Why Newton

May 14, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Newton MessagePad 2000

Every now and then I like to post photos of my ‘mobile office’ setup of the moment. Very often this setup includes one of my Newton MessagePads, and often enough, when people see I have a Newton with me, they’re curious to know why I keep carrying a 15-year-old device (20-year-old in the case of the Original Newton MessagePad). I’m talking about people who actually recognise the device. Sometimes — especially in person — I get asked what’s that thing I’m using that looks like an ebook reader but it has a colourful Apple logo on it and why is that and so on and so forth. I also get the occasional opinionated feedback: why use that old Newton when I’m also carrying an iPhone and a 9.7″ iPad.

The answer is quite simple, really. The Newton offers me a unique experience: writing naturally using a pen-like instrument, on the surface of a device which recognises and transforms my handwriting in typewritten text I can edit, copy, paste, and send to my Mac as a text file.

Today we are accustomed to technologies that give us instant gratification. In this regard, the Newton demands a bit more patience. Forget the jokes about the poor handwriting recognition: the later MessagePad models and version 2.x of the NewtonOS handle handwriting recognition much better than the first models. You have to practice a bit, there’s a stage of training and adaptation, where you help the device to understand your writing by correcting its mistakes, and where you sort of adjust your writing rhythm in a manner that the Newton can gracefully keep up with you, interpreting and transforming your words as you jot them down. Having patience at this stage is crucial. In my experience, you get to sacrifice a bit of instant gratification at the beginning, only to have a very satisfying reward later.

This means that now I can write a note on my Newton faster than I can type it on my iPhone or iPad. Also, if I’m in a hurry and I need to write down something quickly, I can tell the Newton not to recognise the handwriting on the fly — I can simply save the note ‘as is’ and go over it later.

The long battery life and the incredibly persistent storage are another two features that make my Newtons invaluable tools. I haven’t lost one bit of information since I started using my first MessagePad 2000 twelve years ago. These pieces of 1990s technology already got rid of the manual Save command well before the advent of iOS and other mobile operating systems. Whatever I input in the Newton, I know it won’t be lost (unless, of course, the device suffers some catastrophic failure), and if I need to do some extended word processing, I can always put down the stylus, connect the keyboard, and type away. But again, what really fascinates me and keeps me incredibly attached to my Newtons, is the experience of just writing down something as if I were using pen and paper, and see my writing recognised and neatly arranged in editable form.

There’s so much talking lately about how we live in the future, how ‘magical’ technology can feel today, and so on and so forth. I remember July 2001, that first weekend I spent learning the basics of my then-new Newton MessagePad 2000, and seeing my first handwritten notes and calendar entries digitised. Despite being already discontinued, I felt I was holding a powerful, futuristic device. Even today, at least in part, I still can’t consider it an obsolete piece of technology.

Paul Miller’s debriefing: some considerations

May 2, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

At the end of April 2012, Paul Miller, one of the writers at The Verge, started his experiment — staying away from the Internet for a year. During his leave of absence, The Verge periodically published his observations about his newfound ‘unplugged experience’; I read a few of those articles, and I’ve enjoyed Miller’s style and musings. I remember, one year ago, how many people considered his experiment just a silly thing. Some — rather patronisingly, I must say — were quick to point out that to have a well-adjusted relationship with today’s always-on state of connectedness, it’s better to use the network wisely, to actively control its influence over our lives, and to act accordingly when we perceive it’s just too much.

I defended Miller’s intentions and his desire to start a path of self-discovery. In the past, people left their urban environment and went to India and the Far East on trips of self-discovery (and I mean trips in every way). Miller’s journey is no different — a kind of modern equivalent of that, if you want. 

Now he’s back, and he has summarised his year away from the Internet in a very interesting article. Sure, Miller’s considerations can be condensed as follows: leaving the Internet was great at first — more time to think, focus, read, write and give friends and relatives the attention they deserved; but after a while old (bad) habits resurfaced, things devolved into periods of inertia, and also came the realisation that the problem isn’t Internet per se, but lies within one’s self.

