Category: Apple

a trip to Tekserve

After thinking through the various options I had for getting past the issue I had with the hard drive cable in my MacBook, I decided that handing the whole thing off to someone else was my best option. So I dropped off my MacBook at Tekserve yesterday. I had to take a half-day off work to do it, but if I waited until Saturday, that would be another whole week gone, and then probably another week before I could pick it up. I’ve now been without a working MacBook for a whole month, so I decided it was worth burning a half-day of PTO.

I’d never actually been to Tekserve before, though I’ve known about them for a long time. When I got there, I had to take a number and wait about a half-hour. Then, I explained the issue to a nice young man who took down all my info, then consulted with a tech, and came back with an $80 estimate. If all goes according to plan, it should be ready on Wednesday. I’ll probably go back into the city on Saturday and pick it up.

I feel like a bit of a failure for not being able to replace the hard drive cable myself, but heck, I’m old and I’m really more of a software guy anyway.

So if I get the MacBook back on Saturday, then I can pick back up on all the stuff I had to put aside before things went south. Like upgrading to El Capitan, getting a new iPhone, and doing some more work on straightening out my music library. Oh, and setting up a better backup plan too.

MacBook trouble, OneDrive, and other stuff

My replacement hard drive cable for the MacBook showed up yesterday, which is great, but I had no luck whatsoever extracting the two tiny screws that hold the old cable in place, which is not so great. There are a number of MacGyver moves I could try to get them out, but I’m not feeling really confident about any of them. So I think maybe I’ll be taking the thing into Tekserve next weekend and let them figure it out.

Meanwhile, I wanted to do something useful yesterday, so I decided to move a bunch of my personal files on my desktop PC into OneDrive. Microsoft announced last week that they were dropping unlimited storage in OneDrive, which annoyed a lot of people. But seeing this in the news reminded me that I have a lot of OneDrive space that I’m not using. I have an Office 365 Home subscription that formerly had unlimited storage, but now has 1TB of storage, which is still quite a lot. So I moved most of the files out of my local documents folder into OneDrive. Now I’m using about 3GB in OneDrive, and I have all of those files backed up to the cloud, and available on both my desktop PC and laptop. I also moved some files out of Dropbox and Google Drive into OneDrive. I have a free Dropbox account, so that’s only good for 2GB, and Google Drive is good for 15GB, but that’s shared with Gmail. So, for anything I can keep  in OneDrive, I think I’m going to try to standardize on that as my default cloud storage.

I’ve found that, while Microsoft hasn’t been great with multi-platform support in the past, they’re currently doing really good with that. Their Mac client and iOS client are both quite good. And they have an IFTTT channel, which might come in handy at some point.

I’ve been thinking about how far I can go with moving stuff into OneDrive. A terabyte seems like a lot of storage, but I could use that all up if I tried. If I were to move all my photos into OneDrive, that would be about 15 GB. A lot, but manageable. And if I were to try to move my iTunes library (music, videos, and audio books) in, that would be another 500 GB or so, which would be a bit too much, I think. But if I limited it to just music, it would be about 50 GB, which might be ok, though it would be a bit of a mess. And I have quite a lot of random DRM-free audio books, comic books, ebooks, and videos purchased through various Humble Bundle sales and other places. The total size on all of those is quite large, but, for most of them, I can re-download them if they get lost. Humble and Big Finish, at least, allow you to re-download past purchases easily.

I’ve also been thinking about other ways that I could get more use out of the services included in the Office 365 subscription. One odd thing that’s included is 60 minutes of outgoing calls via Skype each month. This doesn’t really help me much; I have plenty of minutes on my cell phone plan, so there’s no reason to use Skype for outgoing calls on my cell phone. If I could replace my home phone with Skype, though, that might be useful. But I looked into that, and it seems like that wouldn’t be worth the trouble. First, I’d have to sign up for a Skype phone number, so I could receive incoming calls. That would cost $5/month. And I can’t port my existing home phone number into Skype, so I’d have to deal with having a new phone number. Then, I’d have to figure out how to hook up a phone to use with Skype. Stand-alone Skype phones (and adapters to hook regular phones up to Skype) were a thing for a while, but it seems their time has passed. Looking for any of them on Amazon generally shows them all as being discontinued and only available from third-party sellers. So, in a nutshell, those Skype minutes are pretty useless.

I miss my MacBook

I was hoping that the replacement hard drive cable for my MacBook would show up in the mail yesterday, so I’d be able to get my MacBook back together this weekend. But there was nothing in my mailbox when I got home from work. So now I’m hoping it will show up today.

