Left = no film, Right = Power Support anti-glare film

If you’ve read my Elago S4 Breathe iPhone 4 case review and my more recent Cool Bananas SmartShell iPad 2 Case Review you should now be getting a feel for the fact that I hate dressing up my Apple devices in anything big and bulky unless absolutely necessary. The same applies when it comes to covering any Apple device screens in a “film” to protect it. Since the very first generation iPhone I’ve been plagued with tiny scratches on the glass, I used to curse every time I saw one, now I just take it in my stride and accept scratches will appear unless I wrap my iPhone and iPad in cotton wool.

I’ve tried all sorts of screen protection for the iPhone in the past and hated the way they all make the screen feel under the finger, Apple spent a long time developing the feel and smoothness of their glass touch-screens and it’s sacriligious to cover them up with a cheap and tacky film. I also used to hate the micro-bubbles that appeared under the films that, no matter how carefully you clean and apply the film, there’s always a few you can’t eliminate. I also found that the films would mark much more easily that the bare/naked glass with a fingernail or similar. Granted the mark is on the now removable film but what’s the point in a film to protect the screen from sightly marks if that film itself marks more easily?

So when I got my original iPad a few years ago I didn’t even entertain the idea of putting an iPad 2 screen protector on the beauty and even after a year’s daily usage the screen remained fairly free from scratches. The same could not, however, be said for greasy finger prints and smudges on the highly reflective iPad screen. I’d go so far as to say the iPad made my OCD demons mad on a daily basis. I bought a special screen cleaning spray (which is very good by the way) and used it regularly to clean my iPad screen.

All was well, I loved my iPad and eagerly awaited the iPad 2, which I upgraded to on launch day. The screen on the iPad 2 was no different to the original although I did find my fancy new smart cover had a tendency to leave 3 vertical lines in the screen smudges so the good old cleaning spray was out in force even more often.

Then came a nice sunny Summer (unusual here in the UK) and I found the iPad’s achilles heel, reflections!! Using the iPad was near impossible outdoors on a bright sunny day, even with the brigtness turned up to the max and the screen free from any greasy finger marks, viewing the iPad 2 outside was not comfortable.

Since I live in the UK and sunny days can be few and far between I dealt with it as best I could, moving into the shade wherever possible to read anything on the iPad. It wasn’t until I booked a long holiday to Florida that I realised I had to find a solution. I subscribe to many digital magazines via Zinio and have several eBooks that I wanted to read whilst sunbathing in Florida. None of this was going to be feasible on the stock iPad screen so I started investigating iPad 2 screen protectors but more specifically, anti-glare screen protectors.

I thought I’d do some thorough research into the best ones around and buy one to try for the holiday and remove it upon returning to the UK. After hours reading on-line reviews and user ratings I decided the best one was probably going to be the Power Support Anti-Glare iPad 2 Screen Protector and sod’s law it had to be one of the most expensive too at £29.95! Wow that’s around the same price as Apple’s Smart Covers for what was essentially going to be a disposable screen anti-glare film for my holiday.

After ordering the £30 film it arrived in the post and when I opened it to have a look I immediately started to get buyer’s remorse. Had I been ripped off? £30 for a thin piece of film? I don’t quite know what I was expecting, maybe I was hoping there would be more than one in the pack in case I messed up the installation first time around. But no, just one single sheet in the big cardboard packet. GULP!

I didn’t rush into fitting the film. I read all the instructions and the extremely helpful fitting video on YouTube

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Then I took the plunge, moved into a dust free environment (i.e. my bathroom with the extraction fan on), cleaned the screen, cleaned the screen again, used a can of compressed air to blow the screen and then peeled back the first film and applied the top edge of the screen protector. Slowly applying the rest of the film as per the video above and finally breathed a sigh of relief when the last edge was down. There were one or two large bubbles which pressed out to the side with ease, it’s strange, the film isn’t like the iPhone films I’ve used before, this film is quite thick and you don’t get small round bubbles, rather large bubble patches that press out easily.

