SSD on Macbook Air and El Capitan

At work, I was given a 2011 13” Macbook Air with 4GB ram and 256GB storage space. This isn’t my main work machine, but one that I can carry around much more easily when I’m on call. Setting this machine up has been a lot of fun because I’ve had my main work machine since 2010 and there’s been all this extra stuff installed on it. Installation of things is a whole lot simpler than before. There’s brew. There’s virtualbox/vagrant for running other stuff.

But even then, 256GB doesn’t go a very long way. So I’ve upgrade the box with 1TB ssd. The speed has been pretty amazing. The ONLY thing left to gripe about is that I can’t upgrade the ram. It’s been soldered in. Yes, it does save space and reduces heat, but it still sucks that I can’t upgrade.

I also use this machine around the house and as an air display target.

Wifi

We are fortunate to have a good size house around 2200 square feet with 2 stories. One of the bad things about having a larger house is that wifi always sucks somewhere. I've gone from several iterations 802.11g, n, ac and even ethernet over power lines and bridges. Nothing gives me the feel of anything close to a wired network cable. So my main servers are always close to the router. My main workstation is upstairs. And I've invested in many of the same devices upstairs as downstairs because downstairs was always far away.

Recently, I've decided to look into wifi systems again. I've heard good things about Eero, Google Wifi, and Netgear Orbi. Looking through the website reviews, I see that the general consensus is that Netgear is the best choice even though it technically isn't a mesh network. The Orbi has the highest throughput speeds and the main drawback is the price. It is on the expensive side, but I decided to give it a try. I ordered from Amazon and it got here in two days thanks to prime shipping.

I quickly installed the device and it really was as easy as the reviewers said. There are two pieces of equipment, the router and the satellite. The router can be turned into an access point. After setting up the router, adding the satellite is as simple as setting up an Echo or any other hardware that uses wifi.

And let me say that all the problems I used to have with wifi are now all gone. I used to get okay connectivity with slower than expected speeds. With the mesh, everything just works, and SO much faster. It is well worth the price. For some people, I get that this expensive wifi doesn’t offer much more than just extra speed. But if you need that speed, there’s currently nothing better.

Home Automation

We’ve been living at our place now for about 5 years. In all this time, we’ve never had to worry about home security. Not that we live in a totally remote suburb area with no crime. It is just that we’ve never felt we needed it. Until the end of August. One night, I was sitting in the upstairs bedroom reading, when around 1am, there was a knock on the door. It was weird to hear a knocking, because we usually know when our friends are coming. I got up and then I heard a doorbell. Li asked what was it as she’s a light sleeper and generally know when I get up. I told her that I heard something. Of course, she gets up right away and followed me to the top of the stairs.

We heard more knocking and tried to look outside through our door’s peephole, but it was too dark. Couldn’t tell if there was someone there or if they were trying to hide from being seen. We have a large window that looks out to the porch with thick blinds behind it. We didn’t dare try to peek through that as people from the outside could see movement. So we ultimately called 911. They said they would send a patrol car over. Later we would find out that they didn’t think we were in any danger, but we certainly thought so. It would be a good 4 hours after we called that they would come by. Fortunately, nothing did happen and we suspect that it was probably some drunk guy either forgetting where home was or had the wrong directions from someone. In either case, we were not in any real danger, just a scary experience especially condering that we have two young kids and two elders in the house.

This incident certainly brings heightened awareness to our security. We know that we cannot rely on the police as they come when they can. If they have more urgent matters, then we’re going to be lower on the priority list. That’s reality in many places and with more people in the area, the more likely there will be higher priority items.

