Macbook Pro 15: 2006 – 2009

2006 MBP

Many of those who bought MacBook Pros in 2006 – when Apple made the switch to Intel processors – noticed a series of issues with these machines. Built quality and heat being the most common cause of complaint. The late 2006 series – featuring among other things new Core 2 Duo processors, wireless n-enabled protocol – seemed to be more mature with an improved built quality.

At the time the new series came out it took me a while to decide whether to buy the newly released MBP or rather the previous one for cheaper. Since many applications still ran under rosetta  at the time and couldn’t fully take the advantage of the powerful intel processors – i.e. Photoshop, Office,.. – I decided to go with a refurbished old model (a MacBook Pro Core Duo 2.0 GHz), the lower price allowing me to get a 3 years international coverage with Apple – my budget was 2000 CA$ (1700 the MBP + 300 the apple care). Since I was paying big bucks for a laptop I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t have to deal with expensive repairs: a great move the apple care, it was worth every penny.

Macs have been the rolls royce of computers for a while: attention to design and materials, great operating system etc. The sale surge of these past years, mostly due to the ipod popularity and the iTunes music store, brought about some arguable decisions among with a decrease in quality. Of course overall today’s products are rockets compare to those of a few years ago and have fantastic new functionalities, but take for example the screens: why can’t I choose a matte (antiglare) anymore? I hate the glossy screens because of light reflex and false colors. They did realize some customers wanted the matte but they offered it for extra money and only for the MBP 15 or 17″. Think about an iMac, a terrific machine I will never buy with a glossy screen!… And where did the firewire 400 go? It was so practical and fast!

The superdrive of the refurbished MBP I got was defective, it kept giving errors when burning cds or dvds… I had it changed once, and only a few months later the same errors reappeared so I brought the baby not only to get the superdrive fixed, but also to get it checked for a heating issue. When touching the top case near the airport antenna (bottom of the display) you could feel an unbearable burning heat, same with holding the machine on your lap, it would start cooking!

As a result they replaced the superdrive and the logic board. The machine seemed to be working great …. except for the superdrive,… again! I eventually gave up burning cds or dvds but I was pissed, I had a 2,000 $ machine that had had the superdrive changed twice and still I wasn’t able to burn media… What a piece of crap…. I called the Apple Care number in Italy, told my story and complained with resentment, claiming a new MBP.

The guy was nice but wouldn’t let me have a replacement and suggested me to get the superdrive replaced AGAIN at an authorized repair centre. Ok, I did that, fine! But after a couple of weeks my hard drive broke and I could only stare at the grey screen with a folder and a question mark. Thank god I had made a back up just a few days before!

This time after several expensive calls (calling Apple Care costs like 15 cents/min in Italy!) and a lot of complaints I got a replacement. I sent back my machine and after a couple weeks I received a brand new MBP 15″. I was pretty happy: I went from a 80 gb to a 250 gb hard drive, from a 2.0 CD to a 2.4 C2D processor, from a small to a large and multitouch clickpad and so on. The only dud was the glossy screen with the black frame around which I found ugly and not a bit as classy as the former macbook pro or the powerbooks.

The nice thing was that the new machine has a one-year warranty and the possibility to activated an apple care plan. Given my previous experience I was motivated to get one!

Ironically it turns out that a few months after I had the new machine I notice a screen blinking. I do a quick search online and find out it is a well known issue with MBP probably due to the nvidia graphic chip…. Basically the screen blinks randomly, it is not constant, it can be fine for hours then happen once then not happen again for a while. It blinks regardless of using the slow 9400M or the faster (dedicated) 9600M GT.

When I have some time I will get this screen issue checked,…. but what a hassle! What I have learned is that if you have an expensive machine (and I find MBP beautiful and powerful but extremely expensive!!) it’s worth having a protection plan, you never know!!

Installing Skype in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

(if you have Ubuntu 6 – Edgy Eft see my other post)

Really really straightforward!

just go to the skype download page (here)

1. Look for the Ubuntu logo and hit “Feisty Fawn” to start downloading
2. Once the download is finished you’ll find the skype-debian_1.4.0.99-1_i386.deb (that’s how it’s currently called, it may change name) on your desktop or wherever your download files go.