The weather has been great in NJ this week, so it would be a good day to forget about computers and go for a long walk, but I’m still recovering from my hernia surgery, so I’m stuck with short walks for now. I guess I’m going to continue catching up on my comic book reading today. If I was in better shape, I’d be heading out to the Superheroes for Hospice show today, but I’m probably better off skipping it this time around.

replacing a MacBook hard drive cable

So it’s Sunday morning now, and Monday will be one week since my surgery. I’m feeling good enough now to do some walking outside, back and forth to the bank or grocery store, but I get tired a lot quicker than normal. And I’m starting to feel like I can pick up on some projects, like trying to get my MacBook working again.

I’ve figured out, through trial and error, that I most likely have a bad hard drive cable. I’m going to try replacing it, using these instructions from iFixit, and see if that works. I ordered the cable (and a couple of tools) from iFixit today, so I’ll likely have them by the end of the week, and try to do the replacement next weekend.

Just for laughs, I called Apple and verified that they won’t touch my MacBook, since I replaced the stock HD with an SSD, thereby violating the sanctity of their precious hardware. If that wasn’t the case, I’d be really tempted to take it to the Apple Store and let them take care of it, even if it would cost a lot more than doing it myself. And if I had enough energy to take the train into NYC, I’d probably take it to Tekserve, and let them do it,  but I don’t think I’m going to be able to handle NYC any time real soon. So I’m going to hope I have enough manual dexterity to remove and replace the cable myself.

My MacBook is about two years old, and I’m hoping to get another couple of years out of it, so here’s hoping this works!

another busy week

My company’s upgrade to Dynamics AX 2012 R3 over the past weekend went well, all things considered. We’ve been having lingering problems all week, but we expected that we would, and we were prepared for it.

My hernia surgery is still scheduled for Monday, so I’ll be out all next week. I still have some open issues at work that I’ll have to close out or hand off to someone else today, but I’m sure they’ll get along fine without me.

Meanwhile, my warranty replacement SSD arrived from Samsung yesterday, so I can spend some time this weekend rebuilding my MacBook, hopefully. I have a tentative plan for doing a clean El Capitan install on the new drive, and then migrating my user data over from my old backup drive, but I’m not sure if it’ll work or not. Either way, I should have plenty of time to work on it next week.

hard drives and health

I’m trying to get myself back on a “normal” diet today, after my clear liquid diet over the weekend. I’m not sure it helped anything, but I assume my doctor knows what he’s doing. It turns out that not eating any food for 72 hours really takes a lot out of you. I went into work this morning, but gave up on it and went home around noon. I’ve since had a sandwich and a nap, and I think I’m feeling a bit better.

Meanwhile, I called Samsung to see about replacing my failed SSD drive, under their warranty. My first call to them was a failure, as the rep said he’d email a form to me, but didn’t. The second call got me as far as getting the form, which I filled out and emailed back. So now let’s see if the support rep does anything with it. What he should do is issue an RMA # and send me a prepaid UPS label. I’m not sure how long their RMA process will take, overall. I’ve been trying to decide if I should put the original drive back in the MacBook and use it until I get the replacement. If I had more energy right now, I’d probably do that, but a second nap is sounding pretty good.

Out of commission

My MacBook hard drive, a Samsung 840 EVO, seems to be good and dead. I had hoped that it was just the file system that had gotten messed up, and reformatting it would allow me to use it again, but that didn’t work. It’s less than a year old, so I’m hopeful I can get a replacement from Samsung. But their support line is only open Monday to Friday, so I’m not going to be able to deal with that today.

I had a plan all mapped out to reformat the drive, install OS X, migrate my data from my backup drive, re-install a bunch of applications, and so on and so forth, but I’m not getting that done today.

And I had also been planning to drive out to my local Cablevision store to pick up a CableCARD for my new TiVo Bolt, which should be arriving next week. But, after visiting my doctor yesterday, I’ve found out that my little stomach problem might be a bigger deal than I thought it was. He’s got me on a clear liquid diet for the weekend. So I don’t really have the energy to get in the car and drive anywhere.

So I’ve got the MacBook disassembled on the kitchen table, and I’m using my ThinkPad instead, for now. The rest of the weekend will, I think, involve lots of comic book reading and napping, with occasional breaks to consume Jell-O, ginger ale, and mushroom broth.

MacBook crash

The hard drive on my MacBook got messed up last night, somehow. It’s pretty much unusable at this point. Disk Repair won’t fix it, and I haven’t had any luck copying files off of it. I don’t have a recent backup, just the old drive from when I replaced the original drive with an SSD, back in December. I can boot from that drive, and see the files on the SSD, but I can’t do much with them.

