Personal

New Mac: Aluminum 2.0Ghz MacBook

Bought an aluminum MacBook today and it's really nice. It's significantly more sturdy than the white MacBook we bought earlier this year. It's very solid, no flex at all. The new track pad is nice, the screen looks better, I don't have a problem with a gloss screen so thats not an issue. The keys feel a little softer and I like that. Battery life is a little less I think, speed is about the same although the CPU is 2.0GHz rather than 2.4Ghz, I can't tell the difference.

I tried doing a transfer over wireless ethernet from the old one but that failed. Don't know why. Mobile Me transferred all keys, bookmarks, email etc and works very well just as a way to copy stuff between machines. We paid 1199 for this one and 1299 for our white macbook so it's a nice deal. The main thing I like about it is the sturdy case, the feel of the keyboard and the screen is a lot better.

Bought a JBL Onstage 200iD ipod/iphone speaker

My wife wanted a speaker for her iphone for the kitchen so I happily obliged :) I was looking at the Bose Soundstation but it's way overpriced for the sound. Batteries were not important to me so I ended up buying the JBL Onstage 200 which is iphone compatible and blows the Bose away sound wise. Sound wise, it's ok, only so much you can do with a couple of 2 inch speakers but it's plenty fine. I have my Shure head phones or the stereo system for critical listening.

Setup was easy. Pop in the iPhone dock adapter and then the phone fits it very snugly. It comes with adapters for all the various iPods including the older iPhone.

The iPhone integration is limited. I can't use it as a speaker phone so thats annoying but then it's 130 bucks. Still, I'd have paid 200 for something that also did speaker phone. The options at the local best buy above the 130 buck range were not attractive. All were lacking features to justify the price given the sound quality wasn't there.

Anyway, happy with the JPL. Sounds good.

MacBook Pro hard drive fails

I'd been getting time machine errors which when I looked at the backupd messages in the console were showing as bad blocks when copying files to the time machine backup drive. These have been happening for a couple of weeks now. I finally downloaded a SMART utility yesterday which checks the drive health and it marked it as FAILING. Not good.

I went to www.ifixit.com and they have a guide for replacing the hard drive in a macbook pro. I bought a 320GB Seagate SATA drive for 140 bucks at Best Buy and got the T6 and #00 screw drivers at the local Ace hardware. I followed the directions on www.ifixit.com and about 30 minutes later the drive was replaced. It wasn't that difficult, just follow the steps and be careful.

I'm just restoring the drive now using superduper and then I should be good to go.