Therefore, some people (Miller included, perhaps) will consider this Internet-deprivation experiment a failure. I don’t think it’s been a failure. If this one-year sabbatical has brought Miller a better understanding of his self, then it’s been successful. Anyway, Miller’s summary has been a thought-provoking read, so here are some observations I’d like to add. 

Back to where you’ve never been

There’s a detail that struck me when reading Miller’s piece. At one point, not far from the beginning, he writes:

I thought the internet might be an unnatural state for us humans, or at least for me. Maybe I was too ADD to handle it, or too impulsive to restrain my usage. I’d used the internet constantly since I was twelve, and as my livelihood since I was fourteen. I’d gone from paperboy, to web designer, to technology writer in under a decade. I didn’t know myself apart from a sense of ubiquitous connection and endless information.

Using the Internet constantly since the age of twelve means not having much memories of how things were before the Internet. What’s good about this is that Miller’s viewpoint isn’t much affected by nostalgia. You can’t really pine for what you don’t know. This, in a way, made Miller’s journey away from the Internet more ‘pure’ and also more challenging. For comparison, when I started using the Internet constantly I was 28. That makes a huge difference. If I were to do a similar Internet-deprivation experiment, it would be quite easy for me to switch back to my pre-Internet days. I could find and relive my good old routines in a few days. This is mainly because, having developed a life before the Internet, I’ve never really felt my online and offline dimensions as two inextricably intertwined components. As I wrote in my article Online, offline, and the ‘need’ to share:

I tend to see some kind of separation between the online and the offline because, well, I lived that moment when the online started creeping into my life. I lived that moment where the online started becoming an activity that separated me, in some ways, from my surroundings. I lived that moment in which logging in and ‘going online’ was somehow like going someplace else. And since I could spend (a lot of) time doing things in this ‘other place’, the experience was more addicting and detaching than, say, losing myself in a book (an ‘offline’ activity). While over the years and especially in these recent years I’ve come to accept this increasing interconnection between the online and the offline, while I’ve come to terms with the fact that technology has gone under our skin (figuratively for now, and maybe literally soon), for me the “disconnection from the smartphone and social media” is still a disconnection, and “the logic of social media” doesn’t follow me long after I log out.

So, if I disconnected from the Internet for a year, I’d simply remove the ‘online’ component, and it’d be easier for me because I always felt the ‘online’ component as something that has been added to, not implanted in (or grown within) my life.

That’s why I think Miller did a rather good job in finding his ‘offline space’, at least at first. And in my opinion, one of the reasons why things haven’t stayed great in Miller’s Internet-less life is precisely because his experience without Internet was somehow new, was something he never really experienced before as an adult. This has a significant impact when it comes to connect and socialise with other people. Or in this case, maintaining connections that have for the most part developed within the Internet era.

Out of sync

Miller writes:

But without the internet, it’s certainly harder to find people. It’s harder to make a phone call than to send an email. It’s easier to text, or SnapChat, or FaceTime, than drop by someone’s house. Not that these obstacles can’t be overcome. I did overcome them at first, but it didn’t last.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

I would stay at home for days at a time. My phone would die, and nobody could get ahold of me. At some point my parents would get fed up with wondering if I was alive, and send my sister over to my apartment to check on me. On the internet it was easy to assure people I was alive and sane, easy to collaborate with my coworkers, easy to be a relevant part of society.

So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a “Facebook friend,” but I can tell you that a “Facebook friend” is better than nothing.

My best long-distance friend, one I’d talked to weekly on the phone for years, moved to China this year and I haven’t spoken to him since. My best New York friend simply faded into his work, as I failed to keep up my end of our social plans.

I fell out of sync with the flow of life.

