Tag Archives: Technical Notes

Hey! If you ever want to create a false-positive for bad RAM in the new MacBook series, I’ve got a foolproof way to do so!

You’ll need two MacBooks. Put them both on a flat surface. Close one of them, then set the other MacBook on top of it. Power up the top MacBook. It will start up, and a few seconds later the power light will start gently pulsing but the screen will remain black. No matter what keys you hit, it won’t wake up.

Ta Dah! Those are the symptoms of a failed Power On Self Test due to bad or missing RAM.

What’s actually happened is that there’s a little rare-earth magnet in lid of MacBook that closes a switch in the body of the MacBook when the lid is closed. The magnet in the bottom MacBook is closing the switch in the top MacBook. The top MacBook will not wake up – as far as it is concerned, its lid is closed.

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here on a regular basis.

Here’s the deal. I’m going to try to post here more often, but no promises. I’ve been doing some server maintenance that had fallen by the wayside, and it kind of kicked off my urge to vent more in public. Y’see, the hosting company got hacked back in January and I needed to reset my login passwords. Then I checked the server logs and found that I had an insecure installation of some gallery software that had become a link farm for spam sites. And some Russian streaming music site had somehow sucked up half my bandwidth.

So obviously I haven’t paid enough attention to this place for far too long. To make up for it, I’ve just gone through and back-linked a whole slew of comics. Read, enjoy, comment on them here. I’ll post other stuff too, I promise.