After patting myself on the back for the flawless application of the film I placed my iPad 2 back in the Cool Banana case and immediately noticed a problem. The film is such a snug fit and goes right up to the edge of the glass, the Cool Banana case is also a snug fit on the front and the lip on each corned sligtly covers the edge of the glass, hence touches the anti-glare film. It’s not too big an issue, but it did cause the corners of the film to lift up a little and since I thought this could let dust and other bits of gunk under the film I decided for the purpose of my holiday I’d rather have the anti-glare film and sacrifice the rear protection of the Cool Banana case for now.

Cool Banana case causing film to lift in the corners

Text remains nice and clear/sharp even with the anti-glare matte film fitted

My first surprise was how clear the screen still was with a film on it. My second and biggest surprise was how the film felt under the finger. I’m going to stick my neck out here and say it feels better than Apple’s bare glass. On the bare glass I found that my finger encountered differering levels of resistance when I swiped over a particularly greasy area of the screen. Not apple’s fault, my fault for having greasy fingers I suppose but with the anti-glare film there was no greasy residue just a smooth dry surface for my finger to swipe across.

Now onto the main reason for fitting the film on the iPad 2, the anti-glare properties. Wow! Seriously, wow! This film is amazing, you can honestly sit in full Florida lunch time sun, on a beach and read everything on the iPad screen without straining your eyes, moving into shade or trying to tilt your iPad to an un-natural position to reduce glare.

Two of the guys on holiday also had tablets, one had an iPad 2 and the other a Motorola Xoom and they were impressed with the film too. The Xoom owner is your typical “anti-everything-Apple” geek but even he had to admit the iPad 2 with anti glare film was the only device that could be used out in direct Florida sunshine. He even used it over his Xoom to check some work emails and football scores because it meant he could stay around the pool rather than go inside and use his Xoom.

left = with anti-glare film, right = no anti glare film

I completely forgot to take photos of the iPad 2, Xoom and iPad 2 with anti-glare film side by side in the sunshine whilst in Florida but I did remember when I got to the airport which had some pretty large and harsh fluorescent lights overhead. I loaded the same BBC news article on both iPad 2′s and tried taking some crude side-by-side comparison photos. They’ve not come out as well as expected but you can clearly see a big reduction in reflection of the ceiling lights. Once an iPad enabled friend comes over I’ll do some much better comparison shots with fixed lights, tripods, etc and also a video to help demonstrate just how good the Power Support Anti-Glare iPad 2 Screen Protector really is.

As a testament to how good the film really is, I’ve been back from Florida for 2 months now and the film is still on my iPad 2 for several reasons:

1. The reflection reduction is so good.
2. The lack of greasy fingerprint and smudge marks
3. I prefer the feel of the film to the original glass
4. It’s protecting my glass from any scratches.
5. …it’s expensive and I don’t want to waste it when it’s this good.

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.

I thought it might just be a *glitch* with 10.6.8 and patiently waited for Lion. When Lion was released I decided to not take a chance upgrading my stable 10.6.7 and so I wiped 2 of the drives I had in a RAID array and installed a fresh copy of Lion which I downloaded from the App Store (if you want to know how to create a bootable Lion install from Apples Lion download leave a comment and I’ll post that soon). Even the fresh install of Lion was showing a random kernel panic every 5minutes to an hour and rebooting the system.

I thought it might be that 10.6.8 and Lion didn’t like the SSD drives that were still mounted even though they weren’t the boot drives. The MacPro 1,1 came with 4x drive sled bays for SATA hard drives but there were also another 2x hidden SATA ports on the motherboard that I connected the SSD drives to and mounted them in the spare optical bay. So I unplugged the SSD drives from the 2 hidden SATA ports and set about using 10.6.8 and Lion (each OS on a different RAID partition) but still both were rebooting because of a kernel panic.

I’ve opened up a report at http://bugreport.apple.com/ and they’ve requested my kernel crash logs which are in /Library/Logs/Diagnostic….

These from 10.6.8

another

another

another

The following is a crash log from a completely clean and fresh install (not upgrade) of Lion on a new RAID array

and the latest Lion one after upgrading my graphics card to a 5770.