So we started looking into home security. I really liked some of the services offered by vendors. But ultimately, decided to look into home automation products. Our requirements are pretty simple:

• Cloud based storage, preferably free
• Easy to use and manage
• Easy to setup
• Easy to take apart
• Provide full compatibility with as many devices as possible

We first looked at Apple HomeKit as we have a lot of Apple tech around the house. We purchased the August Lock Bluetooth Edition, but one thing that always bothered me for a “smart” lock is that I have to be within Bluetooth range for the app to work. In order to get longer range, I have to buy another device? And it doesn’t work with HomeKit. I also purchased two iDevice switches. These worked okay for a couple of weeks, but then it was always a hit and miss with Siri. Even the native app seems to lose the devices. Then I tried Insteon, which claims to have the most number of compatible devices. It may be true, but it didn’t play well with any of the other home stuff I got, including my MyQ Chamberlain garage door opener. Although it did work with my Hue lights.

After some more research, I discovered IFTTT. If you don’t know what it is, go there now. It’s one of the most amazing Internet of Things site ever. There are so many recipes for automating things. This became one of the requirements for me buying any new gear. If it doesn’t work with IFTTT, then I’m not that interested.

Ultimately, I found SmartThings. I was hesitant about getting SmartThings because it was made by Samsung who wasn’t exactly on great terms with Apple. There are lots of things to like as there’s great support for a wide variety of devices, IFTTT, and their forums for both consumer and developer alike. The main disadvantage is that it didn’t work with any of my existing products. I finally decided to make the switch.

I got the SmartThings hub along with Go Control Premium Z-Wave Home Security Suite. I got the SkyBell HD Silver WiFi Video Doorbell. And I also wanted two of the NetGear Arlo. I chose the doorbell and Arlo because they have free cloud-based storage for the video. You can pay for more storage, but for what I need, it is more than enough. I don’t need to see what happened to my house more than a week ago.

Installation of everything was pretty simple. A couple of firmware updates and basically, like Apple stuff, it just worked. It also found my WeMo switch that I had lying around from long time ago. The Hue lights worked. Installation of the phone application was smooth too and it is the gem of the whole thing. The phone app makes it easy to start the process of finding devices and organizing them. You can create automated routines similar to IFTTT, but with an added advantage of multiple conditions such as “when there is motion on any motion sensor and it is nighttime, then sound the alarm.” You wouldn’t want to set off the alarm if there’s motion around the house during the day.

Like most modern services, the phone app is really just a pretty wrapper around a web service. The web service allows you to log into your account from anywhere and you can see the state of your devices along with performing actions on them. For example, you can turn on and off a light from anywhere. One really neat bonus feature is that you can customize each device with a handler. The handler exposes additional features of that device. For example, while a Hue light is a light, it is a bit more than a light because you can also change its color. Only after you tell SmartThings that your Hue lights is a Hue lights, you can change its color. You can also create custom routines in Groovy to better automate your home. For example, you can create a routine that says, if the garage door has been opened for more than 5 minutes, close it.

After seeing all of this working so smoothly, it sort of becomes addicting to add devices for more automation. For example, I removed our August Lock as it was essentially useless and replaced it with two Schlage Connect™ Touchscreen Deadbolt with alarm with Camelot Trim. As Li wanted to have the porch light on during the night, I got a white Hue bulb. Since we have two garage doors with two different garage door openers, with MyQ it is able to only open one of them. So I got a z-wave GoControl garage door opener.

With all devices, we now get notifications whenever a door/window opens and close. I’ve also set it up to get notifications whenever the locks lock and unlock and I can see who did it. Same for the garage doors. At night, the porch light along with a Hue strip turn on and they turn off at 7am. If there’s motion at night when we’re sleeping, videos are captured and the alaram sounds. If the batteries run low on any of those devices, I get notified. When there’s motion outside our door, we get notified and video is captured. When we go to sleep, all the locks are locked and the lights get turned off.

All in all, I am very happy with the set up. I wish I had done it sooner.

Another Summer Another Consolidation

It’s been a very busy few months. The main change is the arrival of our second boy William. Work was very busy as we migrated from a physical data center to a virtual one. And at home, I migrated from running 3 servers to 1 giant one. Okay, one giant one plus a NAS. Main reason is the energy cost. Running extra servers for VMs that are sporadically used just isn’t worth it. I might at some point move them to the cloud entirely and let someone else pay for the electricity costs. I’m constantly bouncing back and forth between running the services myself and putting them into the cloud. I guess I prefer my privacy with my own hardware. That’s one of the big reasons why I went with a Synology NAS. I really like the redundancy and I’m using a cloud backup service to go with it.

