It’s been an exciting week of product announcements from Amazon and Apple. Decide who does a better Steve Jobs impersonation.
Amazon Kindle Press Conference – September 28, 2011, New York, NY
Apple Special Event – October 4, 2011, Cupertino, CA
2011 Mac Mini Hard Drive Upgrade Video
We just upgraded a 2011 Apple Mac Mini to have an SSD, a second hard drive, and new RAM.
Video
Also available on YouTube in High Definition or Standard Definition.
Parts List
- OCZ 120 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-120G
- Western Digital 1TB Blue WD10JPVT 5400RPM, 8 MB cache, 2.5 inch, 9.5MM height hard drive
- Corsair 8 GB DDR3 Laptop Memory
Kit CMSO8GX3M2A1333C9
- Apple Mac Mini
- Cable: Apple Part 922-9560, also called “Apple Mac Mini Server (Mid 2010) Bottom Hard Drive Server Flex Cable” or “Hard Drive Flex Cable Bottom”. We used part number 1009005 at welovemacs.com. This is sold as a kit from ifixit.com.
Alternate Parts List
The OCZ Vertex 3 is the fastest consumer SSD at the moment. Other SSD’s that you might consider include:
- Highest reliability SSD: Intel 510 Series 120 GB
- Best value high capacity SSD: Lexar Media Crucial 512 GB m4
The Western Digital Blue drive mentioned above is high capacity and quiet. For a faster spinning hard drive consider:
- Western Digital 750TB Black WD7500BPKT
The dedicated graphics in the mid-tier Mac Mini make it worth it for me. But for the cheapest Mini, consider:
- Apple Mac Mini MC815LL/A 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 dual-core processor, integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000, 2GB RAM, 500GB hard drive
UPDATE: My video shows adding two 9.5MM height drives. I just upgraded another Mac Mini with a 9.5MM SSD and a 12.5MM standard hard drive. As with my first upgrade, the hard drive goes in the bottom slot (the side closest to the top of the case when upright). This does fit. But first you need to slide the logic board out slightly. Be sure to remove the IR port adapter before sliding out the logic board. The OWC video shows how to do this. I used a cut up coat hanger to insert into the logic board holes and slide it out.
First Boot
Starting with a blank hard drive is easy on the 2011 Mac Mini. Hold down Command-R to boot into Lion Recovery which allows you to format the drives and download Lion over the Internet.
TRIM Support in Lion
For optimal SSD performance, enable TRIM support within OS X Lion. Grant Pannell describes the terminal commands to enable TRIM.
Photos of Upgrade
Panasonic DMC-TS3 Waterproof GPS Camera
Panasonic DMC-TS3
It’s summer. And if you’re like me, you want to get out and take pictures. But wait. Are you forgetting something? Yes, you forgot about your crushing fear of dementia which will inevitably make you forget where the photos were taken. Well, there’s a solution for that.
It’s the Panasonic DMC-TS3
The DMC-TS3
(Panasonic DMC-TS3
Here’s a map of geotagged photos from within iPhoto of my bike trip along the Great Allegheny.
Other Geotagging Solutions
There are unfortunately very few cameras with GPS tagging built-in. Cell phone cameras such as the iPhone will geotag photos automatically. You can use any camera with the neat iPhone app GeoLogTag but this requires several extra steps to add the location information later. I’d love to have geotagging built into a larger sensor compact camera like the Canon S95.
Waterproof
While the Panasonic DMC-TS3
Being waterproof, it’s also great for skiing or any outdoor sports where rain or sweat would attack a normal camera.
The only thing I wish the DMC-TS3
iKlear Cleaning Kit
When clients give me computers that have lots of dirt and smudge on the screen, I grab iKlear
Now I also use iKlear
Bogus Domain Name Expiration Notices
As a owner of several websites, I regularly get misleading domain expiration notices from companies that are not my domain registrar.
Sometimes the notices are about domains that really are expiring soon. Today, I got a notice of expiration notice from a place called domainregisstra.com from verranhaddad@sellstones.com. While the email never stated the expiration of the domain, it implied one by stating a “due date” of May 13, 2011. The email text stated:
Attn :
This solicitation is to inform you that it’s time to send in your registration for [mywebsite.com]. DRS is a submission service and search engine ranking provider.
Failure to complete your search engine registration by May 13, 2011 may result in the cancellation of this offer (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).
Your registration includes search engine submission for [mywebsite.com] for 1 year. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer by May 13, 2011. This notice is not an invoice. It is a courtesy reminder to register [mywebsite.com] for search engine listing so that your customers can locate you on the web.
So I looked up my domain at whois.com and found out the real expiration date of April 20, 2015.
The main scam here is that this looks like a renewal notice from my registar. But it’s from a company that wants to move me to a different registrar. If I was going to renew my domain, I’d just go to my real registar.
The price quoted from this email is $75 per year. That’s a scam considering that places like hover.com and godaddy offer domain registrations for $5 to $15 per year. The only claimed extra value is a “search engine submission”, which is really a worthless service. If your site is brand new and no search engine knows about it you can submit it to Google and submit it to Bing for free.