Category Archives: useless

The dying MacBook: Early adopters fate.

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So it is. I have a MacBook, the beautiful ( at least it used to be ) white, 13″ screen, first model. But as with any living being, death is certain and signs for its arrival are mostly undeniable. Would my MacBook be a human patient, he would be approaching multi-organ failure. But let’s step over to the comprehensive list of failures.

Bluetooth seems to work only when Moon and some other planets are in a constellation allowing certain, yet to be discovered, microwaves to be sent to the outer world, thus enabling bluetooth. I can assure you that this planetary constellation is indeed very, very rare and so is my bluetooth.

I wouldn’t bother just because of a broken bluetooth device, but fun is that one of the two USB-Ports seems to have been infected by the same disease little Bluetooth already has. Random failures. Just random.

There are days when I just don’t care about these little details. Its the days when the display starts to flicker. I’m not the only one ( the above reported issues are also well-known ), as you can see here. I’m glad to have a external display allowing me to take back control – and actually see it!

That’s it? Nope. Battery life is over, okay, no comment here, just normal. But case life too? Actually its broken in two places, and it appears to me to be just lousy. really. I’m quite confident though that it won’t happen with a new Alu MacBook, which I’m going to buy as soon as I find out about my fathers credit card number. Any hints welcome.

Good night.

Update: After I posted this here, my ComboDrive began making strange noises. And hasn’t stopped doing that since. Hmlz.

Legacy Olé!

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MacBook Pro Legacy Edition.

MacBook Pro Legacy Edition.

It is so funny, having the year 2008 and being forced to take of stuff like this:

 

enabling the A20-gate to access more memory than usual a few hundred years ago, then reading through the interrupt documentation ( my favorite is actually “Read light pen position”, int 10 ) to discover that actually all of it is completely outdated and that new standards were built on top ( VESA, e.g. ).

But believe me, it is really interesting to learn that stuff, it gives you a really new way of seeing a computer.
Anyway, i stuck at the A20 line. It’s there for well-documented legacy reasons ( I toyed with the idea to link to wikipedia, but dropped it, everybody should be able to access wikipedia :-) ) and survived even the Apple PPC-Intel transition, so now its part of my mac. In fact its nothing really disturbing, just a few lines of code, and I think it shouldn’t be considered a major flaw. It’s just funny.
Another thing that will maybe amuse you is the interrupt descriptions. Its just so not up-to-date, rather fits in a museum than on a mainboard, but well, still supported. Except maybe the light pen, though I like the idea.