I’ve got two brand spanking new MacBook Pros. One is an Core i7 and the other a Core i5 which I was experiencing slow boot up times with.

The i7 is blazingly fast and boots my Intel X25-M 160 GB SSD in around 20 seconds from pressing the power.

The i5 (2.53 Ghz) however with the same SSD was booting in 50-60 seconds. Enough time to go make coffee, read the paper and build a house. Unacceptable to say the least.

Various solutions online suggest re-installing Snow Leopard but what worked for me was resetting the PRAM. After I did that it boots like normal (~25 seconds).

Obviously the problem isn’t with the specific SSD but the fact that the PRAM is in a bad state of some sort.

How to reset the PRAM

Google Chrome is a browser made by Google. The reason behind creating Google Chrome in a market where we have old giants like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera Software’s Opera and Apple’s Safari was the fact that Google felt the need to start from scratch and design a browser to handle the needs of today which for instance is supporting JavaScript heavy sites such as GMail.

It took me a few minutes to locate an OS X version of Google Chrome. It is still under development just like the Linux version but nightly builds can be downloaded here.

Bare in my mind that nightly builds aren’t even of beta quality.

In case you experience autotest hanging around doing nothing with your rspecs simply put RSPEC=true in front of the command or add it permanently to your environment.

RSPEC=true autotest

Because she’s a space cadet.

I just got a My Book Essential Edition 1TB external hard drive.

It came formatted for Windows with a FAT32 filesystem but as I’m on OS X I wanted to repartition and change the filesystem to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Should be easy enough using Disk Utility but it just kept bitching about some error:

“The underlying task reported failure on exit.”

Useless. No information as to what actually went wrong. Looking in the system.log (/var/log/system.log) more information was revealed.

Disk Utility[587]: newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk1s1: partition size not a multiple of 4K.

So by changing the partitions to be a multiple of 4K everything now works.

I’ve been working a bit on Gazettr lately after a fairly long period of inactivity.

One of the things I’ve changed is moving to a more Google Reader like interface with a static sidebar for the feeds and thereby also a static article area. Seems to work quite nicely and I like the changes.

I got rid of the top menu bar which took up too much reading space and moved it to the sidebar (that menu needs some work still). I’ve also for the time being removed all ads.

Absolutely fantastic. One of the most inspiring beautiful TED talks I’ve seen.

I got a CD with the new Norwegian band Cortina this Christmas. Pretty good listening. I recommend checking them out.

If you need to manually migrate mail between for instance Tiger and Leopard you simply need to copy the preferences mail file and the mail folder itself.

The preferences file which holds information on your accounts, signatures, rules, etc. is located here:

 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Transfer that to your new installation to the same folder.

Then rsync your mail folder (or transfer it in whatever way you like). Remember to close Mail on both Macs.

Make sure no Mail folder exists on the target machine below ~/Library and then rsync:

rsync -az ~/Library/Mail your_user_name@target_machine:~/Library

After that simply start Mail and it will ask for authentication details for your accounts.

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