travel tech

[cellio]

Dani lent me his iPad for my trip. It has proven to be very convenient, aside from the auto-correct introducing some errors when I type. (I'll fix any that I've missed when I get home.)

My iBook crashed yesterday. I don't know what the problem is or if it can be fixed; it made a loud sustained whirring sound, not the klunk of a dying disk (at least for PCs), so I don't know if it's a disk error or something else. I couldn't figure out how to turn it off - no response to the mouse or keyboard, nor to the power button. I ended up popping the battery after things quieted down (so the disk wasn't spinning); no idea if that made things worse.

If I can't fix it I'll need to replace it with something. The iPad is nice so it might be that (with a real keyboard), if it has a real text editor and access to the file system. Does it? Is there an emacs port yet?

Comments

mac woes

[arslan-ibn-daud.livejournal.com]

Normally the power button brings up the dialog box that says "do you want to shut down", and if your computer hangs, then the dialog box never comes up. You can do a forced shutdown by holding the power button down for about 5 seconds. That can, of course, corrupt your disk, and force the system to do a filesystem check when it reboots, but such is life. Taking out the battery works too :)

Mac laptops can go into a high-whine mode when working hard on some processing...for me this happens if it does a BIG compile, or runs a big Flash game like Farmville. This is the fan speeding up to keep the innards from overheating, and it normally powers down when things cool off.

Best advice: try rebooting the ibook, and give it a long time to do its filesystem check. (It should show the Apple logo while doing this). If you can't get that far, take it to an Apple store.

I hope it's OK...my last Mac laptop had a similar death about a year ago...in the middle of our vacation in Nebraska :(

Re: mac woes

[cellio]

Thanks! I did press and hold, but maybe not long enough. When I rebooted I saw, in alternation, the apple logo and a file icon. After about five minutes I gave up;based on this comment I'll try again and just let it run for a while.

I was downloading pictures from my camera (just for security) when it happened, so I guess that's kind of disk-intensive.

Re: mac woes

[arslan-ibn-daud.livejournal.com]

Yeah, importing photos can tax the machine if you've got a lot of pictures. (Iphoto spends lots of CPU cycles creating thumbnails and different sizes for each picture, so that iphoto's zoom feature will work smoothly). It should still have offered you the shutdown dialog, although it could be sluggish getting around to it. (Just like any other Unix machine :)

I'm not sure how long a filesystem check should take. The time for a filesystem check seems to be proportional to the size of your disk. I think it checks every 1024 bytes, so a 2MB drive will take twice as long as a 1MB drive. And hard drives getting bigger every year means the check gets slower. 10 min is not unusual these days.

Re: mac woes

[cellio]

If I recall correctly it's a 60G disk - not big by today's standards, but it's an older machine. With luck it just wants more time.

And while reinstalling an OS is annoying, I don't keep anything only on this machine, so I won't lose data. Fortunately I had already posted all my queued LJ posts; I was preparing to write more when this happened.