As a paid service ($99 a year), Apple’s MobileMess can be described as a complete failure. So far, almost a month after the launch of Apple’s MobileMe, it has been unable to fulfill the promise of “Everything up to date. Anywhere you are.”
“Over-the-air updates on your iPhone in seconds.”
I have no problem synchronizing Email, Contacts and Calendar between my Mac and the MobileMe cloud, even though the sync service that runs on my Mac is not exactly “push”, as originally marketed. My main beef is with the Push services from MobileMe cloud to my iPhone. The service is so inconsistent that i am having real difficulty trying to troubleshoot the cause of it. For a 20-hour period, i just could not get updates to show up on my iPhone. I did all the steps listed in Apple’s troubleshooting guide for iPhone/iPod sync issues. In addition, i even wiped everything out by re-installing the 2.0.1 firmware. I was on the MobileMe support chat line but the support personnel gave up eventually.
Mysteriously, between 1700 and 2000 today, it started working. I was able to get Push email, Contacts and Calendar working at the same time. Unfortunately, it did not last. MobileMe push service to my iPhone is broken again.
I am going to give MobileMe another week. If this Push issue continues, i am getting my money back from Apple.
Update
It appears that MobileMe Push does not work when iPhone is in Airplane mode with WiFi turned on. Changes made on iPhone are pushed successfully to the MobileMe cloud but not the other way round. For the past two days, Push sync from MobileMe cloud has been working.
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When i bought my 23″ Apple Cinema Display several months ago, it bothered me that i could not turn the display off. There is a Power button on the ACD itself but whenever i pressed it, a window would pop out asking me if i wanted to perform the following actions on my Mac Pro: Restart, Sleep or Shut Down.
Window that popped out originally when the power button was touched.
In order for me to “turn off” the display, i had to wait until the Power savings setting for the display to kick in.
Barely two hours ago, i am not sure what caused the setting to change. When i accidentally touched the ACD power button, the display went dark. On checking the Display options in System Preferences, i finally found that i can configure different options for the Power button!
ACD Power button options.
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I don’t exactly remember what broke the scanner functionality of my two-year old HP C6150 fax/scanner/printer. It could be the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update, or it could be the HP Printer Driver 1.1 update. When i tried to use the scanner, i get the following error message:
Scanner could not be initialized
To fix this, just uninstall the Hewlett-Packard software using the provided HP Uninstaller.app. HP support provided a solution, but it is not necessary - actually, not possible to - install just the scanner software first. Just reinstall the whole package and this problem will go away.
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Ever since i got my Mac Pro in February, i have been having random issue with Safari. Sometimes, it would take a very long time loading a page while on other occasions, some items on a page would not be loaded. The error that i would commonly see is “Safari can’t open the page”.
Initially, i thought this could be due to me running a VMware Fusion virtual machine that’s causing the problem. But i have no such problem in Firefox. Finally, i decided to google for “Safari can’t open the page”. This took me to the Apple Discussion forum with the solution. For some reason, Safari in Leopard (10.5.2) is very flaky about the DNS. Originally, the DNS Servers for my Ethernet card pointed to my router:
After adding the two OpenDNS IP addresses, i have not seen any “Safari can’t open the page” error.
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If there is one complain that i have on my recently purchased Mac Pro, it would be the Pioneer DVD burner. When it’s reading or burning DVD, it’s almost jet-engine loud. It’s a far cry from the whisper quiet dual quad-core Mac Pro. I read that it’s possible to quiet down the DVD burner a little by flashing another firmware on it. Also, by default, the DVD drive can only change its region code no more than 6 times. I want to free my DVD drive and be able to play DVDs from outside the US.
The best known site for hosting region-free DVD firmwares is The Dangerous Brothers. I managed to find a region-free firmware for the Pioneer DVR-112D. However, this firmware flasher only works in Windows. I have a VMware Fusion Windows XP virtual machine but it is a really bad idea to update the DVD firmware in a virtualized environment. I know it is possible to run Windows XP or Vista on Mac Pro using an Apple tool called Boot Camp. Installing Windows XP using Boot Camp requires a bootable installation CD with Windows XP SP2. Other than my work notebook, i have no other Windows machines at home, which explains why i did not have any installable Windows CD.
At the same time while i was figuring out how i could get my hands on a Windows XP CD, i also wanted to try out Boot Camp Assistant, a utility that is supposed to help install Windows XP or Vista on a Mac. I ran into a roadblock as soon as i click on the “Continue” button.
According to error message, Boot Camp cannot be used to partition an external disk drive. Thinking that the utility had somehow recognized my two external Firewire-attached disk drives, i ejected the drives and unplugged the firewire cable. Second attempt without any externally-attached disk drives, exactly the same result. A quick search on Apple’s Discussion forum revealed that Boot Camp Assistant does not work with any RAIDed disk drives. Specifically, it is not possible to install Windows XP on RAIDed disk drives. But i was not trying to install them onto my startup disks, which was built as a mirror set. I was trying to install on the third internal SATA disk drive. Boot Camp assistant picked up on the RAIDed startup disks and refused to budge.
In order to run Boot Camp Assistant, i would have to destroy the mirror set. It was not possible to destroy the mirror set using Disk Utility because it was my start-up disk. So i had to shutdown and boot my Mac Pro using the Leopard install disc. Booting into the Leopard install disc and running Disk Utility from the install disc allowed me to delete the mirror set. After booting up my Mac, i gave Boot Camp Assistant a trial run and this time round, i got past the bogus error message.
