I finally found a good use for my degree

I have had my B.Eng (Electrical) degree since 1999 - that is 7 years. Only today I found a practical, worth while use for it.

It is one HELL of a good bug smashing stick....

Move!

Moving a 120l QT, 400l FOWLR and 550l Reef tank is no easy job. Especially if the new place is upstairs... And not just up the stairs, the stairs is in an L-shape. Which means the tank is too long to fit around the corner. Try lifting a 10mm braced glass tank over a 1.3m high railing...

Then to move 1100+ litres of water.... 80kg of live rock. And all of this whilst trying to keep the fish and corals alive.

Well, it is done. I will post pics soon.

Some really useful applications

During the course of life and work I had crossed paths with a huge amount of applications for the Macintosh platform. I have compiled a small list of the most useful applications that I cannot see myself go without.

Mori
Mori is a general purpose outliner/notebook that I use extensively to collect and sort all the bits of information one generates during life. It is rather new but powerful, however there are still some critical features missing such as customisable folder views etc.

Merlin
Merlin is a project management tool much like Microsoft Project - just slicker and cheaper.

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Another sad day

My Pearl Goby just died ☹

Here is a picture of him:

Pearl Goby
Pearl Goby
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MacBook Pro and Long Sleep Delay

If you like Apple Machintosh computers like I do, and you have recently purchased a MacBook Pro you'd also be frustrated at the increased delay (20-30 seconds) when trying to sleep the notebook. My G4 usually went to bed in 2 seconds. Since I very regularly need to take my notebook with me to meetings and clients, I use sleep intensively. The reason for the increased delay is NOT due to the Intel architecture. It has everything to do with a feature called SafeSleep. The idea is basically to save a snapshot of RAM just before sleeping, but instead of turning off the notebook it goes to sleep. If you turn it back on before the battery goes out, it will resume from volatile memory. Otherwise, if it dies due to battery running out then when turning it back on, it will resume from the saved RAM image - just like hibernate in the Windows world. In my scenario, my notebook is never suspended for longer than a couple of hours. This means the likelyhood that the battery will run out whilst suspended is very close to 0. So I did the following to reset the system to the behaviour prior to MacBook Pro's and whichever vesion of Mac OS X that introduced this feature:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo  rm /var/vm/sleepimage    # Optional but reclaims disk space