One thing I noticed about moving all those VMs into one server is that all those VMs still depend on disk IO. And I can see that my VM which has lots of cpu power is constantly showing that there’s a lot of load because it is waiting for my RAID disks. So I bought a 1TB EVO SSD for my VMs. Now, there’s NO iowait! Whoo hoo, I don’t have to worry about how many VMs I run anymore on my 6-core server.

Migration to Mac

Over the years as my work has been more and more involved with "Software as a Service”. This really only means that my work is hidden behind servers and available on the web. There’s no software to install on your computer. Instead, you have to access the website/service from your computer to ours. And typically, the computers we use are Linux based for the main reason of them being easily remotely managed and availability. We need our computers to be usable 24 hours a day every day. They can’t take a day off.

When I first started using computers, it was during the time of the IBM XT and compatibles era. But that was still more expensive that my family could afford. Instead, I learned on TRS-80s. Then after I was able to save enough, I bought a clone. And that brought on endless peripherals and upgrades in the pursuit of building the next dream computer. I have always been in the PC camp and even worked on compilers for DOS and Windows. Back in those days, Apple computers model II and early Macintoshes were considered “educational” and not very friendly to low-level work.

Times changed. When I started at PIX in 2010, they gave me a Macbook Pro. Was my first and I had to get used to working with it. Migrating to OS X from Windows wasn’t too hard. One thing that I really liked was how much easier it was to develop for Linux from a Mac. Even though Windows has traditionally been more open, the platform itself became very closed. The tools were very Windows centric. It was cumbersome to take scripts / programs written in Windows and easily take them to a Linux box and have it work the first time. I was trying to do this even though I had a Mac, because I also still had my Windows laptop. Eventually I embraced the Linux/unix way and moved my every day tools over to Mac. Sure, I still have a Windows server and Windows desktop, but these days, everything else is Apple based.

The ecosystem is what I like most. I really appreciate how easy it was to share pictures and videos with my mom and my parent-in-laws. We got them iPhones and it has helped make things easier for them too. My mom uses her iPhone to help her learn English. Even at home, the pictures we take on our phones show up on our iPads and TV.

I still have my work Macbook Pro. But this weekend, I finally got to buying a Macbook Pro for myself. And I’m using it to write this entry. The one from work has gotten older and it is starting to feel that way. Yes, my work will get me a new computer, but I also want a Macbook Pro for myself. So my migration is complete. I don’t see myself buying another Windows box again. The only things I have working on Windows these days are games. Otherwise, everything else has moved to either Linux or Macs. I generally find tools that are multi-platform perform better and work more comfortably for me.

Synology DS1515+

Recently, we got a Synology DS1515+. For those that don’t know, this is a network-attached storage device (NAS). There are lots of competing products with all sorts of options for number of disks it can hold, what type of RAID it supports, how many network ports, etc. Ultimately, this is really just a computer with specialized software to hold the disks and to present the disks in a lot of different formats and interfaces. If you wanted, you can use an old computer and run something like FreeNAS on it to make it do something very similar. Like most things, you can either build everything yourself with all the customizations you want. Or you can also just buy something like this DS1515+ and get things going in a short amount of time. The choice is yours.

As I grow older, with more responsibilities, and a larger family, I find myself with less and less time to tinker with things. I just want things to work. For that reason, I chose the Synology. It is absolutely amazing how much of my life is digitized. I also want more of my life digitized. There’s too much paper already. It’s getting close to tax season and all I see around me is paper. I don’t mind it when Richard draws on the papers and gives us another absolutely amazing expression. But when it is just forms and boilerplate templates, it drives me crazy.

