Ahhhh! It’s been a long time since I last posted, but I’m back up and running for good, now (there’ll be another 24 hour outage when I move to RPI, but other than that, we should be good!).
I’ve replaced Trinity with a nice new machine, built from a bunch of parts I bought (all from Newegg, of course).
I initially tried OpenSolaris (which Mike is succeeding with), but between the package manager needing a serious amount of help and my general inexperience with a rather different OS, I had to go back to Debian. So, no ZFS for now, maybe next summer.
Here’s what’s what in the new computer:
2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (E7200)
2GB DDR2 RAM
2×750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16
all in a cute little Shuttle case (the K48). I had to later acquire an extra SATA cable and a ATA-to-SATA power cable (to get data and power for the second drive), but that wasn’t a problem…
The stock Intel fan sucks, as everyone has already noted, but Arctic Cooling’s fan simply doesn’t fit in the small case! (so don’t spend extra money on it… just… make the Intel one work!)
The most awesome bit: I get 106MB/s writing to the disk (and 60MB/s over AFP over Gigabit Ethernet, or about 80MB/s over SAMBA). Mike and I discovered that Apple’s SAMBA client is broken: I get about 2MB/s with SAMBA on OS X, but 60MB/s with AFP on the same system, and 80MB/s with SAMBA on Linux on the same machine. So, simply put, don’t use SAMBA from Leopard.
My PowerMac G4 seems to have stopped working. Luckily, Dad brought a G3 B&W home from our neighbor’s a few months ago, so check it out!:
What with crooked disks and a 300MHz CPU, the chances of this being a lasting solution are somewhat slim; I’m going to replace Trin with a small homebuilt machine (based off a Shuttle box)…
Also… this is running inside a chroot off of the Debian 4.0 install CD, so if it goes down… don’t look at me 
We had some frozen shrimp in the freezer that needed to be eaten, so Tim and I took that on as our next cooking challenge. We found a recipe for Ancho Shrimp with Smoked Gouda Corncakes that would use up the shrimp, and be something other than chicken, which seems to be all we make. We also baked some chocolate white chip cookies and made a Orange Cream Punch as our drink.
After searching for ancho peppers, ancho chile pepper or some spice that could be a substitute, we struck gold at Shaw’s. We walked into the store, picked up lettuce for salad and basically walked into the pepper section, which just happened to have dried ancho peppers. With that most important ingredient, we set to work.
Continue reading ‘Shrimp & Corncakes and Chocolate White Chip Cookies’
Hello again! We made food again tonight, July 11th. I got this crazy idea to make chicken and rice stuffed peppers, which is what we decided to make tonight. In addition, we made buttery lemon spinach, an orange juice/lemonade/iced tea drink known as Tiger Tea and a brownie ice cream sandwich cake dessert.
We started by making the dessert, because it took the longest and had to be frozen a few times. The first step was to make the brownie layers, which were easy to mix and bake. Those had to cool for a while, and then the ice cream center was added. It took a bit of effort to get the brownie out of one of the pans, which made everything a little more difficult. And the ice cream layer, which had to be level, was interesting because we had to slice the ice cream in layers, and had to keep melting it in the oven for a few seconds at a time. In the end, it was alright, the brownie part wasn’t great, and it was really messy.
Continue reading ‘Stuffed Peppers, Spinach and Sandwiches’
Hi, Amy again, writing before we embark on our next fooding adventure tomorrow! On June 28, Tim and I made an attempt at a classic Utica/Rome, NY recipe called chicken riggies. It’s basically chicken and pasta (penne in our case, though rigatoni is suggested) in a creamy tomato sauce. It’s kind of odd to think of and explain, but it was actually quite great. The most hilarious bit during cooking this was the sauce. When you let it settle, it turned white, but when you stirred it, it turned bright orange. Absolutely awesome. We skipped the cooking sherri, which was fine, but I think rigatoni would have been better.
