Macgasm

My Mum’s Core Duo 2ghz Macbook with 1gb of RAM was getting a little long in the tooth so my Dad had me research and find quotes for parts to upgrade etc. A local Apple Dealer and Repair shop was going to charge almost $500 to upgrade to a 320gb drive and 2gb of RAM.

I’m here to tell you that taking it to a store is wholly unnecessary.  I knew beforehand that this upgrade should be easy so I told my Dad that I could probably do it. It’s one of the craziest, easiest processes I’ve run into with computers.

I’ll walk you through the basic steps.

1. First you want to take a Disk Image with Disk Utility and save it to an external HDD. (Click New Image and Select your home drive.)
2. Turn off the computer and take out the battery.
3. Remove the L-bracket from inside the battery case.
4. Flip the gray switches and out pops the RAM.
5. Insert New RAM (Push hard, the most common problem from this upgrade is not seating the RAM properly.)
6. Pull out the HDD by tugging on the white strap.
7. Take off the Magnetic Shielding(what the white tab is affixed to), reattach it to the new drive.
8. Slide the new HDD in.
9. Reattach the L-bracket and reinsert the battery.
10. Boot from an OS X DVD (insert the disk and hold C on start up.)
11. Select the proper language at the initial prompt, but at the install screen select Utilities – Disk Utility from the Menu Bar.
12. Attach your external drive.
13. Format the new drive by selecting Erase in Disk Utility, here you will choose the Volume Format, the default is Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) which is what I went with.
14. Move to the Restore tab, click Image and browse to the Disk Image you took in step 1 and saved to the external drive.
15. Drag your new drive from the list on the left to the Destination field and click Restore.
16. Wait! and Reboot. The copying of my Mum’s disk image took about 2 1/2 hours over USB 2.0 for a 72 gb image.

Amazing huh? 16 steps to a more capable computer.

The process might scare some people but I’m mostly writing this because I feel that this really is easy enough that someone in your family should be able to do it. There is really no need to pay someone for the service. My Dad saved about $300 by going to Newegg (and Me!) rather than taking it to a service center.

And really, if Jony Ive spent so much time designing these machines so it would be this easy, don’t we owe it to him to at least try?

*Disclaimer – If you are very encouraged by this post and decide to try the upgrade, neither I nor Macgasm.net claims any responsibility for it going wrong in any way. This guide should be taken as a informative article only, not a set of instructions.

Apple Upgrade Guides – RAM – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1651

PDF LINK  - HDD

A couple of weeks ago I did a write up on MacTracker, a program that details the specs of pretty much any Apple product. Today I saw on Macworld that the creator, Ian Page, has released a version for the iPhone/Touch.

Again, just a great program for nostalgia or looking into that old relic you have kicking around.

iTunes Link - Mactracker

So, after a terribly frustrating day trying to get a huge .pdf into something that might be acceptably viewable on my iPod Touch, I tried deleting various test photos from iPhoto.

Delete. No freed up disk space. Delete another event. No freed up disk space. Small tick in the back o’ my noggin.

iPhoto has a separate Trash. Which needs to be emptied by hand. Go check your iPhoto right now, I bet most of you have been happily deleting photos without even realizing that they’re not actually gone.

I checked preferences and didn’t see any way for it to empty on quitting so it looks like we’re stuck remembering.

MacTracker provides detailed specifications for every model of computer and device that Apple has released. And I think it’s great.

Over the last year or so, I’ve started my very own classic Mac Collection. I’ve amassed a Classic(with carrying case), 2 Mac SE’s, a Powerbook 520(the very first laptop with a trackpad!) and the jewel of my collection a Newton H1000. Along with a G3 tower(with the flip down side), a G4 tower(flip down side) and an iMac G4(half-basketball, crane-neck).

For any one of these wonderful beasts I can find all the original specs, maximum OS, and original price. I can even play their start-up AND death sounds.

If you’re a Mac enthusiast, looking to upgrade, want a walk through the past or to find out about some of Apple’s more obscure products; check out MacTracker.

I just found out Apple made a digital camera.  In 1992.

MacTracker is freeware but a donation is appreciated.  Thanks to Ian Page for this great program and all his contributers.

iD software released a port of the classic FPS ‘Escape from Castle Wolfenstein, the first of B.J Blazkowicz’s many adventures.

