Peter Doolittle talk on "working memory".

Working memory is the part of our consciousness that we are aware of.
1. Allows us to store immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge
2. Allows us to reach into our long term memory and use it to achieve our current goal

We can remember about 4 things in Working Memory. It has a very limited capacity and we'll forget those things very quickly, seconds, unless we do something with them. We need to process them as they happens.

Working memory Capacity has a long history and is related to some positive effects. People that have relatively high Working memory capacity tend to be good story tellers and tend to be able to reason at high levels.

We need to use Working Memory efficiently to handle the stream of life that comes at us to make sense of it and to achieve our goals. Working memory is really quite small and this talk sheds some light on this interesting architecture. That's how I view it - as an architecture. I think the RAM, cache, disk storage solution in computing is a kind of metaphor for this. But, did our understanding of computer architecture allow us to pin this solution on our mind when actually we are just approximating the solution. Anyway, it's a nice talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_doolittle_how_your_working_memory_makes_sense_of_the_world.html

External WD 1 TB will not connect (mount) on a Mac

I have had this problem for a while where the external WD drive doesn't want to connect or be visible on the Mac. I thought it was the cable and fiddled about with that but no. Occasionally it would connect but it didn't follow a pattern, or didn't seem to. I am using the drive as a Time Machine backup.

I may not have fixed it entirely but I can now get it to mount and indeed it has mounted correctly ever since - a few times.

I went to the Disk Utility app and the 1 TB WD drive was being found. It was in the left-hand pane as  shown in the image below.

The below image shows the drive in its working state.
In it's error state it was displaying the text: disk1s3

I went to the Terminal and ran the command:

diskutil list

This provided me with the following:

John-Mac-mini:Volumes John$ diskutil list

/dev/disk0

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER

   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0

   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1

   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk0s2

   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER

   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1

   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk1s1

   2:                  Apple_HFS                         1.0 TB     disk1s3

I then mounted the drive:

John$ diskutil mount disk1s3

I noticed immediately that the drive mounted on the desktop and in the DiskUtility app.

Note that the disk identifier may be different for your setup. If you are unsure, look at the disk Utility app where I have drawn the red rectangle.

As I say, I haven't fixed this because at the next power off it may refuse to connect again.

When running distil list again the drive partition is given a name ' My Book Time Machine' as expected. I am not sure if this name is only available after mounting, and therefore it is correctly blank before mounting, or whether that is a part of the problem.

/dev/disk1

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER

   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1

   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk1s1

   2:                  Apple_HFS My Book Time Machine    1.0 TB     disk1s3

The INSERT key on a Mac is '0' on the number pad

Yep. It is.

Useful for a number of things. If you're on a MAC, with Windows running in a Virtual, and you're running vSphere to log into an ESXi Windows VM, ... (take a breath) ... then you'll need to enter a CTRL + ALT + DELETE.

Which is actually, Ctrl + alt + Insert, which is in fact, Ctrl + alt + 0.

(That will make sense if you need to do it, it's just garbled nonsense if you're not trying to do it)

1. You are on a Mac.
2. You have VirtualBox
3. In VirtualBox you have a Windows virtual machine
4. You are running the Vshpere application in the Windows machine.
5. vSphere is connecting to a Windows VM on another computer (Windows #2).
6. You will need to issue the CTRL+ALT+DELETE command to that other Windows (Windows #2) to start it.
7. vSphere will accept CTRL+ALT+INSERT, however because we're on a Mac, we'll need to use CTRL+ALT+0