SD TabletWear Advanced Motorola XOOM Case [Review]

SD TabletWear Advanced Motorola XOOM CaseHaving used a naked Xoom for a couple weeks I hastily purchased an official Folio case, which has been doing it’s job, just. After a couple weeks of use the Folio case is providing excellent protection when travelling, but it’s nothing less than awkward when trying to use the Xoom with it fitted! A desk-stand it is not! Having looked at various options for a replacement Xoom case I decided the SD TabletWear case was perfect. A faux leather (this case is only £20 remember) outer skin with soft innards and a decent mechanism for using the case as a desk stand, it ticked all the boxes.

My concern around the case being too flimsy were quickly dispelled as the case is reinforced with some pretty stiff material inside. It’s not as protective as the hard plastic of the official Folio case but it’s not as ugly either! Book-style cases suit tablets really well and the solid magnetic fastener on this one keeps the case firmly together whenever required.

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Apple update 10.6.8 and Lion (10.7) cause Kernel Panics on MacPro 1,1


I bought my MacPro (MacPro 1,1) in September 2006 and nearly 5 years down the line it’s still going strong, or at least it was.

Some recent projects I’ve been involved in have required some serious processing power to render gigapixel images and the original 2xDual Core XEONs weren’t up to it. I found a matching pair of cheap E5345 QUAD core processors on eBay and fitted them (that’s another post that will be on here soon along with photos of the CPU swap out process). I threw some SSD’s in a RAID array in there for good measure too and the combination of those two things made a phenomenal difference to the rendering times. My Snow Leopard 10.6.7 install was nice and stable, not a single crash/hang/kernel panic or reboot.

Then Apple released a Snow Leopard update 10.6.8 to “ready you for Lion” so I dutifully upgraded the 10.6.7 I had installed on my SSD’s and it all went terribly wrong. The system now erratically rebooted itself and a look at the logs showed Kernel Panics all over the place. I have a second OS X 10.6.7 for emegency situations, booted into that and ran that for a few days and it was all fine. I rolled back my 10.6.8 to 10.6.7 using a TimeMachine backup and everything was stable again.

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Safari in Lion adding a suffix of [SP] to web page titles [SOLVED]


Twitter user @benmarsh recently noticed that his Safari running under OS X Lion was adding [SP] after the title of any page he visited and was seeking some assistance.

Initially he thought it was just one of his Safari plugins but even after disabling all Safari plugins the [SP] still appears as shown in the screen shot below. Read more…

TomTom HOME gives error trying to backup your device [FIX]


Before embarking on a road trip to the USA I bought the USA and Canada maps for my TomTom One IQ. Having never installed maps on my TomTom before I thought it wise to take a backup of the device as it is now, just in case anything went wrong installing the new maps.

I noticed TomTome HOME software had a “Backup my device” option which is meant to just take a complete snapshot of your device to allow for a full restore at a later date. Read more…

Cool Bananas SmartShell iPad 2 Case [Review]

If you’ve read my review of the Elago S4 Breathe iPhone 4 case you’ll know that I’m not a fan of cases on  aesthetically pleasing Apple products but here I go again with a review of the Cool Bananas SmartShell iPad2 case.

I bought my iPad 2 on launch day along with a basic grey Smart Cover from Apple, there were no 3rd party cases available at the time. I’ve been using the iPad 2 with a naked back for the last 6 months and whilst the aluminium back is fairly scratch resistant I am starting to see some fairly big scratches appearing on it. I’ve established that most of these are from sliding it in and out of my general everyday bag which has some gnarly metal teeth on the zip.

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