Category: hardware

Apple iOS devices

I’ve updated both my iPhone 5s and iPad 2 to iOS 8.1. The iPhone is working fine, but the iPad is really showing its age. It’s running pretty slow, and some apps are crashing occasionally.

I’m looking to buy a new iPad, but I’m still not sure if I want to shell out for the new Air 2, or get last year’s Air 1. Either would be much speedier than the iPad 2.

Meanwhile, though, I decided to trade in my old iPad, and my old iPhone 4, which has been gathering dust for the last year. (I’m not sure why I didn’t do something with the old iPhone sooner, but better late than never, I guess.) I was surprised to see that the iPhone 4 is still worth $35 from Apple’s recycling program. I’m not sure if they’ll actually pay that, or if they’ll mark it down for some reason, but I wasn’t expecting anything for it, so whatever I get is fine. And, while Apple’s site gave me a value of $85 for the iPad 2, Gazelle offered me $100, so I’m sending that to Gazelle. (Gazelle’s offer for the iPhone 4 would only be $25, so I’m slightly better off using Apple’s program for that.)

Swatch Sistem51

I just got a new “Sistem51” watch from Swatch. I got interested in this watch after reading a review of it on Hodinkee. I like the idea of a reliable, automatic, watch for a reasonable price. (The other automatic I have is my Dad’s old Rolex. And old Rolexes don’t really count as terribly reliable or reasonably priced. Though in my case, it didn’t cost me anything, and it’s been OK since having it serviced a few years back. But I digress.)

I’ve had two other Swatches, one of which I bought in the early 90s and the other in 2003 or thereabouts. Both were their cheapest plastic watches, which generally go for around $60 (or did when I last checked). I’ve replaced the watch bands on both of them multiple times, but they’ve both kept ticking since I bought them, no problem. I just threw out the older one, since the part of the watch that the band attaches to had broken in such a way that I couldn’t attach a new band. (The watch still kept perfect time.) And the newer watch is still working fine.

The Sistem51 is an interesting concept. You can read more about it at the Swatch site or the Hodinkee article, but, basically, it’s a machine-assembled, sealed, automatic watch. So, in theory, it should just keep running for quite some time without any trouble.

The strap on it is leather, but the buckle is plastic, so I have a feeling that I’ll probably need to replace that at some point. But the band itself isn’t going to snap like the plastic ones do. I plan on using this watch as my regular, day-to-day, watch. I’m hoping it will last at least five years before needing a new strap. Maybe when something does eventually go wrong with it, I’ll remember this blog post and write an update.

CFL and LED bulbs

Like most people in the US, I’ve transitioned nearly all of the lighting in my apartment from incandescent to CFL over the last few years. I’ve never been really happy with the CFL bulbs though. The ceiling fixtures in my living room, dining room, and bedroom are all on dimmer switches, and of course the CFLs don’t dim. And, while I haven’t really tracked this, I’m pretty sure I’m not getting as much life out of these bulbs as they advertise. Here’s an article that seems to back up that observation. And here’s one from IEEE with some interesting data.

Last week, the fixture in my bedroom started buzzing. (There’s always a little buzzing with CFLs, but this was noticeable and distracting.) So last night, I messed around with it a bit, trying different bulbs, checking to see if everything was screwed in right, and there weren’t any loose wires or anything. No luck. I couldn’t get rid of the buzzing. I thought about calling the landlord on Monday, and having them look at the fixture and/or switch, but I haven’t really had much luck with the landlord fixing stuff that isn’t completely broken. They tend to just make things worse. (I could probably write a few funny blog posts about my landlord’s maintenance guys, but I’ll resist the temptation for now.)

So instead, I decided to go out to Home Depot today and buy a couple of LED bulbs. I picked up two Cree bulbs for $10 each. That’s pretty expensive for a light bulb, but if they really last for ten years, then I don’t mind the price. There’s a good bit of stuff on Treehugger about LED bulbs. I haven’t read it all, but in general, it sounds like the current generation of LEDs should be at least a little better than CFLs, and the next generation of LED bulbs could be a lot better.

The ones I bought did indeed solve the buzzing problem. They work fine, and don’t buzz at all when on full. And they do work with the dimmer, unlike the CFLs, though they buzz a little when dimmed.

I’m writing this post partly as a marker, so if the LED bulbs in my bedroom die, then I can refer back to this post to see when I bought them. If the marketing claims on the box hold up, then I shouldn’t have to change them until 2024. By which time, hopefully, I won’t still be in this apartment!

New MacBook Pro

I got myself a new MacBook Pro this week. (OK, technically not a *new* one, but a refurb.) It’s the 13″ mid-2012 model described here. My previous MacBook was purchased in 2007, so I was definitely due for a new one. I had done a few upgrades on the old MacBook, so the basic specs are pretty much the same — 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. The processor is, of course, newer, and hopefully better (i5 vs Core 2 Duo).

I set it up last night, transferring files from my old MacBook via FireWire. I used the migration capability built into the initial setup program. I’ve used this before, and it always seems to work well. It took about four hours to complete.