   

3. Open the downloaded package, then the Package Installer will do the rest!

Found this post useful? Leave a reply! cheers

How iPods vary in price around the world

Brazil continues to be the country where iPods are more expensive than everywhere else. According to the Australian Commonwealth Bank, a 2 Gb iPod nano costs US$ 360 in Brazil and US$ 240 in India. The country where the iPod is sold at the lowest price worldwide is Japan with a price of US$ 147 passing Canada (US$ 154) which used to have the cheapest price.*

Once again the proof of how goods are overtaxed in Brazil, resulting in super high prices that keep people from buying things they need/like and making them pay their bills through installment plans with skyrocketing interest rates.

*Source: Brazilian Newspaper “Folha de São Paulo”, May 23rd 07 [Brasil continua a ter iPod mais caro do mundo].

Pandora off the air in most countries

Pandora is an Internet radio service launched in 2005, it allows you to enter a favorite artist or song and the service then matches you up with similar tunes and artists. Other services, such as Rhapsody and Napster, have similar features with their custom radio channels, but Pandora does it a little differently than most. Pandora is the offspring of the Music Genome Project, an undertaking designed to analyze music and determine what makes people favor a particular song or artist, and then match people with music they might also like.

Due to licensing constraints Pandora can no longer allow access to most listeners located outside of the US. Here’s what comes up accessing the Pandora web site from Brazil. Apparently only the US, the UK and Canada still have this service available to public.

That’s really too bad because Pandora is/was a great way to listen to music you wouldn’t listen to otherwise and it does follow your tastes to a certain extent.

Reportedly the music majors have put pressure in order to stop broadcasting in those countries where there still are no agreements on copyright licences. In the US there’s a law that regulates copyright on the internet and other digital platforms, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Pandora made agreements in the UK and is working in the same direction with other countries.

Now the Pandora web site is being restricted to listeners verifying the user IP address. Workarounds like configuiring the browser to access through a proxy that’s located in the US, or through sites that allow anonymous surfing are probably not worth the effort.

Farewell Pandora!!

I have just tried Last.fm (the social music revolution), it’s pretty cool, what do you think?

[Some geeky work-arounds for accessing Pandora from outside the US are described here]

Linux on a G4 Mac Mini – Let’s try Yellow Dog

Machine:

1.42 GHz G4 Mac Mini (512MB)

[great machine! OS X is also great but it is getting a bit slow at times, that's why I thought of giving it a try with Linux installing both OS X Tiger and Yellow Dog. There are several Linux distributions available for those Macs made before Apple transitioned to Intel processors (i.e. PowerPC Macs with G3 G4 and G5 processors). Linux distributions I've considered were Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva and openSUSE. I ended up downloading Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.1 code-named Phoenix (from the TerraSoft website). This distro is free and its iso has 3.6 GB, I chose it because it's the only one that's made just for the PowerPC architecture and it seems like having a good support].

Linux Distribution:

Yellow Dog 5

(a Fedora Core, RPM-based distribution)
Download the .iso file (from the TerraSoft website) and burn it onto a dvd.

Do some research! Take a look at the TerraSoft site and here or here (in italian ->here).

How to install YDL and OSX (if you want to dual-boot Mac OS and Linux)

Step 1 – Back up your Mac Mini HD [cds/dvds/external HD]

Step 2 – Partition the Mac Mini HD [get out the gray Mac OS X Install Disc 1]

With Mac OS X running, insert the OS X Install Disc 1 that came with the Mac Mini. Run the installer from the disc and, when prompted, hit “restart”. The Mac Mini will reboot and load the OS X installer from the disc.
With the installer running, open on the “Installer” menu in the top left of the screen. Choose “Open Disk Utility”. From here we tell Disk Utility how we want to partition the hard disk. I have divided the 80 Gigs hard drive (real size is 74.5 GB) into 4 partitions:

3 volumes I have marked as “Free Space” (their filesystem – Format – will be specified during the Linux installation)

• one of 2 GB for Linux-SWAP
• one of 14 GB for Linux-ROOT [ext3]
• one of 8.5 GB for shared FAT32 filesystem (for sharing files between OSX and YDL)

1 volume of 50 GB I have marked as “OS X” with the format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”, which is the Mac OS X filesystem, HFS+.

Once done setting up the volumes as desired, click Partition on the lower right, and quit Disk Utility.

You’re ready to install OS X onto the partition you just created (the 50 GB one in my case).

Now OS X is installed, you only need to insert the YDL DVD and restart the system and make it so it will boot from the dvd-drive (I think I pressed C, I can’t remember). The Yellow Dog installation graphic will appear and you will be guided to choose how to manage the Free Space partitions you have previously created.

[...]