These observations perfectly exemplify the point of view of someone whose life, relationships and connections have all been developing in a meaningful way within the Internet era. It’s hard being disconnected when everyone else in your life is not. It’s hard having to communicate through ways — the phone call, the written letter, dropping by someone’s place — that are considered dated and quaint. Today, an unannounced visit (even among friends) is basically frowned upon, almost treated as an unauthorised intrusion. I fondly remember a time when it was considered a pleasant surprise. 

The ‘finding people’ aspect Miller talks about is another thing where my experience and his experience significantly diverge. Having developed my strongest friendships mostly before the advent of the Internet, if I were to stay disconnected for a year, I wouldn’t encounter much friction in reverting to ‘older’ ways of (re)connecting with my best friends. We all used to chat a lot on the phone, and arrange meetings and outings via phone or text. If I could afford such an Internet-free sabbatical, I guess it would be beneficial to my personal relationships, because most of them actually started suffering when the Internet began pervading our lives. For someone in my position, all this talking about Internet that ‘connects’ people, all this babbling about the ‘power of social media’, is rather ridiculous. For someone in my position, apart from a good few exceptions, the ‘connections’ developed via the Internet can’t really compare with relationships developed and cultivated in person, in the ‘offline’ dimension. 

In general, Internet has brought convenience, more than depth, to the way we connect with one another. That’s why, for me, a “Facebook friend” is not better than nothing. That’s why, for me, certain ways of being ‘connected’ via the Internet aren’t all that different from when people keep the TV or the radio on because “it keeps them company”.

Yes, when we put Internet aside, we also put aside its convenience: every road looks uphill, we see every small delay or obstacle as ‘friction’, and it’s hard to keep up when everyone drives a car and you’re the only one on foot. Perhaps Miller could have been more proactive in his attempts to keep in touch with people, but I also think that his friends and acquaintances — knowing his situation — could also have gone the extra mile more often. What I find especially sad in that “falling out of sync with the flow of life” is that we’re living in such dysfunctional times where people of Miller’s age (and younger) feel compelled to return to the Internet because, as Miller writes, “The Internet is where the people are”. Internet should be a part of the flow of life, sure, yet I’m feeling that Internet is progressively commandeering the flow of life. And while not everything Internet has brought with it is bad, I can’t help but feel saddened by where things are going.

Visitor statistics

April 23, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

#alttext#

Harry Marks, in his post Quality over Quantity:

It’s difficult to pull yourself away from the feeling that you need to be posting more and doing everything you can to keep numbers up, but when it comes right down to it, it’s all about who is paying attention to your work, not how many.

I stopped obsessing over visitor statistics shortly after the migration from the old Quillink Observer to this website+blog. I admit to having been a website stats addict up to 2011, and I admit that in the past I often associated quantity with relevance. And the feeling Marks talks about — I know that very well. 

Of one thing I’m sure, though. Ever since I started writing online (2001) and maintaining a blog rather regularly (2005), visitor statistics never influenced the choice of content or the frequency I posted. There was a time when I genuinely thought that posting quick links to interesting stuff I find while browsing my feeds and the Web was a way to ‘keep the site fresh’ and maintain interest, but that didn’t improve or worsen the status quo. I’ve just been keeping my pace and following my rules — which are quite simple: to write and publish articles only when I have something to say; to favour longish, original pieces instead of quick link-posts with a line (or a word) of commentary; to let my followers on Twitter and App.net know when I’ve published a new article without insisting or shoving it down their throats, so to speak.

Over time, I’ve learnt to overcome my insecurities about ‘relevance’. I’ve learnt that there are people out there who value my opinion and who are willing to listen to what I have to say. I’ve learnt to appreciate that having ‘only’ 80 visits in a day is fine when one of those 80 gets in touch with me via Twitter, App.net or email to tell me that he or she has liked my article.

