If you are reading this, there is a good chance it is because your 2011 Macbook Pro bit the dust big time, just like mine did. I paid over $3000 for it, and whilst it is 6 years old now I have grown incredibly fond of it, and I really wanted to revive it.
The problem stems from the Graphics Card. There are actually two graphics processors in these machines, the Discrete Card which is an ATI Radeon (This is the one that fails) and an Integrated one, which is an Intel Chip integrated into the motherboard. The reason Apple included two graphics processors is that the ATI Radeon is super fast, which is great for the gaming experience and video, and when you are working on spreadsheets or sending emails, the integrated Intel processor uses way less power and considerably increases battery life. The truth of the matter is, if you aren’t a gamer, the Integrated Intel Graphics Processor is just fine, and thankfully this chip is what allows you to get your machine up and running again.
**THIS HAS WORKED FOR ME – I HOPE IT WORKS FOR YOU, BUT I CANT GUARANTEE IT**
This is not a guaranteed permanent fix – But it has been working for me, and hopefully you experience similar results.
My machine kept crashing not long after it would boot, which made it impossible to work on, until I found out that if you don’t have it plugged in to the power, it should boot using the integrated graphics. When its plugged in the power hungry faulty card is used, so disconnect from power.
Disconnect The Power
Once you get it booted go into system preferences and look for “Energy Options”
Stop Folders Opening Automatically when Hovering Cursor Over Them
I really hate how folders open automatically when you hover your mouse cursor over them on Mac. Sometimes I need to place a number of files into different folders, and having them open automatically when I just want to drop something in there is a real pain. It slows me down, and is just plain annoying. Thankfully, it is easy to stop this behavior. Open Preferences, and look for the accessibility option.
Once you have the accessibility tab open, look for mouse & trackpad options in the left pane, and then click it to open.
Now you will be able to see the source of the problem. Spring loaded folders.
To slow down the time it takes for folders to pop open when you are hovering over them, slide the slider towards “long” delay. To stop folders from springing open automatically completely, uncheck the “spring-loading delay” option.
I have just received Telstra’s Gateway Max 2 Unit, and my first impressions are overall good. It is aimed very squarely at beginners/novices, with not much for the pro’s to tweak in the back end. It is ultra light, with a somewhat flimsy feel. It has been rock solid so far, with an uninterupted uptime of four days. The unit does not come with instructions, just a simple but adequate Quick Start Card. The firmware does have some nice features such as Dynamic DNS options, Port Forwarding, Parental Controls etc…But not much for those of us that really like to dig in and do some hardcore configuring.
Different volume levels in videos can be a real pain. I have a folder with dozens of music videos that I like to watch from time to time, and often one song will be very quiet and I need to raise the volume to hear it, then the next song will blow the speakers apart because it is so loud.
Sound Normailzer fixes all of that by adjusting the volume of each video to be the same – so you can set your volume once then sit back and enjoy your videos.
The program seems to be built on, or at the very least modeled after MP3Gain Express For Mac, so for those of us who have normalized our music collection, the interface and simple usability will be very familiar.
Just drag and drop your video files into Sound Normalizer, and it will start analyzing the volume levels.
Once analysis has finished, you will see the results listed. It shows you the current dB rating of the track, and the amount of gain it needs to apply or subtract to achieve the desired dB level. The desired level is set by default 89dB which is pretty much the standard most people will want. You can adjust this if you want to, but I advise leaving it alone.
If you are happy to proceed and make the changes to your videos, press “Apply Gain” in the bottom right hand corner, and Sound Normalizer will start fixing up your videos.
The good thing is that it doesn’t actually adjust your original video, it adjusts a copy, and saves it to a new location which can be selected in the preferences. The new copy’s file name is appended with the normalization target dB, which in most cases will be 89dB.
Sound Normalizer works with all of the most popular Video AND Audio file types.
Video formats such as MP4, MKV, FLV, AVI, RMVB, WebM, 3GP, TS, M2TS, MTS, MOV, WMV, MPG, DivX, etc.
Audio formats such as MP3, WMA, AAC, AC3, AU, M4A, MMF, OGG, FLAC, WAV, MP2, etc.
Sound Normalizer is not free however, but it is well worth the $7.99 price tag. Grab your copy today in the app store, or find out more on Sound Normalizers Preview Page HERE.
Like millions of other Apple/iPhone users around the world, I turned on Apple Music. Immediately, my whole music collection turned on its head. I had duplicate playlists, song files went missing and couldn’t be located, songs were renamed incorrectly, and music I had on my phone that is not in the Apple music library disappeared. Like most other musicians, I had a lot of music from my own bands there, and lots of music from fav’s who shunned the streaming service, like Prince. This music was ALL gone, and no matter what I tried to do, I just couldn’t get it back onto my iPhone. I tried to click the upload button next to affected tracks in iTunes to supposedly load them to iCloud, and it never worked. I could never get those tracks back onto my phone.
