Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750GB or 1TB drive in a Macbook Pro

I know there must be alot of other people out there like me who are wondering, will WD’s new big drives fit in my notebook? The problem is most modern laptop drives are 9.5mm high, while WD’s new WD7500KEVT (750GB) and WD10TEVT (1TB) drives are in the older 12mm high standard size. So, the short answer is no, they won’t fit in a lot, maybe most, notebooks.

So will it fit into the Macbook Pro? The answer is yes, but with some important caveats. And sorry for redirecting you, but I'm trying to move away from blogspot.

On the Jawbone 2 and the Plantronics 925

Jawbone 2, I can't help but look longingly at your sleek, handsome design...I pored over reviews of your clever noise-cancellation technology, but ultimately, Jawbone 2, we were destined to split. And I can honestly say it's not me, baby, it's you.


Sure, it started out well enough. Your designers had wisely choosen to abandon your predecessor's terribly brittle metal earloop design which were constantly snapping in two in my pocket when not in use, upgrading you to a presumably more durable plastic loop. And things were great in the beginning. I loved your slimmer profile. I thought your sound was even clearer that the Jawbone 1. But to my surprise I quickly discovered you had the same fatal flaw. Beneath that plastic veneer, you had a brittle metal prong as well, no more durable than your predecessor. I tried to overlook this obvious flaw, as I quickly went through the four differently sized earloops that came with you, despite the fact two of them didn't fit me at all. But ultimately you were just too high maintenance. I couldn't handle the repeated trips to Jawbone's site to order more packs of $15 ear loops, and I had to put you out.


But what's this? there's a new silicone in-ear replacement to do away with the loop? I was thrilled; we could start all over again. We got back together, and again things were good...for a few days. I tried to make it work, I really did...but the way you just kept falling out of my ear mid-conversation, well it was just plain rude. I did try all the sizes, but we just didn't seem to fit, baby. It wasn't going to work out.


It may sound crass, but I admit I immediately went looking for a replacement. An upgrade. and I found it on Amazon. The Plantronics 925.
She was slimmer, lighter, sleeker. She may not have quite the sound quality you had, baby, but she could stick with me through an entire conversation. She could go all weekend on a charge. She came with a clever battery-powered charging case for my pocket, and perhaps best of all didn't use an earloop.


I'm not looking back. We had some good times, but I've moved up in the world. 925 and I are very happy together, even now, months later. I gave you to my father. Perhaps he'll be more understanding of your flaws.

Using Dual Displays with the new (4-2009) Mac Mini

I just made a very cool discovery about the new mac mini that got delivered today: you can use both the mini display port and the mini dvi port simultaneously, each driving its own monitor. Full-sized desktops have been doing this for years, of course, but for some reason it didn't occur to me the mini would be capable of doing it. Anyway, haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, so I thought I'd put it out there for the general good.

Using a Unibody Macbook with Dual External Monitors

So you want to drive two external displays from your shiny new unibody macbook pro...well, I've got good news and bad news. The mini-displayport doesn't have the juice to drive multiple external monitors, even mated to a solution like the Matrox Dualhead2go which worked so well with the previous DVI-equipped macbooks. Enter theTritton SEE2 Xtreme. Though it's very choppy when dragging windows on the screen, generally the video quality is very good, and it's only GPU-intensive motion that causes issues. The device works with a few hiccups, such as issues when waking from sleep on the usb-driven monitor, but it's the only solution available, so... There are other usb to DVI adaptors on the market, but no other can handle 1920x1280 resolution. If you're driving a pair of 24" displays or larger, this is the one you have to get. Also, Triton, the company behind this device, released a updated driver recently that solves the previous issues that occured with the OSX 10.5.6 update.