This post will continue to get updated as and when there is a cause or solution found to my crashing.

3rd August 2011 – Have heard from others who have upgraded a MacPro 1,1 like me and running Lion without a problem. They all seem to have upgraded their graphics card to Apple’s ATI 5700 card so I ordered one of these from Apple today for a whopping £203 which should hopefully arrive tomorrow. Once installed I shall boot back into my fresh Lion installation for a few hours and see if there are any more crashes.

4th August 2011 –  I received  the new 5770 Apple upgrade kit and will set about installing this later on this evening and report back……..
…the 5770 was installed without a hitch and the MacPro booted up first time with no errors. I logged into my stable 10.6.7 and tinkered around playing 1080p videos full screen on my 30″ ACD and lots of GPU intensive tasks and it seemed much smoother at HD video playback etc. After a few hours I decided the card was working as it should so crossed my fingers and booted into my Lion installation. Again all seemed ok, nice smooth 1080p playback, I even tried some 4k video playback and it was smooth full screen. After about half an hour I thought maybe it was all stable so I thought I’d do a bit of housekeeping and repair any disk permission errors using Disk Utility. However, Disk Utility still refuses to verify or repair permissions of RAID arrays in Lion. There’s a lot of info on the Apple discussion forums about this so I opted to try verifying permissions from Terminal and it found some errors. So I then tried to repair those errors via terminal and left that running and went to bed. About 2 mins later I heard the tell-tale “boing” of the Apple start-up chime…it had crashed and rebooted whilst trying to repair permissions.

5th August 2011 - I went back to the machine this morning and sure enough I was presented with the log in screen as it had rebooted after a kernel panic. I logged in but there was no prompt to submit a crash report to Apple as there normally is and there is nothing logged in /Library/Logs/Diagnostic/ where the kernel panic reports normally live. So I can rule out my graphics card as the KP (Kernel Panic) happens with both original 7300GT and brand new Apple ATI 5770 cards. Time to start eliminating other items. Next on my hit list is RAM. I only have 7GB installed and it all seems ok when I’m booted in 10.6.7 and the Apple Hardware Test that comes on the OS X install CD returned no errors but for completeness I thought I’d run some extensive memory tests. I downloaded two programs Rember and Memtest, the former is a GUI for the latter. I tried running Rember from within OS X and it returned no errors but as some of the memory is not accessible whilst booted into the OS I installed Memtest and rebooted my computer into single user mode (hold down CMD+S when you reboot). Once in single user mode I typed

to run memtest tests on all memory sectors twice. I’ve left that running and come to work but I’ll report back later if it found any errors. If there are no RAM errors I might take half the modules out anyway, boot Lion and see if it KPs and if it does swap with the other half of the RAM and see if that KPs. If it does it KPs with every single module then I doubt it’s a RAM issue. I’ll then look to install a non-RAID drive and install a fresh copy of Lion on that to see if the KP still happen on a non-RAID drive. I still think this is an Apple induced issue with 10.6.8 and Lion, I’m going to start looking into whether 64bit EFI might be to blame (the MacPro only has a 32bit EFI but 64bit capable processors).

Memtest completed two complete thorough RAM module checks and all passed without a fault so RAM ruled out.

19th August 2011 - Right I’m still getting KPs on my Lion test install and am sticking with 10.6.7 for now so I can keep working but I’ve now pretty much ruled out any hardware faults.

• I bought a new ATI 5770 to replace my 7300GT and still KP.
• I removed my SSD RAID array on the 5th and 6th SATA Ports and still KP.
• I tried booting with only Lion HDDs in and removed the 2nd RAID array and still KP.
• I bought another 8GB RAM and ran with just that in on its own and still get KP so RAM ruled out.
• I ran fans at near full speed and COU core temps stayed below 40°C and still KP.
• I ran fans at default speed and cranked my CPU usage to 100% for about 4 hours and no KP in LION so I doubt the CPUs are bad. Once I stopped the CPU stress test I opened Safari and browsed the web a little and it KP’d.
• I’ve run with WiFi and Bluetooth disabled to see if those were a cause but still got KP. I might try removing them from the motherboard completely though just to check but they are genuine Apple modules.

