Mac
End Of The Weekend
Sundays lately have been a day of total relaxation around our household. However the ever-rising mountain of laundry made us be a little more active then we normally would have been on such a day. Although I did find enough time in my busy schedule to take a nap with Loki.
After staying up until 4:30am last night (losing that hour to DST sucked!) I stumbled out of bed around 10:30am this morning. Coming into the computer room, I sat down and checked my email. There on my Mac’s dock was the bouncing blue sphere telling me that there were updates from Apple to install. I looked at what was available and most were run of the mill. There was an update for my Airport card, one for iPhoto, and one or two others for some applications. I let the Mac install them and reboot as it requested without thinking.
I really wish I hadn’t.
About 30 minutes after rebooting, my Mac started its random rebooting again. This was one of the issues I had for weeks along with the graphical freeze ups, so I proceeded to reset the PRAM. Knowing already that this is kind of a Mac ‘cure all’ I thought I was in good hands. After rebooting and holding down Option+Command+P+R until it made the happy sound twice, I hoped that I had cured its ills.
I would be mistaken.
Since then, the Mac has continued to randomly reboot whenever it feels like, usually when I am right in the middle of something. In fact I am writing this on my PC for fear that it will reboot on me in mid-sent
Just kidding.
I did notice that after its last random reboot that it can no longer see my external HD. This also started happening during my last round of reboots. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of the issue or part of the issue itself. Right now it’s too late to really worry about this and something I will work on for the the rest of the week. For now, it’s time to end this weekend by going to bed.
Geekin’
This week was a weird week at work since I am not used to having Monday off. I think I literally get about 3 Mondays off a year. I kept thinking I was a day or two off all week. For instance, I would have bet money that Thursday was Friday.
I spent a great deal of the night on the computer working on a new site layout. Yes, I know I just refreshed the site back in December, but the way I look at it, you can never redesign too much.
In good new I managed to finally fix my Mac’s graphics problem. After resetting the PRAM, and playing around with a few more settings, I have not had a single crash since. In fact, I’ve weened it from automatically shutting off the display after 5 minutes to staying on permanently. I’ve also tested the full screen video by playing the newest Star Trek trailer for almost 10 minutes straight. You have no idea how grueling that was!
The stars happened to align in the right way this week and therefore Jess and I both have the weekend off together. We really don’t have any plans other than laundry and my determination to get everyone together for a podcast this week. It’s supposed to be warm (high 50’s) with periods of rain, so I think it might be safe to assume we’ll be spending some of the weekend outside. After last weekend however, any and all car trips are out. Jess in her pregnant state is now extremely car sick.
On a totally random topic, I was driving to work Thursday morning when I heard ‘I Don’t Know’ by Ozzy Osbourne on the radio. I was half asleep as I usually am on my morning commute, and it immediately woke me up. After the song was over, I remembered how much I used to listen to Ozzy with all my friends. Realizing I haven’t listened to him in ages, I have been going through some of the Ozzy essentials tonight. Why did I ever stop listening?
Rock And A Hard Place
My issues with my Mac continue. When I first connected it to my new 24″ in monitor, I was getting random graphical errors that would totally lock the computer up. This would force me to do a hard reboot. I did some reading, and I narrowed down the issue to the following causes: overheating, 24″ is too big for its internal graphics card, bad RAM, and the main logic board.
Setting off in my quest to narrow down the cause, I did lot of reading on a lot of Apple forum boards. My first suspect, overheating, was slightly confirmed. The Mac will of course run hotter if you’re asking it to push a bigger display, but everyone said the mini’s internal cooling system should handle it no problem. In fact, I read lots of testimonials of people running a Mac Mini on a 24″ display without problems. Just as a precaution though, I turned my mini on it’s side for better airflow to its intake vents on the bottom.
In reading about overheating issues, this also brought confirmation that the graphics card should have nothing to do with it. Being somewhat of a skeptic still, I turned my screen saver off and set my power setting to kill the display after 5 minutes. Since I have witnessed my Mac already locked up on the screen saver on more than one occasion, I felt this would be prudent. These two semi-solutions seemed to work well, and the Mac would only be an issue if I was working on it constantly for more than 5 hours without giving it a break.
I really didn’t even bother with the bad RAM issue since I had just replaced my RAM again. I replaced the stock 1GB with 2GB shortly after I got the machine, but several months later that RAM went bad. It wasn’t until last month that I finally purchased new RAM and took it back to 2GB. I have a hard time believing that 2 new sets of RAM can go back on me in the same machine in under a year’s time.
Everything ran just fine until 2 days ago, when I started getting random reboots. The last happening last night. Up investigating this, I did find that my external 320GB drive I have hooked up to the Mac seemed to be not getting any power. I fiddled with the cable and it came back on. It was a few minutes after this the drive disappeared again and the Mac rebooted on its own. Power fluctuations like this could certainly cause a random reboot. I have to work on it this weekend and see if I can figure out why the drive is loosing power. However, if I cannot narrow down the issue, my only culprit left is the logic board. I’ve actually discussed this with my wife, and she was the first one to say it wasn’t worth replacing and that we should just get another machine. I would love to get a Mac Pro, but don’t have any where near the bank needed for such a purchase. A Macbook would be sweet, but for what I do I would want to go a Macbook Pro. Again, no bank for that at the moment. So, the logical choice would be another Mini. I would have absolutely no problem with that. However, the rumor mill has been a buzz about a new Mac Mini coming out this year with a better processor, 2GB stock RAM, and a new nVIDIA graphics card. I can most certainly wait for that.
So in the meantime, I sat down at my PC last night and started cleaning it out, prepping it to take over day-to-day duties. While I am not giving up on my Mac, I have to be realistic and come to terms that it may not be stable enough in its current condition as an everyday work machine. Once I get the PC setup, it’ll be time to really delve in and find what the problem is.
Apple Mighty Mouse – The Dirty Truth
I would love to talk with someone at Apple that had a hand in designing the Mighty Mouse. In true “Reservoir Dogs” fashion, I would sit this design in a chat and have a nice little chat with them.
Just like Mr. Blonde, I would stay calm and ask them why they would design a mouse that has a 360-degree scroll ball that cannot be removed for cleaning purposes. Then, no matter what answer he/she would give, I would go Van Gough on their ass.
I have been using a wired Mighty Mouse for almost a year now. In truth, it is the only mouse I have every used when I bought my Mac last year. I fully subscribed to the Apple culture and bought my Mac, an Apple aluminum keyboard, and a Mighty Mouse. The keyboard is fantastic, but the mouse is nothing but a pain in the ass.
For example, the buttons need to have a little tactile feedback on them. Having a smooth mouse with no features looks great as a design, but no so much for someone who has used a 2-button mouse everyday for the past of 17 years. If you’re just a little off, you end up ‘hitting’ the wrong button. That’s really annoying when you go to lick a hyperlink and instead you bring up the context menu.
And as for the previously mentioned roller ball – I love and hate that little guy. When it works, it’s like peanut butter & jelly; it doesn’t get any better. However, when you do go scroll down and not matter how hard or fast you roll your finger downward, nothing happens. That’s when my resolve goes into Neanderthal mode, and I slam the entire mouse down on my desktop a few times like I’m trying to open a coconut. After usually a dozen or so good hits, the roller ball start to function again.
Don’t get me wrong, this design is a fast improvement over their single buttoned version, and don’t even get me started about the original iMac mice, a.k.a Soap On A Rope. I just wish Apple would make a product that you could actually service. At $50.00 a pop, these mice aren’t cheap. I could really look past it’s smooth button less surface if I could just pop out the roller and clean it every once and a while.