The old MacBook was on 10.7, since it’s not upgradeable to 10.8. (The new MBP is, of course, on 10.8.) So, this is also my first experience using OS X 10.8. There’s not much new in it, compared to 10.7, from what I’ve seen so far, so I’m not having any trouble there.

Overall, there really isn’t much difference between this new machine and the old one.The keyboard layout is pretty much the same, so it’s nice not having to get used to a new layout for once. And the general form factor and weight are very similar to the old MacBook.

So far, It doesn’t appear to be noticably faster than the old one, which is a bit disappointing, though I didn’t really expect much in that area. I don’t think I really do much to stress the processor.

I don’t really like the direction Apple is going in, with respect to upgradability, but the basic MacBook Pro is still reasonably upgradeable, per iFixit. So, a year from now, if I want to upgrade it to 8 GB of RAM and maybe replace the hard drive with a bigger one or an SSD, I can probably do that.

Hard drive crash

One of the hard drives on my work PC crashed a couple of days ago. My work PC is (or rather, was) configured with an SSD for a boot drive, and two regular SATA drives, in a RAID 0 configuration, for a secondary data volume. It was one of those SATA drives that failed. Since RAID 0 doesn’t have any redundancy built in, that killed the volume.

The only data I had on that volume were the files for my VM. The way we have developer machines configured here, we have general productivity stuff (Office, etc) on the boot volume, and all the developer stuff on the VM. The setup for developing for Dynamics AX is fairly complicated, so it makes sense to do it on a VM.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any facility set up for backing up our VMs anywhere. Also, between the way AX stores source files, and the way we have TFS set up, we don’t always check in code daily, nor do we have a simple way of backing up in-progress code changes that haven’t been checked in. So, the end result is that I lost about two days worth of work on my current project.
I had, at one point, written a backup script (using PowerShell and 7-Zip) to back up the My Docs folder on the VM to the My Docs folder on the physical machine, but I hadn’t ever set it to run on a scheduled basis, so the backup file there was about a week old, which meant that I also lost a few SQL files, some test spreadsheets, and one quickie VS 2010 project that I’d written to test a web service. Oh, and I was keeping the backup script itself (plus some other scripts) in a ‘util’ folder on the root of the VM C: drive, so those didn’t get backed up either, and were lost.
So the takeaway from all of this, of course, is that I need to do what I can to get around the limitations of the environment I’m working in, and set up some automated backup procedures.
In terms of backing up the My Docs folder, I rewrote my lost PowerShell script, and set it up in task scheduler to run at 6pm daily. It ran fine last night, and I think it’ll work fine on a continuing basis.
In terms of backing up in-progress work in AX, I extended the ‘startup projects’ class that I blogged about recently to also allow me to export all of my active projects. I have it exporting them to a folder under the My Docs folder, so, if I run the export at the end of the day, prior to the file system backup, I should always have a backup of my current work, in a format that I can re-import into AX, if need be.
There are still some big holes in this system, including the fact that I have to remember to run that export daily. But it’s a good start. I’d like to add some extra stuff to this process, including daily SQL backups, and maybe a push of certain backup files to the cloud. The SQL backups are kind of hard, since the AX test database is 70 GB. And my employer, for some reason, likes to block access to cloud-based backup & storage providers, so I can’t just copy stuff into a DropBox folder, so that part’s a little tricky too. 
I’ve also considered setting up a local Mercurial or Git repo, checking in the AX export files every day, and pushing them up to a private Bitbucket repo. This would give me offsite backup, with the added benefit of increased granularity and visibility, but it would probably violate one or more corporate policies.
As a follow-up to this post, I’m going to write a few more posts, about some of the scripts I’m using now.

My MacBook’s birthday

I was looking at some old notes this morning, and I realized that I bought my current MacBook on December 2, 2007. So, tomorrow will be the MacBook’s fifth birthday!

I had been planning to replace it at the end of this year, but, as I’ve been thinking about it, I may put that off for a while more. It’s still working fine, and I don’t really have anything I need to do that I can’t do on this one.

I’m running OS X 10.7.5 right now, and I know that this machine isn’t supposed to be upgradeable to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). That’s really the only reason I’d feel the need to get a new machine.

what to bring to Comic-Con

I’m having a little trouble deciding on which of my many random gadgets I should bring with me to Comic-Con this year. I’ve been thinking a bit about how this has changed over the years.  I think, for the first couple of years I went, I probably didn’t bring any — no cell phone, no laptop, nothing. If somebody back home needed me, they’d have to call my hotel and leave a message. (And if I had to return the call… geez, remember how much long-distance calls from a hotel phone cost?) And I would just ignore e-mail for the week. It wasn’t a big deal. (Hard to imagine that now.)

I remember bringing various handhelds over the years — my Palm VII, Palm i705, Toshiba E310, and possibly others. And I have occasionally brought a laptop. And a camera.

This year, I will of course bring my iPhone and iPad. I’ll probably bring my Kindle, though maybe not. I want some stuff to read on the plane, but maybe I’ll just bring a couple of graphic novels. Or read comics on my iPad. I *should* bring a laptop. But the wifi on my MacBook has been acting up, so I may not be able to use the internet on it, unless my hotel has wired connections. And my ThinkPad is kind of bulky, so I’d rather not travel with it if I don’t need to. I’m seriously thinking about just taking the iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard. I like the idea of not having to lug a laptop around with me.