So I’m at least trying to do my part by putting everything into Synology. I’ve setup Crashplan to back up the stuff and it looks like it will take around 31 days to back up 2TB. I wish I had my work’s ISP where we have 1Gbps bandwidth. I’ll see what will happen first, will Crashplan finish backing up my stuff or will my son be born?

Winding Down 2015

Hard to believe that another year has gone by. A lot of good things have happened. Much to be thankful for:

• Richard going to school and liking it!
• Li’s pregnant.
• Richard went to China, learned more Mandarin and missing China. He comes back saying, “我不喜欢美国” (I don’t like America).
• Celebrated 5 years of marriage.
• Li’s parents turned 71 years old. Grandma turned 96. Mom turned 76.
• Li’s nephew came to America.
• Went to Lake Tahoe, China, Las Vegas, Disneyland.
• Richard got to go on a real train in Felton, CA.
• Richard went to Las Vegas, stayed at the Bellagio and loved the watershow. He now always talks about wanting to see watershows. He can rattle off the times of when the watershow starts.
• Automating our home. Apple-izing our lifestyle (Apple TV, Mac mini, HomeKit, Watch). LTE 4G on all our devices.
• Added a new server, running Ubuntu.
• Read a few books.
• Watched a few movies and TV shows via Plex.

A New Server

This past Saturday, I got a new machine from Craigslist:

Intel Core i7 Six Core Processor i7-4930K 3.4GHz 12MB CPU
Samsung 32GB DDR3-1600 Memory
2TB Hard Disk Space (Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM))
ASUS P9X79 PRO Intel X79 XTX Motherboard
4x USB3 , 6x USB2 , eSATA Ports
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS
6x PCI Express Slots, 8x DIMM Sockets
Integrated High Definition Audio
Integrated SATA II & III controllers
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD6670 1GB VGA/DVI/ HDMI PCI-e Video Card
LG 24X DVD+RW/-RW internal drive
Integrated Intel Gigabit Ethernet
SONATA Piano Black Mini Tower and 500W Power Supply
No operating system, keyboard, mouse or monitor included

All for $700. Of course I had the machine tested before purchasing it. Since there’s no operating system, I couldn’t really check the 2TB drive, which when I got home, I found it was dead. No biggie. As this machine was going to replace my old dual xeon box, I basically took the drives from there and played the swapping game. My “server” upstairs had 3 2TB drives in a raid 5 which I took out and put into this 6-core box. I took the 4 1TB drives from the dual xeon box and moved it to my server upstairs.

I also had a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD which I then used as the boot drive for this computer. This box screams and is whisper quiet. It boots from bios screen to login in about 5 seconds. As this will be the a Linux server, I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it. This is a first for me to have a Linux server. All previous boxes were Windows. But since all my work is on Linux now, I figured it was time to do things in Linux. To run my virtual machines, I’ve purchases a license of VMWare Workstation for Linux. This will ensure that my existing VMs just have to be moved to this box and voila, they can boot!

After playing with this box, I knew I had to max it out, so I ordered 32GB of ram (4x8GB) and another 2TB drive. When they arrived, I played some shell game again. This time, 4x4GB ram came out of the 6-core box and moved to the server upstairs. The ram it had was moved down to the 6-core box. So now the 6-core box has 8x8GB RAM. I then added the 2TB drive to the RAID 5. And started the rebuilding of the RAID 5 from 3 drives to 4 drives. I can see that the reshaping will take some time. The best thing about it is that the existing partition is still available! Currently, while the raid is still rebuilding, I’m copying over about 250GB of VMs over the 1gb network to the partition. And my Plex media server is also usable! It is kind of addicting to see such high availability and performance.

Apple Watch

I now have my Watch for almost 3 weeks. I have the sport version with the gold color. I didn’t want to pay extra for just the stainless steel look. A couple of first impressions. First, I don’t like the rubber watch bands. They’re not comfortable and the holes are too far apart for the fit to be that comfortable. So instead, I got the endless loop in blue to match the other gear.

