Disk problems and recovery

I have for the first time in maybe 10 years had a disk crash so severe that the computer didn’t start. And here I was under the impression that the risk for this happening should be less with an SSD disk.

Anyways, my computer had been displaying several weird symptoms over the past days, mostly as internet connectivity problems. And when I got to work today it would not wake from sleep (it had been fine at home half an hour earlier). I did not think this could be a disk problem right away, so I first tried to boot into safe mode. However, the boot just stalled. I left it for 20 minutes, but no progress. So next step was to start from the recovery partition and running Disk Utility. Doing that indicated a number of file system errors. I let Disk Utility fix them, and now everything seems OK again.

Not too bad, nothing was lost – at least I haven’t noticed anything yet.

Pebble, a month later

So, I’ve had my Pebble for a while now, and I still like it. The vibration works great for waking me up. I never had a wrist watch that could do that with sound. More exciting though, is that things are finally happening at the apps front. The watch face SDK was released a few weeks ago, and boy was there a pent up need to produce watch faces!

Most are crap of course, but some are really good. I am currently using Revolution, which is a excellent. Huge display of hours and minutes, so even I can see it. But it also shows seconds and date. Also, some user written apps are showing up – still far fewer that watch faces though. I am using Timer occasionally. It is a simple but useful countdown timer that really should have been built-in. And to show what is possible, we have a Hex Editor no less! Yes, it allows you to totally screw up the watch OS and other apps. Weird, but why not.

And of course, the RunKeeper app has finally appeared! Woot! This was announced already when the Kickstarter project was set up, and was probably the main reason why many decided to get a Pebble. The current version only displays distance/speed in miles. Hoping for a fix to that asap …

No more Windows for me

Well, that’s not quite true. But I have stopped using a separate Windows computer, and instead run Windows 7 in a virtual machine on my Mac. I am currently using Parallels 8.0 which works brilliantly. I have switched back and forth a bit between Parallels and VMWare Fusion. I’d say that they are quite similar functionality wise, at least for the things I use them for, which is almost exclusively to compile and debug with Visual Studio. Anyhow, the less Windows the better so I’m happy with this setup for now.