I also tried tinkering around copying IOPCI kexts and IOPLatformFamily kexts and copying copies of these from a working 10.6.7 installation over the Lion versions but that didn’t work either.

Where does this leave me? Basically nowhere. I’m still buggered if I use 10.6.7 or 10.7.0 or 10.7.1 and get regular KPs. I’ve not managed to go more than 1 hour without a KP, except funnily enough when I was stress testing the CPU and it could happily sit there all day at 800% CPU usage. Having now bought another 8GB of RAM and run with just that in and the original 7GB removed I can rule out having bad RAM, plus the fact it works in 10.6.7 for days without a KP means it definitely software related.

I still haven’t got around to breaking apart one of my RAID arrays and trying to install Lion on just a single non-RAIDed drive. I do still think RAID could be part of the cause, since in Lion I still cannot verify or repair disk permissions on a RAID array using disk utility but I can using diskutil command in terminal but most of the time I get a KP about 90% through….suspicious. But then my hopes are dashed by people like @poo in the comments who has the same issue but doesn’t have any RAID arrays. But then again his problems may be something completely different.

For now I’m sticking with 10.6.7 and every so often trying Lion and some tweaks but having now spent £203 on an ATI 5770 and £180 on another 4GB RAM I’m reluctant to waste much more time or money on this and just hope Apple find a solution/cure soon?

1st September - I’m still running 10.6.7 and had no time to do any more experimenting to resolve my KPs but I have just had a reply from Apple Tech via bugreport.apple.com (some 6 weeks later) and they now need a complete Kernel Core Dump which I’ve never heard of before and they’ve included some complex instructions on how to setup a 2nd Mac running OS X as a Kernel Dump Server which has to be connected via ethernet to my MacPro and then modify the nvram of my MacPro so that all kernel dumps are sent to the IP address of the 2nd computer. That way they grab every single kernel instruction and upload that to them. The file could be up to 1GB in size so they’ve given me ftp details to upload the file. So it seems Apple are investigating this which is promising. I’ll update once I hear any more.

13th September - I eventually found time to copy clone the contents of 2 of my drives that were in a RAID array to my Mac Mini Server and pulled them out. I installed an old 80GB Seagate Barracuda drive in HDD Bay 3, booted into my good 10.6.7 and used Disk Utility to format it as HFS with a GUID partition. I then downloaded the latest Lion installation package (10.7.1) from the App store and installed that on the newly formatted drive. Once booted I ran the terminal commands as instructed by Apple Tech Support so that any crash logs will now be saved across the network to my Mac Mini Server and am currently waiting for a kernel panic. Sod’s law it won’t bloody KP now! I’ve unmounted the other remaining drives in the MacPro so that to all intents and purposes this is now just a MacPro with a single 80GB (non-raid) drive installed. Guess I’ll just have to keep playing in Lion to see if it’s become any more stable. NOTE – Disk Utility now lets me verify and repair permissions on the Lion disk which it didn’t before when I had Lion installed on a RAID array. Watch this space.

14th September - Dammit! After using it for several hours last night it seemed fine, went to bed, woke up and it had kernel panic in the night and rebooted, the crash log for submission to Apple mentioned “spinlock acquisition timed out” or similar I’ve seen that many now I don’t take much notice to them. I checked my MacMini Server which is meant to collect the core kernel dumps and there was nothing. Even though I had changed the nvram settings as per Apple’s request so my MacMini Server would collect all the core kernel dumps, I’d forgotten to restart the computer after making nvram changes. So I restarted again, and then forced a test kernel panic (if you want to read up more on how to setup a 2nd machine to collect your core kernel dumps read this) to check if the core dumps were now going through to my MacMini Server but they still weren’t. I’ve left a message with Apple tech for help on this matter but in the interim I’m going to try and setup a MacBook Pro as a dump server and see if that works. Anyway, we can rule out RAID as being the cause of any KPs. I know one or two commenters below said they get KP and don’t use RAID, not that I didn’t believe them, I just had to run through all my elimination processes. RAM replaced, new HDD (non-RAID), new 5770 Graphics card….erm I’m running out of replaceable hardware items that could be to blame. I really hope it is an Apple bug with 10.6.8 and Lion (10.7 and 10.7.1) and not faulty CPU. I’ve now accepted that I’m going to have to try eliminating the CPU in all this and need to roll back to stock CPUs. I’d like to get the CoreDump working properly first and submit them to Apple so that can hopefully see somthing that I can’t. Sorry to say this again, but watch this space…