Meanwhile, what I’ve been doing with those visitor stats is to try to figure out a way to use them as behavioural indicators. One thing I’ve noticed is that readers can be a fickle bunch, no matter the quality one offers in a blog. In the past I’ve had some well-known and respected guys link to a few articles of mine that got their attention. The increase in traffic was substantial (and even if I don’t care much about numbers, I’d lie if I said that I didn’t feel good about the increased attention), but it pretty much reverted to its usual standards in a day or two. The image above sums this up pretty well.

While I still find a bit depressing that a lot of people, after discovering my blog in such a way, don’t stick around, my attitude has changed pretty much over time. Once I would have thought It’s my fault, I’m not interesting enough. Now my reaction is more like Hey, this is me, this is what I write about; I strive to provide good quality and well written pieces. You won’t return? Your loss. It’s not arrogance. I’ve been writing (in two languages) for so long I know what I’m capable of. And over time I’ve received enough appreciation to give me the additional boost to further strengthen my resolve to keep on writing, here and elsewhere.

Four years after: a brief review of my MacBook Pro

April 18, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

15-inch MacBook Pro mid-2009

It was late June 2009 when I opened that box. My first Intel Mac, a 15-inch MacBook Pro, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, 256 MB of graphics memory, and a 320 GB hard drive. Considering that up until then my main machine had been a 12-inch PowerBook G4, with a 1 GHz processor, 1.25 GB of RAM, 32 MB of graphics memory, and a 40 GB hard drive, you can imagine how noticeable the improvement in performance and user experience was for me.

My line of work doesn’t require frequent equipment upgrades, thankfully, so I usually change my main Mac only when absolutely necessary. The downside is that when the time to upgrade comes, I have to choose a new model wisely, because it has to last for a few years, and that means choosing a machine with a certain degree of upgradability. In this regard, I must say that this MacBook Pro has turned out to be a great choice.

With hindsight, 2009 was a good vintage for MacBook Pros. This Mac is certainly better manufactured than the aluminium PowerBook G4s and MacBook Pros of the 2003–2007 era. The ‘precision aluminium unibody’ case is a remarkable improvement over the previous assembly design. Simply consider the fact that, to replace the internal hard drive, on my 12-inch PowerBook G4 I had to remove more than 40 tiny screws, while the count goes down to 14 on this MacBook Pro. But the unibody assembly is also a marvellous improvement because the MacBook Pro, after almost four years of intense use, basically still looks like new.

It took a while to get used to the keyboard (I still love the feel of the keyboard of the aluminium PowerBooks), but again, I had to recognise that the keyboard in the unibody MacBooks is simply better designed. For one, it’s easier to clean, and there’s virtually no place where dirt can accumulate. In this regard, a terrible spot in the previous aluminium PowerBooks and MacBook Pros was the space along the bottom row of keys, just above the trackpad/palm rest area. 

Four years after: what’s bad

Somehow it doesn’t seem fair to include the hard drive among the weaknesses of this MacBook Pro. Considering that in almost four years I’ve actually turned off the MacBook Pro probably less than 10 times; and considering that for the most part the MacBook Pro has been working 16–18 hours a day on average, I’d say it’s rather amazing that the stock hard drive has lasted this long. 

Instead, the one truly disappointing element of this machine has to be the optical drive. At first it was just noisy (even noisier than the tray-loading CD/DVD drive of my clamshell iBooks), then, maybe after a year of light-to-moderate use, it became erratic and unreliable: sometimes it would refuse to read a CD-RW or DVD‑R disc I had burnt a few days before; sometimes it managed to burn a DVD on the second or third attempt. After a month of not using it, one day it just stopped working. What a piece of crap, indeed.

