The Nifty Minidrive is a Nifty Hack

I know it's fashionable to hate on the Nifty Minidrive: "overpriced SD adapter!" "I can get an equivalent one for $2!". Truth is, it's an ingenious hack; a well executed, high-quality concept conceived by two local Manchester lads with a Kickstarter campaign. I've tried the cheap alternatives and they just don't compare.

Yesterday I was in Staples (aka Home Depot) for various reasons, and on a whim I picked up a Sandisk 128GB SDXC card to replace the 64GB one I was already using with Nifty. A quick swap, and now I have a grand total of 640 GB of space on my MBPr. That was just too easy!

(This said, I hope Apple hurries up with the MBPr refresh so I can buy a new laptop with 1TB disk. I was really disappointed by the lack of hardware announcements at WWDC; my current MBPr is now 4 years old but I'm not going to drop two grand on a new machine with chips from 2014...)

"Erase Free Space" on OSX to reclaim space

Being a heavy VMWare user, my laptop disk is always very close to being full. In a perennial search for space-saving tips, I've found a few sources mentioning the "Erase Free Space" command in Disk Utility could help reclaim a few GBs.

What is this command? Most operating systems "cheat" when deleting a file: they just mark sectors containing the file as free, without actually deleting any data. "Erase Free Space" is meant to actively write zeroes on all disk sectors reported as free, in order to actually erase content that might have been written to such sectors at some point in the past. It's a privacy / security feature, not supposed to reclaim space, but hey, it won't hurt to try! So I decided to give it a spin.

My experience was as follows:

1. Verified that I had 34 GB of free space (out of 500).
2. Launched Disk Utility selected the disk partition  i.e. the lowest "Macintosh HD" leaf item in tree menu.
3. Selected the Erase tab, clicked on Erase Free Space in the lower-left area. Because I have an SSD disk, I chose the "fastest" level: excessive wear should be avoided on SSD disks as much as possible, and I was not performing this operation for security reasons anyway so I didn't really care.
4. Observed disk free space dropping to zero in about a minute. Received message that disk is full (fair enough) and then another that Disk Utility failed to erase free space. Reported free space was now 34 GB again.
5. At this point, retrying the operation or going to First Aid -> Verify Permissions returned all sorts of errors about the disk being locked. One error was this: "This disk needs to be repaired using the Recovery HD. Restart your computer, holding down the Command key and the R key until you see the Apple logo. When the OS X Utilities window appears, choose Disk Utility."
6. I duly followed the procedure; however, when I launched Disk Utility in Recovery mode, almost everything was greyed out except "Verify Disk". This is because I use FileVault (i.e. total disk encryption) so the generic recovery utility, by design, has no access to the actual filesystem, which it sees as a single huge chunk of garbage data spanning the entire drive. It was a welcome surprise: it looks like this security feature actually works as it should.
7. I clicked Verify Disk where I could (on the top disk item) and it didn't report any problem. Closed Disk Utility and went to the Apple menu -> Restart.
8. After logon, all permissions-related commands in Disk Utility were usable again.
9. Most importantly, I now had 39 GB of free space.

Conclusion: it was a slightly scary experience, but got me back a nifty 5GB (or 1% of drive), so I guess I'll do it again in a couple of months.  I suspect the saving might actually be due to OSX reacting to a sudden lack of free space by flushing all the semi-permanent caches it can find; either that, or it forces some sort of defragmenting/fscheck routine at the following startup that results in a more optimized filesystem. To be honest I'm not terribly curious, I'm just happy I have another trick up my sleeve!

Apple Firewire-related update resulting in USB disk not mounting - fix

Last night Apple pushed a small OSX update, purportedly related to Firmware. It required a reboot and completed successfully. Unfortunately, it also stopped one of my external USB disks from mounting. Others were mounting fine, but this disk (which was mounted the night before, during the upgrade, and removed after shutdown) couldn't be seen.

To say I was scared to death is an understatement: there's always a chance that problems like these are due to hardware issues. Unfortunately, Solid State Device (SSD) disks have a limited life and will eventually fail. This was a 500 GB disk with a lot of very useful stuff on, programs I need every week or so, now-untrovable applications, etc. Before I'd let go of this baby, I wanted to go to the bottom of it.

Almighty Google pointed me to an old post mentioning USBProber but it didn't mention what USBProber is (a debug tool by Apple) nor where I could find it (it's not installed on OSX by default, at least not on 10.8 Mountain Lion). Luckily, another blogger mentioned it, and I could finally get it from the Apple site: you will find USBProber at the Apple Developer Site under the name "IOUSBFamily Log". I got the 10.8 version and installed the package ending in "-Log", as instructed.

