On to new things

Today is the first Monday in a while where I haven’t had to wake up early to the unpleasant sound of my alarm and go to work. This is because as of Friday I no longer work as an ACMT running a service branch for an Apple reseller, I handed in my notice and worked out my final week trying to get everything in good order for whoever would be filling my position.

I have a week off before I fly out to the US for training with my new job, which I am terrified to start. I have a feeling its going to be a crazy week trying to organise everything I need to travel for the month and trying to do a but of learning and revising of skills that will probably be relevant to my new job. 

By all accounts the company I am going to work for now will be a stark contrast from my previous employer, in that they actually seem to care about their staff and want to retain them by treating them well, that and seemingly having a very good and social corporate culture make me think I should enjoy working for them.

Don’t get me wrong though I’m not ungrateful to my previous employer at all, quite the opposite. I was given a fairly large amount of responsibility and autonomy very quickly, this mixed with a pretty serious lack of training meant I just had to put my head down and teach myself everything I needed to know about my job and how to do it. 

More than anything it thought me how a small to medium sized business should be run, admittedly this is because I would do the exact opposite of what they did in most situations. It was always interesting to see how staff reacted to business decisions made and how to felt about hiring and promotion choices. A lot of decisions involving staffing seemed to be made at whim and had no merit or thought behind them, especially in the management path and the resentment this seemed to cause with lower levels of staff was shocking and caused for a fairly high turn over of staff in a job where retention of them should be relatively simple. 

I will miss a lot about it though, some of my peers where absolutely fantastic to work with and will remain friends for a long time. Fixing sickly and broken Macs was something I actually really enjoyed doing and was a little sad to think I wouldn’t be doing it again anytime soon, at least professionally. 

For now though its on to new and better things! 

Saturday night listening

Tonights playlist.

ProTip

If you ever accidentally smash the glass panel on an iMac but still need to get it off the machine, cover it in clear plastic vinyl (The kind you cover children’s school books with) and use suction cups as normal.

it comes off in one easy to deal with sheet this way, rather than separate shards that would destroy the LCD. 

Not that I would ever accidentally do this… not at all. 100% hypothetical. Yep. 

Babble

According to the rumor mill Google are too unify all existing messaging platforms into one product called “Babble”.

If this is true it’s something I would be pretty okay with, I’m a huge Google user, I utilize most of their services on a daily basis but I definitely do find a varying degree of fragmentation between certain products.
As Google Talk is the main messaging service I use I’m all for a better more unified user experience.  

Nananana BatChmod

Recently while installing a linux partition on my Mac I had a moment of absolute stupidity and wasn’t paying attention when formatting, I accidentally deleted the partition with my OS and all my files. 

I threw another HDD in with a fresh OS installed and recovered most of my documents back. The only problem was for some reason the folders came back with messed up permissions that where a pain to fix. 
Yep you can do it manually with terminal but I just was not fucked/Didn’t know the command off hand, So I used BatChmod and it worked a bloody treat.
This app has just been sitting on my work USB key for yonks without use and now I find myself using it once or twice a week for work. 

That Apple thermal paste issue.

Anyone who reads various Apple or tech blogs may have heard of this before. It seemed to be a very common problem at the time and of course goes against the traditional wisdom of how to apply thermal paste. 
I work as an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician in my day job and I see daily that that the problem still exists, Anytime I work on a logic board or heat sync I cringe at the drastically overly applied paste. 
 

It did however make me curious as too how much of a difference it can really make. So I decided to try it out on my Late ‘11 Macbook Pro that has never been changed from the factory applied thermal paste. 

The image above has 3 screen shots of 3 different attempts. One using the factory paste, the 2nd using the spread technique and the 3rd using the pea method. 
For all 3 tests I used the exact same Apple thermal paste. I booted the machine after at least an hour of being powered off in a cool area and ran a HD video in chrome for 1 hour and 5 minutes. I had smcFanControl running for each on its default setting.  I was surprised by the results.

*The first test with the badly applied stock paste gave me a temperate of 62c at the time of finish. I did notice it go up to the low 80s at some points.  

*The second test with the spread method surprisingly ran hotter by 4 degrees coming in at 66c. I didn’t notice this one go much higher than the 70s but was busy at the time so I’m not to sure if it hit the low 80s.

*And the third, the pea method clocked in at a much cooler 47c by the end. On this run I did notice it go up again to the low 80s. 

So for me the winner is the pea method, but oddly badly overly generous factory paste came in cooler than a smooth thin spread layer. 

Todays listening

Mostly 90s/00s stuff.

Half of which I hated at the time of course.

Google Retail

Recently reports that Google plan to open retail stores started to surface.
I can’t help but feel this is definitely a step in the right direction for them in terms of how they address their hardware sales. I have been saying for awhile now that I feel Google needs to “pull an Apple” with the Nexus line and take total control of manufacturing and only use the Google & Nexus names on the devices.  
Dispite how well android is doing as a platform overall, I think a consistent Google controlled flagship Nexus line would help fight the image of fragmentation that a lot of people still view it with.

I really do like the idea of a Google retail store in Dublin City to play about in