…And what’s good

Practically everything else. I don’t use the MacBook Pro for particularly CPU-intensive, demanding applications, but nonetheless I still use it for a bunch of different tasks, and I have at least a dozen applications open at all times. After four years (and unlike previous Macs) it doesn’t feel old or slow or sluggish. Sure, it helps to have upgraded the internal RAM to 8 GB (the maximum allowed by this machine); and of course the latest MacBook Pros and Airs are and feel faster, but my MacBook Pro still holds its ground when I return to it. When I decided to upgrade from my 12-inch PowerBook G4 after five years of continued use, one of the reasons was that Apple had left PowerPC Macs behind, but most of all it was because of the general performance — sadly, that poor PowerBook was showing its age. (Mind you, it’s still in use as a lightweight second option, and it’s still a great machine for Web browsing, email, light photo retouching and similar tasks, and it’s undoubtedly useful in case of emergency).

However, one truly outstanding feature of this MacBook Pro is the battery. On a full charge, it still lasts almost four hours, with medium screen brightness, and wireless (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) turned on. After four years, it’s really amazing, especially when I think of the generally mediocre battery performance of most of the PowerBooks I used before (all fine and dandy during the first year or so, then operating time and reliability rapidly decreasing). 

Conclusion

I’m quite satisfied with this 15-inch mid-2009 MacBook Pro. It’s still a responsive machine, well manufactured, resilient and great looking. It still has a healthy battery performing surprisingly well and, apart from the mediocre quality of the optical drive, there’s really nothing to complain about this machine. I predict a few more years of use, since I intend to do one more upgrade to further extend its useful life: a dual SSD-HD internal configuration, with the SSD as the main unit, and the current 500 GB hard drive as secondary unit, replacing the useless optical drive (with the help of adapters such as this one). And whatever Mac I’ll purchase when it’s time to upgrade again, I’m positive this MacBook Pro will still be a fantastic second machine to have around.

Some thoughts after recovering from a hard drive failure

April 16, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

File under: I didn’t see this coming

Don’t get me wrong: I’m enough experienced to know that you can’t naïvely expect a hard drive to last for long, especially if it’s the internal hard drive of the machine you use most. Yet, despite your level of preparation, the death of a hard drive tends to catch you by surprise quite often.

In the last 20 years of dealing with hard drives, I’ve witnessed the most diverse demises. A hard drive usually dies rather quickly, but it generally has a way to warn you that its passing is getting alarmingly near: it starts emitting new noises or noise patterns that are different from the usual. This ‘acoustic’ approach has saved me in a couple of situations in the past, when I wasn’t as backup-savvy as I am now. By hearing different ticking patterns, I could predict the imminent failure and save 80–90% of my stuff in time. 

I also witnessed extreme cases, like with the internal 40 GB hard drive of my 12″ PowerBook G4, where the drive degradation was so gradual it actually kept working for two months after manifesting strange (and at times frighteningly loud) mechanical noises. During that period, the PowerBook could boot fine and a lot of things were working well. There were no performance-related issues or applications that took a suspiciously long time to launch. But the upcoming death of the hard drive was evident, not only because of the noises. Disk Utility had deemed the disk ‘irreparable’ after aborting a verification process that had already taken 45 minutes. After half an hour of use, the PowerBook’s fan would rapidly reach full speed and the chassis would become extremely hot in the disk drive area. I was lucky I could save everything before having to replace the drive. At the time, money was quite tight, and that ‘slow death’ bought me some time to save enough for a replacement. (I can’t emphasise this enough: this is not common hard drive failure behaviour, so treat this anecdote as the exception, not the rule). 

Two nights ago, the hard drive of my MacBook Pro did nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite, actually. It just died without warning. No strange noises, no unusual ticking patterns, not even an increase in noisiness (even quiet drives tend to get a bit noisier as they grow old and especially when their time’s about over). I periodically run Disk Utility on the main drive to check up on its health. Never a problem, not even the occasional mix-up in the drive’s logic structure. Nothing. I was watching a movie and suddenly the image froze, while the audio kept playing for a while. I thought there was something wrong with the video file, or that the player application was acting up, so I tried quitting it. No response. Force-quitting didn’t get me far, either. The Mac quickly became unresponsive, so I forced a reboot. 

