Traveling tip with MacBook Pro + iPhone Charging

Feb 8

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology | Comments off

I find myself often low on phone battery and wanting to use my laptop somewhat on a trip without a plug on an airplane. Here is a quick tip to charge your iPhone from the laptop without using much battery.

1. Open your MacBook Pro to the point it wakes from sleep.

2. Plug in your iPhone and the usb cable to start charging it.

3. Put the MacBook back to sleep.

4. You’ll notice the iPhone continues to charge off the laptop while its sleeping. Heaven.

By the time you land your iPhone is back to 100% charge and you sipped just a bit off your MacBook Pro.

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2010 MacBook Pro Graphics Switching Kernel Panics

Oct 31

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology | Comments off

I have a 2.66 ghz MacBook Pro 2010 model. It’s awesome. It was the first computer Apple offered that did on the fly graphics switching between the integrated graphics card and the NVIDIA dedicated graphics card. Sadly around Mac OS X.6.5 things got a little weird.

See I would spend most of my time using the laptop on an external display (laptop shut) with keyboard and mouse and the machine performed great. However, when i used the laptop without a display it would randomly kernel panic, not a lot but enough to where I thought something was wrong.

Enter a patch in 10.7.2 to fix the graphics card bug. This is where users should’ve gotten suspicious.

Enter 10.8 my machine starts kernel panicking more and more (usually 4 times per day). So I install a product called GFX Card Status which tells me when my graphics card switches between integrated and the Nvidia card. Programs that must have the Nvidia card going are photoshop, Google Chrome, Omni Graffle, Skitch. What a surprise the machine mostly would kernel panic when those apps were open. So I moved to Safari full time and never load Photoshop. All was well.

My machine didn’t have AppleCare so I was unsure what could be done. I brought it into Apple a few days ago and they ran the hardware test and my machine passed. They then ran their Graphics Cards specific testing program that takes ten minutes to run. Within 5 seconds they saw this.
img_0310

I was lucky, Apple said this is a known issue and will replace the motherboard by the end of the week. If you are noticing kernel panics on your 2010 MacBook Pro even if it is out of warranty be sure to stop by Apple and tell them to run the specific graphics card test on it.

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Music business going fremium in an Ocean

Jul 12

Posted by Andrew Machado in Brand Advertising, Technology | Comments off

On February 18th, 2011 Frank Ocean publicly release for free his mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra after frustration that his label wouldn’t put it out.  It instantly was downloaded thousands of times, remains one of the highest reviewed albums from 2011 and spawned two singles in Novacane and Swim Good.

One of the benefits of releasing a mixtape for free is you do not have to pay a licensing fee for any of the samples and music used because you are intaking zero revenue for the music. On the flipside Frank probably paid the bill for studio time, mastering, etc, but what would the payoff be if he wasn’t generating any revenue from the release?  Touring? Nope he only performed 7 dates last year…that won’t put food on the table.

Fast forward to 2012.  His official studio album Channel Orange hits iTunes a week early (on about six hours notice to the public) on the 10th of July and is on pace to sell 100k+ copies without a music video, a radio friendly single and zero distribution through retail.  It will outsell the likes of Chris Brown, Linkin Park and other pop juggernauts.

So why is this?

1. If you build it they will come

The internet allows great products like software and music to travel virally extremely quickly. If people like your stuff they can push it out to Facebook and Twitter with ease. Just ask Instagram.

2. The proof is in the pudding

Frank gave away the drugs last year with Nostalgic, Ultra and a good majority of those folks are salivating the opportunity to get their next fix.  Since the first go round was free I don’t think people have a problem supporting him with 9.99 on iTunes.

3. Momentum is infectious

itunes-reviews

Almost 6k people have taken the time to give it a five star rating in the first 72 hours. Imagine what it will look like by Sunday?

So I ask: Why don’t more artists besides hip hop and R & B artists go the freemium route giving away a mini album of material before serving the main course?

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A music video made for $20 that has 43 million views

Jun 27

Posted by Andrew Machado in Brand Advertising | Comments off

4 months back a video was posted of Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and a few others from the Disney posse dancing around their house to a song called “Call me Maybe”. It now has 40+ million views, the song is #1 in america and she is signed to a major label.

You can’t teach this stuff in school, but damn Justin Bieber’s team is great at marketing.

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