Once you have both OSs installed, when turning on the Mac Mini, instead of rebooting directly into Mac OS X as before, it will now load a bootstrap from which you can hit the letter “L” to boot Linux, or “X” to boot Mac OS X. By default (not hitting any key) it will boot the Yellow Dog Linux.

Marisa Monte – Universo Particular

An excerpt from the concert held in the Don Pedro Segundo Theatre of Ribeirão Preto (São Paulo) on April 29.

The show was definitely worth the wait in line for the ticket. Marisa Monte has a great voice and lots of talented people play in her band. She’s awesome!

Installing Skype in Ubuntu Edgy Eft

When I had Ubuntu up and running I was quite anxious to play with the new OS and customize it with my favorite apps. Some apps I was able to install via Add/Remove Applications (Azureus, Amule, VLC) quite easily, other apps I had to understand how Synaptic worked and read through the Ubuntu wikis.

The first app I wanted to install was Skype and here I describe how I did it hoping it comes handy to other beginners like me.

Installing Skype through Repository:

1. Go to: System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager



You will be asked for your system password, then a Synaptic Package Manager window will come up.
This window shows the so called repositories which control the installation process and get the application packets from the Internet into the OS.

2. From the Synaptic Pagake Manager window click Settings>Repositories.
3. From the new window Software Sources select the Third Party tab and click Add.



4. Paste the following into the APT Line field:

deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free

then click OK and OK again until you get back to the Synaptic Package Manager.

5. Click Reload to refresh the repositories
6. Search and Mark for installation the packet Skype, click on apply and keep going until the application is completely installed
7. If all went right you will find Skype from the menu Applications>Internet

That’s all!

Ubuntu Linux Novice

Over the last year I have been fighting in my lab with Windows XP until I finally installed a copy of Ubuntu Linux release 6.10 code-named Edgy Eft. My experience so far has been quite positive even though getting started with Ubuntu required some efforts. The wikis of the Ubuntu web site have been very helpful.

My experience with Ubuntu so far:

1. Downloading and burning a cd with the OS is easy to do as it is well explained in the Ubuntu web site
2. Kind of funny having to run the suggested error check prior to intallation
3. The partition of the hard drive while installing the OS requires some research! number of partitions, size, filesystem …
4. The installation of the OS is quite fast, it only takes 15-20 minutes
5. For an OS that’s free, the graphic user interface is quite impressive
6. A number of useful applications is installed together with the OS
7. Installing additional applications isn’t as intuitive as it can be with mac or windows can be done in different ways. Some apps can be installed easily through the Add/Remove Applications. Other apps can be installed through the repositories in Synaptic or through command line in Terminal.
8. The desktop switch feature is pretty cool and saves time
9. Not surprisingly the machine – 2 GHz Pentium IV w/ 512 MB of RAM – is performing much better than when running win xp

Tim Brasil

Quegli abbuffini di Telecom Italia sono arrivati pure in Sud America. In poco tempo in Brasile hanno guadagnato quote di mercato sulle altre compagnie di telefonia mobile (Vivo e Claro sono quelle che come Tim coprono gran parte del paese). C’è da riconoscere che Tim è stata la prima a raggiungere la maggior copertura GSM del Brasile, cosa non facile visto che la sua superficie è 28 volte quella dell’Italia e in molti casi poco accessibile e con poche infrastrutture. Tim Brasil gode sicuramente di ottima salute e in un’economia in espansione come quella brasiliana gli affari non possono che prosperare. I margini di crescita del mercato di telefonia mobile in Brasile sono enormi, è facile immaginare che nei prossimi anni il numero delle utenze crescerà di molto e non c’è da stupirsi se sia proprio un gruppo messicano ad interessarsi all’acquisto di Telecom Italia. La scelta di Telecom Italia qualche mese fa di vendere Tim Brasil a prezzo di banane ha lasciato almeno i brasiliani esterrefatti: gli italiani si trovano per le mani un pozzo d’oro e che fanno? decidono di venderlo ad un prezzo ridicolo…. Ma che se la comprino americani o messicani perché questi barbogi rubagalline che si riempiono le tasche finché possono e poi svendono a cavolo ci hanno già divertito. La classe dirigente italiana dimostra ancora una volta lungimiranza zero, salvaguardia dei propri interessi finché è possibile, zero rispetto per chi lavora e si fa il culo.

La Tim ha sicuramente esportato il suo modello di pubblicità invasivo e petulante. Cartelli e cartelloni sono disseminati per il Brasile intero anche nei posti più impensati.