TMTOWTDI

Hello! You’ve reached Adam Feldman’s blog. I’m a computer science & engineering and entrepreneurship student at the University of Michigan. Take a look around and please enjoy my musings. If you would like to learn more about me, here’s my resume.

I’m currently working on Reason, a web startup that’s making news better.

My most recent musings can be found on Twitter, but I’m looking forward to getting back to writing long-form content soon.

On the day iOS 5 came out, I was trying to download the update along with everyone else in the world. According to iTunes, my download was estimated to complete in 6 hours; there was no way I was going to wait that long. I hopped on my favorite torrent tracker, found the proper iOS 5 binary for my iDevice, and started the download.

It finished in 40 minutes or less.

Why doesn’t everyone bake this tech into their update delivery mechanisms?

After 5 years (almost to the day) of matrimony, it was time for me to replace my aging (read: dying) late-2006 Macbook Pro with a unibody model. You know it’s time when everything stops working even passably well all at once, even after you’ve done everything possible to breathe new life into the machine (my old computer has a SSD in the ExpressCard slot that serves as the boot drive, among other hacks). The new machine came in today, and I just finished getting some additional pieces of hardware installed.

Instead of paying Apple’s crazy prices for RAM and SSDs, I bought some memory off Newegg and found the only SSD company that seems to provide a Mac firmware updater with their drive. I also bought an Optibay, which allowed me to replace the optical drive with the hard disk that came with the machine. I tossed the SSD in where the original hard disk goes, and put the optical drive into the external drive case that comes with the Optibay so I can use it the rare times it’s needed. 120G boot drive and 750G drive for my user folder = <3.

I found great hard drive and optical drive replacement instructions on iFixit, since the Optibay instructions haven’t been updated for the latest revision of the Macbook Pro internals (shame on them). Thank you iFixit for being amazing!

After switching the drives around, I thought I would have to use my custom Snow Leopard installer USB stick to install 10.6 on the SSD then upgrade to Lion through the Mac App Store (the machine wouldn’t even boot from the USB stick, not sure why yet). It turns out that you can use the pre-installed bootable recovery partition to get Lion installed on the new drive. As I sit here writing I’m waiting for the install to finish – it’s estimating another 4 hours as it continues “Downloading additional components”….

Yay for new toys!