Posts tagged osx

Medic Computer Down!

November 15, 2007 at 1:22 pm · Filed under uncategorized

Been in self tech support hell lately. A couple weeks ago, a power outage switched off my external drive in the middle of it being used which destroyed the file hierarchy. For various reasons it took about a week to recover all the data which didn’t live elsewheres. I restored the hard drive and copied everything back on to it.

Then just a couple days ago, my laptop froze up and then refused to boot again. I launched it in firewire target disk mode — which thankfully worked — attached it to Nifer’s machine, and backed up everything in my home folder to my external. Then I rebooted with a bootable DiskWarrior cd and set it to repair. This seemed to work. My machine booted, I immediately installed superduper and did a full clone of my laptop.

The next day, it froze again. I ran DiskWarrior again and it repaired a couple useless permissions but that was about it. Interestingly, it would boot in safe mode fine, but normal boots always resulted in either a generic lockup or this lovely corrupt stack kernel panic message:

Last night, I tried doing a fresh install of the operating system just in case. Unfortunately, the install process just errored out every time.

At this point, it’s looking like a hardware issue, so tonight I’ll run TechTool on it.

I’m glad I can do my own tech support, but I really wish I didn’t have to — I don’t have time for this.

UPDATE: TechTool was worthless as it said everything was peachy. I tried removing the one 3rd party RAM chip I have in there and sure enough that seems to have done the trick so far. Install completed fine and it loaded alright. Now I’m just restoring block-level from my superduper backup as I figure it wasn’t a software problem.

I’ll need to get some more RAM though as 256MB is just not enough. Interestingly it says lifetime warranty on the chip so I’ll have to look into that.

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The Great App Hunt Continues…

April 24, 2007 at 1:42 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood + Blogging about blogging

So I’m still trying to figure out which app combo works best for efficient blogging on the mac. Now that Nifer is on a new macbook, she needs something easy and efficent to use for blogging. I was looking at Ecto, which is pretty nice. However, now I’ve got my eye on just using the Flock browser with the wordpress new post page as the home url.

From my brief trial run this morning, Ecto seemed really nice and easy (once I fixed it to work with wordpress 2.1 and got tags going). I also need to test it’s photo integration a bit more to see how seemless it is.

I originally wasn’t thinking about using Flock since it is more a browser than a dedicated blogging app, but it might be a good choice anyway. It’s built-in blogging module really sucks, but the flicker photo bar is fabulous and you can just drag and drop images into the wordpress post interface (like I did on this post). With this and the drag and drop web snippets bar, it’s a really nice blogging environment. Also there is an added benefit to working directly in the wp admin in that you can check comments, blogroll, and whatnot while you are at it. The disadvantage here is that you can’t work offline, it’s slower to save, if WP stumbles while saving (which it rarely but sometimes does) you’ve just lost your post.

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