I recently swapped out the HD in my 1st-gen 1.83GHz MacBook (read my original review ), and thought others might be interested in the experience of going from a 60GB hard drive to a 40GB SSD. It might seem odd to buy a smaller hard drive, but it’s been well worth it.

Reason & Motivation

“Imagine if nearly every computer slowdown vanished. That’s what it’s like using a good SSD.” This post by Marco Armet is why I couldn’t stop thinking about a hard drive upgrade. My MacBook was 4 years old, and showing it’s age. But after reading that I wondered if an SSD could stave off the purchase of a new machine.

Impetus

Once I saw an 40GB Intel X-25V for around $80, I decided to take the plunge. The X-25V sounded very close in performance to the highly regarded X-25M, and I thought I could make do with 40GB, even though it was smaller than my (currently full) hard drive. The price was right, and a similar 80GB drive was almost $200.

Losing Weight

Once the decision was made, now I needed to make everything fit on a 40GB drive. I really only use my MacBook for my web design work, and I don’t work with terribly large files. All our photos, videos, music, and other media are on our iMac, so I figured I could go lean and mean on this machine. I also decided to put the old drive into an enclosure and move any large, non-essential work files onto it. A nice bonus is that I’m also able to use the old drive as a Time Machine backup, which adds some redundacy to my backup routine.

I trimmed down my music collection, deleted programs that I don’t use, used Monolingual to remove unnecessary language files, and generally tidied up. OmniDiskSweeper was invaluable for identifying where space was being used up. Prior to replacing the drive I was around 35GB used.

Install process

Installation was quite easy, I just did the following:

• Popped out the battery
• Removed the three screws holding the cover for the HD and RAM
• Slid the old HD out
• Removed the screws holding into the caddy
• Placed the new SSD into the caddy and replace the screws
• Slid the new drive in
• Replaced cover
• Replaced battery

Before removing the old hard drive, I cloned it to an external with SuperDuper . Once the new one was installed, I booted off the external and cloned it to the new one. After a reboot,it was the computer I remembered, but so much snappier. I wasn’t able to find any details on how much of a difference an SSD upgrade would make on such an old machine. So I grabbed my iPhone and did a few before & after tests. Nothing is exact, but it gives a good idea of what a difference an SSD can make.

*Firefox, Gmail & Harvest Fluid apps, iTunes, Transmit

Living Within 40GB

While 40GB is somewhat constraining, it is something I can work with. The biggest headache has actually been the OS updates. The last one was a 7GB download, and I don’t usually operate with that much free space.

Conclusion

Overall I love the extra speed, and it has breathed new life into a machine that I was seriously considering replacing.

Why I Write

There are a number of different reasons I share my thoughts on Twitter. I try to tweet things that are interesting or funny to me, in hopes that those who know me or follow me might enjoy them. I try to share information that might be useful to others. I sometimes post quick questions that I have, and try to answer questions others have asked.

I also enjoy the challenge of writing in very small bursts on a regular basis, and crafting my thoughts concisely enough to fit in a tweet. It is a disciple that gets me writing, and I think it has encouraged more regular blogging.

Who and Why I Follow

The accounts that I follow basically fall into the categories below.

Web Design/Development

• Keeping up with local web designers
• Learning from web designers who are at a similar place in their career
• Keeping in touch with the latest technologies on the web
• Learning from some of my web design heros
• Finding useful articles and services

Keeping in touch

• Following news about my favourite basketball teams
• Keeping up with news about my favourite TV shows (Dollhouse, Castle)
• Getting to know the stars of those shows
• Getting the latest updates about applications I use
• Keeping in touch with friends and family (would be easier if more would use Twitter :)

Entertainment & Insight

• Some of the people I follow are just funny, end of story.
• Others (like my wife) offer nuggets of wisdom.

Why not Facebook?

I’ve heard Twitter compared to Facebook’s status updates. There are similarities, but one of the differences between Twitter and Facebook is that when you follow someone on Twitter, they get notified of that fact, but there is no obligation to follow back. And if I decide that I’m really not interested anymore, and unfollow, there is no rejection message sent. So I can fill up my Twitter timeline with what is interesting and useful to me, without worrying about who I might offend.

