I went out for a the day on Saturday and when I came back I went up to my room to check on how my Macbook was doing with copying some files into iTunes when I noticed that the charger indicator on my Magsafe was orange, meaning charging. It had been plugged in overnight and was green, meaning finished charging, since I left. So it was strange that the laptop was charging rather than just running off the mains power. I then went to move my Macbook when I noticed a few sparks and some smoke and to my horror I looked down and noticed that where the thin cord comes out of the power brick, the wire was burnt and was smouldering! Obviously I very quickly unplugged it and held it well away from anything flammable as clearly the thing was still extremely hot. Needless to say I took it into the Apple store today and got a replacement instantly (brilliant service as ever Apple!), but not before snapping a few photos to show everyone:

I’ve been hard at work recently developing my iPhone application called ipCalc. It’s probably not an application that most people are going to want to use, but it has fairly simple logic behind it so I decided that it would be a good way to learn about the iPhone SDK. So far I’ve managed to learn Objective-C and I can safely say that I really do like it, and I’ve also managed to get my head around programming GUI applications which is so very different to command line applications as there’s so much more to think about.

Apple have made it so that you have to pay $99 in order to get a license to test application on an actual device (for me, my iPod Touch) and to submit applications to the App Store. I seem to have managed to apply to this program, but my application is currently pending. I hope that I manage to get accepted because then I will decide what to do with my ipCalc application… I will have to think about whether or not I want to charge for it – although my first thoughts are that this application will be free.

So, I’ll continue to improve the application and I might even release some tutorials on here about my experiences with the iPhone SDK as I have definitely found other tutorials that are out there very useful!

First Attempt	Current Version

When I first started with Linux I found it hard to find a decent distribution because most seemed to have complicated package managers which made it hard to install a program due to dependency issues. However I found Gentoo which seemed to fulfil what I needed.

Gentoo is a great Linux distribution because it uses a brilliant package manager called ‘portage’. This allows you to find and install a wide range of packages and versions without the worry of having to specify dependency issues yourself. It even allows you to install multiple versions of some programs (such as gcc) if you need to. However, Gentoo has always been a distribution for enthusiasts and people who have the time to learn about Linux in depth. It’s not really designed as a mainstream distribution – it’s designed to be used by people who want to configure their systems right down to the smallest config file and compiler optimisation.

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About a month ago I was deciding what to do with my old desktop machine which seems to have been used very little since I got my MacBook. I had Gentoo (a Linux distribution) on there, but I decided to install Ubuntu along side to see what it’s like, as I had heard good things about it. Then, a couple of days ago, Helen asked if I had any old computers lying around, so I commissioned an old box I had and installed Ubuntu on it for her.

The installation on both machines was very quick and easy, resulting in usable desktops within about 10 minutes. Helen’s machine did however require a slight modification to the display settings because it wouldn’t allow a screen resolution over 640×480, which is shockingly small these days! I fixed that by changing the monitor type in the settings to a generic 1024×768 monitor and that allowed me to set a more respectable resolution.

Since this is Helen’s first time using Linux, I shall be interested to see if Ubuntu lives up to its chat and actually delivers a truly usable, open source desktop solution.

I would certainly recommend Ubuntu to anyone thinking of trying out Linux – just download the CD/DVD image from http://www.ubuntu.com/ , burn it to a blank CD/DVD, insert it into your drive and reboot. There’s an option to try it out without actually installing it, which is useful for people not wanting to commit straight away.

Whilst in Keswick this week, we decided to work out how the ski jump on the Wii Fit decides how far you go. It’s clear that the faster you are going, the further you go and the straighter you are whilst the air, the further you go. But it was unclear as to what the best tactic was for after takeoff, so we investigated.

