Stupid Robots

Switched over from Laughing Squid hosting (the older stuff, not the cloud hosting) to Dreamhost. While LS was decent, I wanted to do some more complicated things (custom DNS settings, subdomains) and didn’t want to have to rely on someone else to handle it. That, and Dreamhost was having a massive discount on Martin Luther King day. So, The migration is complete, total downtime of maybe 3 hours or so. Coming up: Drupal. I’ve been messing with Drupal quite a bit recently, and I like the way it works (content creation, management, coding).

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A slow computer is a pain to use, and trying to figure out what’s causing the slowdown can be a difficult process. Here are some steps I use to figure out what’s slowing me down.

The first step is to figure out what’s prompting the slowdown. If it’s happening at login or at startup, it’s probably a program launching in the background. You can see which programs are starting when you login by going to System preferences, then the Accounts pane. It should pop up showing your account. Click the tab titled “Login Items”.

This shows the various programs that start up when you log in to your account. I have a lot, but most people don’t have this many. Many of the programs that I have set to start up at login are helpers, that watch for an event to happen and then act on it. One item that almost everybody has is iTunesHelper, so don’t be alarmed about that one. If you see one that seems out of the ordinary, Google it to see what it does.

Startup Items are programs that run when your computer is started up, and there are a couple of ways that they can start up. The older (and more common) way to have them start is by placing a copy, or a link to the real program, in the StartupItems folder. These fodlers are in the root level of your hard drive. Be very careful of what you do here, as you can seriously muck up your system if you change a setting. The one in /Library/StartupItems/ is used by third party programs, and is where your trouble might lie. Check there, Googling odd programs.

If your computer is slowing down at seemingly random moments, you can try catching the offending program in the act using Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor lives in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder of your computer. Set it up so you’re looking at all processes, and they’re sorted by CPU usage.

Keep this program running, and when your computer slows down, look to see what program is using a lot of the processor (it can go above 100% if you have multiple cores). If you don’t recognize the program, Google it (sense a pattern?) to see what it does. If it’s something you can do without, quit it, either by using the Quit button in Activity Monitor or by navigating to the program and quitting it there. If the program is owned by another user, you will have to enter an Administrators name and password.

If your computer is still slowing down, there’s another way you can figure out what’s wrong. When a program is encountering situations it isn’t prepared for, it usually outputs an error or debugging message to a log file. You can view these log files using the Console application. This program also resides in /Applications/Utilities/. Make sure you have the all messages option selected, and then scroll back to the time your slowdown occured and see if an application was outputting a lot of logging messages at that time. If there is one, just treat it like you would if you found the offending program with Activity Monitor (Google, quit it).

There are other places programs can hide to autostart, and while you can find out if they’re misbehaving using Activity Monitor or Console, trying to stop them permanently is a tutorial too large for this article. As a push in the right direction, it involves the daemon launchd and the command launchctl in the Terminal.

Hmm, been a while since I posted here. Well, back to fun stuff.

My family (minus my dad and I) use a PowerPC Mac mini for their computing needs. It’s been going fine for 3.5 years now, but it’s been getting a bit slow, and the 80GB hard drive is running out of space. I convinced my dad that a hard drive upgrade might help with the speed, and would definitely give my mom more space to store photos. We ordered a 160GB drive from Newegg (this one), so a 2x increase in space would be seen.

Sidenote: PowerPC Macs are fine machines, and while this one may just be 1.5GHz, it has performance closer to a 2GHz Pentium 4 or something. Nothing amazing, but pretty good. It handles 4 users on a daily basis, each logged in with Fast User Switching. The discrete GPU means it can handle games decently well, and the only thing I wish was better (well, I wish it all was better, but this is the biggie) was the RAM. 1GB is too tight for 4 people to use.

There used to be a couple of guides online on how to upgrade the HD in PPC minis, but they seem to have been taken down over the years. I did find a video guide on the Other World Computing site, but it didn’t cover what to do for the antennas, so I decided to play it by ear for those.