Second, I didn’t realize how quickly I would find the watch indispensable for alerts. It is really easy to check on any alerts and see if it is important enough to take out either the phone or iPad or computer to respond. In my field, alerts are my lifelines. I need to get them as soon as possible, but I’m not always at a place where I can take out my phone disrupt the flow. But looking at a watch is much more socially acceptable.

Third, paying by watch is SO convenient. Paying by phone is cool, but not having to take out the phone to pay is even better.

There are some additional health benefits as it stopped my wife from telling me to get up and walk around. It keeps track of my heart rate. It controls my music. I have yet to take it on a run, although that’s planned. Stay tuned… More coming.

Mechanical Keyboards

As a programmer, my main interface with the computer is through the keyboard. I’ve used many different types of keyboards over the years. My favorite from the old days have been the IBM mechanical keyboards. They were heavy, loud, and required a hard stroke to type a letter. But I loved it probably because I learned how to type on the IBM typewriters. There’s a certain satisfying click to the keys when you hit it. You can tell by the feel of the keys whether you hit it or not and makes typing faster easier.

Although over the years, as we moved different technologies such as PS/2 and to the current USB keyboards, I’ve lost my IBM mechnical keyboards. One of the reasons has been ergnomic keyboards. Finding a good quiet ergonomic keyboard was easier finding an equivalent mechnical keyboard. I remember when I had the IBM keyboards, my roommate could hear me from another room even though the doors were closed and there was quite a bit of space between the rooms. Luckily, I was able to find a good keyboard that had most of the features I wanted and is pretty quiet, the CODE keyboard from WASD. I have the full-size keyboard and I love everything about it. There are only two additional wish lists I have: bluetooth wireless and ergonomic design.

There’s one other thing I really love about mechnical keyboards: the keys are replaceable. Literally, you can take a key off and replace it with another key as long as the keycaps are designed for the type of mechnical striking mechanism for your keyboard. I have the Cherry MX clear keyboard which are the quietest versions. There’s still a bit of a click to the keys, but I’ve trained myself to hit them only as hard as necessary to recognize the keys without hitting the keys all the way down to the bottom.

And lately, we’ve been on a navy blue phase. My iPhone case is the midnight blue case. As are our iPad cases. So I ordered a set of navy blue keycaps for the keyboard. What I’ve learned is that replacing most keys is not hard at all. There are some that are wider/longer such as the backspace, shifts, spacebar and the longer keys on the numpad have a stability bar on them so that when you hit off center, the key does not come flying off. Replacing these keys are a pain and requires a labor of love. It took me about 2 hours to replace 32 keys out of 104 on my keyboard. Most of that time was spent on the longer keys because the stability bar makes these keys so hard to replace. But I love the look and now that I know what it takes, it probably won’t take me nearly as long to do it again. Since I really love the look, it was well worth the time.

VMs

One of the things I enjoy doing is experiment, as you can probably tell from the previous blogs. And to experiment properly, I need spare machines or sandboxes. I’m too cheap to invest heavily in cloud services. Even though AWS has a free tier, it really doesn’t have a LOT of horsepower. Or I need access to things on my local network. And so I’ve invested in a virtual machine (vm) host.

A vm host is a fairly powerful machine with lots of resources so that it can run multiple client machines. The client machines or virtual machines act like a real machine, except that it shares resources on the host with other VMs. These VMs allow you to install other OSes without affecting your host. The OSes on these VMs can be anything ranging from Linux to Windows to recent versions of OS X.

When you create a VM, you can decide what resources the new machine would have, for example, how many CPU cores, how much RAM, and how much hard disk space. Once you create a VM, the software creates a bunch of disk image files that contain the VM. And one great benefit of these files is that they are transportable to another computer! You can move the VM for either load balancing purposes or disaster recovery. Let’s say that your VM host is experiencing RAM problems. Obviously the host machine can have all sorts of random behavior. But your VMs need to be running, what do you do? If you have another VM host, you can move the files to another VM or if you’re using a fast network storage, you can just load the files directly. In either case, the new VM host can run your VM without having to reinstall or reconfigure anything!