I’m not sure what caused the problem, but I have a feeling that it might have something to do with removing Trim Enabler, and running “trimforce enable” on the drive, which I did a few days ago. The drive has been running reliably with TRIM enabled via Trim Enabler since December, and I don’t see why enabling TRIM with an OS command vs a third-party utility would be an issue, but maybe it is.

I’m a little embarrassed and mad at myself for not having a more recent backup. But, the way I work now, it’s actually not that big a deal. Most of the stuff I need from the Mac is in Evernote or Dropbox. I really don’t create any irreplaceable files that don’t wind up in the cloud one way or another. So I’ve been thinking through things, and I’m going to have to reinstall a bunch of applications, and re-download a bunch of Doctor Who audio files, but there’s really nothing that’s going to have been irrevocably lost. Still, I’ve had “backup my MacBook” on my to-do list since January, and I just never got around to doing it.

OS X El Capitan and third-party software

I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad to iOS 9, but I haven’t yet upgraded my MacBook to El Capitan, aka OS X 10.11. I use a few oddball bits of software on my Mac, so I like to make sure everything’s up to date and compatible before doing an OS upgrade.

For El Cap, I’ve found a few items I need to review and make some decisions on. First, Bartender, which is a nice little menu bar organizer, has a new version out, and it’s a paid upgrade. Version 1, which I’m using, is compatible, but it would be better to upgrade to version 2, since v. 1 requires you to jump through some hoops to get it working in El Cap. The upgrade price is only $7.50, so I’ll probably get that.

TotalFinder is a Finder add-on that I’ve used for years. I’ve been using it for so long that I’m not even sure what the regular OS X Finder looks like. But I guess I’m going to have to find out soon, since TotalFinder isn’t quite compatible with El Cap. You can get it running, by turning off System Integrity Protection, but the developer doesn’t recommend that, and he’s not going to keep actively developing TotalFinder anymore. He’s recommending a few alternatives, such as Commander One, which is a separate file manager and doesn’t plug in to Finder. There’s a free version, and a paid “pro” version. I may consider it, after seeing whether or not the plain old OS X Finder is good enough for me. I know Apple has enhanced it a lot since I started using TotalFinder.

I’ve been using a little program called Trim Enabler to enable trim on my SSD, since I replaced the drive in my MacBook a while ago. Why this is necessary is a long story, but now, it can apparently be done with the “trimforce” command at the command line, so Trim Enabler isn’t necessary anymore. But the company that released it now has a utility called Disk Sensei which might be worth buying, though it’s not necessary. I can buy it as an upgrade from Trim Enabler for $10.

TextExpander is compatible with El Cap, as far as I can tell. I paid for the upgrade to TE 5 recently, so I should be fine there. LaunchBar should be fine too. I installed the latest update for that last night. My preferred VPN client, Viscosity, is up to date also, and is probably compatible with El Cap.

And I think that about covers the oddball apps that do weird system-level stuff that’s likely to break with an OS update. I’m sure Firefox, Evernote, 1Password, and Microsoft Office are all going to be fine. They’re all actively maintained and up to date.

So I’ll probably try to clean up the issues noted above this weekend, then maybe do the El Capitan upgrade next week at some point. I should probably back up my hard drive too. Which reminds me that I need to update Carbon Copy Cloner too!

Goodbye, Instacast

I found out today that my podcast app of choice, Instacast, has been discontinued. It still works, for now, but I guess I should find a new app to use. I was actually thinking about trying a new app anyway, but had been too lazy to actually download and try anything.

I’ve been curious about Marco Arment’s Overcast, so I just downloaded that to my iPhone, and I’m going to give it a try. I’m seeing a few things about it that I already don’t like, but I’ll see if I can figure it out and get used to it. (There’s a good write-up on Overcast at The Sweet Setup.)

There were actually a number of things I didn’t like about Instacast when I first started using it, but over time I got used to it, and I think it worked pretty well for me, with a few little annoyances that continued to bother me.

Overcast made it very easy to set up an account, save the credentials for it to 1Password, and then import my subscriptions from Instacast, so that was quite nice. Once I had it set up, though, it marked all old podcast episodes as “played,” so it looks like I’m going to have to go in and manually download the stuff I hadn’t yet listened to in Instacast. I’m figuring out how to do that now.

I also recently signed up for Huffduffer, so I could easily download and listen to arbitrary episodes from podcasts I don’t regularly listen to. I’m thinking that might be easier to manage in Overcast than Instacast.

I think I’m going to try to start using Overcast tomorrow, during my morning commute. If it works well, I’ll delete Instacast and be done with it. If not, them maybe I’ll switch back to Instacast for a while until I can find something I like.