NOTE – It is becoming more and more apparent that only people with upgraded CPU are suffering from kernel panics and crashes in Lion. From the comments below you will see people with X5355, X5365, E5345 etc. Did the MacPro 1,1 ever ship with 8-cores and if so what was the factory OEM 8-core CPU that it shipped with?

15th September - Right so I’ve not had a Kernel panic for nearly 2 days. What did I do to accomplish this, I wish I could say for sure. First things first, I tried setting up my MacMini Server to be a core kernel dump so when i did have a KP 1GB+ of crucial logs would be logged on there for me to upload to Apple. I had problems with this, if I tried to force a kernel panic by typing:

sudo dtrace -w -n “BEGIN{ panic();}”

at the command prompt it would begin connecting to my MacMini Server’s IP, correctly find it and retrieve it’s MAC address and then timeout trying to send the logs. After hours and hours trying to figure it out, including setting up a Macbook Air and Pro as a core dump server I finally figured out that by default the kernel dumps go out over ethernet EN0 which is ethernet port 1 and I had my cable plugged into EN1 (ethernet port 2). Once I switched ports and triggered a kp manually the core dumps were sent correctly to my remote machine. OK so all I needed now was to wait for it to kernel panic. Didn’t take long, mouse froze and then poof it rebooted without any kernel core dump going to my remote server. WTF! That didn’t work then. Normally I get a kernel panic screen or the terminal prompt scrolling across the top of my desktop image. Right I’ll just keep using it until I get a proper kernel panic I thought.

So carried on using it for a day with basic core apps, safari, chrome and that’s about it. No crashes. I left it playing full screen streaming HD from the NASA site all night to see if overheating GPU or similar could be the cause, nothing. Now here’s some things I did do

but I’m sure I’d done before.

1. I had to update my flash when I went to NASA website I think so I downloaded latest Flash.
2. I removed my ethernet port 2 from Network pane in System preferences and I mean removed not just turned off.
3. I removed my Airport from Network pane in System preferences and I mean removed not just turned off. There have been others with iMacs reporting Airport cards causing KPs and to roll back kexts, since I’m hardwired to my TimeCapsule I just thought fuck it and removed it from the list.
4. I normally have an Apple iSight camera connected to the Firewire port on my Apple 30″ cinema display, I have unplugged that.
5. I normally have a USB multi-card reader connected to the USB ports on my 30″ ACD, I have disconnected that.

I’ve now been up for 1 day 22 hours. In that time I’ve setup two email accounts in Mail app and downloaded 30,000+ emails and I’ve installed iLife 11 and run software update to bring all the iLife apps up to date.

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.

I suggested it could be to show that it’s a Secure Page hence the SP but it shows even on non-https pages and can clearly be seen on the basic vanilla Google homepage in the screenshot above.

If anybody is able to help shed any light on this please leave a comment below as he seems to be one of only a handful experiencing this strange problem.

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this post, @benmarsh managed to solve it all on his own…he’d enabled the Debug tools in Safari and unchecked the option to “Use multi-process windows” so the [SP] stood for Single Process.

benmarsh Ben Marsh

Aha! [SP] refers to Single Process – I remembered I unchecked Debug -> User Multi-process Windows yesterday! D’oh!

Ping is the new social networking side of iTunes that lets you follow artists and friends to see what they are listening to, tracks they are buying, concerts coming up etc. Sounds great but how do you get your friends to find and follow you? This bit should be simple but in a very un-Apple-esque way it isn’t.

