When your Macbook Pro's graphic card dies

Image via WikipediaAs it was noted in major publications several times already, NVidia made quite a mistake when they produced N84/N86 graphic cards with faulty parts. So when I became an early adopter and bought myself a Macbook Pro in July of 2007, I was also given one of these graphic cards and until now it's performance was nothing but breath taking. Unfortunately it appers that my usage patterns (probably a bit above-average carrying around, but not everyday) have finally brought it to it's knees and on Friday evening it died.

Since in Slovenia we can't use Apple Care I was more than pleased when Apple announced that they will be extending the warranty for their graphic cards to two years - I was just a month or so over warranty.

With my mind at rest about possible costs of repair I decided it was time to see how can I make the newest backup of the data on the hard drive. Since I could clearly see that my MBP successfully log-ins and connect to my home WI-FI network (broadcasting ping helped with that - ping -b 192.168.1.255), my first thought was that I should use SSH to log into the computer and then begin the painful process of copying somewhere around 100GB of data over 802.11G WI-FI and to the USB hard drive. But this didn't work because I have closed port 22 for SSH. For a laptop, that seemed quite reasonable at the time.

After discussing options like taking disk out and use converter for SATA/IDE-to-USB to plug it into other computer, mounting my MBP as target disk on my friend's Mac, etc., I was finally struck with divine inspiration - "If it can connect to WI-FI then obviously everything starts as normal, therefore I can just use Time Machine". The second I thought about it I was thinking to myself "how couldn't I thought of that before"?

Few minutes on and Time Machine was happily making backups.

So remember kids: Use backup and use a backup solution that can do EVERYTHING on itself with no buttons like "Yes, make me a backup".

Neat chairs lying around Ljubljana

Since I am fully occupied this summer (first a trip to Belgium, Paris and Amsterdam, now internship at Zemanta) I am left to plea guilty on charges of neglecting my blog. ;)

For a start I would like to touch a bit lighter theme - does anyone know what all those chairs that lie around Ljubljana are for (besides sitting on them :-)? I have a feeling that they are meant to be there with some kind of artistic reason - if not that, were they at least put there at some special occasion or something?


"Ljubljana chairs" (that is written on them) is just a bit too general search term for Google...

Visor, turns Terminal to quake-like console

A few days ago I went to Blacktree to download Quicksilver to give it another try (when I started with OS X I didn't saw value in it; few months later it really turns out that Spotlight is a bit limiting) and found a rather interesting add-on for standard Terminal - Visor. Visor gives you the ability to press a custom key combination to show Terminal - just like Quakes in-game console for advanced commands and finer tweaking of the game.

As far as I've been using it, it turns out to be quite useful. When you need to quickly do something in console it is already at your fingertips, but if you someday feel the need for a conventional stand-alone console you just press Command+N to open it.

I find it particularly useful because I can summon the console by just pressing alt+space instead of constantly trying to find the console with alt+tab+tab+tab ("Oh no, I just pressed tab one time too many and now landed on another Space. Again.")

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Download photos from Picasa Web

Image via WikipediaFew days ago I had a problem of downloading pictures from one of Picasa web galleries. There was no download button and even if it were I would still need Picasa to download them. At first I was a bit disappointed by this and thought that I would have to write a script for myself or use a separate program to get them. But I then realized that Picasa Web makes a RSS feed for every gallery unless user specifically disables it.

I launched iPhoto and quickly found the solution to my problem - Subscribe to Photo Feed (Command+U) in File menu. Voila! Problem solved and entire album downloaded without the hasle to download another program just for a bunch of photos as it is suggested in one of the related articles.

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Status updates on your pizzas

Image by brotherxii via FlickrBy pure coincidence I stumbled upon an interesting script - while reading Amit Gupta's Tumblr I noticed he linked to a python script that checks on regular intervals what is the status of pizza you ordered.

But more than the script I was plesantly surprised about the idea - pizzas were delivered to our homes even before internet but only now had the concept of live tracking came to life. For the time being, only in US.

It will take some time to be used widely even though ordering meals to your home is quite popular among students in Ljubljana and would probably be welcomed among them. When one is hungry minutes just seem to last forever and I can imagine that knowing what is happening to your meal would make a bit of a difference.

Personally I am not a fan of ordering food - with the notable exception of pizzas - everything just looks a bit weird to me when they deliver it to your door. But such live tracking would be awesome not just for food.

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Mail costs - US to Slovenia

Image from FlickrFew days ago I decided that my iPod Touch is going to need a bit of protection if I am going to carry it around. After a bit of thought I decided to order Sena Ultraslim Pouch since I wasn't too thrilled about some of the other cases that look a bit to chunky for everyday use.

Not too pricey and with a special offer 9.99 dollars for international shipping it seemed a pretty good deal. I grabed my debit card and ordered it straight away. The only problem was that I forgot to read fine print regarding international shipping.

Only after already making a transaction I took the time to read the fine print and see that Slovenia was one of the countries which are not valid for special offer. It seems that although Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 and is heading it for the past five months or so, we still sometimes find ourselves experiencing special treatment. In my case this special treatment would mean that I would have to pay additional 30 dollars to Fedex for costs of getting a package from civilization to Slovenia - the same amount as I would have to pay for the case itself.

If I was a bit disappointed about Fedex (I presume its their policy/offer), I do have to give some praise to Sena though - after contacting their support about my sloppiness, their average response time was about 5 minutes and they reverted transaction straight away. Although funds were already withdrawn from my account, they should happily reappear in a few business days according to their representative. I will probably try to get the same case but this time in some other way.

Oh well, need to think pink and forget about banana republic...

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View PDFs on iPod Touch with FilemarkMaker

Image by riccardodivirgilio via FlickrAfter playing around with my iPod Touch for a few days (didn't jailbreaked it yet though) I quickly came to the idea of reading PDFs on it - and as simple as that may sounds, it turns out it's not. Although you can sync quite a few things with your Mac, you can't sync PDFs.

At first I tried by just importing PDFs to iTunes, but you still can't copy them over to the iPod. Then I tried to save and view PDF as an image but although I was using pretty decent images, iPod still shrinks them down to 640x480 or something which makes them unreadable.

Two ways that I found to actualy work were mailing PDFs to myself and reading them in the Mail application or using Filemark Maker. Mailing PDFs would be acceptable, but it still feels a bit awkward to me personaly and I decided that for the time being I will be using Filemark Maker.

Basicaly what Filemark Maker does is that it uses data: URI scheme to encode PDFs as URLs which you can bookmark and - after syncing your bookmarks with your iPod Touch - open and read as if they were located localy on file system.

It works well with small files and until you bookmark a couple of PDFs - after that I noticed a bit of a lag (about 5-10 seconds) when starting Safari for the first time since restarting iPod. I suspect it caches bookmarks afterwards and all works well.

I am still wondering however why Apple decided not to support syncing of PDFs or giving iPod Touch and iPhone users some other way of storing PDFs and other formats that Safari/Mail support...

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