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Four years of going Paperless
I've always been good about keeping receipts, but I just shoved receipts in folders sort of ordered by date. Just over 4 years ago, I was looking for a receipt and got frustrated that I couldn't find one. The idea for ReceiptWallet (now Paperless) was born as there was no other Mac product on the market tailored to receipt management. Two weeks of work later, I had a working version of the software and released it to the world a few weeks later.
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Computer sleep vs hibernate
While troubleshooting my computer today to see if I could prevent it from crashing if it went into hibernate mode (where the OS saves out the contents of RAM before sleeping to the disk and completely shuts down the system), I again came across information on how to disable hibernate. I've seen this information a number of times, but didn't really pay attention to it. Recent Mac laptops, by default, have hibernate turned on which is great if your machine loses power completely and you haven't saved your work. However, I always save my work and rarely let my machine get all the way down such that the battery is completely dead. So, hibernate simply makes it longer for my machine to sleep; with the addition of 2 more GB of RAM, it takes even longer to write out the contents of RAM.
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Picking smoke detectors
Fire protection experts recommend replacing batteries in smoke detectors every year when you change your clocks for daylight savings time. So this year, I heard an ad that also recommended a carbon monoxide detector which we didn't have. I started looking at combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, but quickly dismissed that idea as all the reviews indicated that the combo units ate batteries like crazy (my house is older and only has 1 hard wired unit). In addition, my reading suggested that houses have both ionization and photoelectric type smoke detectors. No combo unit had carbon monoxide and the 2 types of smoke detection.
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Unsupported MacBook Pro RAM upgrade
As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to get more performance out of my 2 year old MacBook Pro. When I purchased machine, I got it installed with the maximum amount of RAM that I could, 4 GB. Newer machines support up to 8 GB of RAM and I'll definitely get 8 GB when I get a new machine. I had read reports of people putting 6 GB of RAM in my vintage machine and as RAM is one of the limiting factors in performance, I did a little investigating and everything I read said that there were no issues. Typically putting more RAM in a machine than the hardware supports leads to kernel panics and random crashes.