To replace the hard drive, you’ll need a very thin putty knife, and P0 and  P1 size screwdriver. The P1 will need to have a long, thin shaft (3 inches should do it) as it needs to reach through a hole to a screw. Hardware wise, you’ll need a PPC Mac mini, a new hard drive, and an external, 2.5″ IDE hard drive enclosure. I got a cheap enclosure at my friendly neighborhood Microcenter, and a new putty knife at Home depot, so I’m ready to go.

There are two ways to transfer your data from the old drive to the new one. You can pop the new hard drive in the enclosure, and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive before you swap the hard drives, or you can do it afterwards with some fancy magic. I was impatient and took out the old drive before the new one had arrived (which it did later that day), so the second option was the way I went.

To open the mini, first flip it over so the white plastic is face down on a hard surface.

Then, slip the putty knife in between the plastic and the aluminum outer case…

…and then bend the knife out. The clips on that side should pop out, and that side of the base will pop up.

Now slide the putty knife into the other side. This will take a lot more force, as there’s not a lot of clearance now. I find it helpful to make the tip of the knife thinner by sanding it down. Repeat the process on this side.

Now pull the base up. You may need to use the putty knife to lever the base up more. Now you have the actual computer. Put the shell aside for now, we don’t need to touch it. Also, now is a good time to start blowing the dust out of the crevices, as this machine probably hasn’t been opened in years. The two metallic plates are the antennas for Bluetooth and Airport. If you don’t have them, skip the next 2 steps. To remove the antenna closer to the rear, just pull up on the rearmost part of the antenna, and the rest of the antenna will come off the clip holding it.

The next one is a bit more delicate. Loosen (not remove) the screw on the left hand side of the drive sled towards the front. The antenna is now able to be slid up.

Now we need to remove the drive sled. There are three screws you need to unscrew. Note, all of the screws in here, except for the 4 holding the actual hard drive, are P0 size, so use the appropriate screwdriver.

Now gently lift the drive sled up. You need to pull the drive interface board from the motherboard. If you have the antennas, thread them through the hole while you’re removing the sled.

Next, remove the optical drive. There are 6 screws, 2 each on the 3 sides that don’t have a large, disc sized whole in them.

Now gently slide the optical drive forward with one hand while holding the interface board with your other.Put the drive and it’s screws in a safe place.

Now, remove then fan. I’ve heard there can be either 2 or 3 screws holding it in. Mine had 3. Just let the fan flap around, you just needed it out of the way of a screw.

Now remove the 4 screws holding the hard drive in. These are the P1 sized ones. There are 2 on this side…

..and 2 on this side. The first is where the fan was and the other is accessed by sticking a screwdriver through a hole to access it. You should remove the kynar tape, but I forgot about it and just punched through it.

Now separate the hard drive from the interface board.

Now put the new drive on the interface board, and screw it back in.

Put the fan back.

And the optical drive

Replace the drive sled, making sure to thread the antennas back in if you have them.

To replace the rear antenna, just clip it back on. The front one is a bit trickier. First, loosen the screw it needs, then slide the metal clips into the grooves for them in between the drive sled and the optical drive.

Now put the shell back on. Make sure the antenna wires are tucked safely away inside the case. position the shell on top of the base, and then press down on it evenly, making sure not to have one side drop too much more than the other. Also watch out for the metal shielding on the back, it might get caught, and that would be bad.

Now install the old drive into your enclosure. This is a pretty cheap one, but follow the instructions that came with it.

Now you can transfer the old data over (if you haven’t before). If you have a Firewire external drive, you can boot off of it and use Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer the data over. If you have a USB external drive, you need another computer. Connect the old drive to the other computer with USB, and then connect the mini to the extra computer with a Firewire 400 cable. Make sure the extra computer is booted up. Now press the minis power button, and hold down the ‘T’ key on a keyboard attached to the mini. THis boots it into Firewire Target Disk Mode, allowing the extra computer to access the hard drive inside of it over Firewire. A message may pop up saying the disk is unreadable, this is normal, select “Initialize…”. If it doesn’t pop up, open up Disk Utility and format the drive as “Mac OS Extended (journaled)”. Now you can clone the data using Carbon Copy Cloner. It took a bit over 2 hours to transfer ~70GB of data, so go take a nap or something while you wait. When it’s done, your mini will be able to boot off of the new drive. Now find some use for a smallish external drive.

