Unlike most people I have spoken to, I have actually found a place for an ipad in my little gadget universe. I can see it being a more capable replacement for my Nokia N800 which is now getting a little long in the tooth. The only issue I have is that the Ipad is a device that is tightly locked down by Apple (do you hear that all those Android Tablet manufacturers?). That was the reason I steered clear of the Iphone in the first place.

At the same time, my Nokia E71 is now slowly dying (charger pin getting loose so that it does not charge properly anymore). I have been thinking maybe I should go with one of those giant-screened Android phones like the HTC Desire or the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. Buying one of these phones will be around the same as buying a 3G Ipad. Hmmm!

apple · hardware · mobile · Nokia

I have been somewhat troubled by the inability of my MacBook running 10.4.11 version of OS X to hibernate properly (suspend to disk). It all started when I upgraded the RAM from the standard 1GB to the 4GB it is now. After the upgrade, it could not reliably wake up from hibernation without a crash occuring after using some memory-intensive programs such as some Adobe software and Aptana and such, which would require a forced reboot. Having lived with this issue for sometime (started shutting down instead of hibernating), I decided to try to Google some answers.

After trawling through some forums and blog discussions, I found a Dashboard widget called Deep Sleep which is easy to use (one click) and seems to reliably put the notebook to sleep without wake up crashes (that’s what happens to me when waking up early morning). So if your macbook is a little insomniac like mine, then do give it a try.

apple · hibernate · hibernation · MacBook · notebook · OS X · suspend · tiger

For about 3 months I have been having a problem with my Macbook running OS X Tiger with 3GB of RAM. The problem seems to only occur when I run a resource intensive application such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Final Cut or even Garage Band. What happens is normally when I close those applications then put the notebook to sleep (safe sleep aka hibernation), when I wake it up it goes through the process slowly (slower than normal wake up from hibernation) then it crashes. Because I very rarely shut the notebook down, this seems to happen at least two or three times a day.

Annoying? Well what do you think? The waking up process, which is supposed to be quicker than starting it cold, takes a lot longer and then you have to force the notebook to reboot. This is unacceptably inefficient and not to mention scary. I keep thinking that there is something wrong with the hardware, but it does not get worse, it just seems to happen with any resource-intensive application.

The solution is apparently very simple: just open terminal and type sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage, then enter your password and then if there is no error, you have just deleted the sleepimage file, which is where the content of your RAM gets dumped when the computer goes to sleep. When done, just reboot the machine and all should be fine. I even tried running Photoshop and then putting the Macbook to sleep and it wakes up fine.

So if your MacBook has a crash on wake up (that’s what happens to me in the mornings), then just delete that sleepimage file in /var/rm and it should be recreated afterwards and everything should be fine. It is particularly wise to do this after upgrading your RAM. I upgraded mine from 1GB to 3GB and did not know that I had to do this.

apple · crash · hardware · hibernate · hibernation · MacBook · OS X · safe sleep · sleep · upgrade

With rumours circulating in the last couple of months of Apple’s plans to open new stores in Sydney, I wonder if this will mean a vastly improved customer experience at the store level. If it is, then it will be the one-stop shop for all my Apple needs (everyone has an Apple need, right?).

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academy · apple · counter · offensive · store