Pixel Chimp's blog
Replacement power supply for Apple Cinema Display
NB: Photos copyright Eroni De Oliveira
A reader sent me some information on replacing the Apple power supply for the Cinema Display. He realised that a 24V 'LED Strip' power supply should meet the power requirements for the display.
The power supplies sell for around $20 which is a considerable saving compared to the Apple version around $100 to $200 (depending on usage). He was in the process of testing 2 'dead' displays and was able to exchange parts between them to diagnose the problem for each display… Read more »
Wifi deployment of Macbook Air's
Note to self…
Deploying multiple Macs over 802.11.n isn't really practical.
Using a 1.27GB Deploy Studio netboot set to boot one Macbook Air took 2:30's to get to the DS runtime to be able to select a workflow.
A test with 6 machines booting in parallel took 11 minutes for 5 of them to get to the same usable state. One machine failed to boot the netboot set & it sat the at the grey Apple screen, so it probably wasn't pulling in the netboot image over wifi.
These times don't include running any restore workflows, so actual restoring could take hours for a large master image. Wifi doesn't support multicast streams so each client needs to maintain a single connection to the server.
flashback-test.sh
Here is a script to test for the presence of flashback on Mac OS X. There is info describing it & other variants on f-secure.com and the f-secure.com weblog.
The script performs the 'defaults read' commands that f-secure recommend in step 1 & step 9 of their detection instructions. Read more »
Apple 23" Cinema Display possible fix for 'short-long-short' error
An explaination of one way to resolve an issue with an Aluminum Apple 23 inch cinema display (circa. 2005-2006) suffering from a 'short - long - short' flashing power light & no visible display. This solution worked for me, it may not work for you, but others have reported similar sucesses, see the forum posts in the links for more info.
Import local hosts into VirtualBox guest VM
I have made a simple script to take the locally defined hosts & import them into a Windows virtual machine running on VirtualBox.
It means local testing domains defined in your Macs /etc/hosts file can be viewed from the Windows environment, combined with xdissent's ievms script it makes handling virtual machines a simple process.
Notes.
The script creates a batch file & then runs it inside the VM. The VM requires the virtualbox guest additions. Read more »
Zen theme layout
Here is a quick reference post showing the basic structure of the Zen 2 Drupal theme, see the Zen project page for the source, and the project help.
Large version of the layout image. Read more »
Reverting PHP 5.3 to 5.2.10 on Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard ships with the latest version of PHP, version 5.3. Unfortunately Drupal 6 will produce error notices due to the use of deprecated functions. It seems the solution is to 'hack Drupal core' or use an older version of PHP. It seems likely that Drupal 5 won't be updated to support PHP 5.3. Read more »
Dying G5 forum threads
Here is a quick list of links to forum posts that are from people having issues with failing G5 Power Macs.
Apple discussions
- PowerMac G5 Dual 2GHz freezes any time, boots sometimes with one processor (very long thread)
- Solutions for dead G5
Macworld.com
- Power Mac G5 logic board failure? (very long thread)
The quiet ones
Well I thought I had lots to say, but I guess I don't. So add this site to the list of neglected blogs.
In the meantime here is an example of the nice touches Apple go to with their software, the icon for TextEdit. Going the extra mile is usually worth it.