I waited several more days until finally acquiring an installation disc for Windows XP with SP2. I promptly proceeded to run Boot Camp Assistant and installed Windows XP on the third internal disk drive. One important note: during the XP installation, you must reformat the Boot Camp partition. As part of the installation process, Boot Camp Assistant created a FAT32 partition. However there is some problem with this FAT32 partition. If you proceed with the XP installation without reformatting the partition into NTFS, then you will see this error:
Disk error
Press any key to restart
I attempted to use the version 1.15 of the region-free firmware flasher from TDB but running it gave me an “Unable to set kernal mode” error message immediately. Trying an older version (1.09) threw the same error as well.
After googling for a while, i found a tool called dvrflash, which happens to be from TDB as well. I also found another tool called MCSE (MediaCodeSpeedEdit) that allows you to add capabilities to official DVD firmwares, including the ability to patch official firmwares so that they are region-free. I also downloaded the latest Pioneer DVD-112D firmware from the official Pioneer website.
After patching the version 1.24 firmware so that it’s region-free, i tried to flash the firmware to the DVD burner using dvrflash:
# dvrflash -f d: A0813001.124
Drive Information:
Description : PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-112D
Firmware Rev : BC14
Firmware Date : 07/09/27
Manufacturer : PIONEER
Drive is in normal mode.
Firmwares and Drive type mismatch
If you want to convert your drive, you need to supply both Kernel and General
I thought it may be the patched firmware that was causing dvrflash to fail. I tried the same command with the original firmware but it was the same disappointing result.
After doing a little more research on google, i found another dvrflash parameter that i could use. So i ran the following command:
# dvrflash -ff d: A0813001.124
dvrflash went a little further this time and it appeared that it was flashing the firmware until yet another error. At this point, it looked as though my DVD burner was in a half-baked state. The firmware revision was reported as 0000 instead of the expected 1.24. No matter what i did, i could not eject the DVD tray from Windows (Mac Pro’s DVD drive does not have any physical eject button). Running dvrflash with the -ff option put the DVD drive in kernel mode. Panic stricken, i booted back into Leopard, hoping that a reboot would fix it. Nope.
I can’t remember why but i booted back into Windows. Next, i decided to give the TDB firmware flasher another shot. Amazingly, the firmware was flashed to my DVD burner and at the same time, putting my DVD drive back in normal mode. Running dvrflash without any parameter indicated that the DVD burner had indeed been flashed to firmware revision 1.15. On the heel of this success, i decided to try my luck on upgrading to the patched version 1.24 firmware from Pioneer using dvrflash. It worked!
DVR-112D info in System Profiler before:
DVR-112D in in System Profiler after being updated to 1.24:
Running DVRFlash shows that the Pioneer DVR-112D is now region free:
Device : A:
Vendor : PIONEER
Model : DVD-RW DVR-112D
Revision : 1.24
Status : RPC-1 (region free)
Now that i got my DVD burner’s firmware updated, i wanted to recreate the mirror set for my start-up disk. Unfortunately, recreating the mirror set means erasing the data on the disks to be configured in the set. I had to clone my start-up disk to another partition on the third internal hard disk using Carbon Copy Cloner. Cloning about 100 GB of data took almost an hour. At the completion of cloning, i set cloned partition as my start-up disk and rebooted my Mac Pro. After recreating the mirror set with a pair of disk drives, i cloned my start-up disk, which is now on the third disk drive, back to the mirror set. That took yet another hour. When that finally completed, i configured the mirror set as my start-up disk and rebooted one more time.
All these activities took place over the course of several days and a marathon 5-hour session that involved installing Windows XP and flashing the firmware.
The morning after updating the firmware, i saw this on hardmac.com:
After a long period of silence, the software DVDflash has just released an update. The version 2.5 will allow the flashing under OSX of the following engravers:
DVR-111
DVR-112
DVR-115
DVR-212
DVR-215
God damn it! I could have flashed the firmware in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard without going through all the hell of installing Windows XP!!!
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My second attempt in installing Leopard on my 4-year old 17-inch Powerbook G4 1GHz failed. The first attempt was a migration from Tiger to Leopard. Even though the migration was successful, things were running extremely slow. Worse, i was getting kernel panic every so often.
My second attempt, i decided to erase everything on my Powerbook and install a fresh new copy of Leopard. Again, the installation appeared to be successful. However, it was impossible to play sound/music without them sounding like a broken record. Kernel panic was not happening as frequently as after my first attempt but it still happened several times.
The minimum requirement for Leopard, as stated on Apple.com, is any “Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor” and “512MB of memory”. My Powerbook runs at 1GHz and it is equipped with 1GB of memory. So what’s up with that?
On my Powerbook, Tiger definitely roars while Leopard purrs like an animal with a severe cold.
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On the day after i picked up my Mac Pro from the University Village Apple Store, i promptly ordered two 2-GB DIMM modules from OWC (macsales.com) for it. The DIMM modules arrived the following week. After installing the DIMM modules, i swore System Profiler indicated that i had 6 GB of RAM. Several days later, i installed Leopard 10.5.2 update and on reboot, to my horror, i realized that the “6 GB” of RAM has become 4 GB. On closer inspection, the two 2-GB DIMM modules were being recognized as 1-GB DIMM modules!
Initially i thought the culprit was the 10.5.2 update. After getting some advice from AppleCare, i booted Mac Pro into maintenance mode and loaded Apple Hardware Test (AHT). AHT would freeze whenever the OWC DIMM modules were installed, regardless of the locations where they were installed (Mac Pro comes with two 4-slot banks of memory cards). If i took out the OWC DIMM modules, AHT would have no problem. Another user on Apple’s support forum had the same problem.
Good thing OWC has a pretty decent exchange/return policy. After contacting its tech support, i received a pre-paid UPS shipping label and now the “bad” DIMM modules are on their way back to OWC.
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