Viewing South Padre Island from Florida

Did you know that you can see South Padre Island from the westerly coast of Florida?

That’s right, you can! It must be 3 o’clock in the morning, with a good set of binoculars, and a lot of patience. It’s preferred to use a tripod to make sure your binoculars are nice and stable.

Next point your binoculars 43° south southeast by 22° north east. Make sure you have some red lights nearby as a red light will help your eyes focus.

Wait for just the right time for the earths rotation to be in just the right place, don’t forget it cannot be on a full moon.

Most importantly, again, most importantly, you must close both of your eyes for at least five minutes to make them adjust. Then open your eyes, focused through the binoculars, don’t blink for at least three minutes. There you have it, you should start seeing the speckled lights of South Padre Island.

If you have any trouble or have any questions, let my friend Diana know she’s done it many times.

I hope this is been fun for you, until next time.

Taking my wife on a date, guess where?

That's right, to watch the WWDC 2012 keynote! I'm a great husband.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iCloud and iTunes in a Family - Clearing up the confusion

One question I get asked a lot from family and friends as they set up their iDevices.

"What account should we use for purchasing music, apps, tv shows, movies, books, etc? We currently have 5 accounts and it is so confusing keeping track of who bought what and signing in 5 different times when we do app store updates.. It's too confusing!"

I want to share with you how my family uses our iDevices as it relates to iTunes and iCloud. Not that this is a life changing topic, but it is reality, many use iDevices for music, movies, games, texting, IM'ing and even sometimes, phone calling.  It is confusing with all of the options for iTunes and iCloud, iMessage, PhotoStream, Backups, etc, etc.

I basically subscribe to the write up that was done by macstories. See below.  I wanted to write it all up myself, but since they are much better writers and I would be essentially repeating what they've already detailed out so well, I figured I would just send you to their site.

http://www.macstories.net/stories/ios-5-icloud-tips-sharing-an-apple-id-with-your-family/

Hope this helps.

Corrupt sleepimage file causing 3 beeps on macbook pro boot up

I ran into an issue with my wife's MacBook Pro (Early 2011, 2.0 i7) where anytime it would go into safe sleep (i.e. the battery went completely dead while the computer was asleep, causing it to resume from the sleep image file when power was plugged in) when I would bring it out of safe sleep it would make it 50% through the resume process and then I would get 3 tones/beeps separated by about 5 seconds and then repeating the same sequence.  During that time the front LED would flash at the same pattern.


Because I had replaced the RAM (came with 4, wanted 8, but didn't want to pay the Apple price, so instead I bought from Crucial.com - they are amazing) I had suspected that maybe the RAM was bad or that it wasn't seated properly.  I proceeded to re-seat the RAM and run a RAM diagnostics test ("rember" from Kelley Computing, http://kelleycomputing.net/rember/), the test passed.  I called Apple to schedule a visit with my local Apple authorized technician, jett.net in Redding, CA).  The technician booted up the laptop using the special Apple network diagnostics and all of the hardware "checked out" as just fine.


I decided that instead of calling Apple back, I would try fixing this myself since it appeared to be a software issue not a hardware issue.  Because of the unique situation where the computer would start to resume just fine and then get the 3 tones, it seemed related to the safe sleep file (/private/var/vm/sleepimage).  I had read that any time you put your mac to sleep the sleepimage file will get created, if it doesn't exist already.  I decided to delete the file so that it would get re-created the next time the Mac was put to sleep.  Now, I needed the Mac to go into "safe sleep" which is challenging, because normally this would only happen if the battery was completely depleated.  I learned a new terminal command to force the computer to always go into safe sleep.


 "sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 1"


Where, setting hibernatemode to 1 tells your mac to always go into safe sleep.  By doing this I was able to force safe sleep to happen without waiting for the battery to be drained.  After putting it to sleep and making sure the LED in the front of the computer was NOT pulsing (i.e. the power is truly off) I turned the computer on and it started to resume from safe sleep and it was able to finish booting as it should, no beeping occurred and all was well.


So, in summary


1) when resuming from safe sleep, computer would beep three times every five seconds
2) I used "sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage" to delete the sleepimage file
3) I used "sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 1" to force safe sleep when I close the lid and/or choose sleep from the apple menu
4) Booted from safe sleep and confirmed it was working as expected.
5) To go back to regular safe sleep mode (i.e. do not engage safe sleep unless the battery goes dead) using "sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3"


Here is a link to the pmset commands that I used. 
http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html


Computer information:
MacBook Pro 15", Early 2011, i7 2.0Ghz, 8GB RAM
OS X 10.7.2 Lion


I hope this can help someone out there.