When Bunnies Attack

I mean, really. My hard disks in my desktop were less than 120GB for the longest while and that lasted me years. It blew my mind that I could really ever accumulate more than 80GB of data in a year. Well, it turns out everything is bigger these days. I guess it won’t be long before we’ll be equipping laptops with 1TB drives!

My poor little Macbook Pro actually ran out of disk space yesterday and it took most of the day to repair that. I’m running a whole host of applications and Parallels so I can run WinXP. I started deleting things, defragging, and rebooting the Mac a lot. What’s sort of stupid about OS X is how it really doesn’t do garbage cleanup on the disk until it absolutely has to. So even if you have like 10GB free, forget it! That will probably used for deleted files. And only when you reboot the computer does it decide to clean up all those deleted inodes.

It took me a while to figure this out. It turns out that because I do a lot of photography that I create massively huge files! Sure, each photo might be 3-5 MB, but multiply that by 1000s and you get GB of data that gets moved around! Like, recently I was out at the Cherry Blossom Festival and I took 1,355 photos for something like 3.7GB. (I used up all 4 of my SD cards!) Crazy!

So, yeah, I’m a total mediaholic! And my poor little laptop drive just can’t keep up with it. I’m contemplating upgrading to a much much larger hard drive when I can! Of course that voids the Macbook warranty, so I don’t know if i want to tackle that right now.

It’s weird, I hear that Macbook owners can easily change their hard drives by tugging on a pull-tab near the battery. But, noooooooooooo, for Macbook Pro owners we have a wholly-inaccessible HDD compartment which requires popping the keyboard off! And lifting thin ribbon cables, etc. I remember when I replaced my other laptop’s HDD (after it had sort of gone south) and it wasn’t that bad. Unscrew the flap, take out the sleeve, disconnect the cables, reapply.

Anyways, so, I read up on Macbook article that showed how easy it was to swap in a new hard drive that could be bigger and faster. I think faster really is what I need, not necessarily larger. I do a lot of compiling code and photo processing, so anything to speed up the disk cache would help tremendously. My other laptop had the upgrade to a 7200 RPM drive which is probably why it felt really light and fast.

There is a group for everyone on Flickr. Do you like lizards? What about ping pong ball enthusiasts? Or maybe 101 uses for mayonnaise?

I recently went to check out the Cherry Blossom Festival here in SF and on my way over I snapped a few pictures of various things. One of them happened to be macros of some flowers in a McDonald’s storefront flower bed. I usually like to give people context, so I also took a picture of the McDonald’s storefront itself. And, what do you know? Someone actually asked me to post my picture to a group dedicated to … yes … McDonald’s Storefronts. Oy!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mcstores/

• Ten Steps to Cell Phone Security (Yahoo Finance)
  
  “… San Francisco resident Wendy Nguyen was even more shocked to receive a bill for $26,000 after her cell phone was unknowingly stolen before she left for an overseas vacation. … Cingular still held Wendy accountable for all charges. … Not only that, they advised Wendy that if she couldn’t pay the bill she should consider filing for bankruptcy! …”
  
• Bush v. Bush (Daily Show)
  
  “… So let me see if I have this straight: basically, First Term President Bush, you invaded to remove the threat of Saddam Hussein, and you (Current President Bush) are there to battle the threat created by the lack of Saddam Hussein…? …”
  
• Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Ars Technica)
• Drink more fruity drinks, they’re good for you (Slashfood)
  
  “… It’s actually the ethanol that you find in drinks such as rum and vodka. When it is added to fruity drinks it actually makes the fruit part of the drink even healthier. …”
  

OK. I know a lot of us have been waiting for this, but what the … ? At first it said April 26th, now it says April 23rd. Better yet, it’s already April 25! Grr! I want my CS3!

Cool stuff on ze Net as of today!

• 301 Useless Facts
  
  “… The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp (marijuana) paper. … People photocopying their buttocks are the cause of 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide. …”
  
• Letter: Daylight exacerbates warning
  
  “… You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. …”
  
• Hands off my chocolate, FDA! (LA Times)
  
  “… The FDA is entertaining a ‘citizen’s petition’ to allow manufacturers to substitute vegetable fats and oils for cocoa butter. … ‘Consumers won’t know the difference.’ …”
  
• How Wal-Mart’s TV Prices Crushed Rivals (Businessweek)
  
  “…The fallout is evident: After closing 70 stores in February, Circuit City Stores (CC) on Mar. 28 laid off 3,400 employees and put its 800 Canadian stores on the block. … ‘The tube business and big-screen business just dropped off a cliff,’ says Stuart Rose, chief executive officer of Dayton-based Rex Stores…”
  
• 
  Samsung R55 Hybrid HDD Laptop Launched (PC Joint)
  
  
  “… According to Samsung, when used for small chunks (up to 10Mb) of data in R55, Hybrid Hard Drive had 26% improvement on data reading and 71% improvement of datawriting speed, 32% lower power consumption and increased HDD longevity by 10%. …”
  

Yup, the continuation of two previous blogs has now been rolled into one mondo blog. The previous links were:

• http://theblogsicle.blogspot.com (The Blogsicle)
• http://firecow.blogspot.com (Fire Breathing Cow)