JT's Blog

I recently purchased a G-S350SUAB external hard drive enclosure from our local Boise, ID Apple reseller. I purchased a Seagate 1TB Internal Hard Drive, model #ST310005N1A1AS-RK to insert into the enclosure.

I connected the drive via the Firewire 800 cable to my 24” iMac (early 2009) running OS 10.6.3 and formatted it to a Mac OS Extended with Journaling per the PDF instructions that came with the enclosure.

All went well, however the drive continues to spin down, then immediately spin back up and repeats this process when the screen on the iMac goes black or what I refer to as in activity. Eventually the iMac will go to sleep, but upon waking the computer the drive will not spin back up causing me eventually to do a hard shutdown of the computer.

To correct this I first attemted to go to the Energy Saver preference pane in System Preferences and uncheck the “Put Drives to Sleep” option under both the Power and UPS sections. This did not correct the problem.

I then went to the Terminal and completed a sudo pmset command to set the disksleep timer to 0, thus disabling the drives function to spin down. Unfortunately, this only worked for the internal drive and a USB drive connected.

I hunted high and low for a solution to my problem, when I came across an applet called Keep Drive Spinning 1.1. As the summary notates:

“This applet simply creates a launch agent that tells OS X to touch a hidden file on the selected drive once every minute so that the drive stays awake.”

Upon running this script I set the external drive to touch the hidden file every 30 seconds. Running it any longer did not correct the problem. This applet continues to run even after a reboot or restart.

As for the drive, it works well and houses my Home Directory.  The Firewire 800 connection much faster than the USB 2.0 connection I used in attempting to house the Home Directory on an exteral drive.  The Seagage drive is very quiet.

The one negative besides the drive spining off and on is the Blue LED light indicating the drive is powered.  I would prefer not to have this or have it located in the back.  Of couse this is only an issue when I am encoding something during the night.   Since that is on the rarest of occasions I believe I can live with it.

It should be noted I have sent an email to Macally technical support and hope to update this post with their response.

Update:  I took the enclosure back to the local Apple Reseller and spoke to the owner regarding the issue I was having.  As he put it “you have gone to way too much trouble, it sounds like the power supply in the enclosure has gone bad”  So I purchased another enclosure and it did the trick.  I will be taking the broken enclosure back for a full refund.

This has been around for a while, but I love to find new things.  If you wanted to intantly darken your Mac Screen, by pressing the ctrl-shift-eject buttons  To bring the screen back, simply move the mouse or hit the all important any key.

Posted via web from jtray’s posterous

I am not very fond of using browser based applications to chat with friends and family over the web.  In chatting with my Facebook family and friends, which most of whom are not OS X users, I found the Facebook user interface to be poor.

An alternative presented itself in the form of OS X’s iChat program.  As of February 2010 iChat users gained access to create a generic Jabber account to chat with Facebook users as a result of Facebook’s chat being powered by Jabber/XMPP.

To set up iChat to interface with Facebook follow these steps.

1. Open iChat
2. Click on Preferences and go to the Account Tab
3. Click on the plus sign and add a new account
4. Select a Jabber account from the Drop Down Menu
5. Enter the following yourusername@chat.facebook.com.  (Your user name can be found via Facebook’s Account settings page.)
6. Enter your password
7. Finally in the server box type “chat.facebook.com,” then configure the port to 5222 and make sure to un-check the box for “Use SSL.”

From there sign-in and start chatting away with your Facebook friends.  Please note several third party applications on both Mac and PC support this feature as well.

The iPad dropped a little over a week ago, I a huge Apple fan boy resisted and did not dive in head first and buy an iPad. The reasons are simple, but not overwhelming. The first reason revolves around the fact the iPad did not provide me any key feature that I didn’t already have with other electronic devices in my possession.

Unlike the iPod I didn’t have a big need to use it as a eReader for eBooks, or iBooks, whatever Apple had decided it should be called. I am not a big reader and to be honest still find actual paper books more appealing than an electronic version.

The other thing is I own a 24 inch iMac. At the time it was the biggest screen Apple offered. I like a big screen and prefer a larger screen versus a small 10 inch screen. As @PilotPete put it on a recent episode of the Mac Geek Gab, using the iPhone or iPad is like viewing the world through a straw.

This could not be any truer. I use my iPhone when I am away from home, but prefer to do my computing via a computer. Andy Ihnatko tweeted this weekend complaining about the iPad WordPress app crashing on him, losing 2 drafts. I thought writing a blog post would be nice via the iPad, but it doesn’t feel secure enough to risk losing  hard work without actually using a text editor to create the post.

Speaking applications, it would appear that many of the iPad versions of iPhone apps need to be repurchased for the new platform. This should not come as a big shock and I don’t mind paying the developers for the applications, but paying full price seams a bit much.

The applications that I tested at the local Best Buy Demo table, were however fantastic, but as I said before I can get the same out of my iMac, MacBook or even my iPhone. Of course if I were to buy one I would want the 3G version and I would likely wait for the second or even third revision before purchasing.

Believe me I wanted a new Apple toy, but in the end I could not see a need, but to all my fellow Apple fan boys and girls I hope you’re happy with your purchases, but for me there wasn’t enough there to buy an iPad.