I happened to look at Activity Monitor earlier today and noticed a “few” smbd processes running
I figured it was just a fluke and so I just restarted. However, all those smbd’s were not deterred that easily. They’re back, and in greater numbers:
$ ps waux | grep smbd | wc -l 148
I’m not even sure where to start on this one. I google’d for ‘mac too many smbd’ but didn’t turn up much. Hopefully they’ll get bored and move on.
SMARTReporter (which is free and highly recommended), has alerted me that my Mac Mini’s internal hard disk is knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door.
The good news is that the mini was purchased with AppleCare. The bad news is I don’t remember exactly when it was purchased, and the extended warranty may have expired.
I recall looking up warranty information on Apple’s site before, so I head over to http://www.apple.com/support/ and start poking around. Here’s a promising link:
“View AppleCare Agreements” sounds like exactly what I want. I log in, and behold!, I can see that I have two warranty agreements; one for the mini, and the other for my MacBook Pro. However, there is no indication if the agreement is still active or not. One could assume that only active agreements are listed, but I wanted to get the actual expiration date. The computer was purchased roughly three years ago and for all I knew the AppleCare agreement was expiring today.
So I continue to rummage around on the Apple Support site and get nowhere. Time for Plan B. After some googlin’ I come across a forum post which points me to https://selfsolve.apple.com/. I enter the mini’s serial number find that I’ve still got a month of coverage. Yippee.
But why wasn’t this information available directly once I logged into the Apple Support site? Why did have to google for five minutes to find this rather basic information? Frustrating, but at least my little saga had a happy ending.
So in summary, if you want to…
Heres some shaky low-quality video I nabbed at Macworld.
I have more photos and videos I want to share, they’re all on my mini, and SMARTReporter says that its drive is about to die. They’ll be up once I get the data out of harm’s way.
P.S. I haven’t actually seen Cloverfield. Any good?
Macworld has been an absolute whirlwind. I was hoping to post with some frequency, but I’ve been working the booth practically non-stop, and ‘net access here kinda sucks.
You can find a couple pics of us hard at work on the NEAT blog, and also check out the Macworld’s preview of NEAT Receipts for Mac.
I know blogging about blogging is, like, totally cliché, but this is blogging about blog installation, which is, like, totally different.
I haven’t played with any web technologies in a few years. All I have is a vague recollection of installing and configuring MovableType, and I slightly less vague recollection of it being a headache. I’m not bashing MovableType in particular. Setting up any sort of web application on a remote web host without really simple administration tools is a non-trivial task. Or so I thought.
I’ve been with csoft.net for a bunch of years now. I originally found them because they had shell access and secure IMAP. They cater to security-conscious people who more or less know what they’re doing. Great. I more or less knew what I was doing, at the time. But, times, they are a changin…
Like I said I hadn’t touched any web software, set up MySQL, or hacked php for several years and I was so keen on going through it all again. So I went looking around for hosts with fancy “one-click” installs and the like. After a hour or so of research, I came up with a few possibilities but decided to sleep on it before I pulled the trigger.
The next day, while eating quesadilla, I decided to give the manual WordPress installation a go, despite my previous reservations. Mexican food tends to inspire me. It’s my spinach.
So, I ssh’d to my web host, downloaded the tarball, copied it over to my web space, and clicked through the setup right in my browser. I had to set up a new MySQL db, which I also did right through my host’s web interface. I did not read any instructions. I was up and running in 5 minutes, with a one quarter of a quesadilla remaining.
Bravo.
The other day, for no apparent reason, I began to reminiscence about my old Prodigy days. Prodigy was a dial-up service, like CompuServe or AOL that offered message boards, news, reference information, games - and more! What differentiated Prodigy from the rest key was the unlimited usage for a flat subscription - when most other services where charging by the minute. That means I could waste hours in front of the PC, and not make mom and dad take out a second mortgage. Kid tested, parent approved.
I remember spending a good deal of time on the service, but most of the details are hazy. Aside from reading message boards about R/C cars and Sierra game tips, only one other thing sticks out in my mind. A game. A game where you wandered through a maze. Why? No idea.
Oh yeah, and there was a house with chicken legs. How did the house get chicken legs, and why is it in the maze? Again, no idea.
Fast forward to this morning. I was browsing through some of my less news feeds, when an article entitled “Prodigy Lives! Play MadMaze On the Web” on VintageComputing.com. Could this be the very game that has inexplicably risen out of my subconscious? And better yet, could I play it via the web right now? Tantalizing, indeed, but was this in fact the same game I remember from yesteryear? It did match 2 of the 3 keywords - “Prodigy” and “Maze”, but was there a Chickenhouse?
I clicked the link in my newsreader to load up the full article and was greeted with a few screenshots of the game. Of course I recalled the Prodigy login screen, and the Mad Maze start screen looked kinda sorta familiar - but I wasn’t sure. Then, after a little fancy scrollbar interaction, there it was, just as I remembered it - the Chickenhouse.
I could hardly wait to play. According to the post:
MadMaze-II plays almost exactly like the original;
Awesome!
the only down side is that it requires Internet Explorer to play.
Opposite of awesome!
I guess I’ll have to fire up IE on my crash-happy old gaming box for this particular nostalgia fix. Thankfully, VintageComputing provided some sweet wallpaper to tide me over.
The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia has posted a nice Google map of the Schuylkill River/Perkiomen Trail Network. The map has annotations for public transit, parking, and other areas of interest.
Another bicycle-related map site to pop up on my radar recently is Bikely.com. Bikely lets you create cycling routes using the Google maps API, and share them with others. Although I haven’t had much time to spend with it yet, I hope it proves to be as useful as it sounds.
After about 5 months, I finally got around to donating my old car, my beloved Nissan 240SX. Barnaby was good to me since I bought him back in 1999, but he was definitely showing his age and starting to become a bit of a money-pit. Back in March I replaced him with a gently used Honda Civic which I’ve been very happy with so far. When I bought my new car, I decided that I wanted to donate my old one, but due to business, procrastination, and a few other usual suspects in the bad excuses lineup, I never got around to it until last week.
For the donation, I went through donateacar.com, because it seemed stupid easy and they allow you to pick from, like, a kajillion charities. I filled out the web donation form Monday, got a call from a towing company Tuesday, and my car was picked up Wednesday. Nice turnaround, I say. The whole process was painless - from an organizational and logistical perspective at least.
I borrowed a digital camera and snapped a few pics before I said goodbye forever. Just for kicks, I thought I would try out one of these new photo sharing services instead of uploading them to my old site. Flickr seems to be what all the cool kids like to use, so I created an account an uploaded all my photos into a “set”. Also, I’ve heard good things about Picasa, and Google recently released a web albums feature, so I decided to give that a shot too.
Linkage: flickr set Picasa album
Both were simple enough to get set up. Flickr’s upload time seemed faster, but I had to upload the photos in two batches. Then I had to sort them into a “set”. I used the OSX Picasa Web Album uploader standalone app (because I don’t have iPhoto), which seemed to upload to my Picasa web album just fine. I don’t really have anything of note to mention about the two services yet, seeing as I’ve spent a whopping 5 minutes interacting with both of them, combined. Maybe I could post a nice comparison. Or better yet, maybe this guy can do it for me.