Conclusion

As someone who likes to avoid anything that might resemble a fad or bandwagon, I resisted Twitter in the beginning. I signed up when I realized that I shouldn’t knock it until I’ve tried it, and as someone who makes a living on the web it is important to be able to advise clients on areas like this. Now that I’m using it, I find the bite-sized chunks of information enjoyable. I suspect I might suffer from Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder

Anyway, at the end of the day, Twitter is just a tool for you to use in the way that best suits your needs. Three years from now it may still be here, or may not; but it does seem to be impacting culture, if only on a small scale. What really matters though is if you can gain in some way from using it. If my examples gave you an idea of how it might, then join us. If not, feel free to keep living the way you did before Twitter arrived, because fundamentally, the world hasn’t changed. At least not yet…

So why don’t we ditch Photoshop & Fireworks? Rather than complaining and hoping Adobe with fix things, lets just move on. In a recent post highlighting the release of Bento 3, Gruber suggests that Adobe start from scratch like Filemaker did with Bento, and finished with, “But where’s Adobe’s “Bento” for bitmap and vector image editing for the Mac? The Bentos in this space are coming from indie developers with apps like Acorn, Pixelmator, Lineform, and Opacity .”

I suggest that we start using apps like these, instead of Adobe’s increasingly un Mac-like software. I understand that some of the features and functionality might not be there yet, but isn’t using great software that is missing a feature or two better than suffering through crashes all the time?

Switching to software made by an indie developer will send a much louder message to Adobe than a few blog posts. If you want them to hear you, your dollars speak louder than your keyboard ever could. And what if an infusion of cash would help these guys add the features we need, while staying true to their roots as lightweight, simple software. Wouldn’t that be even better that Adobe fixing Photoshop? Let’s all help create a Fireworks killer or two.

So instead of waiting for Adobe to start over, or for someone else to come up with the perfect program, why not pick the the one you like best, and help them get there. I’m going to start by ditching my aged copy of Fireworks 8, (I know, I know, but it was working great up until Snow Leopard) and giving Acorn a solid shot. Heck, I already have a license from MacHeist, might as well use it.

Now excuse me while I go purchase the upgrade to Acorn 2.

In my research I also noticed that DrawIt looks to be taking up the challenge of competing with Fireworks

After reading Transcending CSS , and trying out the 960 grid system framework , my last few designs have started from the HTML, and worked from there. I’ve marked up the content semantically in HTML, then laid out the page using CSS. Once everything was were I wanted it to be, I set about creating background images, logos, etc from my design comp.

I found that using this process went a lot faster, with fewer hiccups. It made it easier to troubleshoot problems, and seeing the design with no visual embellishments helps to confirm that a design is solid.

On a related note, using 960 was a great. Using the included Fireworks template and ensures that I use a strong grid, and then moving from that to the code is quite easy. Taking a bit of time to learn the system at the beginning has saved lots of time on other projects, and probably even make the first site I did shorter overall. I’m definitely adding this to my web design toolbox.

After reading Cameron Moll’s Exploring Cufon and Kilian Valkof’s Combining Cufón And @Font-Face I got to work following Kilian’s tutorial. Getting @font-face to work was quite easy. Just add a declaration like this:

@font-face {
font-family: "Tallys";
src:
    local('Tallys'),
    url('/fonts/Tallys_15.otf');
}

I’m using Tallys by Jos Buivenga. Basically, the font-family declaration specifies that when you use “Tallys” in a font-family declaration later in your CSS, that you are referencing an embedded font. The src specifies where that file is found. Using local(’font-name’) first uses a local copy if the site visitor happens to have it installed. Normally you should use local() twice, once for the full name, and once for the PostScript name (for Mac OS X) as per this article . However, in this case the full name is the same as the PostScript name.

Once I did that, it worked great in Safari and Firefox. The only thing I needed to do was bump up the font-size, as Tallys is noticeably smaller than Georgia that I had been using.

Getting Cufon setup was almost as easy. Using the online generator was a piece of cake. I uploaded the created file and the main Cufon file, uploaded the jQuery fontavailable plugin. Then I called the fontavailable plugin, and activated Cufon for the selectors I was using, if the font was not already available locally or being embedded with @font-face. I had a couple of minor problems, first just minor errors in my code, then a hyphen wasn’t showing up for some reason. Never figured out why, I deleted it and used a comma instead, then noticed that there were other hyphens elsewhere that were working, so I put it back in. Once I added it back, it worked fine. Maybe it had been pasted in, and was a different character? One thing I learned though, was that if you are troubleshooting Cufon in Safari or Firefox, comment out the @font-face declaration, so you can see the problems without having to flip back to IE all the time.