Category: Apple

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Apple update 10.6.8 and Lion (10.7) cause Kernel Panics on MacPro 1,1”

Posted on

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. Continue reading “Safari in Lion adding a suffix of [SP] to web page titles [SOLVED]”

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Cool Bananas SmartShell iPad 2 Case [Review]”

Posted on

Listen to any BBC Radio live stream using VLC including Radio 1 and 1Xtra

If you want to listen to BBC Radio 1 Live stream you can do so by going to their website and clicking “Listen Now” but that will load the HTML player and if like me you keep accidentally closing your web browser it will stop the stream.

I much prefer using VLC (free) to listen to my streaming audio and it’s possible to listen to the Radio 1 stream using VLC but it proved tricky to try and locate the URL of the live stream so for those that are struggling:

http://bbc.co.uk/radio/listen/live/r1.asx

Continue reading “Listen to any BBC Radio live stream using VLC including Radio 1 and 1Xtra”