Month: December 2013

The Boringest Maverick

Now that I had some free time (and a backup drive within arm’s reach), I finally upgraded my laptop to OS X Mavericks. And it’s….eh. Everything works fine and I haven’t really had any problems so far, but not many of the new features really excite me that much. Better social integration only really matters if you’re a social person. I’d still rather go to the Google Maps site than use an Apple Maps app. I don’t use Safari, so I haven’t even checked its new features. And it’ll take a while before I can really tell how much the battery life improves. The tabs in Finder are nice, though.

The one other thing that does look interesting is iBooks. Not so much for the Apple book store, but just as a convenient place to organize and read stuff like the books I’ve bought from O’Reilly or Gumroad, since you can import your own files. I’m sure there are a dozen third-party apps that could do the same thing, but I’m lazy and iBooks was just one click away… :) It supports PDF and EPUB, but it uses different apps to view each type and it’s not really clear which is preferable yet. I’ll have to play with it a bit more.

So, not a great upgrade, but not a bad one either, and it was free after all.

What Do You Do With 30GB?

Also speaking of dead hard drives, now’s as good a chance as any to sort through some old drives left over from old systems, since I’ve now got a USB adapter (kind of like this one) that lets me hook up drives without having to open up the case.

Some of these are dead or dying drives that I didn’t want to immediately throw out because I wanted a chance to erase them first. My secret crab bisque recipe will never be yours, dumpster-divers! The drive I just replaced in this server actually crapped out completely while I was 3/4 of the way through erasing it, so it’s now relegated entirely to the role of ‘squeaky noise-maker’.

Some of them still work perfectly fine, but I’m not sure what to do with them yet. One is a 1TB drive, which is still a good amount of space, but it won’t fit into any of my current systems, and it’s too small to act as a backup drive to them. But it’s too (physically) big to use as an upgrade in my PS3. Probably the best thing to do would be to stick it in a USB enclosure and use it as a General Purpose Portable Drive ™. But then I’ve also got a 500GB drive left over. And a 320GB drive. And a 160GB…

And some of them are ooooold. In one box I found a dusty WD Caviar drive that’s 13 years old and is louder than every other hard drive I have put together, but amazingly enough it still works. But it only holds 30GB; what could I even use it for? And I’m trying to make my workspace quieter, not louder. But then my natural reluctance to throw out anything that might be useful in some theoretical way kicks in…

iDunno

Speaking of failures… I finally got around to upgrading my phone to iOS 7. I was hesitant at first after various reports of it performing poorly on older phones like mine, but after a while those reports started sounding a little overblown, so I took the plunge and it worked pretty well.

Except iMessage. Which is kinda important since I’d rather not incur SMS charges for myself and the friends that use it. It remained stuck at this “Waiting for activation…” state seemingly forever, even after running through all of the official troubleshooting steps, resetting everything, waiting a full day, trying a bunch of anecdotal “well this worked for me…” tips from forums, etc.

After a week of fiddling with it a hundred different ways, I eventually figured I’d try using iMessage from my Mac just to see if it at least worked from there, and maybe isolate whether the problem was with the phone or the account. But, when it asked me which email address I wanted to use, it wouldn’t let me actually select one. It displayed my email address and put a checkbox beside it, but it would immediately clear the checkbox if I tried to set it, and I couldn’t proceed any further without it checked.

Confused as hell by this point, I logged into my Apple ID to check if there was anything wrong with it or set incorrectly, but it all seemed fine. I did notice that I didn’t have an alternate email address set though, so I thought I may as well set one while I was there. And then suddenly the Messages app would let me finish setting it up now that it had two email addresses to choose from, and going back to the phone, it activated iMessage within seconds.

Was it the setting of the alternate address that fixed it? Do you really need an alternate address for iMessage? Maybe just logging into the Apple ID account management cleared out some old crud from the database that was interfering? *shrug* It’s one of the few times where Apple stuff hasn’t “just worked” for me and I start wishing I could browse through their server-side trace logs…

Arise!

Hard drive failures suck. A couple weeks ago, I noticed this server box was starting to make some odd squeaking noises, and I was reasonably sure that there weren’t any mice trapped inside. I checked the SMART stats, and sure enough, bad sectors had started appearing on one of the drives. In the days after that, the number kept steadily rising, and just trying to access some directories started spitting out I/O errors.

The data was safe, as it’s pretty robustly backed up, but it presented me with a bit of a dilemma: do I just replace the drive, or do I consider replacing the whole system, as it’s now around five years old?

In the end, I wound up kind-of upgrading it. I kept the system, but upgraded it to 4GB of memory cannibalized from my recently replaced gaming box, and replaced both of the hard drives in it instead of just the failing one. Instead of two 1TB drives, it now has one 240GB SSD, and one 4TB hard drive. The SSD makes for a nice and snappy boot and home drive, but it obviously can’t hold much, so any large collections of data will go on the 4TB drive, with symlinks all over the place as needed. The CPU’s still adequate for its relatively light needs, so with these upgrades, this system should hopefully last for quite a while longer.

Now how long is it going to take to restore all those files…