Category: computers

A New iMac‽‽‽

Published December 10, 2010

This past weekend I took my iMac back into the Apple Store to try and get the now-blemished (after another repair) display resolved. Per usual a part was ordered, and on Thursday morning I took the machine in to have the display replaced. Last night when checking on the repair status I noticed that the machine was ready, so I called Apple to see if I could pick it up. Extremely unexpectedly, the person who took my call explained that the data transfer was almost complete and that I should be able to pick it up in the morning. I found this very bizarre, as a data transfer is normally only done when upgrading a machine or replacing the hard disk.

It turns out that something went wrong during the repair and instead of having me wait on another part I was going to be given a new / replacement iMac and the data transfer was to get everything moved over. Talking to the tech when I picked up the machine it sounds as if someone “plugged something in wrong” or somehow made the logic board (motherboard in Apple-speak) fail and instead of waiting for yet another part to arrive Apple instead opted to just give me a new machine. This includes a receipt exchanging my machine for the new one, AppleCare transfer, and all.

The machine returned to me is the Mid 2010 model which has some nice upgrades over my original one (Late 2009), as shown here. Specifically, it has a slightly faster processor (2.96GHz Intel i7-870 vs. 2.80GHz Intel i7-860) and better video (ATI Radeon HD 5750 w/1GB RAM vs. ATI Radeon HD 4850 w/ 512MB RAM) and a comparable hard drive (Western Digital WDC WD1001FALS-40Y6A0 vs. Seagate ST31000528ASQ).

The nicest upgrade was the way the RAM ended up being reconfigured. When I took my Late 2009 27″ iMac in it was fitted with 4x 2GB 1066MHz PC3-8500 SO-DIMMs; two OEM Apple parts and two purchased from Crucial. When returned to me the new / Mid 2010 machine had 2x Apple 4GB 1333MHz PC3-10667 SO-DIMMs. This swap was necessitated by the newer machine’s faster RAM requirements, and it’s really nice to see that Apple replaced things in this way. Before this I had no free slots, which meant that going above 8GB of RAM would have required me to throw out two existing modules. Now there are two free slots, so whenever the next upgrade comes around I won’t have to toss out any parts.

This worked out pretty well, as the new machine has a just-fine display that came wrapped up just like new. There’s a slight small bit of what appears to be plastic on the inside of the glass in the lower right corner, but it’s so small that I don’t really notice it and can probably remove it with a slight puff of air; nothing to complain about at all. There was also a small black smudge on the front bezel, but this came off with a bit of alcohol.

While this whole experience was a bit frustrating overall, I’m content that it worked out this way. I received a newer machine, it appears to work fine, and my inconvenience was offset by a minor, but nice upgrade. And to think it all started with nothing more than a bad optical drive…

(As part of the upgrade I also received the disc set that goes with the machine, and this includes an iLife 11 install disc. This will be quite handy.)

Update on October 21, 2014: When at the Apple store attempting to get the GPU in this iMac fixed for free, I found out what happened to my original 2009 iMac: the LVDS connector on the logic board was damaged. Apple must have then opted to replace the entire machine.

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Apple Magic Trackpad and MiddleClick

Published December 3, 2010

Unlike the Magic Mouse (which hurt my hand within minutes of beginning to use it), Apple’s Magic Trackpad is a rather nice cursor input device. It’s identical to the touchpad in Apple’s newer MacBook Pro family, where multi-touch is used in conjunction with an entire touchpad that clicks, eliminating the need for both buttons and tap clicking. I personally cannot stand tap clicking on touchpads, so I will normally disable it and either have one hand on the button and the other on the pad (when I need to work quickly) or lift my finger to move it to the pad to click. With this device one can simply use multi-finger gestures for scrolling and app switching while clicking the entire pad with one (or more) fingers.

As the Magic Trackpad ships, Apple has support for scrolling, primary and secondary clicking (left and right), application switching, and Exposé activation. What Apple (stupidly) did not include is any method of sending a tertiary (middle) click which is the de-facto method for opening links in new tabs in all modern web browsers. Without this one has to either hold Command (⌘) and click (a two-handed affair) or secondary/right click and select open in new tab (slow). Both of these make quickly reading web pages difficult.