Grey screen. Apple logo. Spinning wheel. Minutes passed. Not good. Fans started, rapidly accelerating. Not good at all. Then a flow of text and command strings (like when you reboot your Mac in Verbose mode) appeared briefly. Then, a message in various languages warned that the computer would restart due to a problem. Definitely not good. At this point, the Mac entered a self-restart loop, trying to finish the boot process but never succeeding. After seven attempts, I turned it off. The drive was evidently gone. I felt more surprised than angry or worried. I stared at the powered-off MacBook Pro for a few moments: Did that just happen? Really? — I was asking myself.

A bit of luck

I keep various backups of my stuff, and despite not being the perfect tool, I’ve always given Time Machine a chance since day one. I keep Time Machine backups of my MacBook Pro, although I don’t keep the external Time Machine drive always on during the day. In other words, I don’t do hourly backups (also because I have CrashPlan always running in the background, keeping a tight backup schedule of my entire Home folder), but I turn the external drive on during the day, usually towards the end of the day, and do at least three or four backups.

Luckily, when disaster hit on Saturday night, I’ve had the Time Machine drive running for a few hours, and when the internal hard drive failed at 3:50 AM, the last useful Time Machine backup was completed at 3:43 AM. I thought, If the backup is fine, I can restore the system from Time Machine without losing practically anything.

The problem is that drive failures always catch you in a bad moment, and I needed to recover and have the Mac up and running again as soon as possible. Having a drive die on you on a Saturday night means waiting at least until Monday to do anything. So I started browsing online for a quick replacement. Again, since my current financial situation is not good, another constraint was the budget, so the replacement had to come quick and be cheap. Disappointingly, the online Apple Store doesn’t sell internal hard drives for Mac laptops, only a few expensive solutions for Mac Pros (at least here in Spain). I checked other good sources and found a few eligible candidates: not needing a huge internal disk (the one that failed was the stock 320 GB this MacBook Pro came with, and I still had 60 GB free) was another good thing, because today internal hard drives in the 320–500 GB range are in fact quite affordable. Yet, even for the best of options I would have to wait a few days for international shipping. Oh well, I can’t do much to speed things up anyway; — I thought — I’ll place the order on Sunday evening and hope for the best, meanwhile I can continue my work on my 12″ and 17″ PowerBook G4s. 

Yesterday I went for a stroll with my wife in the city centre, to clear my mind and divert it from the paranoic trains of thought one inevitably has in these situations (“What if my backups are corrupted and I lose all those important documents and a year worth of photos?“, things like this). We visited the FNAC store just out of curiosity, though I clearly remembered from a previous visit that they didn’t sell internal hard drives — they mostly had desktop and portable external storage solutions. When I saw a box with a Seagate 500 GB 2.5” internal hard drive on special offer, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had found an affordable solution that was also bigger than the drive it would replace. And I had found it in a store. On a Sunday. If all went well, I could be restoring everything in a matter of hours.

Keep calm and carry on

Yesterday night was devoted to replacing the hard drive and attempting to restore the entire system from the last Time Machine backup. I connected the external disk via FireWire 800 and crossed my fingers. When I booted the MacBook Pro I realised it couldn’t boot from the Recovery HD partition, because that was a blank new hard drive, but evidently there was one in the external Time Machine drive, because after a few instants, the OS X Utilities main interface was there on the screen. I selected Restore from Time Machine backup and prepared to wait a long long while as almost 200 GB worth of stuff had to be copied back in the internal hard drive. At around 9%, the recovery application aborted, citing unspecified errors. I was bummed. Since it was the most recent backup, the backup performed just 7 minutes before the previous drive died, I thought that maybe an error had occurred because some of the essential files in that backup had been corrupted. So I tried with the penultimate backup. An error, again. It was 4 AM, I was tired and a bit depressed, and decided to go to bed. 

