Mike Cohen

MacBook Pro Saga Ends

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My MacBook Pro ordeal is finally over. After a huge fiasco attempting to sell my old MacBook Pro on eBay, I sold it to Mac Of All Trades. Although I got less than I might have been able to at eBay, selling it directly to them was a lot less trouble. I already received (and deposited) their payment.

Trying to sell it on eBay was one of my worst online experiences ever. Selling something fairly expensive like that seems to bring out the worst of the sleaze that infests eBay.

I listed it for 5 times without a successful sale. The first time, the winner decided he didn’t want it because he thought it was a new MacBook Pro (even though I stated very clearly that it was an old model). The next two times I relisted it I had no bidders. Someone offered to trade a Rolex for it, which I turned down of course. If he had offered a Canon or Nikon DSLR, I might have reconsidered, though 🙂

The next time I added ‘buy now’, which a Nigerian scammer used to end the auction. I had stated in my listing that I would ONLY ship to North America, so I told that person I would not sell it to him. He then sent me a fake payment on Paypal.

I listed it one last time, reduced from $1400 to $1200. This time there were several bidders and it sold for $1350. The buyer then told me he won a different one and didn’t want it. None of the other bidders took my second chance offer. At that point I decided to give up on eBay completely. I will never sell anything large like a computer there again.

My Weekend Projects

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I spent most of the weekend tinkering with my home network.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my Airport Extreme. The wireless connection is extremely unreliable and would randomly drop out or become unresponsive. I ended up going back to my Linksys WRT54G, which seems a lot more robust, and setting the Airport Extreme to 802.11n and acting as a bridge with the WRT54G handling the DSL connection and DHCP service. Only my MacBook Pro supports 802.11n, so everything else now connects to the WRT54G.

I’ve also been having various problems with my Linux box. I never could get Netatalk working and had a lot of trouble connecting to Samba shares on it. It had accumulated lots of crud over the years from installing various packages. Since I have my /home directory on a separate file system, I did a clean install of Ubuntu 7.04 server edition, preserving my old home file system. I installed Ubuntu Desktop, development tools, Netatalk, and Samba over it and I now have a usable home server.

Finally, I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP under VMware on my MacBook Pro, since my old Windows VM had also accumulated lots of crud and I was having lots of networking problems with it. I spent almost a full day getting it set up with all of my applications and configuring it for the office VPN connection.

A really neat utility

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A few days ago I bought Hazel, when MacUpdate offered it as their daily promo. After trying it for only a few minutes I was hooked.

Hazel watches any folders you specify and automatically applies rules you create to items in that folder. Rules are defined almost exactly the same way as in Apple Mail, specifying properties to match and what to do with the items it matches. One use is to watch your download folder and automatically move music, pictures, and movies to the appropriate folders.

RAM Upgrade

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I upgraded the RAM in my MacBook Pro to the maximum 4GB today. I find that it makes a huge difference when running Windows, which often slowed my entire system down to a crawl. Parallels was especially painful with only 2GB, but in 4GB I see no speed difference between Parallels and VMware.

Running Windows
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iPhone Update 1.1.1

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I updated my iPhone to firmware 1.1.1. The upgrade took several minutes but was uneventful. I had previously restored it to the original firmware. Before that I had several third-party applications installed, although I never unlocked it since I don’t see any point in switching from AT&T. The only application I really miss is Apollo IM, although BeeJive is pretty good for AIM. I find that m.twitter.com is quite usable and has more features than Mobile Twitterific.

WordPress 2.3

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I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.3 using Subversion. The upgrade was quick and painless, except for an interaction with my server configuration which caused an endless redirect loop. I have my server configured to strip off ‘www’ from the URL, but I had the URL listed as ‘www.mcdevzone.com’ in the blog configuration. Changing it to ‘mcdevzone.com’ in the blog configuration fixed the problem.

New LoJack Release

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We released a new version of LoJack for Laptops today. One of the major changes in this version is a new installer. Instead of using Apple’s installer, this is a full Cocoa application which handles user registration, assigns a serial number through a web service, and ensures that it’s calling successfully. This is the major project I’ve been working on for the last few months.