Perhaps a bit dramatic on the “breaking”-part – OS X Mountain Lion has some really awesome features, but only lasted 2 days on my laptop.

I love being on the bleeding edge of technology, and boy did I bleed this time. In the past I had no issue, running an OS X Developer Preview on my MacBook Pro as the primary OS. Having had no issues with OS X Lion, I thought the cougar variant would be no worse.

Installation went quick once the 4,5GB download was there and the new features of iMessage, cloud services and the welcome arrival of entering search text into the Safari URL field were welcome additions to an otherwise already great OS.

The first alarm bell went off, when Little Snitch refused to work – this was okay and did not bother me too much. More alarming was VMWare’s (as well as VirtualBox and Parallels) refusal to run. Sadly I had to do a restore from my previous backup and a reinstall of OS X Lion.

The OS X Lion reinstall took about 30 minutes on my SSD drive and the restore from TimeMachine another 2 hours. VMWare started and Little Snitch was happy – just a tiny problem – neither OS X Mail or iChat wanted to start.

TimeMachine must have backed up libraries from my OS X Mountain Lion install and then restored those onto OS X Lion, rendering some applications useless. Even reinstalling the latest combo-update denied me success.

Eventually I used Pacifist and restored the iLifeMediaBrowser.framework as libraries within it were reported incompatible (yes, I did try and reinstall iLife which also did not work) and this fixed the problem at last.

Our kitty, Damian is in trouble – read all about it here: Save Damian!

If you have visited my blog before our personally know us, you will have established by now, that I operate within reason and on a logical level – dealing with illogical people is something I hate – as any level of reasoning falls on death ears.

So today, do the right thing and spend a few minutes of your busy life and show your support by visiting Damian’s Facebook page by just liking his pages and friending him on Facebook.

Gelaskins have been scarce in South Africa for several months and even during my recent trip to New York, I was not able to find any.

We eventually decided to order several skins from the Canadian based company. The gallery of pre-made skins is huge and covers pretty much any laptop model and size. More intriguing is the “Create Your Own”-feature which allows you to upload any image (provided that it is of good quality) and customize your skin on Gelaskins’ website.

There is no limit in imagination, and the final product (using high-grade 3M vinyl adhesive sheet) is excellent:

Creating a custom skin was as easy as uploading images and then using the web-based layout tool to arrange/resize the images for the chosen device. You are able to use transparent images to overlay images and arrange images in the layout editor.

My initial order had issues as the cut-out for the skin was not done properly and I could not detach the skin without the danger of tearing the skin. When I contacted Gelaskins, they were concerned about it and promptly offered to re-ship the faulty skins at no extra cost.

Shipping from Gelaskins was quick, but I did alert them about my horrible shipping experience with UPS to South Africa and I strongly urge you to only order from Gelaskins if you can pick an alternative to UPS. If it was not for UPS screwing up my delivery, the Gelaskins purchase would have been an awesome experience from start to end, but UPS did manage to leave a bitter taste behind.

Unfortunately this is out of Gelaskins control and the did provide feedback that my delivery issue has been escalated to their local UPS office.

Applying the Gelaskin is however really easy:

• Clean your MacBook Pro with antistatic foam to get rid of any dirt and make sure the surface is completely dry
• Remove the Gelaskin from the sleeve and from the sheet
• Align the skin on your laptop without pressing the skin down. The adhesive on the skin does not really stick and the skin can be peeled off at any time. You are able to adjust the skin without much trouble.
• Once the skin is aligned, take a soft cloth and push out any bubbles. It is common that bubbles will form, but gently pushing them with a soft cloth to the edges will remove them.

There are very compelling reasons to upgrade your current MacBook Pro. While my MacBook Pro is still a 2011 model with 8GB of RAM I always felt that it could be a bit faster. Even with the 7200RPM Toshiba drive fitted, IO operations felt sluggish (even more so after installing the OWC) and I wanted to see if a SSD would make a big difference.

The 30-day return promise from OWC made the choice of the Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD 480 GB drive an easy choice. When it comes to SSD options, not many companies provide reasonable pricing and like OWC a 5 year warranty on their products – pricing is steep at USD 1,000.00 but the results are overwhelming and worth it.

My MacBook Pro supports 6GB SATA out of the box, and although the System Profiler does not show TRIM support, this is not an issue, as the OWC SSDs have TRIM support built-in.

Installation of the drive is as simple as:

• Taking a backup of your current system via TimeMachine
• Removing the bottom cover and the factory installed Toshiba drive
• Attaching the mounting screws of the original hard-drive to the OWC
• Restoring from TimeMachine (I chose a new install of OS X Lion and then a restore of my data

The performance of the OWC is simply mind-blowing. A cold-boot to the desktop takes roughly 10 seconds whereas a shutdown takes about 3 seconds.