Thankfully a guy by the name of Clement Beffa wrote a MiddleClick, a utility which makes three-finger taps (or clicks), an input not captured by Apple’s software, send a middle click. The version (currently) on the main page (MD5 checksum e7a7e1b5f5e55cb5ffac6d091f03f8c9) is slightly broken and the 3 Finger Click option in the menu doesn’t work. However, this version (MD5 checksum 1b02e356684c40bbbb21cf83f70c52ca) does work properly and I’ve been using it to three-finger click for a few hours now. This makes basic web browsing and reading pages a one-handed affair

The only complaint that I now have about the Magic Trackpad is that the pivot for clicking is near the top of the pad, which makes clicking the pad near the top more difficult than when it is pressed near the bottom. This isn’t terrible, though, as clicking the pad near the bottom does not feel abnormal and is what I (currently) find myself doing naturally.

For the time being I’ve unplugged my mouse, and I’m quickly finding the Magic Trackpad to be quite comfortable to use. It’ll take another week or three before I’m sure that I’m comfortable with it, but for now things seem to be going quite well. I’ll need to go back the a classic mouse when using EAGLE for PCB CAD, but that’s a special case because quickly using it requires the one to do things such as hold one mouse button while clicking another.

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Apple Damaged My 27″ iMac’s LCD

Published December 3, 2010

Trying to resolve the apparent smudge inside my iMac’s display resulting from a recent Genius Bar repair I bought two of these $2.99 suction cups (item number 46900) from Harbor Freight^† and used them to open the display per these instructions.

Opening the display is trivial, as gently lifting on the suction cup handles popped the glass face upward and allowed it to be lifted off. Unfortunately, the mark noticed last night is not a smudge on the panel or glass, but instead appears to be in the panel itself. I spent time cleaning the panel because it also had a number of hand and finger prints on it, blew out some dust, then closed it up. It now looks perfect, save for the mark in the upper left corner. (Note, cleaning a display before closing it up is non-trivial and simply not fun.

Since this wasn’t there before the repair job I can only presume that something done by the Apple tech damaged the display. I guess I’m going to have to take it back again and see what they’ll do.

I’m rather disappointed by this.

^† These suction cups, Harbor Freight item number 46900, appear to be identical to iFixit item IF145-023-1. The color, description (lifts 15 pounds!), and even details of the molding are identical between the two.

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27″ iMac Display Smudge after Genius Bar Repair

Published December 2, 2010

On Monday I took my 27″ iMac in to have its optical drive replaced. While at the Partridge Creek Apple Store Genius Bar being repaired the techs noticed that a fan wasn’t behaving as it should, so they replaced that as well. When I picked it up today everything seems fine, except there’s now a small smudge in the upper left corner of the screen (seen above) and a thin smudge line across the main panel a few inches below that. Both of these appear to be on the LCD itself, which is located just behind the flat glass front.

I’m a bit disappointed, but I may end up just cleaning this myself as removing the glass to access the inside of a late-model iMac is apparently not particularly complicated. I’ll need to do this myself in the future if I ever want to upgrade the hard drive, so I may as well buy some small suction cups now and do it.

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iMac Goes To The Hospital

Published November 23, 2010

My desk looks pretty sparse without the 27″ iMac sitting on it. A few months back I noticed that the optical drive wasn’t working correctly, so today after calling support I have a 1pm appointment at the local Apple store to have the problem assessed. Since the drive simply doesn’t read disks; making slight clicking and whirring noises before ejecting them, I believe that the drive probably needs to be replaced. Hopefully there is a spare drive in the store and the techs will be able to replace the drive quickly, as this machine is pretty core to my network at home.

At least this will give me an easy chance to clean behind where it normally sits. A fair bit of dust has built up back there in the last year.

UPDATE: A new optical drive has been ordered, and Apple will call me when it’s in the store so I can bring the iMac back in to have the replacement done. Until then I’ve got my iMac back at home.

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Plantronics Blackwire C610

Published November 12, 2010

I occasionally have to work from home, and most of that work ends up involving long conference calls. I’ve taken to using VOIP for these calls, but until now I didn’t have a quality headset to use during such calls. I’d tried everything from speakerphone via my iMac‘s built-in audio to an iMic and old analog gaming headset, but nothing sounded good and was comfortable to wear for more than a few minutes.

Having used Plantronics headsets for years at work I decided to see what they offered for portable / computer use and came across the Blackwire C610, one of their enterprise products and purchased it from PROVANTAGE for just under $70 shipped.

