So I recently got a new MacBook Pro to replace my ailing one which gave me the rare opportunity to compare my late 2008 (the first unibody MBP) with the new 2010 model.

The main difference between the two models are the CPUs, mine has the Intel 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo and the new one has the new Intel 2.66GHz Core i7. I also opted for the new High-res anti-glare screen over the regular glossy one I have now. (Back then, it wasn’t even an option to chose from).

Cracking the box open, you still get the same sleek packaging, with the little “Designed by Apple in California” label, the documentation and cables in the tray, etc… Why mess with a great package design, right? Read the rest of this entry »

So I don’t know if this is something that I missed entirely in the documentation, but a while back, one of the drives in my NAS gave up on life and decided to stop working. Being the lazy person I am, and relying on the uber redundancy of RAID6, I left it for a few weeks (including the time after I purchased a replacement drive). In my defence, I lost the key to the drive trays and had to wait until a friend of mine could find me one. (To skip my long winded path to the end solution, just jump to the last paragraph)

In any case, today I swapped in the replacement and in an anti-climactic fashion, nothing happened. In fact, it didn’t even pick up the new drive. I feared that the NAS itself was dead and I would have to go through the painful process of getting a replacement and everything. None the less, I decided to would take a chance and reboot the unit. Luckily, this did the trick and while it still didn’t automatically rebuild the array, it now detected the new drive.

Checking the RAID configuration page, the only available option was to assign the new drive as a spare.

After some digging on the Thecus Forums, the only mention I found was indirectly through another person’s troubleshooting post where he mentions that setting the drive as a spare fixed his issue.

I was hoping to get some solid information that would support this, but I figured I had nothing to lose and at the very least, I’d have a RAID5 array with a hot spare to back me up.

9 hours later, I’m back up and running, and the RAID 6 array is healthy once again. It would have been nice if Thecus had some better documentation available, but I suppose piggybacking on a forum is better than nothing.

In short, if a drive in your RAID array fails, and if after replacing the drive it doesn’t automatically rebuild, just go into the RAID configuration screen and set it as a spare and the NAS will start rebuilding the array at that point.

In a press release, AT&T announced that on April 17th, select locations in New York City, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco will be sporting a new toy with their cellphone displays. A Microsoft Surface to be exact.

Initially the Surface will be used to display information about the cellphones for sale as well as display service area maps but AT&T hopes that in the future the Surface will allow users to drag ringtones, graphics and videos to the phones. Note that it says “the” phones suggesting the display models, and not a user’s phone… Perhaps just a way to cover their behinds in case the Surface doesn’t work out as they planned.

Store locations and images can be found on the AT&T website here.

Currently I store all my precious data on an old computer turned server which has worked great for a bunch of years now but it’s time for an upgrade. The 150GB hard drive is filled up and having all my important stuff on 1 hard drive is making me pretty nervous. So I picked up a Thecus N5200B, also known as the N5200 Pro which sports dual gigabit LAN connections, 5 SATA II hot swappable drive bays, and as far as I know, the only consumer NAS that supports RAID 6. Full specifications can be found on the Thecus website.

If you’re like me and like shiny things and blinky lights, this unit is definitely for you! Read on for my initial thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

So as expected, early iPhone adopters were NOT happy about the announcement made by Steve Jobs yesterday at his special event. And because of the floods of emails he got, Steve posted an open letter on the Apple website to all iPhone owners.

His letter basically tries to justify the decision to drop the price of the iPhone and in the end says that any customers who bought an iPhone from Apple or AT&T and isn’t already getting some kind of a rebate will be given a $100 gift card for the Apple store. Details haven’t been posted yet but he promises something will be on the Apple website in the next week.

It appears that Apple is trying to gain back investor confidence since after yesterday’s announcements, Apple stock has been on a pretty steady decline. We’ll have to see how this works out for them.

So today is a pretty big day for all you iPhone fanatics. A New Jersey teen has confirmed today that he was able to unlock the iPhone from AT&T and is using it on T-Mobile. The instructions have been posted on his blog and basically requires you to solder 2 wires and then from there on out, is all about editing the firmware. This is not something for just anyone but I’m sure in a few more days there will be software to do all this apart from the soldering.

Get ready for the flood of unlocked iPhones on eBay!

Anyone who’s not been hiding under a rock since January will have heard about the iPhone and its release just a few days ago on the 29th of June. And within these few days, the iPhone has been dissected, had activation problems, and even had its root password cracked (which is useless as far as we know right now). While we Canadians are still without access to the iPhone for another year, in the late fall, we may be lucky enough to get the next gen iPhone after everyone else has had a chance to work out the bugs for us .

Some common complaints about the iPhone are it’s lack of a video recording function, no memory card expansion, non-user serviceable battery, 64-bit Windows and Vista not supported, and the CPU being a little underpowered when browsing or downloading long emails possibly in conjunction with a lack of available system memory too. One comment I got from a friend of mine when he was in the US playing with an iPhone at the Apple store was, as he said it, “[it] didn’t seem to work right unless I held it upright at an unnatural angle. The flipping back and forth between portrait and landscape isn’t quite as smooth as I’d have expected.”
AnandTech has a pretty extensive review of the iPhone for anyone who’s been trying to decide whether or not to buy one so I’d recommend you’d check that out first. Obviously the biggest selling point to the Apple iPhone is its great looks and “groundbreaking” user interface both of which just makes anyone who sees it go “ooooohhhh.. aaaahhhh…”

I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who’s purchased an iPhone to let us know what their real life experiences are with it.

Anyone with a Logitech keyboard with multimedia keys knows that Setpoint does not play nice with foobar. In fact, there’s no actual support by Logitech! BUT there is a fix! Check out this post over at Weyland.be for instructions.