Fortunately you can just copy a link to your profile and send that to friends via email/twitter/facebook/etc.

First you need to launch iTunes and then click on the Ping icon underneath store:

You should now see your own personal profile page. All you need to do here is right click (ctrl-click) on your name at the top and then select “Copy Link” from the drop-down list. This copies a link to your profile onto your clipboard that you can paste into an email, tweet, etc

The link will look similar to:

http://c.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZConnections.woa/wa/viewProfile?userId=92779645 [This is my profile link btw]

and will open your web browser and should then automatically open your iTunes and navigate to your Ping profile page for others to easy hit the follow button.

The iPad provides yet more proof that Apple can do no wrong, as following on from the iPod and the iPhone it has managed to create a sleek, sexy gadget that has tugged on the heart and purse strings of millions around the world. The iPad is available in a number of slightly different versions, with the most basic offering Wi-Fi connectivity and 16GB of onboard storage space. You can buy versions with higher capacity storage, but the most significant difference between the base model and the high end editions is the inclusion of 3G connectivity.

With 3G onboard the iPad can get online using the mobile broadband networks supplied by various providers and this means that you will not be limited to online functionality only when there is a Wi-Fi network to which you have access nearby. You will need to pay £100 more for the 3G equivalent of a Wi-Fi model which shares the same onboard storage space, so in terms of cost there is a difference. However, if you are going to be taking your iPad with you wherever you go and not just sitting at home and using it with your own Wi-Fi network, then it makes sense to splash out for 3G connectivity in order to make the package complete.

Most major UK networks have revealed their own price plans which will allow the iPad 3G to surf the internet wherever there is adequate network coverage. 3 has one of the best value plans, with a 10GB monthly download limit on a £15 pay monthly contract. Orange and O2 have both launched plans which you can pay for on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, with the former giving you a 200MB 24 hour limit for £2 a day, while the latter ups this to 500MB for the same price. Vodafone is also offering iPad price plans and although its prices match up to those of its competitors, its download limits are not as generous as those offered by 3.

Many people may wonder whether picking up an iPad is worthwhile if they already own an iPhone, or another smartphone like the popular HTC Desire which is based on Google`s Android platform. The iPad shares the same operating system as the iPhone, but its screen is almost three times as large as that of the iPhone and so browsing websites is much more comfortable and natural. It also works much better as a device for reading eBooks and viewing magazine and newspaper articles, which the iPhone can also achieve, but with limitations based on its screen size. People who already have a smartphone might be less interested in the 3G version of the iPad, because the extra money will only give them portable internet access which is currently supported on major smartphones and the portability of the larger, heavier iPad could be more of a curse than a blessing.

One solution to the problem of whether to choose an i Phone rather than an iPad or a combination of the two is to opt for a low cost mobile that can make calls and send texts while having the iPad for your more complex and hardware-intensive tasks such as watching videos, surfing the internet and enjoying applications.

UPDATE – I am now the proud owner of an Apple iPad 3G + WiFi 64GB and have opted for 10GB a month package with Three mobile operator and must admit I am highly impressed with the device. Firstly, my iPhone still had more than 50% battery remaining when I went to bed last night, normally it’d be <10% or dead before the end of a day. Secondly, I’ve not opened my MacBook Air for 2 days since purchasing the iPad which surprised me, don’t get me wrong the iPad is NOT a laptop replacement (well not for most people) but it certainly does eliminate the need to use a laptop for simple web browsing, online shopping, email, etc

I bought my MacBook Air in Feb 2008 and for the last 11 months I’ve always been frustrated with the restrictive screen angle. It didn’t seem to go much past vertical (roughly 120°) so there were certain situations when I had it on my lap where I could not get the screen back far enough to view comfortably.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) my MacBook Air hinge broke/snapped the other day and this has resulted in the screen folding almost completely flat (roughly 160°).

