Adapting to a new MAC

Recently I got an email at work saying that my laptop was due for replacement. The email asked me to choose whether to get a Lenovo laptop or an Apple MAC,. I am not really a fan of Apple products due to their habit of ignoring standard interface conventions. Nevertheless I was persuaded by some co-workers that clicking the apple button was the right choice. The new laptop was delivered very promptly after I clicked on the button and suddenly I had a shiny new MacBook Pro sitting on my desk and I had no choice but to become friends with it.

• On the positive side
• The hardware is impressive  The laptop is slim and light and the screen is crystal clear with a very high resolution. It can even be read outdoors on a sunny day.
• It comes with a solid state disk drive which means that it is lightning fast.
• The CIO office in IBM has set up a process http://setupmymac.ibm.com which  makes it trivially easy to setup all of the essential applications most people need in IBM in one go. This meant I was productive very quickly.
• On the negative side:
• As many of you know, MAC uses the command key for most  situations where most normal computers expect  you to press the control key. This is quite annoying at first, but I am surprised how quickly I managed to learn the new key sequences. This inventing of their own UI conventions is not ideal, especially for people like me who have to regularly use a variety of different operating systems. However, I think I will learn to live with it.
• What is really annoying is that Apple is into minimal design and hence they decided to remove any keyboard keys that they think are rarely used. One of these is the break key. Many users rarely if ever use this key, but in Lotus Notes there is a convention that you can use ctrl-break to abort any operation which is taking too long. Unfortunately this is a key combination that I find myself wanting to use frequently. A Google search threw up a few suggestions for MAC compatible alternatives, but none of them seem to work.
• Another missing key is the escape key, but this is compensated by the Touch Bar.  This is a cool strip which contains virtual keys that change depending upon what app is running. For example, whenever an application is running that can accept the escape key, a small esc appears in the touch bar. Likewise whenever Spotify is playing the touch bar has virtual keys for play, skip etc.  (even if it is running in the background).  This is a nifty idea, but most applications don't take advantage of it yet (probably because it is only available on newer MACs). You can also customise the touch bar so it works the way you like.
• I am a big fan of Bluetooth and I (wrongly) assumed that a modern laptop like a MacBook Pro would have excellent Bluetooth support. To be honest I find the poor Bluetooth performance to be the most frustrating thing about the new laptop. Initially, I connected a Bluetooth mouse and it worked except that I need to turn the mouse on and off every few hours to make my laptop realise that it was still there. Then I connected a Bluetooth keyboard and things got even worse, the laptop looses connection to either the mouse or the keyboard about once per hour (it can be even more often). Finally I added a Bluetooth headset and this seemed to overload the laptop's Bluetooth sub-system completely. The different devices seem to conflict with each other. For example, if I turn off the Bluetooth keyboard (which I often have to do),  the sound on my headset is likely to go up or down. Overall it makes me want to go back to wired devices (if the laptop had proper sockets to plug them into).

Overall I have to say I am still undecided about my decision to go down the Apple route. I am not (yet) looking to take my old Lenovo Linux laptop out of retirement, but I am a still a long way from being converted into an Apple fanboy.

Microphone adjustment on the Thinkpad W510

As I blogged about before, my current work laptop is a Lenovo W510 which is a really great machine once you get it working, but the setup can be a little bit tricky. Because I work on Sametime and most of my collagues are remote from me, I spend most of my days in Sametime Audio/Video meetings. When I got the laptop initially one of the factors that impressed me was the quality of the built in microphone. In fact the quality of the built in microphone was so high that I no longer had to use a dedicated headset.

Unfortunately, after a few months people began to complain that they could not  hear me clearly. Initially I was able to solve this by simply turning up the microphone gain with the "sound preferences" application, but eventually people complained that they could no longer hear me even with the gain turned up to the maximum. I was so desperate to find a solution that I even tried using Windows on my laptop, but this didn't seem to behave any differently so I was convinced that the problem was a hardware one.

I raised a ticket with our local hardware support team to see if they could repair it. They reported that when they tested it the volume coming from the microphone was OK, but there was a lot of background hiss and so they replaced the microphone control board. Initially the microphone worked OK, but then it started to tun itself off again randomly after a reboot or a suspend/resume. Now that I was convinced that it was unlikely to be a hardware problem so I did a little bit more digging on the Internet.

Eventually I found a solution. It seems that although the "sound preferences" application treats the microphone as a single device, there are actually two different devices contained within it. The alsamixer application sees these two devices as "Capture" and "Analog Mic Boost" each with their separate settings (see picture). The sensitivity of the microphone is effectively a combination of both settings, but the "sound preferences" application only adjusts the level of the "capture" device. For some reason the "Analog Mic Boost" had been turned down to 0 and when I adjusted this back up I was then able to make myself heard at team meetings.

Why the colour of you USB connectors does matter

Recently I was one of the lucky IBM staff who received an updated Laptop. The current policy is to supply software developers with a W510 Lenovo Thinkpad. Unfortunately, the employees getting these new laptops have not been totally happy. While the laptops are very powerful and have impressive specifications, most people (including me) have experienced some problems. It seems the laptops do not work smoothly out of the box and the users need to spend some time updating their BIOS and device drivers to get their laptop working satisfactorily.

When I got the laptop first, one of the things that puzzled me was the fact that two of the USB connectors at the side were blue while the third one at the back was yellow. Initially I thought this was simply a matter of aesthetics, but after a while I noticed that some devices behaved differently depending upon which colour port I plugged my device into.

I did a little bit of research on the internet and it seems that this is not just an arbitrary colour scheme. The blue USB ports implement the new USB 3.0 standard. Although this new standard offers the promise of dramatic increases in speed, there are not many devices in the market yet which use this standard. While USB 3.0 should be mostly backward compatible with USB 2.0, the yellow USB 2.0 port is supplied just in case there are any incompatibilities. In addition, the yellow connectors also have a neat feature in that they allow you charge up you USB devices even when the laptop is turned off (see here for details).

Many people seem confused by the different port colour and not everyone sees exactly the same behavior depending upon their BIOS configuration  (e.g. this query in the Lenovo forum). My own personal observations are as follows (your own mileage may vary):

• If I have a USB mouse or keyboard plugged into the blue USB port when I turn on the laptop it will fail the power on self test. However, if I plug a USB mouse or keyboard into these ports after the laptop has booted they will work fine.
• If I have a bootable USB key the laptop will only boot from it if it is plugged into the yellow USB port.
• My mobile phone can be charged from any of the USB ports, but it seems to charge up much quicker when I plug it into the yellow port as compared to when I plug it into a blue port (this seems to conflict with some information on the web which implies that USB 3.0 has higher power capabilities)