“It’s a blip, not a catastrophe.” - Donald Trump.
June 30th, 2015 marked the weirdest day so far. Following the normal routine of the day, I sat down to work. On trying to wake the Mac Pro, I noticed that it wouldn’t wake up. I assumed it to be moisture due to the rains here, but it wasn’t so. After hours I realized that it was the power supply. I couldn’t spend more time tinkering with it, and trying to get it to work. So, instead I tried working from the MBP. While trying to work on it, I realized that it had suddenly become very slow. I chalked it off to the developer beta of El Capitan, and thought I did re-install Yosemite on it, and get my files over from the Mac Pro to start working. I wouldn’t be able to work on anything while the MBP was in this state.
When It Rains, It Pours.
Yosemite wouldn’t install. It booted up fine, and it did give me the options to select the drive to boot from, but no matter what I selected it would not let me boot. ’til finally it booted using the Snow Leopard install DVD.
Thus I was able to install Snow Leopard. I upgraded the OS right until OS X 10.8.5, and when I tried installing Yosemite, the MBP froze. I booted it up again from the DVD, and used the disk utility to check if it was the HDD, it would show the S.M.A.R.T status as verified. At this point I was stumped. Add to all of this the fact that the wifi (airport) card on the MBP stopped working.
I had no machine to work on, or work with. By this time my mood was that of a poked, and cornered bear. On surfing a couple of forums, wishing that it wasn’t the power supply of the Mac Pro, I stumbled upon the below quoted comment. After reading that though, I was feeling pretty okay. Taking everything that came at me in my stride.
Everything works fine. When one day, it doesn’t. - Unknown.
June 30th, 2015 was also the day we were suppose to submit our first app for review to the iOS App Store. The next two days were sleepless, trying to figure out how I could salvage at the least one of the machines. Buying a new, or used power supply for the Mac Pro would take time, since parts are not easily available for the Mac Pro 3,1 here in India. The total cost of acquiring the replacement plus the shipping would become a costly affair. Add to that fact, the Mac Pro 3,1 is now labeled as ‘vintage’ by the Apple service store here. Thus I took a chance, and decided to get a new SSD for the MBP, since everything else seemed fine on it. This was on the afternoon of July 1st, 2015. After purchasing the SSD, I realized I already had an SSD with Yosemite installed on the Mac Pro. Yea, sleep deprivation does that to me. On installing the SSD from the Mac Pro onto the MBP, it suddenly roared to life - Yosemite, and all. While I was at it, I upgraded the RAM too. I spent hours installing Yosemite fresh again, and installing everything else needed to carry on working minimalistically.
Realization Of New Challenges.
July 2nd, 2015; that’s today. The MBP is working fine, and healthy again - except for the airport card. I’ve realized a lot of things in the course of these couple of days. Most noteworthy of all are:
- Figuring out a way to publish daily using jekyll via any connected device (mostly via a smartphone). The last two days have been an utter failure where my daily blogging, and publishing goal is concerned. ’til yesterday I had a daily publishing streak going on for the last six months, in fact exactly six months - from January 1st, 2015 to June 30th, 2015. On the 30th of June, I published a post on the Appathetic blog out of turn because I needed to keep blogging daily, and I could do so with the WordPress app on the phone. On the 1st though, I did finish the stock photography post that I publish every week, but couldn’t upload it (I did publish it today, right before this post). If any one reading this has any kind of advice with respect to publishing via the smart phone with jekyll, do leave a reply in the comments. I do have an idea to go about achieving this, but I did love to hear what you think of the endeavor, or if you’ve tried doing so yourself.
- I need a new desktop machine which runs Mac OS X, and isn’t a Mac Pro, an iMac, or any machine manufactured by Apple. I need OS X for a couple of reasons. One, the OS simply gets out of the way of my work, and everything else I want to do. Two, we just started an iOS App studio, and I think it’s only prudent of me to have XCode running everywhere. As far as investing in a new Apple machine is concerned, I can’t afford to buy the new Mac Pro, and I don’t want to invest in an iMac. Apple machines here tend to cost a ton, and frankly speaking, the service sucks. Which leaves me with the only option of building a custom Mac Pro (Hackintosh). The idea for building a custom Mac Pro was the brainchild of frivolewis. He pointed out to me that one of his friends uses a Hackintosh. So, going forward I am going to be building a custom Mac Pro. I’ve already short listed the parts for it. Expect a post soon on this.
- I need to figure out a way to make my daily workflow is easier, minimalistic and less reliant on machines. Some how. Tough bill to foot I know, but I think this point leaves room for a lot of thought, debate, posts and experimentation.
For the time being, ‘till the Hackintosh machine is ready, I will be writing, publishing, and working from the MBP. Below are some images of the MBP being fixed.
Old HDD
Old/New SSD from the Mac Pro