So if you are like me, explore the benefits of VMs.

On to Mac Mini

In the last year, we finally got rid of our plasma TV, which I had purchased back in 2006 or so. I never realized how much energy it was using, but there’s a noticeable difference in our electricity bill. So when I finally went on a rampage to figure out what was using so much electricity, there were two main culprits: the 42” plasma TV and the dual quad-core Intel xeon server. I took care of one by getting a more efficient 52” LED TV. The second I replaced with a more efficient, slightly less powerful i7 workstation that is acting like a server.

In one room, we have a 37” LED TV that had an HP mini computer that was acting like a media machine. That finally died after 8 years of use. Then I switched to an 8 year old laptop and it finally died due to Richard banging at it. After much debate, we decided to go with a Mac Mini. I finally convinced Li that it was more efficient and quieter and more powerful. With the AirDisplay software, it is so easy to mirror our iOS devices to our TV. As yet another way to easily share media content with others in a living room environment. And with the Mini, it is easy to access our central media content.

This experience is why I prefer iOS devices even after years in the Microsoft world and testing Android phones and tablets.

iPads

One of the things I love in our times are tablets. I’ve been searching for a reading device now for a very long time. Tried many of them, HP X2, Nook, Google Nexus, and of course iPads. But over the years, I’ve been moving more and more into the Apple ecosystem. I love the idea of Android and how it is adaptable and has some innovative features. But utlimately, I always come back to the Apple ecosystem.

And now, apparently, so does my wife. Recently, I traded in an iPad Air 2 wifi for an iPad Mini 3 4G. One thing I love about the mini is the 4G connectivity. Use it just about anywhere and I don’t have to fuss with my phone’s hotspot. There’s a very nice feature for linked devices to turn on the hotspot automatically, but it is finnicky. Not always guaranteed to work and it is a hassle to take out of the phone, turn on the hotspot, wait until the iPad picks up the wifi signal before you can use it. Not a great experience. That’s all gone with a device with 4G built-in. It just works as long as there’s a signal.

However, the other nice feature about the mini is the size. It is just more portable than a bigger iPad and lighter. So my wife basically took over the mini. She carries it around the house and she’s taking it outside more too. We’ve noticed that due to its smaller size, the battery doesn’t last nearly as long. They say 10 hours, but it doesn’t feel nearly as long as the bigger iPad. Certainly doesn’t last nearly as long as the iPad 3. With a smaller battery, it also recharges a lot faster.

So after she’s taken over the iPad mini. I’ve been back onto the iPad 3 as a compromise. And today that compromise is gone. I’ve been reading a lot more on this device mostly because PDFs render much better on a bigger screen. My eyes are slowly going too. So I sold the iPad 3 and got another iPad Air 2, but this time with 4G connectivity. Can’t wait to use it as I’m waiting for the syncing to finish in the background as I write this.

Been Away

Yes, we’ve been away. Li and Richard went to China from April along with her parents. I went there in the beginning of June to spend sometime in China and vacation. We all came back at the end of June. And for the 4th of July, we went to San Francisco. We’ve done basically nothing but traveling and getting over jet lag. Jet lag is really hard when going from Asia to US. Something about that direction makes it a lot harder. Plus, Richard couldn’t sleep at night because he didn’t want to sleep alone. in China, we didn’t have that many beds and so he slept with us. And since being back, he’s had to get used to sleeping by himself all over again. Luckily, it didn’t take long for him to get over it.

More about other stuff coming soon, that’s it for now.

Yosemite Changes

So a couple of things I had to do:

1. Launch apache on my own using “sudo apachectl start’ (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24583859/apache-localhost-username-not-working)

2. Rebuild php modules (http://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/install-mcrypt-php-mac-osx-10-10-yosemite-development-server/)

3. Write a new startup script for MySQL (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26476391/how-to-auto-load-mysql-on-startup-on-osx-yosemite)

That’s it for now. Time for bed.

