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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.

Spanning Sync is finally out of beta and release 1.0 is available. They’ve adopted both an annual ($25) and once-off pricing model ($65).

In the few days I’ve been using it, I’ve been very impressed with the product. If you’re still fighting with synchronising calendars between devices, sharing calendars with others, etc. give it a try – the combination of Spanning Sync and Google Calendar seems to be a winner.

Over the years I’ve tried various approaches to try and synchronise calendars between the various electronic devices I use – laptop, home workstation, mobile phone and PDA. None of the approaches have been ideal because they’ve either required me to use applications I don’t want to (Outlook, for example) or they’ve required me to change the way I work.

The ideal solution would be for me to be able to maintain my appointments and tasks in whichever calendar is easiest to use at the time – typically my mobile phone’s calendar when I’m in meetings, Google Calendar when I’m at my desk and have access to the web and iCal when I’m at home. Anything I maintain in one calendar must be visible in the others.

Yesterday I finally got around to giving the combination of Google Calendar, iCal and Spanning Sync a try. My impressions so far? Definitely favourable. I’ve setup calendars in Google Calendar to match my iCal configuration, but I’ve also had to create iCal calendars for each of the public calendars I access in Google (see the screenshot below). Once that’s done, it’s a matter of synchronising Google Calendar and iCal using Spanning Sync and iCal and my mobile phone using iSync. Heck, if a Unix geek can do it, anyone can

Next step is to setup a calendar to share with my family so that we’re all aware of family events, school activities, etc. After that I’ll have to get them to actually use it…

Yes, it’s true – I’ve switched to a Mac running OS X as my primary home workstation. For the past few years I’ve been running NetBSD on sparc64 systems, but felt that it was time for a change. Something in particular that’s really annoyed me is that Firefox still isn’t stable on 64-bit big-endian platforms – I had to resort to running it on a NetBSD/alpha system and displaying it locally.

It’s still early days, but I’m impressed with how everything Just Works under OS X. It’s not quite a traditional Unix system (NeXT always was a bit different, NetInfo for example), but a Mach kernel, a mostly-FreeBSD userland and a pretty GUI is good enough for me Of course, I’m still keeping my Ultra 60 running NetBSD as my second head – just need to get Synergy configured so that I can talk to both machines with a single keyboard and mouse.