Category: Technology

MacBook Pro Mid 2009 : Replacing hard drive with SSD…

I’ve had my 13″ MacBook Pro since the mid 2009 refresh and it’s been really reliable. Apart from one brief visit to Apple to replace a noisy fan, I’ve had no worries. A few years ago I upgraded from 4G  to 8G RAM, so I’m not stranger to taking the back off it.

Even though it’s quite old by computer geek standards, I really don’t have any performance problems. I do demos with a couple of Linux VMs running Oracle and it works OK. Despite this, I was bored the other night and decided to buy an SSD to replace the internal hard drive. It arrived yesterday, so during last nights insomnia, I decided to fit the hard drive, rather than stare at the ceiling.

The actual hard drive replacement is pretty simple. You can see an example of it here. It takes about 5 minutes.

The transfer of the data proved a little more tricky than I expected though…

Attempt 1:

I use Time Machine for backups, so I slapped in the new hard drive, booted from the CD and expected to just restore from Time Machine. It turns out my Time Machine backups weren’t as complete as I thought. 🙁

Attempt 2:

No worries. I connected my old hard drive using a USB cable, booted from the CD and used the Disk Utility to restore the old hard drive to the new SSD. That would have been fine, except the new hard drive was fractionally smaller than the old one. That would have been fine for a Time Machine backup, since the old drive was not completely full, but for an image restore it’s a big no-no. Now I was starting to get worried. I could always replace the old drive, but I was starting to think I might have wasted my money.

Attempt 3:

So finally I bit the bullet and re-installed Snow Leopard (the most recent media I had), upgraded to Lion, then Mountain Lion through the App Store. Once that was done I dragged my apps and data from the old drive across to the new drive. Job’s a good’un!

So it got solved in the end, but it wasn’t quite the blissful experience I expected. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Thanks to Luis Marques for reminding me about TRIM, with this Twitter comment, “Tim, don’t forget to enable TRIM on SSD (if it supports it) using this http://chameleon.alessandroboschini.it/index.php  or http://www.groths.org/trim-enabler/“

MobaXterm 6.3…

Thanks to Norman Dunbar for pointing out that MobaXterm 6.3 has been released. You can find the download and changelog in the usual place.

I’ll be interested to see how the performance improvements to SFTP work out. I’ve seen some issues with this during transfers of large files before. The built in NFS and VNC servers sound interesting too. I can think of one situation where the NFS server would come in really handy. 🙂

Great stuff!

Cheers

Tim…

Windows PowerShell…

Followers of the blog know I’m a Linux fan, but over the weekend I needed to fix some stuff on a Windows server at work and I took my first tentative steps into the world of Windows PowerShell. It was very much a case of “scripting by Google”, but I managed to get the job done pretty quickly. That episode prompted this tweet.

That resulted in two little exchanges. The first from Niall Litchfield, who must have been a little under the weather. 🙂

The second from @WindowsServer.

I think that’s my first interaction with Microsoft on any social network. I sense a new website called “Windows-and-SQL-Server-and-PowerShell-base.com” coming on. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

 

WordPress Security…

With all the recent press about global brute force attacks on WordPress I decided to install the Better WP Security plugin last Sunday.

It includes loads of security features, including the big ones mentioned in the recent attacks:

  • Changing the name of the “admin” user.
  • Changing the ID of your renamed admin user.
  • Changing the table prefix.
  • Max login attempts lockdown.

Of the 5 blogs I manage, 4 worked straight off with this plugin. Unfortunately, one required a few attempts, so remember to take filesystem and database backups before you start or you may not end up in a happy place.

Over the week since activating the plugin I’ve been quite interested/scared by the results. I’ve been getting several emails a day telling me of user lockdowns due to attempted brute force attacks originating from USA, Russia and the Netherlands.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress installation, you really need to take some basic steps stop yourself becoming a victim. There are a number of security plugins available, which I’m sure work equally well, but I only have experience of this one.

Good luck.

Cheers

Tim…

UltraEdit for Linux/Mac v4.0 Beta II

Hot on the heels of the recent UltraEdit v19 release for Windows, comes the UltraEdit v4 Beta II release for Linux/Mac.

I’ve just started using it and so far so good. They usually progress through the betas pretty quick. I didn’t have time to install the beta I before this one dropped. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

The problem with free and RSS…

The internet has been awash with people bemoaning the decision by Google to close Google Reader. Probably the next biggest talking point has been people asking what they can use to replace it when it’s gone. I’m planning on giving TheOldReader.com a test-drive, once I can get my feeds imported. 🙂

The problem with free

This highlights one of the problems with free stuff. It’s not (always) really free. Google spent a few years building stuff, some of which was pretty cool, and most of which was free, but sooner or later they needed to find a way to monetize this stuff. That’s one thing that never happened with Reader, so not surprisingly it joined the growing list of things that have been cleaned away to make room for the more profitable stuff. It’s a pity Google didn’t first ask people if they were willing to pay a fee to keep the service. Like many others, I would have been willing to pay for the privilege of retaining it.

The problem with RSS

It also suggests that RSS was never really that popular. It’s easy when you are a tech-blogger to think the whole world reads blogs and cares about RSS, but the truth is most people just don’t give a crap. I use RSS to keep on top of things going on in the industry. If I relied on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook I would miss out on loads of things because the UK timezone doesn’t really fit with the vast majority of publishing in my chosen profession. Also, the signal:noise ratio of my RSS feeds is much better than that of most social media channels I subscribe to. So being one of the vast minority of people that actually do care about RSS has left me in a bad situation.

I’m interested to hear any thoughts on ways of ridding myself of RSS, or any other tools you’ve seen that might help me out of my current predicament. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I’ve decided on feedly.com for the moment.

 

 

 

 

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