iMac Paint Job (in progress)

Some of you may have read my post in Troubleshooting, http://www.ehmac.ca/mac-ipod-help-troubleshooting/87216-imac-2008-issue.html about my iMac that had a hard drive failure. Well, I decided that I would give it a fresh new look to go along with the fresh new HD I'll be getting shortly.


The next few pics are the take apart, and the reason you shouldn't be smoking around these machines.

I used an air compressor and it blew pretty much all the nastiness away. That and a microfiber cloth got it to near factory condition again.

Next few pics are of the trouble spot of the hard drive.
(Coming soon)

Now we get to the fun part, after looking for a couple weeks for some more interesting paint, I decided to go with a base of midnight blue. After this is done drying for a day or two, I'll be trying to do some interesting GFX with my airbrush, even though I'm not an artist by any stretch.

 Well that's it for now, I'll update or make another post when I get into the next stage of the airbrush work.
 

Farewell iMac hard drive...

My iMac started freezing. After a couple of reboots it stopped rebooting. I booted using the install DVD, as a good tech would do, to run the Mac version of checkdisk. This failed. All signs point to a failing hard drive. I am not surprised, as this Mac had been on loan to a friend that happens to be a *very* avid smoker.

I used a guide I found online about upgrading the hard drive to aide in my tear down process. I am going to take the hard drive with me to work to plug in to a tower with SATA to run SpinRite on (as I have no such tower here), and hopefully the drive will last until the time I get my replacement drive shipped in. Will have to back up the data asap if SpinRite helps.

Also going to take this opportunity to customize my iMac's paint job. After this long I'm kind of getting tired of the ol' aluminum staring at me ;)

Well the aluminum case is cleaned now, found a bottle of cleaner called WORKOUT that got the nicotine off with almost not effort :) Only problem is that I was not able to get my 1st coat of paint on, as the paint I wanted to use is in another castle, and the hardware store here closed 20 min before I got there.

More updates tomorrow night with pics of first painting steps.

iPad thoughts

On Saturday I got to hold an iPad for the first time. To be perfectly clear, I don't own one and this mini review is based on the demo units available. While it was attached to the counter (local Future Shop), I was still able to hold and witness people holding it every which way as advertised.

At the time, when I inquired about PDF reading in iBook, I was greeted with an answer of, not really -- you need to use a PDF reader app and its interface for getting PDFs on the device. After the WWDC keynote of course, we know that iBook now supports this natively.  This was the big thing I was hoping for as I have many tech manuals, text books, and magazines in PDF and was looking for a nice little color reader for them.

The first thing that I thought about the iPad when I held it was it was heavier than I expected. The second thought was that it was extremely solid. Felt like it would do some serious damage if one were to drop it on their foot from a height. (clumsy modes happen) The touch screen didn't seem as easy to pick up my finger pressing as even my iPod touch. There were a few times I had to tap multiple times before it launched the apps.

Over all, apps ran very smoothly. Safari web browsing was good, couldn't check the mail app because I would have had to put my own settings in there. The few non stock apps and games they had were interesting, though not the focus of the device for me. Pictures looked good. The built in speaker(s) sounded decent even inside the crowded and active Future Shop.

One of the things I did while there was stand back and watch as other people of varying backgrounds used these things. I noticed that the young folk were able to pick it up and use it for the most part no problem. About half of the middle aged folk were comfortable with the iPad, but the others seemed a bit put off by some of the options.

The real test for me is going to be when my mother finally makes her way in to the display stand at the store. I want to give it to her and see if she can figure out how to do things without my coaching. She's been using a Mac mini for the last few years now, so I'm wondering how her "out of the box" experience will be. I've got her primed to get a 3G version in the next couple years to take in the camper instead of a full notebook.