This will be the first time I’ve gone to Comic-Con since leaving NMS. I had a bit more responsibility there than I do at my current job, so I felt then that it was pretty important to keep up with things, and have the ability to run Lotus Notes, and remote into the network, and stuff like that. My work now is such that I can probably just scan e-mail once or twice a day, and maybe shoot off a quick reply or two here and there. There shouldn’t be any real reason for me to have to remote in. If I’m lucky, I may actually be able to relax and enjoy the con…

laptop stuff

We’re in the middle of Hurricane Irene right now, but my part of Somerville is fine, and we haven’t lost power. I’ve been using this time to finish setting up my new ThinkPad, and to wipe my old Inspiron and Aspire One.
For the Aspire One, I uninstalled a few programs, let Windows apply a bunch of pending updates, then created a new account and wiped out my old one.  I gave that machine away yesterday, before the storm hit.
For the Dell Inspiron, I had too much stuff on there to easily clean up, so I just did a clean install of Windows 7 on that, created a user account, and ran updates to get it (mostly) current.  I think that’s ready to sell now.
On the ThinkPad, I’d done most of the quick installs already — Firefox, Notepad++, and a bunch of stuff like that. Yesterday, I took care of the two major installs: Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.  Now, I’m letting the system pull down and install updates for both of those programs.
Over all, I think I’ve probably pulled down 5 or 10 GB of updates over my internet connection this weekend.  Thank god I don’t have a data cap on my Optimum Online account!

new laptop – initial impressions

So I got my ThinkPad E520 today, and I thought I’d write up some initial impressions.

  • It’s lighter than I thought it would be. I guess it’s mostly plastic, and the battery isn’t huge, so that must be why. It feels weird though.
  • This is the first laptop I’ve ever bought that had a numeric keypad as part of the keyboard. (Well, technically, I had a barely portable Amstrad back in the early nineties that had a full-size keyboard with numeric keypad, but that wasn’t really a laptop.) This also feels a bit weird.  When I’m typing, my fingers aren’t in the middle of the laptop, they’re in the middle of the main part of the keyboard, which is a bit left of center. And the trackpad  is centered under the main part of the keyboard, so that too is left of center. I think I’ll be able to get used to it, but it does feel weird right now.
  • The keyboard isn’t bad, but, given the size, I wish they’d gone with a more conventional key layout.  Ins, Del, Home, and End are up on the top row, but PgUp and PgDn are tiny little keys on either side of the up arrow key.  (On the plus side, they did maintain the inverted T arrow key layout.)
  • This laptop has the Lenovo “Enhanced Experience“, which is supposed to speed up boot time. My experience so far is about 45 seconds to the login screen, then 45 more seconds to the desktop after entering my password. Not bad, I guess, but not stunning.
  • This machine has a fingerprint reader.  I set it up to allow me to login with a swipe of my index finger, but it hasn’t worked so far.  I might need to go through the setup wizard again.
  • Lenovo tends to ship a bunch of proprietary utilities on their machines.  This one has a handful of programs pre-installed, but only a few are really useless and need to be uninstalled. 
  • I’ll definitely be uninstalling Norton Internet Security.  I’ll probably install F-Prot for anti-virus protection. I’ve been using it for several years on all my machines with no problems.

So those are my initial rambling thoughts.  I’ll probably post more in a few days, when I’ve gotten a bit further with it.

    old laptops

    Once I get my new Lenovo, I’m going to get rid of my old Dell Inspiron and my Acer Aspire One. For some reason, whenever I’m getting rid of a computer, I like to go back and review some stuff — when I got it, how much I paid for it, whether or not I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it, and so on.

    I bought the Inspiron in February 2007, so that makes it about four and a half years old. I usually consider three years to be a decent life span for a laptop, so this one has certainly lasted long enough. I bought it through the Dell EPP (Employee Purchase Program), back when I was at NMS, my previous job. I was surprised to see that I spent $2000 on it. That seems like a lot now — the new Lenovo is only costing me $550, and it’s a pretty good machine, not a refurb or anything. I got a fair bit of use out of the Inspiron. I took it on a few trips, both personal and business, and I used it a lot when my Mom was in the hospital (and later the nursing home).

    I bought the Acer Aspire One from Woot in July 2009, so it’s only about two years old. I never did get much use out of it. At this point, most of the scenarios where I could see myself using a netbook, I’m more likely to just go with the iPad. I think, for me at least, the iPad really killed any need for a netbook. If I need a full-featured computer, the netbook isn’t good enough, and if I don’t, then the iPad is easier to lug around and use.

    I turned the Aspire One on today, to make sure it was still working, and I took a look at the event log. The last time I had it turned on was March 30. So, five months without any use pretty well indicates that I don’t need the thing. I’ve occasionally thought about wiping out Windows on it and installing Flow or UNR on it. If I did that, though, it would just be for fun; I don’t see any real utility in using either of those on a regular basis.