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March 13, 2006
Pom Pom Pom Pom
Last week Dan and I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Pom Pom Pom Pom, an international podcast about all things Apple. We chatted for about an hour on Karelia, Sandvox, Apple, and the competition. It was a very enjoyable experience.
Many thanks to StuFF mc for the opportunity!
You can either listen to Episode 5 directly or subscribe to the Pomcast in iTunes.
Posted by ttalbot at 1:49 PM
March 9, 2006
CocoaHeads LA Meeting Tonight
Just a reminder that the third meeting of CocoaHeads LA (Santa Monica) will be tonight (Thursday) night at 7:00 PM.
We'll again be hosted by Steve Gehrman at the fabulous CocoaTech offices at 1238 7th Street, Santa Monica, between Wilshire and Arizona. We may move the venue later in the evening to one of the local spots for food, drinks, or dessert.
We're still in our nascent stages, so now's the perfect time to join the group. (It's free).
We'll be having our general Cocoa roundtable, show-and-tell, and discussion about Cocoa debugging techniques, including a demo of OmniObjectMeter.
CocoaHeads LA. See you there!
Posted by ttalbot at 10:52 AM
March 8, 2006
On Mac minis and putty knives
With the recent release of the Intel-based Mac minis, there's once again a slew of postings/articles about how to properly open a Mac mini to add RAM, replace a hard drive, or (now) swap out the processor.
Most articles tell you to use a putty knife with the blade's edge sanded down to be a little thinner. This allows you to pry the case open a little bit so you can insert the knife and start popping some of the latches that hold the mini's lid on. However, there appears to be a significant number of people who end up marring the mini's case when the putty knife isn't thin enough to slip in easily. (This apparently led to the invention of the "wire method" which I am nowhere near coordinated enough to figure out.)
One of Karelia's main servers is a (PPC) mini -- the other is a G4 Cube -- and it works like a champ. When I needed to open the case to upgrade the RAM, I did not order the specially modded putty knife or fumble around with wires. You know what I used? A kitchen spatula. I had three of them in the drawer. All of them were thinner than the putty knife I was going to have to sand down. I tried them all. Two of them were still too thick. One worked perfectly.
In fact it worked so well, that I'm amazed that people still talk about putty knives. Not only was the spatula thin enough to work without marring the case, it was also a lot wider than a typical putty knife which meant that I could unhook twice as many of the tabs at a time. In fact, the spatula made it damn easy to get the case apart. I'm just saying.
So there you have it. Kitchen spatula.
Posted by ttalbot at 3:45 PM