Ugh. The bane of my existence.

I’ve had my 24″ iMac for a little over two years now. I’ve grown to love OS X. I haven’t grown to love my iMac all that much. Where do I start? Well, in October of 2007 I upgraded to Leopard. After doing a straight upgrade I was left with one big problem: My machine wouldn’t turn off. No problem. I sucked it up and did a clean install, even wiping the hard drive to ensure that I’d be using a fresh, clean platform.

About a month into using Leopard I started noticing a weird problem when visiting certain websites. The site that I first able to document the problem on was (embarassingly) Goarmy.com (hey, the site is awesome!). While on the site after the main Flash movie had finished loading and the first content wipe was about animate on the site, my computer would instantly turn off. I’d be left with a black, blank screen with everything dead but the fans in the back which I would have to reset by holding on the power button for 10 seconds.

Anyway, as Leopard was updated and upgraded the black screen of death problem got worse. I’d go to a random site with embedded Flash content and my computer would crash. The same would happen in Photoshop when creating a huge gradient of performing tasks quickly. It was a really annoying quirk (especially if I hadn’t saved my work recently) and was something I couldn’t really explain other than being a problem with the version of Flash I had installed on the iMac, which I endlessly tinkered with.

In December of 2008 I finally hit rock bottom. I upgraded to 10.5.6 and upon restarting the iMac it couldn’t even make it to the login screen. My computer would crash and I’d have to manually reset it to boot it back up only to have to repeat the process at every login screen. During this ordeal I wasted hours and hours of time. I tried repairing permissions, running Disk Warrior and pretty much every trick under the sun. It was at this point I sucked it up yet again and decided to reinstall Leopard. The good thing is that I keep both a Time Machine back up and I regularly image my entire drive contents so losing valuable content really wasn’t a problem. The biggest problem was having reinstall every program and customise my Desktop with all my OCD custom folders and aliased folders. That’s a huge time waster.

So, finally, it dawned on me that it might be my video card (NVIDIA 7300) causing the problems. I validated this thought by booting Leopard from an external drive and trying to visit some of the sites that cause my computer to crash. Well, even booted from an external drive, my computer would crash when visiting Goarmy.com.

Again, I did a big reinstall and, again, encountered the same problems when visiting certain sites with embedded Flash content and performing certain tasks in Photoshop. So, I called Apple Care and went through their whole diagnosis scheme and was given an appointment at my local Apple Store.

Visit the Apple Store was a great experience because they were on time and the tech was on point and knew his stuff. We even booted OS X from one of their external drives and, lo and behold, when visiting Goarmy.com my computer screen went blank. Yikes. My computer ended up being at the Apple Store for about 10 days over the Christmas break, which was bad for working but good because I was taking the time off anyway.

At the beginning of January I got my iMac back after having the video card replaced (actually upgraded to an NVIDIA 7600 card) along with the Bluetooth module. On my first boot up I visited Goarmy.com and the computer didn’t crash and thought my troubles were over….

As I slowly but surely started working again I began to notice some of the recurring problems I had before. Photoshop didn’t like big gradients or fast movements. Websites like Engadget.com, The Palm Pre Promo Site, and The Windsor Star, just to name a few, cause the black screen of death.

So, as I sit here typing this post after another crash I think of what I have to do. I’ll need to call Apple Care again and explain my problem, tell them that it’s not fixed, go to the Apple Store and then leave my computer for repairs. This whole ordeal doesn’t sit too high on my list of things to do right now, mostly because of all the time resolving this issue will take and especially when I have a mountain high pile of work to do. I just hope that I can get this problem fixed once and for all and at the same time find any others with a similar problem and if they’ve had any resolution (so far, I really haven’t found too much evidence of my problem). Right now I’m almost certain there’s a flaw in the graphics card or Leopard’s video drivers because the black screen of death is constantly happening even with fresh, new installs and when booting from external drives.

Stay tuned for the results…

Update 01/31/2009:
Visited the Apple Store. Booted computer and was able to visit a site that caused me problems previously on the iMac and was successful in loading the website. Pushed the CPU and GPU with some terminal scripts. Went to Goarmy.com, iMac crashed. Tech assured me that Apple would thoroughly test the iMac, install a new logic board and NVIDIA video card.