There were no suspicious “circumstances” when the hinge broke, it had been sat on my desk from the previous day with the lid shut and I simply opened the lid whilst the MacBook Air was on my desk and when the screen reached the usual point of resistance (roughly 120°) there was a momentary feel of resistance followed by a snapping/popping sound and the screen then went completely flat.

The screen was still working perfectly normally, no loss in general resistance of the hinge, the backlight was functioning ok, the picture was perfect and there were no nasty noises when opening and closing the screen.

The hinges appeared to be in tact when inspected just above the keyboard so I closed the lid and lifted it up to inspect the underside of the hinges. It was then that I noticed two tiny (and I mean tiny) specs of metal/plastic sitting on my desk roughly where the hinge was. On inspection they appear to be some kind of light weight alloy metal and look like they have sheared off at one end.

I kept hold of them both and tried to get some photos of them with my digital camera but they were too small too get a decent macro focus on, so instead I resorted to my Veho USB Microscope (handy Christmas present) to take some photos and have included a pencil tip, pin tip and ruler for scale purposes just so you can get an idea of just how small these pieces are. [see the gallery at the end of the post for all the photos]

I’m guessing that these two small parts were integrated into the hinge as “stops” to prevent the screen from opening too far. If that is the case then making them just over 1mm wide seems a little daft to me and I’m not surprised they have snapped.

I don’t really mind too much that the screen now opens to around 160° but I’m taking it in for repair this week just incase the excessive opening angle is causing any ribbon cables or similar connecting the screen to the motherboard to rub and wear through. There do appear to be numerous cases of this mentioned across the web, many seem to just have the screen open flat like me but a few others have cracked hinges and completely broken hinges.

I shall update once I’ve heard back from Apple Service.

UPDATE (4th Feb 2009): I’ve now picked my MBA back up from repair and I’ve got a brand new lcd screen, surround, lid and hinge, basically the upper half has been completely replaced and from what I’ve researched that always seems to be the case, replacing the whole screen assembly rather than just the hinges. I have noticed that the new screen seems to suffer from the dreaded horizontal grey lines syndrome I’ve been reading about, I guess it’s a screen from the new Rev-B models, it’s certainly not as crisp as my old screen but I’m going to spend some time with it first before I decide if I’ll complain about it. Also, because of a problem with the date and time being lost every time the battery ran low I’ve also got a brand new battery, which was nice.

There are two model/spec options for the newer Macbook Air:

So it’s an extra £500 to upgrade the processor from 1.6GHz to 1.86GHz and 120GB SATA drive to 128GB SSD drive. However, if you click to configure the cheaper £1,299 machine and take it to the same spec as the £1,799 machine it actually works out CHEAPER!

You can see from the screen shot above that to upgrade from the 1.6GhHz to the 1.86GHz costs an additional £140. To upgrade from the 120GB SATA to the 128GB SSD costs an additional £350. So when you add them both (£140+£350) you pay an extra £490 which is £10 cheaper than buying the pre-configured machine with exactly the same specifiation.

Starting with the cheaper model and upgrading the processor and hard drive takes you from £1,299 to £1,789:

But many people assume that a pre-configured bundle must be cheaper, otherwise what’s the point in having it as an alternative option, but it looks like you are paying Apple £10 to click the upgrade buttons for you because it costs £10 more:

This only seems to apply to the UK version of the Apple online store, I just checked on the US online store 

which shows the model with the faster processor and SSD as $700 more than the base model. If you configure the cheaper version to the same spec as the more expensive version:

You end up paying $200 for the processor upgrade and $500 for the upgrade to SSD so a total of $700, the same as the higher spec pre-configured model.

I have 2x4GB SDHC cards which each hold around 40mins on the highest quality setting, when they get full I normally just open iMovie 08 and import all the footage before wiping the card. The problem is, I sometimes do this on my MacBook Air and was shocked to find a warning saying I was low on disk space on the Air. I had 10GB free before I started importing 4GB of video but I didn’t realise that iMovie 08 un-packs all the video from the video camera’s compressed format so the 4GB ends up being ~16GB+. Importing the video on my MacBook Air is also quite a slow process, on my Mac Pro it’s not too slow but I needed a solution to copying the card contents whilst on the road in order to free up the space on the card.