Just about everyone has played this classic game at some point or another and if you haven’t you should definitely check it out. I think this is my favourite port Wolfenstein; it definitely plays a lot smoother than the Xbox port included at the end of ‘Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which by the by, is another title you should look into playing.

The control format is a good implementation if the pseudo-joystick we’ve seen on other games and they have optional tilt controls as well. They’ve also added a feature that makes the game a lot easier. A Map!

The odd part about this release is that it’s been released both on the App Store and Cydia. Not the Cydia Store though, just the free Cydia. This means that on the App Store the game costs $4.99, but if you have a jailbroken iPhone you can get it for free. Gloriously free.

Both versions include all six original episodes and all 60 levels.

Well, now that I’ve knocked this out early in the day, I’m going to imflame my wrists by playing for the next 6 hours.

This may not be new for some people but it rocked my world today. I’ve never run across a reference to Inspector in other tips or feature lists, so I’m going to share with you.

So, you need  info for multiple items in the Finder, whether it be folders, pictures, music or whatever. Typically, I would select all the items I want info for, Right(Control) – click and then click ‘Get Info’.  And then your screen is a mess of Info panes. This is where Inspector steps in.

If you select just one item, Right(Control) -  click and then hit Option, it acts as a modifier for a number of the tools presented. The one we want to notice is it changes ‘Get Info’ to Show Inspector.’ Clicking this brings up an Info pane as usual but where it differs is when you select a new item or folder. BAM! The info pane changes too! This allows you to scroll through a list of files using the arrow keys, getting separate info for each item without cluttering your screen completely.

This is just so fandangled that I’m going to show you in screen shots.

First, a typical Right(Control) – Click brings up a menu looking like this:

Second, a Right(Control) – Click – Option brings up the new menu looking like this: 

This modifier also allows for several other useful features. One is that if you use Inspector on multiple items it will give you the total size of your selected items. Another is that it will Quick Look at things in a slideshow rather than individually. The last thing I love about this Right(Control) – Click – Option is that it changes ‘Open With’ to ‘Always Open With’.

For clarification  Right(Control) – Click means that you can Right Click or Control Click. For example, if you don’t have two finger right click enabled on your Macbook, you need to hit Control to emulate the second mouse button. This does not mean to hold Control and Right-Click.

Have fun and let us know if you have any other tips and tricks.

I noticed the other day when adding new music to my iPod Touch that iTunes 8.1 added the autofill feature for all iPods. This is a great tool that makes filling your iPod much easier and gives you a fair sampling of your music library.

I’d like to see improvement to the Autofill feature in the options available. One that immediately comes to mind is filling by artist or album. I’m one that loves to listen to whole albums and the Autofill feature only allows grabbing of individual songs.

It seems to me that this functionality is in the Autofill feature, almost definitely, considering how many hidden features and preferences OS X and Apples programs have. Any ideas from the audience for hacking this in?

ComputerWorld is reporting that Safari was the first browser to fall in the yearly CanSecWest contest ‘PWN2OWN.’

The exploit was run by the same Charlie Miller who won last year with another Mac vulnerability. Mr. Miller ran the exploit through a URL, making this a link baiting style of threat. Mostly it’s an interesting bit of tech gossip that you can toss around with your like minded friends but it makes me think more about Mac users and security.

A large chunk of Apple’s recent growth has been from less savvy people moving to OS X for it’s ease of use and security.  These are the types of people most likely to fall into the trap of link baiting. On top of that, through a lack of understanding these types of people are likely to blame the computer before their own actions. This quickly shifts a new users opinion from ‘Apple is heaps better than Microsoft’ to ‘Apple is no diffent from Microsoft but cost me $800 more.’

I’m not saying this will happen or it even being likely, but I know that anyone I have converted to Macs in the last 2 year would be some annoyed if they got a virus. And they would have no clue how to fix it.

[ Computerworld ]

Update: ZDNet has an interesting interview with Charlie Miller in their blog section. It was posted late yesterday and Ryan Naraine poses some interesting question and gets some unexpected answers. Basically, it comes down to that since Apple has not needed to focus heavily on patching exploits and securing the OS and Safari in particular from the top down there are exploits waiting to be found across the board. It’s a good read; check it out here.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/