unsigned long geek = random();

More MacBook Memory

A few weeks ago I came across this interesting thread in the MacNN forums: A Guide to MacBook RAM Upgrades.

According to that thread, certain models of MacBook Pro (pretty much all models after the “late 2007″, or MacBookPro3,1) can be upgraded to more than their officially supported 4GiB RAM, some models supporting 6GiB, others 8GiB. Not one to blindly trust the first online source I saw, I did a bit more research and it seemed that a number of people had had success upgrading their machines to 6GiB RAM and OWC are even selling 6/8GiB upgrade kits for such machines.

As the price of 4GiB SO-DIMMs is fairly reasonable, I decided to upgrade my “late 2007″ model from 4GiB to 6GiB (the maximum that would work without severe performance degradation). As I was already a little suspicious about the RAM I had installed, I decided to replace the existing pair of 2GiB SO-DIMMs with new 2GiB and 4GiB modules. The price for the pair was just over £130 (~$210), which I thought was pretty reasonable.

Installation was straightforward – remove the battery, unscrew the memory door (using a Philips #0 screwdriver), pop out the existing RAM and replace it.

After booting up, “About This Mac” displayed the following:

In the three weeks since the upgrade the machine has been rock solid, even with over 10GiB RAM allocated (the joys of running several virtual machines on it). Definitely a recommended upgrade.

Cheaper international Linux Journal subscriptions

I just received this in a mail from the publishers of Linux Journal:

For a limited time all international subscriptions to the print edition of Linux Journal will be reduced to the low price of $49.50 for 1 year (a savings of over 30% off the regular price) AND upgraded to include a free digital subscription. As a special bonus you will also receive Linux Journal’s System Administration Special Issue free of charge.

I’ve been a Linux Journal subscriber since the late 90s and can recommend it as one of the better general-interest computer publications. To take advantage of the special offer, visit the Linux Journal site. It seems the promo code to take part in this offer is M96INTL.

Update: Fixed the link to the subscription page, courtesy of Mark at Linux Journal. Whoops!

iPod Nano battery replacement

A few days ago my daughter’s 8GB third generation iPod Nano refused to power on. After a bit of investigation on my part it seemed as if the battery had given up the ghost – the iPod works perfectly when the sync cable is plugged in and connected to a computer, but the minute the cable is removed, it powers off.

Being out of warranty (it was purchased about 16 months ago – let me not start ranting about batteries that fail after such a short period of light to medium use), I looked around for repair options. Replacement batteries are fairly easy to come by, but the Nano isn’t the easiest piece of hardware to disassemble. Having learned the hard way, I’m really not a big fan of repairing mobile phones and similar devices myself – I always end up snapping a piece of plastic or bending something beyond repair. Taking that into consideration, I decided to look online for someone to do the battery replacement.

Apple themselves will replace the battery for the princely sum of £46.13 (including shipping), which seems just a tad pricey – a new fourth generation 8GB iPod Nano costs only £107. The well-known Juice Your iPod will perform the service for a much more reasonable $32 (excluding shipping), but it seems a little silly to ship an iPod half way around the world to have its battery replaced. I then came across UK iPod Repairs, who’ll do the replacement for a reasonable £30, excluding shipping. I’ve placed an order with them and will be sending them the iPod tomorrow. According to the site, I should get the repaired item back by the middle of next week – expect an update once that’s happened.

Update:Unfortunately the problem wasn’t the battery, it was the logic board. As a replacement would’ve cost in the region of £80, I ended up buying a replacement fourth generation Nano for her (£105).

NetBSD 5.0 released

For those who may have missed yesterday’s announcement, after a long beta and release candidate period, NetBSD 5.0 is finally available.

Andrew Doran has prepared a presentation (PDF) giving a high level overview of changes in 5.0 . Some highlights include:

• Journaling enhancements to FFS (WAPBL)
• Finer-grained locking on SMP systems
• A new kernel module system
• Vastly improved ACPI support
• Many ports using X.Org instead ofXFree86

All in all, this is probably one of the most significant releases in the project’s history – kudos to all involved.

Pens, lots of pens

A post from Bill Bradford reminded me that I really did need to order a fountain pen to use at work. I have a few fairly expensive pens that I’m wary of taking to work as they tend to grow legs or get misplaced…

Following the Moleskine-friendly fountain pen recommendations on the 43Folders wiki, last week I ordered a LAMY safari (fine nib) and a bottle of Noodler’s black ink. So far, I’m quite impressed – the safari definitely doesn’t feel like a sub $20 pen and, if it does go missing, it’s cheap enough to replace without me smarting at the cost.

I ordered the LAMY from Cult Pens and the ink from Niche Pens – both orders arrived promptly and I have no hesitation in recommending both sellers. One thing to remember – the safari doesn’t come with a converter to allow for the use of bottled ink so it must be purchased separately.