In addition, we made some cheese bread —simply a cut up loaf of Italian bread, buttered and spread with mozzarella cheese. Then the bread was baked it for about 3 minutes, and it was nice and warm and delicious.
Our chocolate chip ice cream pie was excellent. The crust, which I had to make again, was crushed mini chocolate chip cookies. There was a ring of cookies around the edge. The crust was covered in melted vanilla ice cream. We stopped there, and decided not to follow the next step which said to wait 2 hours, then add more ice cream. We just put a ton of ice cream on the first time and froze that. This was definitely a dessert we would make again!
Overall, a very good dinner that was semi quick and simple.
Hi, it’s Amy again! Our first attempt at making a full dinner together happened around June 17. After going through about a thousand recipes, I compiled a menu for a complete dinner.
The main dish was called Southwestern Chicken Salad—a combination of salad, baked flour tortillas, chicken, corn, black beans and tomatoes. The dressing was a mix of barbeque sauce and ranch dressing. It was very simple and good for the most part, though the beans and tomatoes were rather excessive.
The corn bread muffins we made from scratch came from this recipe. They were quick and easy, but we learned that you should use Pam, not muffin papers. Also, the recipe we used, which we found after we went shopping, used only things we already had.
Continue reading ‘Southwestern Chicken Salad Plus Sides’
Hi! I’m Amy and I’m going to be writing about the food adventures that Tim and I are taking over this summer.
After Tim made his fudge, we decided to take on a peanut butter and fudge pie on June 11th. After we found the recipe, we secretly biked to Mazza’s and picked up the graham crackers, cream and evaporated milk that we needed.
The first thing to do was figure out how to make a crust out of the graham crackers. That turned out to be my job, and it was quite an experience. When I made the crust, I used the wrong pan, which was too small and made the pie rather tall.
Meanwhile, Tim made more fudge that we used to make a layer between the crust and the peanut butter. Again, he complained about the candy thermometer, which I finally understand. He had to use a cup of water and try to sink the little fudge drops. He layered in the fudge, while I whipped the cream with a whisk—which wasn’t easy, but made a great topping.
Continue reading ‘Peanut Butter and Fudge Pie’
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Recently, an unknown number of first-revision Santa Rosa MacBook Pros began exhibiting issues with their onboard video cards. After a reboot, or on wake from sleep, the machine refuses to acknowledge the presence of a display, either internal or external. From that point on, the computer never regains its displays - not after a reboot, etc. Subsequent debugging indicates that the machine is misidentifying its NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT card as the MacBook’s Intel X3100 card. This issue is known to affect at least 50 people - a group of affected users has formed a Google Spreadsheet in order to document and organize cases.
AppleCare is recommending replacing the logic board, which some have gone through with, only to have the machine return to an unusable state shortly afterwards. Compounding the issue is the fact that this problem has arisen only shortly after the expiration of the default warrantee on these machines (this issue seems to only affect machines shipped around June, 2007), thus causing the logic board replacement to cost upwards of 400$ for those who did not purchase extended warranties. If you are experiencing the issues detailed below, please add yourself to the spreadsheet and visit our thread on the Apple Support forums, so we can get a reasonably accurate count of affected users.
Symptoms & Notes
- Blank screen, both on the internal and external displays
- The computer boots; it is accessible over the network or with Screen Sharing
- Target Disk Mode works (this can be used to backup user data!)
- ioreg and System Profiler both report an Intel X3100 video card, which is incorrect
- Affects people even with MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1 installed (which was released to fix a similar problem, introduced in Firmware 1.5)
- Seems to be independent of any software updates, hardware changes, etc.
There are a great number of potential fixes floating around on the Apple Support forum thread. These include PRAM/NVRAM/PMU resets, firmware restores, changes in memory configuration, deleting Safe Sleep files, etc. However, none of these appear to be permanent fixes; apparently, even replacing the logic board is not a permanent fix, at least for some!
Someone has mentioned the disabling/deleting Boot Camp might fix things. Replacing my machine’s logic board seems to have worked, at least so far!