Tags: Mac —

I rip my DVDs using a combination of Handbrake and MacTheRipper. I use the 3.0 R14m version. Find a good torrent on TPB, I can;t remember where I got it, but I didn’t pay the stupid ‘donation’. As they’re using libdvdcss, it’s kinda illegal for them to be using it without releasing the source. For Handbrake, I’m using a beta I compiled a while back that has processor specific optimizations. It also has the patch for the Quicktime AAC encoder. If you want it, drop me a comment, and I’ll put it up, but it’s only for Core 2 Duos.

First, I rip the main feature of the DVD. I don’t have any need for the special features. Select just the languages you need, and let MTR do it’s magic. Occasionally MTR will die right at the end of the rip, but switching so it rips the whole disc usually solves it. Be careful when ripping foreign films, as the English track may not exist even of MTR selects it. I usually rip the whole disc for those.

Next, I encode it using Handbrake. For video, I use the x264 encoder into a MP4 file. Two pass encoding with a turbo first pass. Average bitrate of 1850kbps, and for widescreen movies I use strict anamorphic. For audio, I use the AAC (CoreAudio) encoder, mixing down to Dolby Pro Logic II at 192kbps. I fill in the chapter titles when I can from the DVD liner notes, and I have a custom advanced settings string:
ref=6:bframes=4:subq=6:me=umh:deblock=1,2:trellis=2:direct=auto:weightb=1:brdo=1:bime=1:analyse=all:8x8dct=1:merange=24:mixed-refs=1:psy-rd=1.0,1.0

These settings take a while (if it’s the only thing running, you’re looking at about 5-6 hours per movie). I get about 1GB per hour of movie, and minimal blocking and a high enough quality for me. For most people, the defaults will work fine.

I have a ‘Scratch’ Folder on my desktop where I store the files used in the intermediate steps so Time Machine doesn’t fill up on unfinished files. To do this, Go to the Time Machine Preference pane and add an excluded folder.

Here’s a good portion of the applications I use on a day to day basis. Hopefully someone finds something they didn’t know about and I’ve helped them out.

First up are my media apps. Music, Photos, Movies, it’s all here.

The biggie is iTunes. I manage all of my music and movies on there, but there’s some tricks I take advantage of. My internal laptop drive is only 250GB, with 160GB of it for OS X. My movies on the other hand, take up almost 100GB. So, I keep my movies on an external terabyte drive, and have a thing called a symbolic link connecting the “Movies” folder in the iTunes Library to the Movies folder on my external drive. Other things special to my iTunes is the original Magnetosphere visualizer, which is what the newest iTunes visualizer was based on. Looks cooler in my opinion.

Related to iTunes is Last.fm, which keeps a nice little log of what I’m listening to, and also suggests new stuff to me.

PandoraBoy is a standalone Pandora client that has support for the Apple Remote, so it can be controlled from across the room

I use VLC and Mplayer to play esoteric media files. Mplayer for OS X is old and beta, but works well enough. Related to those is Perian, which is a driver pack for Quicktime. Another driver pack that gets a lot of use from me are the Windows Media Components for Quicktime.

To rip DVDs, I use a two step process of first removing the copy protection with MacTheRipper (torrent the latest beta, as charging for open source is BS), the encoding with a custom build of Handbrake that uses the Quicktime audio encoder and optimizations for my machine only.

Synergy is a cool little app I got that puts a little overlay of the track name whenever a new track starts in iTunes.

I also have the latest version of iLife, so there’s iWeb, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD on here. Note a lack of Garageband, which I don’t use at all, and takes up a load of space on a hard drive. Instead of Garageband, I use Audacity for my audio editing needs. It’s small, and has some extra things I like (generating sine tones for one).

Delicious Library 2 is a kinda cool app, though I still haven’t gotten around to adding my books into it as I just got it recently.

Tags: Mac —

So, yeah! An honest-to-god website. I’ll try to fill it up with funs stuff over time, so check back in a while (or subscribe)

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