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I’ve been meaning to get a proper backup system going for a while now and I’ve finally done so with Leopard’s built in “Time Machine” feature. The one thing I hate about thinking about backups is that you don’t want to test your method thoroughly, as that would require you to simulate a catastrophy (i.e. throwing your computer at a wall, or such like) and so it’s very hard to know what’s going to work. This is why I opted for a backup solution which has been written (and presumably tested) by a major IT expert – in this case Apple. I trust Apple a lot – their software is usually flawless and their hardware even more so. And when there are problems, they fix them quickly (e.g. MobileMe problems).

After upgrading my MacBook hard drive, my overflow external drive was spare and so I’ve commissioned it into being a dedicated Time Machine backup drive. Currently it’s whirring away doing the initial backup (some 145.8GB of data…) and when that’s done it will do incremental backups every time I plug the drive in and click “Backup Now”.

I’ve never had to restore anything from backups, ever (*touches wood*), and I’m hoping I never will. But having a good backup plan is critical to modern day life because we hold so much information on our drives. I’d hate to lose all my data, it would really be so annoying.

So once this initial backup is complete, I’ll be a backed up man, ready to roll.

Today I embarked upon upgrading the hard drive in my MacBook because it shipped with 80gb (upgraded at the time from 60gb!) and it was becoming fuller and fuller. I had already moved my iTunes and iPhoto libraries over to an external USB drive because of lack of space, so I thought it would be time to upgrade the drive, seeing that MacBooks are supposed to have user serviceable RAM and hard drives.

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During the process of upgrading my MacBook hard drive I needed some software to copy my original drive over to my new hard drive. This is no easy task because the new drive needs to be bootable and if possible, a complete replica of my original drive (otherwise it would take hours if not days to restore my system to how I like it).

So in came SuperDuper which is a nifty piece of software which will do just what I wanted. It’s free for the trial version which will let you do most things (no time limit) but if you pay $27.95 then you can unlock the extra features like incremental backups. This might be something I’ll look into soon as I do need a decent backup system (I’m going to look at Time Machine first).

It really was so easy to use SuperDuper though – copying from my original drive to my new drive took about 2.5 hours for 60gb of data – not bad considering it’s doing a thorough job of making sure all metadata is intact (something which just copy and paste definitely wouldn’t achieve). Also, SuperDuper is fully Leopard compatible which is definitely nice to hear.

I’d certainly recommend the use of SuperDuper to anyone .

OK, so since the re-jig of the house network, I’ve got a fair few things which are redundant. I’m trying to make use of all of them, here’s a list of what I’ve got and what I’m doing with them:

1 x Shuttle XPC : Using for a FreeNAS installation as a NAS box.
1 x Server : Going to be a HoST test box.
1 x 24-port 3com 10/100BaseT Switch : NO IDEA OF USE!
1 x Linksys WiFi Access Point : Maybe a WiFi repeater for my house?
1 x Belkin UPS : Maybe I’ll use this with the iMac in the office at home.

All good.

I decided to do a bit of “jiggery pokery” today with some old hardware we had lying around at home. I wanted to see if I could easily create my own NAS box. It makes sense to use old hardware and a nice Shuttle XPC was sitting in front of me!

Yesterday I did some Googling and found FreeNAS which is a distribution of FreeBSD with a web GUI for just the kind of thing I needed, so I decided to give it a go. The installation was easy and it’s now installed on an old 128mb USB stick I had (it only uses 32mb). I now have it set up to use the old 80gb hard drive in there as a storage drive and I have set it up for Apple file sharing, FTP and DAAP.

Apple file sharing is useful because it integrates so well with the other computers in the house (pretty well all Mac now).

FTP is useful because, well, I thought it might be a useful thing to have!

DAAP is the best bit… it’s a system I had on the old server in the house which basically exports your music library in the same way that iTunes does, using the iTunes protocol. So I can have a folder on the drive called “Music” (or whatever you want really) and then use iTunes to share that folder over the network – something which will be extremely useful in a household set up.

Anyway, I’m going to get two 500gb drives for it so that there’s actually some space on there and start using it as a proper storage device!