Apple – georgeharito.com

A picture of an iPhone 6 running Overcast while playing an episode of the Song Exploder podcast.

January 10, 2017 / 0 Comments

Podcasts I’m listening to (2016-17 edition)

I thought I’d write a soft blog post to bring in the new year. Lots of things have been happening offline for me in 2016, hence the lack of posts lately – sorry about that!

Anyone who knows me IRL would know that I love listening to podcasts. I listen to them as I drive to the train station every day, on my way to work on the train, during working hours in my headphones as I am coding away, and on my way back home too via train and car again. During the weekends I stream podcasts to my Bose speaker system so I can listen while I do chores around the home. If I could, I’d love to listen podcasts in the shower (but I haven’t found a good Bluetooth shower speaker yet) or while I ride my bicycle if I decide to cycle commute my way to work (but I figure listening to headphones while riding is a big safety hazard).

May 3, 2014 / 17 Comments

Replacing the SCSI hard drive with SD card on my SE/30

So it’s a rainy Saturday evening while I write this, and figured that I should document my recent activities I had with my old SE/30 (plus I haven’t updated this blog in quite some time).

A few weeks ago I ordered a SCSI2SD card. The card is really an adapter that has a SCSI 50-pin male header and 12V molex connector on one end, and a micro USB and micro SD card slot on the other, with some circuitry and ICs in the middle somewhere. It’s a nifty little adapter that can step in the boots of a spinning SCSI hard drive of imminent rust, and replace all that no-doubt-more-unreliable-now hardware with the durability of flash memory storage. So I bought one for shits and giggles, and had a go at replacing the Quantum 80MB (yep, megabytes) hard drive in my SE/30 with a micro SD card and this adapter.

February 20, 2013 / 2 Comments

Changing your OS X short name under Mountain Lion (aka I bought a new iMac and I broked it)

I recently bought a new iMac, and after waiting 4 weeks for it to arrive (and after cancelling my initial order because I forgot to do the educational discount, and then re-ordering the machine), I finally got it. It’s a 27″ iMac with a 3.2GHz i5 CPU, 8GB RAM and a 1TB drive with Fusion (so it’s really 1.128GB). It runs screamingly fast, and absolutely canes over my old 2007 model Mac Mini 2GHz with 2GB RAM.

Anyway, the other day I had the pleasure of migrating all of my data from the Mac mini to the shiny new iMac. All went swimmingly well, except for the carrying over of my user account to the new machine. The iMac requested I create a new account in the middle of the installation / set up process, before asking the Migration Assistant questions, so I created a ‘George’ account assuming that MA will overwrite this with the account I’m bringing over from my Mac mini. Which kind of happened – my Unix user (what you see when you do an ‘ls -lha’ in the 3rd column of a Terminal output) was ‘george’ but my home folder name became ‘george\ 1’ after Migration Assistant completed.

September 25, 2012 / 2 Comments

Review: Apple EarPods

Please note: I am not a writer, journalist or a master of the English language. This is also my first review of a product, ever. So I do apologise if my spelling or grammar offends you.

Recently I had experienced some pretty bad luck with headphones. I usually sport a pair of Klipsch S4i in-ear headphones on my commute to work, and am also often found programming with them on, piping my own eclectic and weird musical tastes aurally into my brain. The trusty Klipsch though played its last tune earlier this week, with the left channel spluttering into nothingness during my walk from the train station to my workplace. I did have a pair of original Apple iPhone 4, but as we all know from the past 11 years of history, the sound quality and comfort are quite low. I also started running again, and the headphones I used for that activity had gone to voice coil heaven many moons ago. These cheap TDK over-ear clip-on headphones weren’t designed for jogging at all, what with their heavy cans and flimsy ear foam. Read more

March 6, 2011 / 2 Comments

Retro Apple //e

This weekend, the opportunity to receive an old Apple //e had passed my way and I took it eagerly with both hands. The guy who had it before me (one of my dad’s work mates) didn’t know much about it, but was about to throw it away or sell it, so I made sure I snapped it up real quick. As we got it home, I had a good look around it and it seems to be an Apple //e Platinum with monitor and disk drive. Unfortunately, the other end of the cable for the disk drive has been cut, so I can’t use any floppies until I either get a new cable and do a transplant, or get a new drive overall.
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March 27, 2010 / 1 Comment

Proposal via iPhone app

For those who know me quite well, they already know this, but for those who don’t, I’ll just come clean and say it.

I proposed to my (then) girlfriend in November 2009 via iPhone app. Yes, I’m a nerd. Here’s how it happened.
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September 6, 2009 / 2 Comments

What ticks me off about OSX & culture

This might come across as a angry little Mac fanboy venting, but I was wondering today what aspects of OSX and/or its culture that tick you off. We talk about what’s great about OSX all the time (and in my opinion, there are heaps of HUGE plusses), but I can easily come up with a few points myself:
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August 30, 2009 / 7 Comments

Combining PDF docs using Automator and Services in Snow Leopard 10.6

UPDATE (10/09/2009): A big thanks to Eric Weijers who pointed out in the comments below that the “Get Finder Items” action that I implemented in this workflow actually doubles up the pages that are in the resulting PDF. If you follow the instructions outlined in the post below, please make sure you don’t add the “Get Finder Items” action.

Before upgrading to Snow Leopard, I had made a few Automator actions that were saved as Finder plugins, and hence were accessible from Finder’s contextual popup window. However, after upgrading to Snow Leopard I found that these Finder plugins were gone (amongst other undesireable, but tolerable and fixable changes). After hearing about Services through the Apple Snow Leopard features page, and podcasts such as MacBreak Weekly, I decided to retool the Automator action as a Service instead.
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June 21, 2009 / 0 Comments

Pulling apart a Wallstreet G3 (and then putting it back together)

I had received an Apple PowerBook Wallstreet G3 some time ago that was looking a little sad. It had been an education machine, so it has had a bit of a rough life. Its external case has many scuffs and scratches, with some worn bits on the bottom where you can see the underlying metal, the PRAM battery was shot and the trackpad had been attacked with what I gathered was a sharp instrument of some sort, perhaps a drawing compass. Naturally, the laptop battery was dead and could only hold a couple of minutes’ charge.

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