Hooray for Apple Hardware Test

Hi,

I actually thought I'd never be saying this, but hooray for Apple Hardware Test! That's the free utility that Apple ships with all new Macs. I've used it on a number of occasions in the past and, despite several hardware problems, it's never alerted me to a problem. Never. As a result, I've tended to forget about it recently, preferring instead Apple's Mac Test Pro, memtest or Tech Tool Pro if I wasn't sure about the exact fault.

However, the other day I had a 1.33ghz, 15in PowerBook with what looked initially like a hard drive failure. The machine wouldn't boot up at all, nor would it start in target firewire mode. It would boot from the Software restore disc (but Disc Utility failed to repair the disc, and it was impossible to reinstall the OS – the installation would only proceed so far, before the blue screen with the spinning wheel appeared).

Mac Test Pro and Tech Tool Pro both failed to boot the machine!

As a last resort I decided to try Apple Hardware Test (as this is included on the Software restore disc – and this was the only disc capable of booting the machine) and lo and behold, five minutes later the culprit was identified – a faulty RAM module.

A replacement from Crucial (very fast delivery!) is now in place and everything's fine.

Whodathunkit, eh?

Kev.

Macworld cd

Hi,

Just received the latest edition of Macworld magazine, and discovered that they've included one of my screensavers (colobar) on the cd. Excellent! (bit surprised that they didn't get in touch to ask first - is this normal?)

Anyway, cheers,

Kev.

New screensaver – coloido

Hi, managed to get to spend a bit of time on Quartz Composer recently, for the first time in ages, and made a new screensaver (coloido) – it's a customisable kaleidoscopic screensaver. Get it here http://www.axmt07.dsl.pipex.com/coloido.html

Cheers,

Kev.

date & time widgets

Hi,

I've been contacted recently by a number of people asking if the UK date & time widget could be made customisable. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that yet, but in the meantime I've made a few variations for different time zones. Have a look here:

http://www.axmt07.dsl.pipex.com/date&time.html

Cheers,

Kev.

The Green Man festival

Hi,

Haven't done any Mac stuff recently worth posting about – been very busy with the other thing (life). Anyway, went to the Green Man festival in the Brecons the other week. Excellent, despite the weather. Vashti Bunyan was a complete surprise (brilliant), and Robert Plant was fantastic. Also great were Tunng, Fridge, John Renbourn and Vetiver. I didn't get to see Devendra Banhart, unfortunately, but it was a great festival. I do think the organisers should take a few things on board for next time though.

• Somewhere to do washing up (sinks and that) as it's billed as a family festival.
• I think the area outside the Folk tent was so trashed by the weather because it was right next to the main entrance. If the entrance was behind the tent I think the ground would have survived better, as it wouldn't have had everyone traipsing past all the time.
• More stalls and shops.
• I think the camping area should have been better arranged, so that people weren't all walking past the family camping area to get to the general camping bit. We had people having a piss next to our tent in the middle of the night, and one drunk bloke actually tried to crash out in our tent! I think the famil area shold have been furthest from the entertainment area.

Anyway, great festival all the same.

Cheers,

Kev.

Neat folder backup script

I wrote this script to provide incremental backups to a work in progress folder on my mac. It copies this foler to an external hard drive, then appends the date to the folder name. This means that every day you get a new backup (and when you get too many, you can just delete the older ones). Replace the file paths with your own:

-- This script will copy a folder of your choice to a destination of your choice, and then append today's date to the newly backed up folder. This means that you'll have a daily incremental backup of you're 'work in progress' folder, for example. --

-- If you save this as a run only application on your hard drive, then use iCal to open it at, say, 5.30 every weekday, it'll backup all your work in progress. You can then schedule your machine then to shut down at, say, 6pm using the 'Energy Saver settings in System Preferences. Obviously, if these backups build up you'll eventually run out of disk space, so you'll need to regularly 'clean out' the backup folder --


tell application "Finder"
activate
make new Finder window to startup disk
set target of Finder window 1 to folder "Hard_Drive:Users:Home:Documents:Workshop:" -- this should be the path to your work in progress folder --

ignoring application responses

-- duplicate your folder to your backup location --

duplicate folder "Workshop" of folder "Documents" of folder "Home" of folder "Users" of startup disk to "Backup_location:Backup_location folder"

-- Note: if you're backing up to a networked drive, you must make sure that you've connected to the drive before the script is run --

end ignoring

delay 120 -- set this to an appropriate number of seconds to ensure the backup is completed --

-- this next bit appends today's date to the newly backed up folder --

set theDate to current date
set todaysDate to ((the month of theDate & " " & the day of theDate & ", " & the year of theDate) as string)
if name of folder "Backup_location:Backup_location folder:Workshop" is not "" then
set name of folder "Workshop" of folder "Backup_location folder" of folder "Backup_location" to "Workshop" & " " & todaysDate
end if
end tell


cheers,

Kev

Fix to QF 1.3

A reader on Macupdate pointed out a problem with QuickFind 1.3. Basically, the Yahoo.com button was returning results from Yell.com. Sorry about that, a silly mistake on my part. It's now fixed, and you can download the repaired version (didn't think it warranted a 'new' version) from my website: http://www.themacguy.co.uk.

Cheers,

Kev.