For a long time I’ve been meaning to put an SSD in my Macbook Pro. Julie’s Thinkpad X200 already has one, but I couldn’t decide which one I wanted. The Intel X-25 was high on the list for a long time, but in the end I bought the Samsung 256GB mainly because I wanted more than the 128GB the X-25 gives me. The 2009 model of the Macbook Pro makes changing your boot drive really easy. All you do is open the battery compartment, remove 1 screw, and out comes the drive. A lot easier than previous models I’ve opened up. It took all of 5 minutes, most of which was spent removing some spacers from the old HD and putting them on the new SSD.
When I booted up, I noticed it took a lot of time for the machine to go through it’s initial BIOS/POST phase. I remembered my friend Eric had a similar problem, so I asked him how he fixed that. Turns out all you have to do is set the new drive as your startup disk in Preferences. Now it boots in less than 30 seconds, and that includes starting up a dozen or so tools.
The last 5 days I’ve had more fun than I’ve had in months, maybe years. Being a geek at heart, the HAR2009 conference was a truly magical event. Not only was the weather perfect, but the talks were of a very high quality. Most importantly, I was able to meet up with many many old friends. People I hadn’t seen in years, or sometimes even longer. It’s kind of strange to see people that you used to hang with, suddenly have 2 kids that can not only walk, but swim.
As you can read in my previous post, HAR2009 is the 6th in a series of events organized by the dutch (and german) hacker movement. And this time it almost didn’t happen. The organizer of all the previous events, Rop Gonggrijp, told us a year ago that he couldn’t do it. After a few months of silent shock, Aldert Hazenberg stood up and took charge. Quite a few people were a little skeptical, but this turned out to be unfounded. He and his team of over 100 volunteers pulled off one of the best events that I’ve been to. A new generation of enthusiasts has entered the scene with a loud bang.
In may of 2009 we went to Indonesia with Eric Cheng for a total of 45 days. We did over 130 dives, and went from Lembeh to Raja Ampat, Halmahera, Ambon and finally Flores. It was one of the best trips we’ve ever done, with a really nice group of people. It took a few months, but I finally managed to upload a gallery of the images. You can also read our tripreport.
| link | Comments Off on Ultimate Indonesia Gallery posted August 17th, 2009 9:13 by admin
Every four years a large outdoor hacker conference is held in The Netherlands. This year the 6th edition is being organized near the tiny town of Vierhouten. Like previous years there will be an amazing conference track consisting of a wide range of talks covering topics like engineering, hacking, ethics, politics and much more. But it’s also a great place to meet like-minded people. People that are not only technologically adept and privacy minded, but also critical of where technology is headed.
This is the first year that I’m not really involved in the organization of this event. In previous years I was deeply involved with the technical setup of the event, and the last 2 events I was part of the board of the foundation that oversees the budget. This year I plan to just be a visitor (ok, not quite, another 2 foundations I’m a board member of are the principal sponsors of the event) and I hope to see as many talks as possible.
Every four years a 