USBProber.app can be found under /DevTools/Hardware. Once launched, it gives you a number of options to track USB activity. I'm not a hardware hacker, I only have a cursory knowledge of Plug and Play mechanics from my old Linux days, so I poked and prodded here and there without much luck. Eventually, what seems to have done the trick was to select "Bus Probe", ticking "Probe suspended devices", and then hitting "Refresh" several times, until the drive appeared in the list. Switching to Finder, I could see that the drive was in fact mounted, and all contents were displayed. Phew.

I hope this is not something I'll have to do over and over. Hopefully I'm not the only one to see this issue, and Apple will eventually push a correction. Meanwhile, USBProbe looks like a nice find to troubleshoot problems like this, and hopefully this post will be useful to people in the same situation.

MacBook Pro "Retina" Quick Review - Or How I'm Learning To Stop Worrying And Love The Mac

Today I finally picked up my new MacBook Pro "Retina" (2.6Ghz/16GB/512GB). I have to say that it's the first Mac I've ever truly wanted; I've used others in the past (the original "60s-tv" iMac, the white iBook, a few G5s and occasional MBP), but they were bought by other people for other people. So I'm not really a "Mac person": since 2002 I've mostly used Linux at home and Windows at work, and kinda abandoned Linux last year for Windows 7.

The first thing I noticed, and a big reason for the switch to The Land Of Steve, is how thin and light this MBP is. It's roughly half as thick as my Dell Latitude E6510 (which is powerful and packs a nice screen, but by God is it bulky), and probably about 35% lighter.

My second thought was about silence. I don't think I've ever owned a laptop this quiet, let alone one with an i7 CPU on board. You can't really appreciate it in a chaotic Apple Store, but when you're all alone at night, the lack of noise is incredibly refreshing. Note that I live in a quiet residential suburb; for any city-dweller this MBP can be considered completely silent.

Most things you've read elsewhere are also true: it boots faster than a phone, and you don't really need to actually shut it down unless forced by installs/updates; the screen is gorgeous (as long as you stick to updated apps like the Developer branch of Google Chrome, avoiding sucky ones like the official Twitter client) and it feels faster than any laptop I've ever used.

I have to say I couldn't notice any lag on my model until now, although I did feel it was a bit sluggish when I first tried one at the Store. I suspect the 2.3Ghz/8Gb configuration (which is what you get there, and what most reviewers have tried) is not enough to smoothly drive the über-screen; but I don't think I'll regret the choice not to shell out another £200 for the 2.7Ghz model, which comes with a larger cache (8Mb vs 6Mb).

And this is all that separates this particular Mac from other Macs out there. But what about differences between OSX and Windows? Obviously there are zillions of flame-threads on this subject, but these are my first thoughts as a switcher:

• The damn keyboard layout. I must find a way to REMAP ALL THE THINGS!
• No PgUp/PgDn/Del/PrtScrn (update: for PgUp/Dn use Fn-ArrowUp/ArrowDown). I'm wearing a black armband to mourn them right now.
• Shortcuts are all fucked up. If you minimize a window and you want to bring it back, you have to Cmd-Tab back to the program, keep Cmd pressed, then press Alt before leaving Cmd. This is just Wrong. To maximize a window without going fullscreen, you have to invoke the "Zoom" feature, which often requires a custom shortcut. And so on and so forth. There is a steep learning curve for keyboard monkeys.
• Trackpad gestures become necessary to survive. This might not be such a bad thing.
• Any non-Apple peripheral will require an Internet connection to automatically download a half-decent, probably-uncustomizable driver. But, of course, why would you ever buy anything not Made By Steve?
• Some DMG files, you launch them and they launch the app right there. Others will show a funny "drag app from this icon to that icon" screen. Others will open a window and expect you to know what to drag where. In comparison, Windows installers look admirably consistent.
• Many developers (VmWare, Ascendo...) make you pay twice for the same product on a different platform. This is not nice. I should be able to deactivate a product on computer A and activate it on computer B with the same license. I'm still one person using one program.
• gfxCardStatus, Little Snitch and iTerm2 are lovely. GPlus Tab and Facebook Tab suck.

More to follow in a few weeks; until Mountain Lion is officially out, I'm not going to deploy the full barrage of developer tools -- I'll probably format the disk anyway to install the new OS, so there's no point in wasting time now.