The Apple Dual-link adaptor: Apple did the Mac community something of a disservice when they named this item, as it's extremely misleading. This cable DOES NOT allow you to connect two external displays to your macbook. Rather, it uses two cables (one USB and one mini-displayport) from your computer to boost the power available from the mini displayport so that you can drive 30" monitors. It's really a shame that the mini-displayport doesn't have the juice to power the largest monitors (or, indeed, to power dual external monitors), but such was the tradeoff for the MDP's small size, I guess. One other use for this cable is, if you have the Matrox Dualhead2go, this will boost the output of the mini-displayport enough that you can run dual external monitors from it...BUT it still doesn't have the juice to run dual 1920x1280 externally; it can only run them at 1680x1050 each. Unless you really want full-motion video (or action game graphics) on both external monitors, you should go with the See2Xtreme, above.



The Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition an excellent device, but alas, as mentioned above it will provide no joy on its own if you have a computer with a mini-displayport. What sets this apart, both in performance and price, from the See2Xtreme above is that it basically contains an external graphics GPU within itself, and it doesn't rely upon USB to output to your display (though it does use a USB to draw the power to drive itself). If full-motion graphics are your requirement, rather than ultimate resolution for still graphics, this is the device you want. You will need to pair this with the Apple dual-link cable above to get the required juice to run two monitors, and then only up to 1680x1050 apiece, but the matrox won't hold back your frame rates the way the usb-based solutions do.

Workaround: Excel hangs when launching MSQuery

This seems to be a problem for a lot of people, as there are at lot of pages asking how to fix this issue. The issue is that when you want to create a new query or edit a query that pulls data into Excel, Excel will attempt to launch MSQuery and hang, only displaying the message "waiting for data to be returned from microsoft query".

Here is a very simple workaround:

1) First of all, create your query in MSQuery directly, then save the query somewhere.

2) Go to Excel, select Data --> Import External Data --> Import Data

3) In the "Select Data Source" dialog box, do not select the odbc connection to the db, instead select the query you created in MSQuery.

That's it, the data will now import correctly, and the profile will save into your Excel worksheet as normal. Just thought I'd share this as I haven't seen a solution posted anywhere.

Parallels: Not going so well

So, I've been running Parallels for Mac for a few weeks now, and I'm kind of amazed at how well it works and ready to ditch it at the same time. On the one hand, it enables me to do pretty much everything I need to do in Windows running under OSX. On the other hand, it does some of that stuff really damn slowly, and doesn't do a couple of things at all.

Things Parallels does well:

Normal Windows use for normal Windows users
Medium-level Office use under Windows

Things Parallels does damn slowly or poorly:

Disk operations involving local windows volumes
Disk operations involving USB or Firewire drives (under Windows, that is)
Mount as writeable some NTFS volumes
Attach to some networked printers

Things Parallels doesn't do at all:

Access the older snap server we have on our LAN
Allow you to successfully install Delphi 7
Allow you to use Direct X versions above 9
Allow you to update your Sun Java under Windows

As you can see, there are some issues. One of the most confusing issues was I could sometimes write certain NTFS volumes, then the next time I attached to them, I had only read access (under OSX, under XP it was fine). It was a little bewildering, but I suspect it's permissions getting reset by XP on the volume. As to access speeds on local Windows volumes, that's probably the single biggest issue. I haven't actually measured, but write speeds are at BEST 5x slower than they would be natively, and often more like 20x slower. It's not a big issue for the average user, perhaps, but I have several 50+GB files I move around, and it sometimes takes days to move one under Parallels. That's just not workable.

I always kind of knew in the back of my mind that Parallels might be great for the OSX user who occasionally needs a Windows app, but it certainly isn't for people who spend the majority of their time in Windows. My experiences over the last few weeks has shown that to be true. Virtualization is pretty amazing, but it's not native execution after all. It's a damn shame too, as I really like OSX better than Windows, but I've gotta live in the real world, and the world I work in uses Windows.

Random Tidbit: Salt-water combustion

If this is not a hoax, it's an incredible discovery. Perhaps not so much for cars, as is discussed, but for larger generators. I'd think the energy density present might not make it practical for mobile applications. I mean, how much salt water would a car have to haul around?