Routine is Your Friend!

It has been said, “Routine is your friend.” I am here to say that is completely true. Sticking to one routine in particular would have saved me a lot of headache troubleshooting a computer issue this evening. At one point I was genuinely worried that my Mac was dead and would need to be sent out for repairs. Which would have been very bad luck, since it was only one week ago that my Xbox 360 died and needed to be sent away (it's still within warranty, fortunately!).

Because of another issue I was having, I went to reboot my Mac, and it wouldn't actually reboot. It just hung indefinitely at a solid grey screen, and the same thing happened with all other attempts. Even when I left it and went to the living room to watch something for a bit, I came back to the same grey screen. I'll spare you the tale of my troubleshooting attempts (which would be quite the tale in and of itself), and skip to the end.

I have what is called an hard drive dock. It's sort of like an iPod dock except bigger, and designed for computer internal hard drives. Those of you who work with me may have seen a hard drive on my desk—I use that as an off-site backup. I occasionally take it home, power on the dock, pop in the HD, let Carbon Copy Cloner do its thing, eject the drive from my Mac's desktop, power off the dock, remove the HD, then take it back to work the next morning so it once again meets the “off-site” part of “off-site backup.”

It turns out that the last time I updated it, I missed my “power off the dock” step. You wouldn't think that would be important, but it seems that little thing was the cause of all my problems. After I finally determined that to be the cause, with repeated testing I confirmed that my Mac indeed only boots up fine when this HD dock isn't turned on.

Of course, I have formulated a theory about why this is the case. My hunch is that, as part of the boot process, the Mac firmware enumerates all the attached HDs. And since there was no physical HD plugged into the dock the Mac hung indefinitely trying to read the disc that it thought should be there but actually wasn't. I'm definitely going to have to test this the next time I bring home my HD. If my hunch is correct, having the dock turned on but with an HD in it should allow my Mac to reboot correctly.

But is it a Mac issue? An odd quirk of this HD dock in particular? Or something that can be duplicated using any HD dock on any modern computer? But you know what, at this point I really don't care. As long as I stick to my routine and switch it off when my backup is complete I won't have further problems, and if I do slip up sometime, at least I know what to check right away.

The Insomniac Time Traveler

WARNING: More techy post than usual today. But I guess that definitely makes it count as Something Completely Different, doesn't it?

For the past year or so, I've had an issue with my Mac where it lost the ability to automatically go into sleep mode, in which it uses extremely little power, instead just sitting there idle until I manually put it to sleep. I tried to determine the problem, but eventually I gave up and figured it was an issue where I'd have to reinstall the OS, which I didn't really want to do. When I bought my new iMac, at first it would sleep correctly, then it refused to, just like my old Mac. I worked more intentionally towards solving this issue over the past week, and I eventually narrowed the cause down to my USB hub. If you don't know, it's a small device that turns one port on the computer into several, so you can plug in more devices. If this hub is not plugged in, my iMac will go to sleep when it's supposed to.

Now, on to a second issue. Apple has an integrated backup facility called Time Machine built into its operating system. I have an external hard drive that I bought almost a year ago for the purpose of these Time Machine backups. It has always worked great, but a few days ago it started exhibiting strange behaviour and would not work correctly. I spent a fair amount of time troubleshooting and looking up error messages online. Nothing I tried seemed to help and I was starting to think it may need to be sent to the manufacturer for repairs or replacement. Fortunately it's just a backup drive, and I also have two separate backups, so it wasn't that much of an issue, aside from the inconvenience.

Long story short, I eventually determined these two issues to be indirectly related. As a part of my troubleshooting, I switched this drive to being plugged directly into the iMac (so I could remove the USB hub), rather than one of the ports on my hub. It seems that for some reason the drive doesn't like that. It only works fine when plugged into the hub. I can't say whether this is a new issue or not, as I think this was the first time since I bought it that I didn't have it plugged into the hub.

So, it appears that I can have either operational Time Machine backups but no automatic sleep mode, or an iMac that goes to sleep but can't update the Time Machine backup. Maybe I'll eventually find a solution, but for now I think I'll give it a rest (no pun intended). Unless my math was wrong, it looks like the difference in power usage between it idling and sleeping will only cost about $1.50 per month tops. And there are other benefits to not letting it sleep (which I won't go into at this time), so perhaps those benefits will actually be worth paying the extra $1.50 for. But still, I don't like not knowing why the drive behaves this way (if it is a hardware issue, it's still under warranty) so I'll probably do some more diagnostics and research as time permits.

Of Mice and Men

Well, I did it. Thursday afternoon on my way home from work, I bought my new iMac. It was perfect timing for me to consider it to be a birthday present for myself, too. The display is great, it can do things that my old one couldn't, and it has about five to six times the power as well. But do you know what? I think the aspect of it that I've been getting the most enjoyment from is not the computer itself, but the mouse that came with it.

To Buy or Not to Buy—That is the Question

I can be so indecisive at times. I could list many situations where my own thoughts on what to do and/or how to proceed have bounced back and forth so many times it almost made me dizzy. One good example is what to do since my Mac is getting on in years.

Happy Birthday, Mac!

Today is officially the sixth birthday of my Apple PowerMac G5. On July 18, 2004, I took the plunge and drove down to London Drugs to buy it. And to this day, it is still in active service. When I bought it I owned two other PCs but over the years they got decommissioned and I stayed with just my Mac.

And you know what, despite its age it still runs great. It manages my media libraries and feeds my iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. It checks email and web sites. It even can encode video. Maybe there's no way it can run the latest graphically intensive games. And there's no way I can ever upgrade the OS any further than OS X 10.5 (AKA Leopard) since it's no longer supported. But it does everything I need it to and that's the important thing.

Occasionally I contemplate buying a new Mac, and whether the extra features and abilities justify the expense. Yes, video encoding would be over four times the speed. But whether it takes four days or less than one to take transcode those TV season DVDs I just bought really doesn't matter since I won't be watching the show that fast anyway. Yes, all the iMacs have built-in cameras. But I think video chats are just a novelty anyway. And yes, I would have a computer capable of running Sims 3, probably the only computer game I would really like to play (all other games I want to play are on video game consoles).

But is it really worth spending $1,500 or so on a new iMac just for that? As much as I like having new "toys" to play around with I think it probably isn't. There's nothing wrong with it, and maybe it'll end up being another few years before it gets replaced. Or maybe Apple will release a new Mac in the fall that's so amazing that I won't be able to resist the urge to buy one. You never know...