First post in some time…
Working for a start-up company takes up all my time. But I’m going to start to devote some time to blogging again.
May 032013
Feb 032012
I’ve done a lot of upgrades to my iMac. Part of this included installing an external SSD as my system volume and adding a number of other external drives for various purposes.
The stock icons that come with iOS for internal and external drives are good, but they don’t differentiate the drives as much as I would like, and I don’t like the orange-yellow or teal colors very much.
Here are the stock icons:
The volumes I use are:
- SSD
An external LaCie 240 GB Little Big Disk SSD drive that is the system volume connected via Thunderbolt. - Scratch
The internal 1 TB drive. I use this drive for short-term storage only as it’s where I will restore my system volume from Time Machine if I lose SSD. - Storage
An external G-Technology 2 TB FireWire 800 drive that I use to store files, photos, DMG’s, etc. - TimeBandit
- An external G-Technology 3 TB FireWire 800 drive that I use as the Time Machine disk.
- Stuff
An external 3 TB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive where put stuff. This drive isn’t backed up by Time Machine. - iTunes
An external 500 GB 2.5″ FireWire 800 drive where I keep my iTunes Media folder. This drive was formerly in my MacBook Pro, which I upgraded to an SSD. I put it into a Macally Hi-Speed FireWire/USB 2.0 Storage Enclosure (PHR-S250UAB).
I found an excellent source of icons at Icon Archive and selected the Hyper Realistic HD Icons by Esxxi.me icon set.
The issue then became how to take the icns files from this set an apply them to the drives. It turns out that this is pretty easy, once you know how.
First, I selected the set of icons I wanted and copied them to a temporary folder:
Next, I dragged each icns file containing the icon I wanted to the root of the volume where I wanted it.
For example, on Scratch, I dragged Internal Black.icns to the root of the volume:
Next, I renamed each icns file to to the special hidden file named .VolumeIcon.icns.
For example, here is the rename operation on Scratch:
Once I did this to all the drives, I wound up with a very pretty set of icons:
If you have trouble with this technique, there is another way to change the volume icon on a disk.
First, find the icns file you want, and open it in Preview. Here is Blue USB.icns opened in Preview:
Once the icns file is opened, do Select All (⌘A) and Copy (⌘C). This will get the icns file on your clipboard.
Next, do a Get Info (⌘I) on the volume where you want to use the custom icon:
And click the icon in the top left hand corner of the info display (to the left of the volume and modified labels). When you do, it’ll glow:
Next, Paste (⌘V) the icns file you previously copied. When you do this, the icon on the volume will change:
So, that’s how you can customize the snot out of your volume icons and make your Mac look all spiffy.
Feb 032012
I decided it was time to upgrade my Mid 2011 27″ iMac (iMac12,2) to an SSD as its system volume.
The hard drive that shipped with this machine is a 1 TB 7200 RPM model. System Information says it’s a WD1001FALS-403AA0, which is a Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gbit/s drive. It’s pretty fast, actually. Here are the performance results:
100+ MB/s write / read is fast for a hard drive. If I was a normal person, I would be happy with these performance numbers. Luckily, I am not a normal person. I sit at my development machine for 10+ hours every day so it needs to run as fast as a scalded dog.
I did a ton of research into how I was going to move to an SSD as my system volume. It turns out that it is a royal PITA, and relatively dangerous, to take an iMac apart and install a 3rd party drive. Additionally, you run the risk of it not working at all as these newer iMacs require special hard drives with built-in thermal protection circuitry and firmware. I won’t go into details, but if you want to learn more google “install ssd on 2011 iMac” and check out the results. http://www.ifixit.com/ is a great source of resources.
An external SSD was the answer. Since I’ve had good luck with LaCie in the past, I decided to buy the LaCie Little Big Disk 240 GB Thunderbolt SSD.
On the negative side, this external drive is expensive ($899) and doesn’t come with a cable (which will set you back another $50). This means it costs ~$350 more than the factory-installed 256 GB SSD.
On the positive side, going with an external drive results in a simple, safe upgrade, and $350 isn’t a huge amount of money. Additionally, if my whole machine dies, I will have my system volume on an external drive that I can simply attach to another iMac or MacBook Pro to get up and running again quickly. I like this part the best.
The device actually contains two Intel SSDSA2CW120G3 drives which retail for $260 a piece (not brown box). These drives can be configured as a Mirrored RAID Set (RAID 1) or as a Striped RAID Set (RAID 0). They can also be configured as a Concatenated Disk Set (JBOD), but that wouldn’t be any fun.
I ordered the disk on Tuesday and it came today (on my birthday) from Amazon via J&R.
Here’s the box:
Opening it reveals some instructions, some warrantee info, a DVD, the drive itself, and a box of stuff:
The stuff includes the power supply, outlet adapters, the base, and an allen wrench for installing the base:
It took about 2 minutes to get the drive ready for the machine:
Once the drive was attached to the machine, I ran some tests. Right out of the box, configured as a Striped RAID Set (RAID 0), this is how the drive scored:
Ummm. That’s insanely fast. Holy crap.
I decided to see how a Mirrored RAID Set (RAID 1) would perform so I erased the drive, reconfigured it, and here’s how it scored:
Next I wanted to see how an individual drive would perform so I erased the drive again and formatted one of the drives. Here’s how it scored:
These numbers all make sense.
Given that I run Time Machine, and have the luxury of preferring speed over safety, I returned the drive to a Striped RAID Set (RAID 0) and used Carbon Copy to clone my system volume to it.
Once this was done, I selected the new drive as the startup disk using System Preferences:
And restarted.
This is good stuff!
Dec 052011
On the Mac, using git to access github.com behind a firewall that does not require authentication requires one to set-up an environment variable to tell git (curl) which proxy server to use.
First, export one or both of the following environment variables from your BASH shell:
export http_proxy=”http://proxyserver:port”
export https_proxy=”https://proxyserver:port”
(Depending on whether you will access github.com over http, https, or both.)
Then append the github URL to your git commands. For example:
git pull http://username@github.com/username/project.git
or
git pull https://username@github.com/username/project.git
Enter your password, when prompted for it, and you should be all set.
- SN
Nov 142011
Jul 232011
Well, “Tia” has been returned to her owners, who found my lost and found entry on craigslist. Good outcome and a fun little adventure for me. (Tia, I know it was a “one night stand”, but thanks for the memories. The snuggles were great.) Perhaps one day I will be lucky enough to own such [...]
Jul 232011
Well, we went to PetSmart: And this doggie has no chip. And we also found out that she’s FAT. 94lbs… Purhased a collar, walking lead thing, and a leash. And some food for fatso doggies. After PetSmart, it was off to Marymoor Park where I met a friend Pekka who was walking his dog Obi. [...]
Jul 232011
I was adopted last night by a Yellow Lab. She came into my apartment, and said, “Oh Hai!” No collar or tags… I called the Redmond Police last night, and no one has reported her missing. Called again this morning, same thing. King County animal rescue is of no use because she doesn’t have tags. [...]
Jul 152011
Here’s a BitLocker pro tip that might save you some time one day. Squirrel it away in your head… I came home tonight, and remoted into my devbox. When I got in, it informed me a restart was required: The usual “Restart your computer to finish installing important updates” dialog, with postpone options that allow [...]
Jun 302011
I’m working on my first WP7 app. So far, so good. I have one annoying thing happening, though, and it’s making me nuts. I’m pretty sure it’s not my code that’s at fault, so I thought I’d put it out here to see if anyone else has seen the same issue. I’m using page transitions [...]