I don't play that many games, but one that I've enjoyed for a number of years has been The Sims. Now that Lion is out and we can talk about it, I found the answer about what to do when it fails with an Unknown Error: Go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete the com.transgaming.* files and the "The Sims 3 Preferences" directory. This will make the game run again.

Some of you might have thought that I'm perhaps a bit too happy about the iMac, and of course too cheap to get a Mac Pro. (Yes, I'm just as excited as anyone to see what the new Pro will be like now that Thunderbolt is a great bus-alternative, but that's for another topic) Let me dedicate this post to the minus points for the iMac.

To be clear, my complaints are with the top-of-the-line 27" i7 3.4 Ghz iMac with 16GB of RAM and SSD disk. Yes, my delivery agent messed up and it's "only" 1GB of VRAM instead of two, but if you wanted to know what's the trouble with the top-of-the-line iMac, this is it:

Heat, heat, heat.... yes, every computer I've had has been pushed to its limits, and this one will be no exception. But heat isn't bad while running doing some crazy 8-virtual-core video-encoding with Handbrake, heat ...

Back when the new iMacs were released in may 2011 I ordered one with 4GB RAM, expecting to replace them with 32GB. However, getting four 8GB blocks turned out to be incredibly hard, and very expensive, so I settled for 4x4GB blocks for a total of 16GB RAM 1333Mhz SO-DIMM RAM. Two sets of 2x4GB from Crucial was very inexpensive (about 800 DKK plus tax), and they arrived a couple of days before the iMac.

While almost all servicing of parts for the iMac starts with having to remove the display and risk getting dust stuck under the glass, replacing the memory was very easy. Remove three screws on the bottom of the screen (surprisingly not Philips 1 screws, something a bit wider), take out some easy-to-use handles and pull. I was surprised at how hard I had to pull, I was afraid I'd break the handles, but no problem there, they didn't ...

Once upon a time I used a beanstalk repository in http mode. By that I mean I had it checked out from a http:// address, rather than the usual svn+ssh:// because Beanstalk didn't support svn+ssh:// . Since then, no-one had touched the project, but today I wanted to do some changes. I went ahead to make them, and before committing I did a "svn up" just in case. It told me:

svn: Repository moved permanently to 'https://xxx.svn.beanstalkapp.com/project'; please relocate

Beanstalk had deprecated http-mode. Sounds like a good idea, really, I don't remember why I was using http in the first place. But, if you, like me, have used SVN for a long time without really learning it, and get into the same pickle, this'll be for you. To relocate, simply run

svn switch --relocate http://xxx.svn.beanstalkapp.com/project ...

So today they released the new iMac. Still no reviews so I have no clue whether I was right or wrong about the chipset. So I've started looking into another pet topic of mine: RAM. I really would like these machines to take a bucket-load of RAM, but Apple still limits themselves to 16GB.

OWC shipped 32GB kits for the last version, and in this blog comment they confirm they expect it to work well on the current iMac as well. In fact, they already sell 32GB kits for the 27" iMacs, but at almost $3000!

So far I haven't seen people report on the previous generation iMac any brand of RAM that would supposedly work but didn't, and Amazon ...