UPDATE 01/31/2009:
Took computer back to office and decided to do a fresh install of OS X just to investigate. Before reinstalling OS X I erased and reformatted the hard drive. Initial installation of OS X 10.5.0 was successful. Upgraded to 10.5.6 through combo update, iMac informed me that boot caches would be updated once 10.5.6 was complete. iMac restarted and crashed upon hitting the login screen. Did a hard, manual reboot and computer crashed again. 3rd time, which turned out to be a charm, the computer booted normally.

UPDATE 2/01/2009:
Decided to do a fresh install of OS X again. Erased and reformatted hard drive. Installed 10.5.0 again. Rebooted to ensure I could boot up the computer had success. Then tried to upgrade to 10.5.6 and upon rebooting after upgrade computer failed. Could not get past login screen after 5 tries.

Reformatted and installed 10.5.0 again. Decided to do a combo update to 10.5.5. Had success in installing the update. Have had no failures while booting up since. However, computer will still crash when visiting certain websites.

UPDATE: 3/02/2009:
Wow. I’ve had one whole week without crashes. After taking my iMac to Apple again and having the computer in my hands for a week I can report that I haven’t had a crash since I got the computer back. Apparently my logic board and video card were exchanged. However, I couldn’t get any kind of straight answer from Apple as to what was done to make my unit work again. I’ll say Voodoo is keeping my iMac running right now. This is the longest I’ve gone without a crash since I upgraded to Leopard back in October of 2007.

Imagine a world when, with the press of a button, you are presented the perfect playlist of music that all just flows together.

Oh. Apple already did this? Cool, does it actually work?

Apple’s new iTunes 8 presents a slew of new features including the ability to generate playlists of music that goes together. The website makes it sound so easy:

1. Select a song
2. Press the Genius button
3. A list is generated

Apple wasn’t lying, this is the way it works… but you will need to do some work before you can just “press the Genius button and pow its there”.

I have over 4,000 songs in the iTunes playlist so trust me when I say this process took a while. When you press the Genius button for the first time it asks you to log into the iTunes store. After logging in you are asked to agree to some terms of use. after you sign your life away you get to wait while your playlist is uploaded to iTunes, then while they generate your matches and you download them. It was painful sitting there watching the progress bar inch along at a snails pace. Maybe it was slow because I did this a few hours after iTunes 8 came out. Anyone else find the service slow?

Once you have the Genius list generated the system works just as advertised. Press the button and volia. One thing I do not like is the new side bar that comes with Genius… but this is totally optional so I have nothing to complain about.

Something worth noting is that all the new iPods that support Genius require you to generate the Genius list in iTunes before the feature becomes available. Not a big deal, I was just slightly disappointed with all the waiting. Clearly I’m impatient.

Anyone else find soemthing they really like about the Genius or any other new feature in iTunes 8? The visualizations are pretty sweet.

Remember back in the old days of last.fm there was this really helpful feature called paste your taste. It allowed you to get a list of all your top artists, copy that list, then paste it into social networking sites like FaceBook or MySpace. That featured disappeared with the release of the new last.fm… until now.

Follow my few easy steps to get your pasteable atrists in no-time.

So, I’ve been having trouble for a few months visiting certain Flash based sites or sites that contain Flash ads in them. I’d say that that I experienced “problems” with approximately 5% of the sites I’ve visited. I’ll define “problems” as a total, complete crash more commonly known as a “black screen of death.” At first I thought that the problem was due to my upgrading of OS X from Tiger to Leopard back at the beginning of November, rather than performing a clean install as I should have done. I could live with the occasional crashes (a blank screen and force reboot) until I had time to do a clean install of Leopard.

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Slowly but surely I’ve started to migrate the computers in the office from PCs to Macs. I’ll admit it, I’ve fallen in love with the aesthetic, OS and functionality just like the millions of other Mac nerds across this glorious planet. During my transition I’ve encountered just about every problem you can think of, from getting Macs and PCs to talk, to getting my Macs to print to shared Windows printers.

Well, finally, I can say that I’ve gotten managing a multicultural network down to a science. Today I’ll focus on network pollution. If you’ve ever used a PC and Mac together and shared files between the two, I’m sure you’ve seen .DS_Store and ._ files show up on your PC. While on the Mac you’ve seen Thumbs.db files pop up every once in a while. So, what are these files? Well, I’ll get to explaining them a little later on in this post. What I will tell you now, though, is that I’ve been able to rid my network of this file pollution with a couple of great programs, the modification of some settings on both the Macs and PCs and a lot of experimenting along the way to finally get rid of these pesky files.

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