Application performance has drastically improved – OS X mail opens instantly and displays all messages. Microsoft Office 2011 applications open within 2 seconds. MyEclipseIDE opens in 15 seconds and booting a VMWare image from suspend mode takes about 7 seconds.

Disk operations typically average at 200MB/sec although I have seen peaks in the 400MB/sec range:

OWC’s customer- and sales support is truly amazing – my order was shipped via Fedex and arrived within 3 business days in South Africa.

TimeMachine backups (typically around 20-40GB per backup operation) average at 200MB/sec read speed and are now pretty much limited by the network speed of my Airport Express.

The installation and booting into the BootCamp partition is natively supported by the drive and booting natively into Windows takes about 20 seconds. Game performance under Windows (Skyrim) and OS X (Civilization) show a tremendous improvement in performance and load time. At times it feels that the Mac Book Pro is struggling to process the data fast enough.

Another positive side-effect is the loading of Safari (which was typically sluggish) and browsing speed (I attribute this to faster read- and access-time retrieving cached fragments from the browser cache).

The MacBook Pro does run slightly hotter and the fans kick in more frequently, especially when resting the laptop on my lap – I only noticed this behavior during TimeMachine backups or more intensive disk-operations.

In conclusion, the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD is a must-have upgrade for any gadgeteer.

One would reasonably expect, that a courier company such as UPS would strive to do one thing well: delivering parcels.

I recently ordered items (a 480GB SSD via Fedex and some Gelaskins via UPS) from the United States. The Fedex order was shipped on the 19/1 and was delivered on the 23/1. The UPS order was shipped on the 17/1 (arrived in Johannesburg on the 19/1) and after much reluctance from UPS and several escalation calls was eventually delivered on the 25/1.

Click on the tracking records below to get an understanding of the dismal service delivery – and it needs to be noted, that UPS in the past was less enthusiastic of delivering parcels – at times they did not want to deliver to a residential address (the parcel was dropped at a post-office, despite the shipping being door-to-door) and other times, delivery was not attempted without me having to phone them.

While I was excited to receive my Gelaskins on the 20th January (the tracking did say “Now in transit for delivery” I was reasonably expecting delivery on Monday 23rd January. That Monday I was told, that delivery was already attempted twice (no indication on tracking information) and a 3rd attempt was on hold since UPS could not contact me.

The delivery was supposed to happen on the 23rd by 4pm, but UPS did not show. On the 24th I was told that import duty was due, and I asked for the inspection of the parcel prior to delivery and then pay online while the courier is present. The courier arrived at 3pm at our business and within the 2 minutes it took me to finish a conference call, the courier disappeared. He then arrived again at 17:10, refused inspection of parcel prior to payment and said that his shift is over and he needs to leave (considering that inspection and payment would have not taken more than 5 minutes).

Insulting is that the tracking information was updated at 17:01 (almost ten minutes before I actually spoke to the courier) and a subsequent tracking update at 21:00 of another failed delivery attempt (in fact there was no delivery attempt as it was confirmed by our security company).

Another delivery was scheduled for the 25/1 by 12pm. By 2pm the courier still had not arrived, but I was promised that he would be there by 4:30pm. Phoning UPS at 4:15pm and escalating to a supervisor, it became apparent, that the driver had just arrived at the depot and did not attempt delivery.

It took several escalation calls until UPS decided that they will arrange special delivery at my home the same day by 7pm. The driver did arrive before that and although the parcel looked “man-handled” and folded in places, the content itself was in good condition.

Since this is not the first unpleasant experience with UPS and previous similar incidents and complaints did not resolve the root-issue, one needs to ask the question: “Why is a courier company like UPS incapable of fulfilling it’s core business service – delivering parcels on time?”

Ever since I switched to OS X, I have never really paid much attention to viruses or trojans, but one can not overlook at times the feeling of “uneasiness” by not having antivirus installed.

I tried out the latest version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2011 for Mac on my MacBook Pro (2011 with 8GB RAM) and although I did not find any malware, trojans or viruses, the biggest “virus” for me was Kaspersky itself.

In order to scan for viruses, Kaspersky installs kernel extensions and I found that after installing the application, my MacBook (running a 480GB SSD drive) would not shutdown at all. Deleting Kaspersky (which then invokes CleanMyMac to delete preferences) by moving it into the trash, also did not resolve the problem.

I found today, that the only way to completely remove Kaspersky (and it’s kernel extensions which have been the cause of OS X not shutting down) is to remount the install DMG and then select the uninstall option.

