I recently sent my MacBook Pro to the Apple Store for repair, and it came back all fixed up. A new display for the backlight banding problem, a new top case for a failing keyboard and a new logic board for replacing the nvidia card. I have a Lacie 2Big Triple that I use as a Time Machine backup for this computer, but I realized the backups kept failing.

Time Machine apparently uses your MAC address to keep track of which machine your backup corresponds to. So of course if you get your logic board replaced, you’ll have a new MAC address and Time Machine will think this is a different computer.

I did some google searching, but this method did not work for me. I had to combine this other method to make it all work. Anyway, here’s the list of what you have to do. First, make sure you go into System Preferences and turn off Time Machine. Then fire up the Terminal and run:


$ cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive/Backups.backupdb
$ xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress NameOfMac


This should spit out your old MAC address. In the backup drive, you will have a hidden file with the values of this MAC address. Now, look up your new MAC address with:


$ ifconfig en0


Write the new MAC address down. What you will now do is rename the hidden file from the old MAC address to the new one, then tell backupd your new MAC address. In this example, your old MAC address is aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff and new address is 00:11:22:33:44:55, and your computer name is My Computer. We also turn off ACL and turn it back on after we make the changes.


$ sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive -d
$ cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive
$ sudo mv .aabbccddeeff .001122334455
$ cd /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive/Backups.backupdb
$ sudo xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:11:22:33:44:55 "My Computer"
$ sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/NameOfTMDrive -e


Now, you just need to remove your drive, then remount it. Go into Time Machine, and turn your backup back on. This will start indexing your drive again and for a long while, it will say “preparing…” It took my computer about 20mins to complete the initial backup. If it begins creating a new backup with “My Computer 2″ you did something wrong because it’s starting a new backup.

Apple should probably make this easier since I’m sure a lot of people are going to have their nvidia cards replaced.

I’m pleased to see that Jamie Zigelbaum of the Tangible Media Group has posted some of the work we did at the MIT Media Lab in the summer of 2008 on G-stalt: an interface to manipulate complex data sets with the hands.

During that summer, our emphasis was on designing a flexible software architecture for easily obtaining and manipulating all types of web content within the G-stalt interface. Pleased with the resulting design, that basic architecture has since found its way back into projects like E15 and others. In many respects, much of the ideas explored in G-stalt are those we explore in E15 — finding new, flexible ways to get traditionally browser-only web content into applications altogether distinct from the browser itself.

After watching the video, I was reminded of the similarity it has to and older demonstration I made with E15 and the multi-touch capabilities of the iPhone. Still a very nice demo, in my opinion.

It’s been online for a couple weeks, but here’s an announcement that we just completed the new website for agency:collective. There are also screen captures with captions under our projects page.