Ubuntu 9.04 Upgrade on the HP Mini-Note 2133

A few days ago I upgraded the Ubuntu partition on my HP Mini-Note 2133 from 8.10 to the release candidate of 9.04 (i386). The upgrade itself went very smoothly, for the most part – I ran Update Manager, answered a few questions and waited for the upgrade to complete. With the fairly pedestrian 1.2Ghz VIA C7 CPU the upgrade took around an hour and a half.

When I rebooted, I spotted the first problem – GRUB presented me with the kernels from 8.10 (2.6.27.*) but not the 9.04 kernel (2.6.28.*). During the installation I had elected not to overwrite GRUB’s menu.lst, thinking that it would still get updated when the kernel package was configured. Oddly, that didn’t happen. My solution was to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add entries for the 9.04 default kernel (doing a dpkg-reconfigure on the kernel package would probably also have fixed it).

Once I had booted the correct kernel, I tackled the second problem – X didn’t work. With 8.10 I had been using the proprietary VIA DRM kernel module, which enabled hardware-accelerated 3D on the 2133′s Chrome9 chipset, but it didn’t work with the updated 9.04 kernel. I moved my /etc/X11/Xorg.conf out of the way and restarted X, which then started correctly with sane defaults (newer releases of X.Org no longer require a configuration file). Rather pleasingly, the OpenChrome driver being used by X.Org started with the correct 1280×768 resolution. The one downside of not using the VIA module is that compiz et al. don’t work – not a big issue for now and one that should be rectified once VIA update their DRM kernel module for 9.04′s kernel. One possible workaround is to boot the most recent kernel from 8.10 (which is still installed), but I haven’t tried that yet.

The third problem, and the most annoying, relates to the 2133′s Broadcom wireless. With 8.10 I had been using ndiswrapper and it worked perfectly. For some reason, as soon as I tried to connect to my home wireless network after upgrading to 9.04, WPA authentication failed (I kept getting prompted for my key and the key I entered was never saved). I then switched to using the Broadcom STA driver, which authenticates successfully, but exhibits a few problems of its own – it often looses the connection to my access point and sometimes doesn’t work correctly after resuming from a suspend. I’m going to switch back to using ndiswrapper to see if it’ll work with a bit more coaxing.

Overall, I’m reasonably happy with the upgrade – other than the issues mentioned above, it went smoothly and the system is working well. The only issue that’s really causing me pain at the moment is the wireless (but then it is Broadcom…).

Not all USB flash drives are created bootable

I recently had to create a number of bootable USB flash drives to install and update systems that don’t have local CD-ROM drives. Of course, I could’ve booted the systems using PXE, but thought using USB would be quicker… How wrong I was.

After struggling for several hours with a flash drive that refused to boot no matter what I did, I discovered an interesting fact – most bootloaders won’t boot from flash drives that have 2048-byte sectors. Of course, the flash drive I was using had 2048-byte sectors… Using a flash drive with 512-byte sectors worked perfectly first time.

Depending on operating system, it may not be that easy to tell the sector size of the flash drive. If using a Unix system, you should see something useful in the kernel ring buffer (displayed by dmesg) when you insert the drive.

A non-bootable drive will display something like:
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] 258687 2048-byte hardware sectors (530 MB)
or
sd0: 505 MB, 126 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 2048 bytes/sect x 258687 sectors

A bootable one will look something like:
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdh] 2061816 512-byte hardware sectors (1056 MB)
or
sd0: 1006 MB, 1006 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 2062328 sectors

Buying AppleCare on eBay

The one year warranty on my MacBook Pro is due to expire in a few weeks, so I’m thinking of investing in AppleCare to extend it by a further two years. AppleCare is rather expensive though, particularly for laptops – $399 (£ 279) for my model if bought from the online Apple Store.

There are a number of sellers offering the same plan for roughly half price on eBay, $199 Buy It Now. Positive feedback for these sellers is close to 100% and, as AppleCare is a worldwide warranty, it seems like a smart move to buy from them, rather than from Apple. Read the auctions more closely and things start to sound a little fishy though. The majority of the sellers who sell a lot of AppleCare packages provide the serial number electronically, rather than providing the retail package or any official paperwork from Apple. Only the serial number is required to activate the warranty, but surely the retail package should be available, if requested? Although the serial number provided may activate the warranty, how do we know that it wasn’t generated by a serial number generator?

I think in this case I’m going to be more prudent and pay a little bit more to buy an AppleCare plan that comes in the proper retail package – there are a number of sellers on eBay offering them and they’re also available from a number of reputable online retailers. The prices aren’t as low, but at least I’ll be more comfortable that I’m buying a legitimate product.