After a little experimentation I’ve opted to use Apple’s built in application, Disk Utility, to make a straight clone of the SDHC card as a disk image file (dmg). The benefit of doing it this way into a disk image rather than just dragging and dropping the SDHC card contents into a folder on your desktop is when you remount the disk image file iMovie 08 recognises it as a connected camera and starts the video import wizard, creating the disk image is also stupidly faster than importing the footage into iMovie which requires heavy processor time.

I’m also using it as a useful backup procedure taking a snapshot of each SDHC card before I format them. Even though I have all videos ultimately imported into iMovie 08, should iMovie decide to corrupt its database or wipe all the imported files I can also start from scratch if I have clones of all the raw footage.

There primary reason, however, I want to backup the raw footage is to preserve the 5.1 surround sound data that the Panasonic SD-100 records. At present iMovie 08 doesn’t support anything other than stereo soundtracks, so regardless of how fancy your camera is and how many surround mics it has, if you are using iMovie 08 the 5.1 sound is going to get down-sampled to stereo. I know Final Cut Pro handles 5.1 surround channels but that’s a little too advanced and out of my price range at present. I’m hoping that iMovie 09 will support 5.1 channels and also BlueRay burning options but we’ll have to wait and see. Rather than kick myself next year when I suddenly have the ability to edit movies with 5.1 surround and realise the additional channels have all been down-mixed to stereo and lost forever, if I take a backup of the SDHC cards now into DMG format then I can re-import them as and when needed.

Create Disk Image (.dmg) from a SDHC card

Open you Applications folder and find the Utilities folder:

then select Disk Utility:

Ensure you have connected your SDHC card to your computer using a card reader and that it is appearing on your desktop or in your finder window. You should see the SDHC card mounted in the left pane of Disk Utility, more than likely it will have a sub-disk branching off it. Click on the SDHC card in the left pane, if there is a sub-disk make sure you click on the highest level (i.e. the top branche or the upper one of the two).

Once the disk is selected click on New Image at the top of the Disk Utility program window:

This will popup a new window asking you where you wish to save the image, I’d suggest you create a new folder called “SDHC Backups” and save them all in the one folder, be sure to give each image file a unique name so you can find it later:

Note that the default option is for a compressed image, whilst this might work and save you some space it’s not the quickest method to create a backup image and I haven’t tested how well it works, so change it to Read-Only with no encryption. I will do a few experiments with compressed images and see how processor intensive they are, any increase in time taken to create an image and how much space is actually saved compared to a non compressed read-only image, I’ll update this article once I’ve done that. UPDATE – On a Mac Pro the compressed image takes no longer to create however there is very little space saving, uncompressed = 3.68GB whilst compressed = 3.66GB so I’m going to stick with uncompressed read-only for now.

That’s it, hit Save and it will show you the progress:

You should now have an image file the same size as the SDHC card in the folder you specified on your hard drive. You can now eject the SDHC card from your computer, and just to double check, double click the image file you just created to mount it on your computer. You can click skip on the validating stage if you are feeling confident, once you see it mounted in Finder open up iMovie and it should detect that a camera has been connected even though the SDHC card is no longer plugged in.

Just connect up your iPhone and iTunes should announce that there’s an update ready and waiting.

I don’t really care what other bugs it fixes so long as my contacts will syncronise with my BMW iDrive via bluetooth…soon find out.

[30 minutes later]…Bad news for BMW drivers, iPhone 2.01 still doesn’t sync address book contacts with iDrive. When Apple mention numerous bug fixes with this version I’m not too sure which “bugs” they’ve fixed but immiediately the phone does seem to be more responsive. The horrible lag when you click on contacts before you could scroll through all your contacts has not gone but it is much shorter now, and after sending a few SMS, the keyboard lag seems to be gone now too.

I’m sure there will be many other fixes “under the hood” but to me and 1000′s of other BMW, Chrysler, Mercedes, Jeep, etc drivers out there, not fixing bluetooth connectivity issues with 2.01 was a big mistake.