Without loading any drivers or software this headset shows up as a standard mono USB audio device, and its inline volume and mute switch works independently of the computer. The mute button also beeps through the earpiece to indicate mute status, and illuminates a dim red when the mic is muted. The headset weights a bit less than the handset alternative headset that I’d used at work for the last nine years and comes with the typical cord clip. There is also a two ear version (the Blackwire C620) for those who don’t like one-ear headsets.

The headset comes with both foam and leatherette ear piece covers, and the sound quality is outstanding. In tests calling friends and on conference calls I’ve received no complaints about quality, and when specifically asked I’ve been told that it sounds better than any mobile phone I’ve used recently. (This probably also has a fair bit to do with the PCM codec used by my VOIP provider.)

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VBScript Function to Check Active Directory Domain Access

Published October 4, 2010

The following VBScript function can be used to check if a given username and password has access to the specified domain. It will return true or false depending on whether or not access was granted.

function fnCheckAccess(strDomain, strUserID, strUserPWD)

    const ADS_SECURE_AUTHENTICATION = &H01
    const ADS_CHASE_REFERRALS_ALWAYS = &H60

    dim objDSO
    dim objUser
    dim strPath

    strPath = "LDAP://" & strDomain

    On Error Resume Next
    set objDSO = GetObject("LDAP:")
    set objUser = objDSO.OpenDSObject(strPath, strUserID, strUserPWD, ADS_SECURE_AUTHENTICATION OR ADS_CHASE_REFERRALS_ALWAYS)
    if Err.Number <> 0 then
        fnCheckAccess = False
    else
        fnCheckAccess = True
    end if
    Err.Clear
    On Error Goto 0

    set objDSO = Nothing
    set objUser = Nothing

end function

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Network Captures and Windows 7 Firewall

Published September 17, 2010

Doing some Windows Firewall testing with a UPX-packed copy of Netcat.

Windows 7 has a rather capable stateful firewall built into the OS. When troubleshooting network connectivity issues one often needs to determine if the client firewall (or something else) is blocking traffic. Quite commonly this involves acquiring a network capture to see what data is going to the client and comparing that with what is logged by the firewall.

I’ve just confirmed that network captures taken by Microsoft Network Monitor v3.4, WinPcap (used by Wireshark and WinDump), and netsh all capture data before the Windows Firewall has its way with it. Thus, packets which are dropped by the firewall are seen in a network capture. Confirmation of this was made by sending test TCP and UDP data with the firewall on and off, observing a local app set to receive the data (netcat), seeing which traffic hit the port via an external tap, what was captured locally, and what drops were logged by the firewall. In each case all TCP and UDP data seen by the external tap was also captured locally, even when it was dropped by the Windows Firewall. ICMP (and other IP protocols) were not tested.

This is a Very Good Thing from a network troubleshooting perspective.

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LiveJournal Is Dead

Published September 7, 2010

For as long as I’ve been making posts on nuxx.net/blog, since back in March 2008, I’ve been automatically cross-posting things to my LiveJournal account ‘c0nsumer’. In recent years LiveJournal (LJ) has become markedly less interesting as folks move to other social networks and abandon the blogging format. I’m not about to give up a place to post random thoughts, images, and technical info, but I don’t think that I’m going to keep contributing such things to LJ.

I’m currently working on backing up my LJ account so that I can archive it somewhere, but as my account became unpaid this evening I suspect it won’t be long before I abandon LJ entirely and post solely here. I may even consider using Facebook, where I’ve maintained a minor presence so that I could view other people’s pictures. I’ve been a bit hesitant to use it for any real content, but as it reached critical mass a few years ago I really shouldn’t continue to ignore it.

So, I think that’s it. While LJ does offer some benefits such as ACLs to restrict access to posts (which I don’t use) and email notifications of replies to comments, I think it’s time to move on. Within a few days I’ll likely uninstall the LJ crossposter from WordPress, make a final post pointing back here, and bid the online social blogging platform that I’ve used since May 28, 2002 goodbye.

UPDATE: It turns out that the expiration of my LJ account does not remove my ability to automatically cross-post. So while I no longer have much of an interest in using LJ, I may as well continue cross-posting to make it easier for others to read.

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MySQL Help (phpBB and aMember)

Published September 2, 2010

As some of you know, I do many of the “webmaster” activities for the Michigan Mountain Biking Association. As part of this, I’m trying to do some MySQL stuff, but I’m really not sure where to start since it seems to be way beyond my abilities. So, I’m going to write it up here and hope that someone can help. Please? Help?

Thank you very much in advance for any help you can provide.

I’ll put it below the fold…

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