MacBook Air freeze: reset SMC

Daily, I take my MBA to work, and connect it to my 30" cinema display. At the end of the day I disconnect and take it home. Once back home, I plug into the 24" LED display and keep on working. The MBA sleeps while I'm cycling to and fro — and wakes up when I plug it in.

Today, I got home, plugged in, and found a blank screen. I waited; nothing happened. I waited some more. Eventually I gave up waiting and did a forced shut-down, by pressing and holding the power button.

To restart, I pressed the power button. The chimes, and the apple came up just as usual; then the little wheel thing came up, but it didn't move. I waited — nothing. I plugged in, unplugged, opened. closed, shut-down (again) etc. I tried all of this again, and again, in various permutations, and with plenty of waiting — nothing. Frozen as a dead parrot!

So, I reset the System Management Controller — that worked :-)

To reset the SMC: Shutdown; plug in to mains power; hold down shift-ctrl-alt (alt is aka option) on the left side of the keyboard, and press the power key once; then release the keys, wait 5 seconds, and press the power key to restart. Effective magic!

The SMC includes the Power Management Unit (PMU) you may be familiar with from other devices.

Starting over (again)

Lovely new MacBook Air — light as a feather pillow.

Power up.

Switch on.

My Air arrived with zero charge. I had a nervous few minutes with no response from the power button. I had time to read the FAQ, try again, and panic briefly before it eventually had enough charge to start up.

Setup admin account

Setup wireless

Software update

This may take some time (for me this was an 870MB download). While waiting you can Install Firefox

Software update again

Repeat until there are no further updates

Migrate user data from your TimeCapsule backup

Do this over ethernet, unless you want a long wait (I had 40GB to migrate. I get 2-3GB/h over a wire connected to my remote Express — 1.5GB/h with two wireless hops, and 7-8GB/h when wired directly to the Time Capsule.)

Setup user accounts

Include a working account for yourself

Configure Time Machine Backup for your new machine.
Start the initial backup.

This will take even more time (my initial backup is requires transfer of 55GB of data).

You can carry on with other tasks meanwhile. You can interrupt the process ("Stop Backing Up" in the Time Machine Menu), and resume later. Again, do as much of this as possible over a wired connection, to speed things up.

Use Calaboration to sync your Google calendars with iCal

Install Fink and Fink Commander

This allows you to install and manage various Unix utilities. I start with emacs-carbon.

Install MacPorts and Porticus

This also allows you to install and manage various Unix utilities and for many has more up-to-date versions. It also has a port of polyml. I start with polyml, tetex, bibtex2html and hevea. Porticus doesn't have carbon-emacs.

Install Kerberos Extras

Our "staffmail" imap server supports Kerberos authentication - just use the realm EASE.ED.AC.UK and your EASE user name and password. Unfortunately Apple haven't yet implemented this fundtionality on the iPhone — so syncing broke my email on the iPhone.

Change back to password authentication; sync again, so mail on the iPhone is back to normal; turn off sync; turn on Kerberos authentication on the Mac.

Install Developer Tools

Apart from anything else, this is probably the easiest way to get CVS installed.

Download iPhone SDK

Useful for the iPhone emulator which lets you see how your web pages will look on the iPhone. Maybe someday I'll write some code too!

Turn on the Safari Develop menu

To display the Develop menu in Safari 3.1 or higher, select the checkbox labeled "Show Develop menu in menu bar" in Safari's Advanced Preferences panel.

MacBookPro with Cinema Display - Sleep and Wake

I have an Intel MacBook Pro.

In my office I have a 30" Cinema Display, wireless keyboard and USB mouse (attached to the display). I have a spare power block next to the display.

In theory I should just arrive, switch on the keyboard, plug everything in to the MacBook(video, usb and firewire connections from the display, power and ethernet from the wall), and go!

In practice, sometimes it worked, and sometimes the MacBook would refuse to talk to the display. Worse still, it would refuse to wake up if I disconnected everything, and tried to run stand-alone. Until I found the secret, I had to force a reboot with the power key.

The secret is, connect the power first!

Connect the power, plug in video, usb, firewire, ethernet. The computer wakes and the display comes to life. Turn on the keyboard, type a few characters (type them somewhere non-critical). A couple of characters may get lost initially, but once the connection is established, everything is fine.

OSX Alarm Clock

Stuck away from home with a dead mobile phone battery, I needed an alarm clock—no sign of it in Date and Time.

The solution: use iCal on the MacBook. Set an event at the time you want the alarm. Set up an alarm action to open a suitably noisy audio file (which will open with iTunes if you have the default setup).

Make sure you set the alarm to go off on date (not 15 minutes beforehand as I first did). Make sure the volume is set high, headphones removed. Leave the lid open and, preferably, power connected. The alarm will wake the laptop from sleep, and play your song.

Update 2009-02-15 In Leopard 10.5.6 the alarm does not wake your computer from sleep :-( In System Preferences >> Energy Saver >> Schedule, set your computer to wake a couple of minutes before the alarm goes off.

If you subscribe to any external calendars, set iCal offline — otherwise any alerts complaining that some calendar is unreachable will prevent the alarm from sounding.

Battery AWOL

Suddenly my MacBookPro 15" doesn't think it has a battery. Energy monitor menu says, "No batteries available"!

I've tried everything that Apple recommends: restart, forced shutdown and PMU reset. No joy. The battery shows 3/5 lights; the computer runs fine on AC power, but dies if this is interrupted. This is my new replacement battery from Apple - see earlier post.

Google shows me that I'm not the only one with this problem (or similar).

Scotsys were helpful as usual. We tried swapping batteries with a demo machine. This showed that the battery had the problem (I suspect that this is a battery software problem).

In any case, I now have a battery on loan while mine is returned to Apple for replacement.

I also bought a spare power supply, as the connection between DC cable and magnetic plug on the original power supply is starting to fray.

Update

New battery and new power brick have been working fine for a few months now. I still love my MBP!