kill mdworker. Of course, it respawns, so the workaround ends up looking like a good old-fashioned game of whack-a-mole:

while [ 1 ]; do sudo killall mdworker; sleep 1; done

Epson has a kick-ass warranty.

My projector quit while I was away. It’s an Epson Home Cinema 720. I have nothing but good things to say about the unit itself—throw is great, it’s viewable in my living room in the daytime (without a screen, clever paint, or any special tricks), and looks unbelievable in a darkened room. But all of a sudden, it was dead, and no amount of massaging, reinserting, or cleaning would bring it back.

After a little digging, I discovered that:

1. Miraculously, the two-year warranty was not yet up. I still had several months to go, and

2. It’s a full replacement warranty. They ship me a new unit, and I ship the old one back—everything paid-for by Epson.

The new unit showed up today (complete with bulb), and works fine, so I buttoned the old unit up, and am on my way to the Fedex depot to ship it back.

I have a few minor complaints. It took two tries to get them to ship a new unit (the first person simply forgot to actually press the button), and the people at the other end of the phone seem utterly unable to grasp the most basic of sentences, unless assisted by their script. But so far, the process overwhelmingly positive. Buy Epson projectors.

One other thing I did learn: clean the fan filter regularly. That probably would have saved the unit from what I presume was heat death. It’s on the bottom, of the device, and dead simple to remove.

I really hate upgrading.

With the Thesis out of the way, I finally decided it was safe to upgrade the laptop—an A1150 Macbook pro—from MacOS 10.4 (Tiger), to something more recent. To make life easier, I dropped in a new hard drive, slapping the old one in an external enclosure, and installed afresh.

Disassembly of a macbook is always fun. Fortunately, this one seemed to go smoothly (thanks in part to an excellent walkthrough from iFixit). Unfortunately, both my internal DVD and the left fan are both toast, which means I’ll have to order a few new parts to keep this box alive much longer. That, and use smcFanControl to crank the remaining fan to 6000 in the interim.

As to the upgrade, of course, it didn’t go smoothly. Fortunately, I had copied the Leopard install media to a hard drive a while back, so I decided to go halfway, rather than buy myself an external DVD (or replacement unit). That was a disaster. The install worked fine, but running migration assistant (to move all my old settings, applications, etc), didn’t. After several days of trying to get everything to work, I gave up and bought an external DVD. Rather than wipe the drive and start over, I picked up a copy of Snow Leopard, and ran the upgrade from within the freshly installed Leopard.

This seemed to work, and fortunately, so did Migration Assistant. Suddenly I had a laptop again!

Sort of.

I keep most of my media (music, video) on a DNS-323 NAS unit in the living room. it seemed like a good idea at the time. In practice, it has been a total PITA. Apple software hates network storage. Still, I was willing to live with the occasional irritation. Except this one.

After the upgrade, my macbook totally fails to connect to the NAS. Apple’s position is that this is D-Link’s fault (for not adhering to the spec), but since D-Link uses, in effect, the SMB reference platform (Linux and Samba), I’m going to refrain from finger-pointing, at least for a while.

Upgrading the NAS to the latest firmware (1.08), which should have solved the issue, resulted in a NAS that loses its hard drives on a regular basis. It just loses them, thinking they have failed. Reverting back to 1.03 solved that little problem.

So, as a temporary workaround, I have to diasble user-level share control on the NAS.

In the long run, I may have to give up on the NAS idea. Apparently, I can convert this unit to work as a kind of time capsule disk, which would not be the worst of ideas, but that kind of kills the AppleTV setup I have going right now.

So at last I had a working machine.

And then I plugged in my iPhone. Nothing. iPad. Nothing. An hour or so of searching turned up this little gem:

I ran into a pesky problem after I installed the iPhone SDK (before that I installed XCode 3.2 from the Installer DVD) under Snow Leopard: My iPhone/iPod Touch was neither detected by Xcode nor by iTunes anymore. It seems that the iPhone SDK for Snow Leopard (downloadable at developer.apple.com/iphone and released in June 2009) installs outdated MobileDevice Extensions that are incompabile with the final release of OS X 10.6

Yep—the same thing had happened to me. So I reinstalled iTunes, and the problem was fixed.

And finally? Except for a few stored password that I have inevitably forgotten I seem to be finally running again. Elapsed time: 10 days.