Upgrading the hard drive on old Macbook Pro (and upgrading to Lion)

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Spread the love          My old 13″ Macbook Pro’s 250GB is at it’s limit. It’s full and slow, and it is running Snow Leopard. So it was time to change it all. The old disk was a 250GB Hitachi HTS542525K9SA00 with a 5400RPM rotational speed, the new, a Seagate Momentus 750GB 7200RPM beast. The Plan? 1. Get the new hard drive onto a usb case 2. Install Snow Leopard on it 3. Install Lion on the usb drive 4. Check if all the applications are ok 5. copy all the data from the old drive to the new one (*) 6. Install the …

Problems of replicating Virtual Machine

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Spread the love          One of the biggest advantages of VMs, is the capability of cloning and replicating them. This allows the creation of a number of similar systems, without having to replicate the configuration and installation time. Unfortunately , there are a small number of downsides: The MAC addresses are also cloned. Remember to generate new MAC addresses on each new cloned VM. Also, Ubunto caches this value, which will generate a typical error message on dmesg: “udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth1” . To avoid this problem, delete the the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and restart the system.

How to manage a small Virtual Machine infrastructure

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Spread the love          Over the last months, I felt the need to start a small virtual machine infrastructure to manage every small need on a laboratory at work. The set up infrastructure is the following: 1x Apple Macbook Pro 4.1 – for development of the appliances 2x HP DL360 with 8GB RAM running Ubuntu 10.4 – to run the VMs Note that is this NOT a production environment. This only covers a LAB needs and requirements, so stuff like redundancy and fail safe will not be included.   Over the next few weeks, I’ll add some important notes.   Workflow The …

Recover data from a non booting Macbook Air (OSX 10.6 and 10.7, and probably 10.8)

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Spread the love          The Macbook Air is the best tool for someone whose main function is to attend to meetings. Although the new (2011) models all feature SSDs, the older models only offered those as an option. As such, even the best build machines are not free from hard drive failures, which remain as the component with highest failing component. Regardless, in case you get stuck with a non booting Macbook Air,  here’s how to recover the data: 1. First, why does this even works? Simple. OSX uses a kind of file system called “Journaled“, which is far different from FAT …

Check opened files by a process on OSX

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Spread the love          Recently i’ve been fighting some performance issues with Spotlight on OSX 10.6. As sad as it may seem, the problem is not on Spotlight it selft, but on it’s reliance on third parties to search inside files. On my case, the issue is related to Office 2010 Exel files: Jul 26 10:52:51 macbook-2 mdworker32[18995]: (Normal) Import: Spotlight giving up on importing file /Users/xxx/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/xxx/xxx.mbox/Attachments/156147/2/_excel_filename_.xlsx after 240 seconds, 235.697 seconds of which was spent in the Spotlight importer plugin. Which makes Spotlight take DAYS for index all my files and emails. Regardless, the way to ckeck what Sportlight is actually …

Comments and registration now available!

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Spread the love          Hi all, I’m very sorry for the interruption on the continuous flow of posts I was managing up until September, but as everyone, when the workload increases, non-essential stuff start to get set aside. Regardless, this projects hasn’t ended, and the flow of new visitors has now got to a stable level. As such, registration for new users and comments are now open to all. Feel free to comment on anything you don’t agree or any other stuff you find relevant.

Intel confirms that POF is being studied for Light Peak

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Spread the love          This is a simple update on the last post regarding POF and Light Peak. In an interview to Tech-On, Jason Ziller, director of Optical I/O Planning/Marketing at Intel states: Q: How long is the wavelength of optical signals used for Light Peak? Ziller: It is 850nm. Optical signals are transmitted via optical fibers made of glass. The wavelength was decided in consideration of cost, durability, transmission range and so forth. However, it is possible that plastic optical fibers (POF) will be used in the future because its properties are drastically improving. Now, I’m yet to understand how can …

Plastic fiber as a use case for Intel’s Light Peak

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Spread the love          For those who haven’t seen any keynote from Intel’s IDF for the last couple of years, Light Peak is the code name for a revolutionary technology that will allow cheap interconnects at 10Gbps, for domestic usage, based on optical technology. Here’s a quick into on Light Peak: Now, there’s a number of obvious limitations on using glass optical fiber. To start with, it’s brittle. No one is considering a consumer cable that cannot be bent! Nor can it have a maximum number of usages, nor having to be polished at each end. There’s simply no way glass optical fiber …

Playstation 3 as a Media Player: m2ts.

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Spread the love          Sony’s Playstation 3 is one of the best media players around: it can play Blu-ray Discs, pictures, music, videos and finally, games. One of the best uses for the PS3 is the ability to stream content from a media server through DLNA. Nothing of what is written above is any news, nor does it brings any big issues to anyone. Now, let’s assume I have a number of media players at home, and I need to find a container that is supported by them all (PS3 included) but also must support all the functionalities I need (HD and …

HTC Magic tethering with Linux and OSX Snow Leopard without Android’s root permissions

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Spread the love          Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, my HTC died just before I finished posting this, so not all steps were thoroughly tested although I did test the end results on both Snow Leopard and Linpus. For all those still waiting for HTC to update it’s Magic smart phone to Android 2.2, where not a lot of options for tethering you device with Linux or OSX machines: root it, pay for PDAnet (and it only works on OSX), or follow the following steps 🙂 How it works Android 1.6 doesn’t offer any capability to use a cell phone as a simple UMTS …