This completely resolved the problem and my MacBook Pro now shuts down in 3 seconds as I was accustomed to.

I have never been a true fan of MTN (Most Terrible Network) and over the years experienced many unpleasant customer service issues. It came with great frustration that my 15 month old iPhone 4 started having issues with the power button. One day, the iPhone’s power button just stopped working and after doing some research, I found that this has been a frequent issue across some batches of iPhones, where the socket for the power-button started to disintegrate, resulting of a stuck button.

Most unpleasant, as I now lost the ability to quickly lock the phone or silence calls. While such issues would have been quickly resolved at an iStore overseas, the South African iStores as well as Core (the official and only Apple distributor) are not getting involved with repair and warranty issues.

In a discussion with executives at Core, it was explained that Core does not get involved in the repair and warranty process as this has resulted in the past resulted in many issues with the customer being “ping-ponged” between their cellular service providers and the distributor.

I consider myself lucky, as I had insurance cover through MTN Insurance on my phone and after lodging a claim last week Saturday, a courier arrived at my offices on Monday to swop out my defunct iPhone with an iPhone loan-phone until the phone is being assessed / repaired.

I honestly did not expect that the repair of a power button would cost R2800 and was relieved to hear that due to my insurance, I would only have to pay R150 for the repairs to go underway. The insurance process was telephonic and/or via email and took no more than a few minutes.

While First National Bank might be really innovative when it comes to banking, I honestly get annoyed with the frequent radio ads making FNB sound like a magical experience. Having consulted for both FNB and SBSA I can honestly say, that FNB’s banking platform is archaic and internal politics (especially when it came to branch banking) caused so much frustration and friction it was always beyond a small miracle, that the bank managed to actually release new software into their branch network.

I have always felt comfortable banking with SBSA and enjoyed for years to be a Prestige banking client. As with most “exclusive” offerings, Prestige banking has become too much of a mainstream product and prestige bankers could not any longer afford that personal relationship with their clients.

For some time I wanted to switch to SBSA’s Private Banking offering and eventually took this step a few weeks back.

The personal attention from the private banker instilled renewed trust in the banking industry (at least when it comes to SBSA and not necessarily their competition). Existing accounts and credit cards were migrated within hours and new credit-, ATM- and garage-cards where personally delivered.

No laborious tasks of filling out forms or having to visit a branch. Changing ATM- and credit-card PINs was possible through both telephone banking as well as through SBSA’s AutoPlus machines.

The monthly charges of R285 for Private Banking are slightly higher than the R205 for Prestige Banking and include annual card-fees and a number of free transactions. The Private Banking service can not really be compared with many of the low-cost banking services, especially when one considers having direct access to two dedicated private bankers at any time in addition to many value added services.

While the likes of FNB advertise many services for free as well as introduce innovative new features, it still comes down to receiving that personal attention when it comes to financial wealth management – not all banking should be about just credits and debits and saving a few Rands in accounting fees.

Synology has really outdone themselves with DSM 4.0:

Although this is the first beta, it introduces a number of improvements with the most noticeable a completely revamped user interface which includes widgets and vast UI improvements over the desktop-style dashboard in DSM 3.0:

The system information is now displayed in a side-widget and several widgets (such as the Package Manager) have received a complete rework and now include features south as Synology Cloud Services for seamless syncing between devices (no support for OS X yet) and Antivirus Essential which runs antivirus scans on your Synology NAS.

My installation and customizations (such as Squid Proxy server) initially did not work, since this beta resets IPKG Optware. The fix is relatively simple and works after a reboot:

1) edit /etc/rc.local and add the bold line:
#!/bin/sh
mount -o bind /volume1/@optware /opt
# Optware setup
[ -x /etc/rc.optware ] && /etc/rc.optware start
exit 0

2) edit /root/.profile and adjust the bolded path:
PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/syno/sbin:…..

Reboot your Synology and IPKG and other services residing in /opt should now work again.

Cloudflare has been running on my blog now for a couple of days, and analytics have started to show on my (free) Cloudflare account. It’s quite interesting to see that over 50% of my traffic and hits have been cached through Cloudflare.

Although I have not enabled aggressive threat-controls, Cloudflare does seem to catch many of the threats. It just a pity that at the moment not much reporting is available (I suppose this might be different in the Pro version):

The combination of Cloudflare with Amazon S3 and Amazon Cloudfront (a topic which I will cover in an upcoming post) is a huge improvement to absorb traffic spikes and improve page-speed.

Comment below on your speed experience on my blog (where you from would help), but you should notice a considerable improvement in image- and page-load times.