Silvermac

If you are one of a numerous victims of MacBook and MacBook Pro hard drive failures, there is a glimpse of hope that you can still have your data recovered. It involves removing the hard drive from its enclosure, from the computer in this case.

Removing the hard drive from a MacBook is a breeze, it takes good part of a few minutes.  However, MacBook Pro owners will need some bravery, surgical precision and, of course, lots of time. Be aware that opening the MacBook Pro will definitely void your warranty.

Sometimes the drive heads get stuck in a parking bay and consequently your hard drive fails to read or boot. There is no clear indication that would help distinguish between this and the genuinely dead hard drive, but since it’s not working anyway, you can still give it a try. Often this fixes the issue.

Remove the hard drive from your computer and hold it on the palm of one hand. Give it one flat-handed brisk slap on the top of the drive. Just one. Then place it back into your computer and see if it worked.

If it’s still dead then it’s bad news. If it works – you have a decision to make; leave it as it is, and continue with your life like nothing ever happened, or get the data off the drive as soon as possible and get a replacement drive. It’s really up to you.

You’ve also learned about the benefits of backing up, so go on and get that external drive, they’re cheap as chips now, and back-up, back-up, back-up …

Well, not exactly an iMac, but it was the sign of things to come. On the eve of (possible) release of the 4th generation iMac, it’s nice to go back 30 years and see this 1977 ad for Apple II.

Image source macmothership.com

One couldn’t fail to notice that apple picture on the kitchen wall, and of course ‘apples and oranges’ in the fruit basket on the kitchen bench.

By the way, is that Shelley Long from “Cheers” ?

Earlier today I visited my sister who returned last week from the trip to Africa. She showed me quite a few pictures she’s taken in Tanzania, but one picture caught my attention in a special way – the one of her reaching the top of Kilimanjaro.

Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa, 5,895 m asl (some 20,000 feet) and proud climbers take a lot of pictures, just like my sister did. Some even put some stickers on the summit signs and boxes (see in the background).

But I really wonder who on earth would think of taking an Apple sticker to the roof of Africa ?

See the larger image here

We tend to say “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. But would someone please tell Apple - It’s broken, please fix it!

Earlier this evening I was writing an article about some cool stuff on Mac, and I needed to capture the screen when selecting the application using Command-Tab, see below.

Whatever I tried it wouldn’t work, as I wasted my valuable keys onto switching applications function. I needed to press Command-Tab, then while the image is on the screen – capture it. The way to do it would be Command-Shift-3, but the Command key was already in use.

Then I thought – Grab ! Yes, Grab has that function where you can start the ticker and you have 10 seconds to get your screen ready before it fires off. I was in Firefox, so I just clicked Firefox / Services / Grab in the menu bar, and three options popped out; Screen, Selection, and Timed Screen. But I’ve got all three Grab options grayed out. (?)

Quick jump to Google and a few forums suggested that this will work only with cocoa applications. So I opened Safari, Mail, iCal – same story. Someone said, you need to select something before it will work, so I selected a few lines of text – same result, just greyed out. Even suggestion of having TextEdit open wouldn’t work.

Finally I thought I could open Grab as an application, couldn’t I? So, surely there it is, in the Applications / Utilities folder. Once you open it, just select Capture / Timed Screen (or Command-Shift-Z on your keyboard) and the ticker starts.

Funny thing is that the generated file is actually a TIFF, but since I need to crop and resize it, it really isn’t a big deal.

When I think back, I’m pretty sure the Grab worked as service just fine in Panther, but not in Tiger (10.4.8) Can someone with Panther check this and let me know? Or even better – let Steve know.

[tags]Grab, OS X, screen capture[/tags]

Steve Jobs demonstrates Apple I, at Personal Computing Festival in Atlantic City, NJ (28/29 August 1976)