I’ve upgraded my Mac Mini (3,1) to 8GB of RAM. It was getting pretty slow – mostly thanks to Firefox using 600MB or so of RAM, and it only had 1GB. But lots of other applications would make it swap, for example, iTunes would take quite a while just to quit, having to swap in before saying “goodbye”. I also bought OSX Lion, which I’m pretty happy with so far. It’s interesting that the UI changes for support of multi-touch, such as full-screen modes also make it better for people like me who like to avoid grabbing the mouse and use keyboard shortcuts for using the desktop.
It looks to be using roughly 3GB to run with my typical things going on, so it never swaps now, and seems much faster, and certainly more responsive to input, application switching, etc. The 8GB memory cost me $52, and took about 15 min to put in. Cracking the case open was pretty tricky, requiring patience and care, but easy enough after watching videos of the process.
My Android phone (HTC Incredible from Verizon) updated itself to 2.3.4. This seems to a fixed things generally, and it seems a lot smoother, though I’ve yet to see any big changes. I’m getting a 16GB microSD card for it so I can fit all my music on it. I’ve switched to WinAMP as a music player, and it seems really nice. No iTunes-on-Mac sync though, so I’ll still be using the iSync stuff, which is barely functional. I’d love to have the time to put a front-end on rsync to get the job done, but I’m not sure if that would cover iTunes’ Smart playlists.
Linda and I had a great weekend up at Jay peak. Lots of sun, the temperature was around 30. This time of year, it’s only mid-afternoon when the lifts shut down at 4:00 pm, but I guess that leaves extra time for relaxing in the sun. There was lots of snow, though it was mostly a hard, smooth surface with a little loose stuff on top. Great stuff for working on those carved turns on the board.
I rode Willowdale today. It was tricky. but a lot of fun. Particularly some open areas where the crust was strong enough for me to ride right on top, There’s a foot or more of frozen corn snow in the woods, so there’s no way to ride it if the temperature gets above freezing. Rain is comming, so it will be a while before I can ride again.
The capacitors arrived, and I soldered them in then reassembled the TV. When I powered it up and it came right on, no clicks or multiple attempts. After a shot celebration I noticed the picture looked pretty crappy. So I took it apart again and reseated a few signal connectors. On reassembly it powered up and looked back to normal.
I used “High Temp” 16V capacitors as replacements, and they’re bigger but fit just fine.