This morning, as I resumed the recovery operations, something occurred to me. I verified my suspicions and I was right: I had tried to restore a Mountain Lion backup using an older version of the OS X Utilities, the Lion version. Since Internet Recovery was out of the question (I tried rebooting with Cmd-Option‑R a few times, but nothing happened), to have a working Mountain Lion Recovery HD partition I would need to install a fresh copy of Mountain Lion on the MacBook Pro, then reboot the MacBook Pro from that partition, and try the Restore from Time Machine backup option again. But I had no physical copy of OS X Mountain Lion. When I upgraded I forgot to create an installation disk for cases like this, mea culpa. Luckily I still had around the USB pendrive with a copy of the OS X Lion installer, so I installed Lion from the pendrive, connected to the Mac App Store, redownloaded Mountain Lion, upgraded, and finally rebooted in the correct, freshly-created Recovery HD partition. The process of restoring the entire system from the last Time Machine backup went smoothly, although the wait was long and suspenseful.

Considerations, in no particular order

– The Restore process is rather amazing. After the final reboot, I was presented with an almost identical snapshot of my system just minutes before the previous hard drive died. All the applications that were open before the disaster simply reopened, with the browsers restoring all open tabs, and other application reopening the last opened documents. I know it’s something that has to be expected from restoring a full backup, but I was amazed nonetheless.

– If you want to be up and running in no time, keep a bootable clone of your main system on an external hard drive, and update it at least once a week. Use great tools like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

– Create a bootable backup install disk of the latest OS X version. Believe me, it really comes in handy in situations like these. On the Web there are quite a few good articles explaining how to make such a disk (for Mountain Lion, see for example this one from Ars Technica, or this one from Macworld, just to name two of the most prominent sources). The process is straightforward, and you only have to invest in a small 8 GB USB pendrive.

– Checking the SMART state of the hard drive is of little use to predict impending failures. It has never worked for me, always reporting “Verified” or similar reassuring statuses even when performing diagnostics on patently bad drives. This time was no exception. Don’t rely on that. Try to develop a fine ear for your hard drive’s noises, establishing a baseline of normal noises and patterns during daily operations, and watching out for anything out of the ordinary (strange repeated ticking, unexpected whirring, and the like). 

– Even if you don’t check your internal drive routinely, drop everything and do so the moment you notice something unusual happening on your Mac, e.g. unexpected slowdowns in system performance, applications becoming sluggish or non-responsive for no apparent reasons, applications that take an unusually long time to launch, etc. In my experience, the most telling visual sign of something odd involving the hard drive is the whole system becoming sluggish and registering any user action with noticeable delay (cursor movement included).

– Remember: hard drives die unexpectedly in most cases. (Solid State drives too, in case you’re wondering). It will happen when least you expect it. It will happen at an inconvenient time. You will be bothered. If you don’t have a backup of your stuff, you will also be panicking. Be prepared.

– Backup, backup, backup, of course. Maybe I was just lucky in trusting Time Machine, but if you really don’t want to invest energies in developing a backup strategy, at least buy an external drive and configure it as a Time Machine drive. It’s an easy, hassle-free and low-maintenance method. Even if you can’t restore your entire system from a Time Machine backup (for whatever reason or error), and you need to reinstall OS X, you will at least be able to recover some settings, documents and data from that backup using the Setup Assistant.

– Check which version of the OS X Utilities you’re using to restore your Time Machine backup. An older version won’t be able to restore a Time Machine backup of a newer OS X version. I was trying to restore a Mountain Lion backup using the recovery utilities created by Lion, and I kept getting errors. You can tell which version of the OS X Utilities you’re using by looking at the icon of the Reinstall OS X option. 

– If you’re looking for good quality, step-by-step guides to replace your Mac’s hard drive (and much much more), keep iFixit’s online Guides in your bookmarks. Really an invaluable resource.