Tag Archives: mac

+1 for Apple

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Night before last, I found bad blocks on my MacBook Pro. I dropped off the laptop at the Burlingame Apple Store (after making an “Apple Concierge” appointment, so no lines), and the Apple employee that took my laptop said that it would be ready in “3 to 5 days, but we’ll try our best”. That afternoon the laptop hard drive had been replaced and was ready for pickup.

When I turned on the mac, the clean install of Leopard asked me if I had a Time Machine backup to restore from, I plugged in the external drive, and 4 hours later (!!) the computer was back.

Bad Blocks Make Macs Unhappy

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My fairly young MacBook Pro started randomly hanging, not coming out of sleep, and being generally disagreeable a couple days ago, and it turned out to be a bad hard disk.

What’s disconcerting is that Disk Utility.app didn’t see any problem with the disk. I had to install smartmontools to find the error.

After installing MacPorts, install smartmontools:

sudo port install smartmontools

Then tell the drive to do a long self-check in the background:

sudo smartctl -t long /dev/disk0

Note that this check may take an hour to run, but it’s done in the background, so you can continue to use your computer while it does its little dance on the catwalk.

Check the status of the test with:

sudo smartctl -c /dev/disk0

I was unlucky:

...
Self-test execution status: ( 121) The previous self-test completed having
  the read element of the test failed.
...

See The macosxhints forums for more discussion about this issue.

Tunnelblick crash recovery

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I’ve found that waking my mac from suspend in a different network than it went to sleep in can crash tunnelblick, or cause tunnelblick to try to spin up another openvpn instance, leaving the network wedged. The workaround is to invoke this in a terminal:

sudo killall -v openvpn

then relaunch tunnelblick.

If that doesn’t work, force-unloading the kernel extension does the trick:

sudo killall -v openvpn
sudo killall -v Tunnelblick
sudo kextunload -b foo.tun

then relaunch tunnelblick.

Photomatix HDR with single RAW images

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We got to visit the Yosemite valley a couple weekends ago, and as I was gaping and smiling at all the grandeur, I tried RAW one more time.

When I got home, though, iPhoto’s conversion was disappointing:

I did some research and found Photomatix — and on the same RAW image, I couldn’t believe it was from the same input! It’s easy:

  1. Find the name of the RAW image (you can get the filename in iPhoto by hitting ⌘-i when the image is selected)
  2. File > Open File..., and type the name of the image into the search box. If you have a Canon camera, the file suffix will be .cr2
  3. click the “Details Enhancer” button:

HDR without a tripod! w00t!