Upgrading Macbook Hard Drive.

I love my MacBook, it has served me very well for the last year or so and apart from maxing out its RAM at 2gb i have not done any major upgrades. Well not until recently.

The MacBook is my main machine not only for work, but for media, communication and education. At the same time, it is my phone, my TV, my notebook and of course the device i use to make my shopping lists! Over the last year i have been steadily filling up its hard drive and with the recent addition of becoming my media center the storage needs have surged. so it was time to upgrade the drive.

The MacBook uses a standard 2.5�? Laptop hard drive, so sourcing a new drive was not difficult, in the end i went for a 320gb Western Digital Scorpio as this combined a performance and a storage upgrade. On top of that it is also advertised as quiet (though in practice i can’t hear my old one either).

As my current internal drive is of a decent size (120gb) and it still had 2 years of warranty left, i also purchased a SATA to USB case for laptop drives. This would enable me to use my old internal drive as an external portable drive in the future, and it would make doing the upgrade easier. Cloning my current drive to the new one, then installing the new one into my machine.

Setting up the drive

So, a couple days after ordering the new drive and case they arrived and i was ready to start. I decided too take a two step approach to performing the upgrade to minimize the risk of loosing data. I had decided to take a time machine backup, and leave it disconnected till i knew that my new system was running smoothly.

The first step was to place the new drive into the 2.5�? portable case and attach it via USB. As this was a brand new unformatted drive i had to use the leopard instal DVD version of Disk Utility to initialize it. In the end i went for a single large (300gb) partition which i named Macintosh HD to preserve the paths for things like my web development testing environment.

After doing this i downloaded and installed the excellent SuperDuper and used it to clone my existing internal drive to the new drive in the external case.

After a couple of hours i booted of the new drive to ensure that everything was working. After passing a few simple tests (starting a few apps, checking permissions) i felt the new drive was good and was ready to move onto installing the new drive into the MacBooks internal bay.

Installing MacBook hard drive

So with the booting drive safely inside the external case it was time to transition it into the internal bay. Before starting this i took a look inside the user guide (available at: http://www.apple.com/support/manuals/macbook/ ) which was helpful, but said nothing about how to swap the drive holder across. So after a quick bit of searching i found the following video:

I purchased myself the Torx 8 screwdriver at a local Halfords store and in about 3 minutes i had my new drive installed.

A useful tip which i found no where had mentioned, is that when you first go to boot your mac with the new drive installed it doesn’t do anything, the first time you have to start up while pressing the ALT key and selecting the correct drive to boot.

So with the new 320gb drive installed, i have plenty of room for my media collection, my college notes and my work files. Job done!

Published: 24 May 2008 | Categories: Apple , Permalink

Accessibility on the fly

The problem

I use a screen reader. I do, really, and i must admit, 99% of web sites drive me to spare. Even though i don’t like to admit it, even my own does. Time to explain.

The problem is with branding, and introductions, welcomes, about me and links etc etc. This sits above the main content on most pages.

Now, speaking for myself (and only myself of course) I have that content there for a number of reasons. Design wise it is useful, and SEO / keywords wise it is useful. However after the first landing on the site it is no longer important.

Some Ideas?

When i am using my screen reader I have to listen though the introductory content which i do not want to do. I can hear you all shouting now saying that i could do a “Skip to content link” I could break logic (for the content) and reorder the content or i could do one of many other methods to sort the issue.

The thing which gets me with almost all of the methods (except maybe the ones in the comments you will correct me with) have the major disadvantage as for when i do want the content its not where I want it. If i was to be going to the site for the first time, i would want to hear the introductory content only on my first page landing?

A Solution?

So with this in mind i was thinking about how i could manipulate sever side technologies, semantic markup and CSS to give me the content i want. After thinking for a while for a decent name, all i could come up with is Accessibility on-the-fly.

What is accessibility on-the-fly?

So in the terms of my first usage case (Introductory content on this very site) i need a system which would know if this is your first visit to the site; as such reorder the page content accordingly. To this end i would create a system whereby the standard page design would not have the introductory content then, if a new visitor arrives on any page they will be greeted with the introductory content.

The bit i would be doing different is to still have the introductory content, but placing it lower in the source order.

The idea behind this is to improve the accessibility of the page. No longer should i need to listen to the introduction, or a click a skip to content link.

What do you think?

As is my standard practice, I have only been cooking this up for a few hours. I would be interested in your responses or usage cases? Do you think you could do accessibility on-the-fly

Published: 13 April 2008 | Categories: Development , Permalink

Microformat tools

The hCard microformat is a fantastic way of making the contact information on a page transition into other formats without needing to write tools to do it yourself, or support multiple download formats.

One of the key parts of this is for tools which will do that transformation. In this article I am going to talk about what some of the tools out there are, and talk a little about some of my own projects in this field.

A good example is converting your information to the vCard format (used by many phones, email and address book applications) or to a specific proprietary format like the one used by gmail.

What are the advantages of this?

In my opinion, if I am putting data or information onto the internet it is for one big main reason, for it to be used. Whether this is talking about the web development industry here, or a map on a clients site, the information or data I am adding to the web in my eyes is there for people to use.

If i think about the typical small company site I may be tasked with building, often one of the key aims of the site is to provide contact details. The web is an effective means of giving away such information and part of its power comes from the ability to search for it. Without using semantic methods (Be it RDF or Microformats) this process of finding the data is pretty dumb.

For a computer is is remarkably difficult to tell the difference between a registration number and a phone number apart. It can be done to some degree of accuracy (with additional information) but it is not a simple process.

It would be much easier (and more powerful) if the data is marked up in a way to specify more about what it is. This is basically all the hCard class names are doing.

So What services are there?

This is not an exhaustive list of the services out there to manipulate with hCard data, but these are services which I recommend or I have played a part in building.

X2V – (conversion from hCard to vCard) this project developed by brian suda will transparently convert any hCard page into a download of a vCard. As far as I know this was the first tool for such a thing and the one which is most up to date with the specification.

hCard to Gmail – This is a service which I wrote a few months ago which emulates the service which Brian offers except this services instead provide conversion to the proprietary .csv gmail format.

hCard search engine – over at Technorati they have developed the hCard search engine. This is a good example of how the technology can be used manipulate the web in new ways.

So What now?

I hope that in this article I have explained some of the reasons why I have a passion for micrformats and other semantic technologies. It is my opinion that the biggest thing any web developer could do now to start improving the web would be to start using technologies like hCards

After all, the hCard format and the microformats principles are a bit like the chicken and the egg. We need people to be using them, before the tools are developed, which in turn encourages more people to use them!

Published: 27 December 2007 | Categories: , Permalink