As time went on I grew to like the broad range of tunes available in Apple Music, and I came to accept that I just wasn’t going to have that old music on my phone anymore.
Over the weekend, I did a back up on my wife’s phone, and she asked for a specific playlist we have to be added. As she did not want to use Apple Music when it launched, I was able to click the playlist in iTunes, and sync her phone, and she had the music quickly and easily. It made me so angry that I decided enough was enough. I wanted control of my music back.
After lots of fruitless Googling, I was finally able to figure out what the issue is, and it is not Apple Music at all. It is “iCloud Music Library” that causes all of the problems. All Apple Music does is give you access to over a million songs, but iCloud Music Library tries match all of your music with songs in Apple’s collection, and then give you access to those tracks on your devices. In theory it sounds like a great idea, that should save drive space and give you high quality tunes. In the real world though, it is a poorly developed, rushed out, cacophony of errors that ruined my music collection. If you listen to mostly main stream music your issues might not be so bad, but if you have lots of live music, rare music, old vinyl you have converted yourself, or in the case of musicians your own original music, iCloud Music Library will mismatch, grey out, and in the some cases, remove music entirely from your device. And, no matter what you do, you will not be able to put it back.
**DISCLAIMER** – I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR MUSIC COLLECTION IF YOU DECIDED TO FOLLOW IN MY FOOTSTEPS! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! THIS ARTICLE EXPLAINS HOW I GOT MY COLLECTION BACK TO WHERE I AM HAPPY WITH IT – THESE RESULTS MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOU.
In the end, it really only took one simple step to end this misery, regain control of what music is on my phone, and still have access to songs not in my collection via Apple Music.
I Turned off “iCloud Music Library” on my phone.
I went to settings and selected music:
Then I turned “iCloud Music Library” off, and got control of my Music Collection back!
Now, doing this is not without its perils, it turns your iPhone music collection on it’s head again, just like it did when Apple Music turned it on. A large majority of my music disappeared immediately, as it was matched (poorly) with music in Apple’s cloud. Thankfully, all of my original playlists before Apple Music were still on my Mac Pro, so when I did my first sync after flipping the switch, and I was able to select which music I wanted myself again, ALL of my music pre Apple Music was back! My 80’s Hairbands playlist went from 230 songs back up to its original 400. And lo and behold, the Gold Album was there as well.
The Down Side to switching off iCloud Music Library – All of the tunes I added to my iPhone collection from Apple Music had disappeared. Playlists containing Apple music disappeared. The ability to click the plus “+” button and save a song to my phone is no longer available. I can still search for and play any song on Apple Music, but I can’t add those songs to my device or use them in playlists, because Apple is a big whiny greedy baby!
Waaaaa – You cant save this song to your phone cos we want you to use
iCloud Music Library – Waaaaa-Ha-Haaaaa!!!! NEWSFLASH APPLE – Not everybody wants to sync their computer playlists to their iPhones and vice versa!
The bottom line is I now have control again, I have all of my favorite music back on my device, and I can control what is on there and what is not. I have lost a lot of functionality with Apple Music, and it is a small price to pay in my opinion, because I can still listen to those songs, and I finally have The Con!
Lionel Ritchie – Now a member of Warrant – Thanks Apple Music!
The Webernets has been running a bit slow lately, so I started looking at ways to speed things up. I stumbled on an article on WPMUDEV titled “How To Massively Reduce Your Images For A Faster WordPress Site“, and I thought I would put it to the test. I downloaded my entire images folder from my server, and here are the beginning stats.
As I am using a Mac, I downloaded the free app recommended in the article called ImageOptim (The article recommended Caesium as a free alternative for Windows users). I was impressed to read on the download page that “ImageOptim is lossless — it compresses image files without changing pixels.”
Opening the program shows a pretty familiar looking window.
I dropped the whole folder in using the default settings and away it went. It took about 50 minutes, and here is the summary it displayed when finished.
And this is the specs on the folder from the finder.
63.9 MB saving is nothing to sneeze at, but I was interested to see if I could push it any further. In the settings, I found a “Quality” slider for Jpegs. By default, it is set to 100% hence the claim to lossless, So sliding it down to 80% will obviously reduce the quality and void the lossless claim, but is the trade off for file size justifiable?
With the Jpeg Quality Slider set to 80, I ran the program again on a copy of the original folder I made before the first optimization run. It took about 60 minutes this time, and here is the summary from the window footer
And here is how the Finder views the folder
110.5 MB Saving on a 330.4 MB original file size is impressive. That’s 1/3! I went through a number of files to check the quality, and even though there is a slight difference if you look hard, for the most part the quality is good.
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