by Michael Sheehan on February 1, 2012
in Consumer Electronics, Fix It, Gadgets, General, Hardware, how to, HTD Tech Tip, Opinion, Review, video
I have an Ultrabook and a MacBook Air and my non-SSD traditional laptop is getting jealous. It told me that it wants to be more like them, faster booting up and able to launch applications more quickly. “Why can’t I be like those super slim laptops you are always using?” it always asks me. Obviously there is no way for it to compete from a weight or thin-ness perspective, and since there was already a 500 GB hard driving powering it, I could replace that drive with an expensive SSD (Solid State Drive). A 500 GB SSD would cost upwards of $500, which would be more than 1/2 the cost of the laptop. If I went with a smaller drive, I would have to ditch some of my data or applications on the drive – that doesn’t sound that much of an upgrade to me.
That is where the new Seagate Momentus XT SSHD comes into play. If you were reading carefully, you saw that this is NOT an SSD drive, there is an added “H” in there which stands for Hybrid. In my mind, hybrid means the best of both worlds. In the case of the Seagate drive, you get near-SSD performance, but with the capacity and price of a traditional hard drive. That is a hard bargain to beat.
Seagate kindly gave me a 750 GB Momentus XT SSHD to replace the stock 500GB Western Digital drive in my Acer Aspire Timeline X. A side note here, the Acer Timeline is a stellar laptop with an incredible battery life, so I was hoping that after this upgrade, it would be even more useful!
But I’m always a skeptic when it comes to a “flashy” name like hybrid SSD (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one). The advantages of SSD is that they are flash-based/solid state drives that don’t have any moving parts, unlike traditional hard drives. You can get traditional hard drives that spin at 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM and that have larger cache sizes (16 MB or 32 MB). The larger the cache, the better as the drive will store blocks of data into the cache and be able to send that data to the computer – the more data it can send, the faster is can move the data.
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I have been in search of a really good way to wrap up my MagSafe power adapter for both my MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The reason being, if you simply wrap them up the “conventional” way, you run the risk of fraying the connections which increases the risks of electrical shocks or shorting out your power adapters. And to replace the power supplies, be prepared to pay around $80 (and I do recommend getting authentic Apple products if you DO have to replace them).
I watched a few videos of people working with the “shortened” version of the power supply, where you utilize the flip out prongs that are built into the brick. Personally, I found these to just be an “OK” solution but not really good for those people, like me, who use the full cord that includes the 3-pronged plug and the heavy cable.
So, I came up with an extremely inexpensive solution and process that allows you to have some pretty good cord management while also preventing those dangerous fraying of your power cords. Before I dive into my solution, below is a picture of my old, Band-Aid solution, which in the end, actually didn’t work because my power supply shorted out and wouldn’t work any more.
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by Michael Sheehan on November 29, 2011
in Apple, application, Cellular, Consumer Electronics, Fix It, Gadgets, General, how to, HTD Tech Tip, iPad, iPhone, ipod, Mobile, Software
I kept hearing about how with iOS 5, you could set up Reminders that would trigger when you arrived or left a particular location. It’s a pretty neat concept. You can program in an address, like your work, and set up a series of to-dos that magically remind you when you are geographically near that location. Or perhaps, you are at a vacation home and need to have a checklist pop up as you leave the location (e.g., did you check to be sure the hot tub was set to low). It’s a smart use of GPS technology to let your brain focus on other items at hand.
So I was very excited to set up some shopping lists that would pop up when I arrived at my local supermarket. Only, I had a problem, I couldn’t figure out how to put in the additional geo-location details to my to-do’s or reminders (and I’m supposed to be good at this stuff). After a bit of digging, I figured it out (and I’m a bit surprised that Apple seemed to bury this functionality into the app).
Here are the steps to create and configure a Location-based reminder:
1) Create a new Reminder. Remember, choose an iCloud-related list. I tried to do this with a Task list that was synced with my Outlook/Exchange profile and the location setting does not show.
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by Michael Sheehan on October 28, 2011
in Apple, Cellular, Consumer Electronics, Fix It, Gadgets, General, Hardware, how to, iPad, iPhone, ipod, Mobile, Software
The upgrade to Apple’s iOS 5 is a few weeks behind us now and most people are up and running on it. And, now the iPhone 4S is out in the market and more people are migrating over from older iPhones to the new iPhone 4S. I haven’t heard of too many issues as part of the upgrade process, though my upgrade on my iPhone 4 was a bit chaotic. I had to go through a restore from backup a few times (I can’t remember all of the exact particulars but it was quite involved, including a few hours of restoring all of my data and applications).
However, one thing that I remember clearly was once I “thought” that I had completed my upgrade and restore from backup, I couldn’t launch ANY applications. Well, let me rephrase that. I COULD launch all of the standard base applications that came with iOS5, but none of my 3rd party applications would launch. I would click on them and then they would appear to launch but then immediately quit or crash! It was extremely frustrating!
But I figured out what the issue was and how to fix this issue of crashing applications after the upgrade.
Essentially, I had not let the restore process complete. I had lots of applications, music, photos, data, etc. on my iPhone and since I was restoring from a previous backup, I hadn’t let the process works its way through. And the reason why I thought I was done with the restore is because of the following: there is a big but subtle different between iOS 4.x and iOS 5, synchronization on iOS 5 now takes place in the background. You are no longer greeted with the “Sync in Progress” screen.
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