To Yosemite!

No, not the place, but the newest Mac OS X operating system. I had recently upgraded to Mavericks, and now I’m on to Yosemite. Why? See this: https://truesecdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/hidden-backdoor-api-to-root-privileges-in-apple-os-x/. My work is extremely sensitive to security issues. Security is probably the biggest feature and differentiator between our services compared to our competitors. Of course, with the recent Sony hacks, regardless of whether it was internal or external, security has become an even bigger issue for us.

And so I’m now on to Yosemite. I have to say that unlike the last time I tried upgrading, this time, it went fairly well. The computer didn’t reboot entirely on its own, but after a manual turn off/on cycle, the upgrade went smoothly. So far, I only noticed that Mysql didn’t start automatically. And I had to install a new version of the USB DisplayLink driver specifically for Yosemite.

Here’s hoping everything else works smoothly!

Samsung 850 Evo

Just installed the Samsung 850 Evo 1TB after cloning from a 512TB Samsung 840 Pro, which took about an hour. After cloning and creating a recovery partition, I have a 999GB boot partition of which I’m using 324GB. Performance on the 512GB was starting to slow down. I think partly from age, and mostly from space. Now I’m less than 50% full again and thus getting write speeds of 470MB/s and read speeds of 515MB/s. Not too shabby. Boot up time takes about 10 seconds again! 

High CPU on Macbook Pro

Lately, I’ve been really annoyed at a problem on my Macbook Pro. I love my laptop. It is one of the most incredibly productive environments ever. The second environment is Windows Server 2008 R2 as a workstation. Both of these environments are rock-solid stable. The one problem, I’ve been having is high cpu usage from kernel_task on Mavericks. I did some research to find out what it could be:

https://www.google.com/#q=high%20cpu%20kernel%20task

Nothing obvious. I would also close down as many different applications as I could. I thought it might have been Chrome as I’ve noticed an increase of this problem occurring when Chrome would run. I switched to Safari. The problem also showed up when I used zoom. I’ve turned off my camera when I joined conferences. Still the problem persisted. I always hated the fact that this problem ALWAYS showed up when I wanted to use my computer the most. Isn’t that always the way?

I then noticed that the computer runs hot. Not sure why, but my guess is that the video card is working overtime with the computer driving a 30” display at 2560x1600 and a thunderbolt hub with multiple usb 3 devices including another 24” monitor at 1920x1080. The upper left corner of the laptop was HOT. I turned off the backlight on the internal keyboard as I used an USB CODE keyboard. This helps to cool it down, but not enough. So I did the simple thing, I moved a fan over and now the fan is helping to keep the laptop cool. Since I’ve started doing this, I’ve not had the same problem with kernel_task running hot. It’s been mighty cool both physically as well as evidenced by cpu/activity monitor.

The only time I see the cpu being busy is when I’m actually doing something like running programs. And so far, I haven’t been able to keep my cpu busy for extended periods of time. I’m back to being a very happy owner.

Dinner with Tongna

Our first night in SF and we met up with Tongna. We decided to go to Stinking Rose to try a variety of foods. We had a tub of roasted garlic, garlic ribs, cioppino, and a garlic crab. Of course it was too much for the four of us. Have to remember that we don't eat that much any more.

Location:Stinking Rose

Traveling Day

Richard had one last day at school before we had to drive to San Francisco. Here he is celebrating a classmate’s birthday. He just ate a cupcake, which he loves to eat!

The drive up to San Francisco was fairly uneventful. We stopped by the new Tejon outlets and Li’s mom bought a new pair of sneakers. Even though we didn’t have enough space in the trunk.
When we got to Foster City, we had to stop by Marina to get groceries and I bought a honeydew boba drink. I’m letting Richard try boba for the first time. He liked the honeydew drink, similar to the one he got in Newport Beach pier. He didn’t like the boba as much.