Category Archives: Apple Existence

My journey away from Windows, and into the light.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Printing, Crossing the Streams, and How I Spent the Last Three Weeks

As I’ve begun playing with printing more and more, some of my fellow photographers at the office have asked me to begin printing for them. They’ve been pleased, I’ve been pleased, and I’ve learned a bunch from the experience. The latest challenge was stymieing me — how to get good prints on Epson Premium Canvas Matte paper?

After a boatload of permutations through print driver settings on the Apple side, I picked up Windows XP and VMWare Fusion in an attempt to print my work through the Windows print drivers. And that, fair readers, seems to have hit the mark.

I printed comparison runs using identical print settings in Lightroom on XP and Lightroom on Leopard, and there were definitely differences — major differences — in how the driver forced ink through my trusty R1800. With that knowledge in mind, I set down today to try printing the three canvas works ahead of me.

After making a custom paper size (one of the images is a bit oversized at 13″ x 25″), I started cooking canvas with what I’d learned. After all three were on the planks, drying, I took a good look at them, and believe I’ve found my printing path — do the work in Photoshop or Lightroom on Leopard, and them do the printing through Lightroom on XP.

Convoluted? Yup. But the results seem to be worth it!

Apple Existence, Photography

Crossing the Streams

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been battling printing issues, trying to print some contract work on canvas through my Epson R1800. To say it hasn’t gone well is giving the experience too much positive light.

As I researched the issue, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one seeing dark prints with the R1800, and not just on canvas. I’ve seen that with other media, but I “band aided” the problem by increasing the brightness of the ready-for-print images. Not elegant, and shouldn’t be necessary, but it worked… generally. However, that process didn’t translate well onto canvas, and after blowing through a roll of canvas, and a lot of ink, I was still no closer to printing canvas correctly.

One of the interesting things I noticed was that the Windows-based folks weren’t having this problem. In fact, some folks would bring the same image up on their Leopard-based Mac and a VM-based Windows XP environment, see exactly the same thing on the screen, but get different print results. And the results on the Windows side were spot-on.

The more I read, the more I decided it was time to put VMWare Fusion and Windows XP on my MacPro.

A quick run up the road, a little time spent installing, and I’m close to having XP on my Mac. For printing. Crazy, eh? I truly have crossed the streams! 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

A Tiger Changes To Spots

After Wednesday’s triumph with the hardware, today I elected to fight the battle of the software, and take the OS to 10.5 (Leopard).

As with the hardware upgrade, the first order of business was cloning the boot drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Just like Wednesday, this took a couple of hours, and appeared to work just fine. I popped the Leopard disc into the Mini, and let the machine reboot off the install disc. Everything appeared normal… until the installation stopped, telling me I couldn’t install to the boot drive. Panic stricken, my brain leaped to all kinds of conclusions — failed drive, lost data, and all kinds of awful things. As it ends up, somewhere along the way, the new 250GB drive I installed the other night used an Apple Partitioning Scheme rather than a GUID Partition Table. First off, I’d never known these were even options, and I certainly didn’t know how the 250GB internal was set up with the Apple scheme. In any case, that was a Bad Thing — the Leopard upgrade wouldn’t go until the drive was re-partitioned with the GUID Partition Table setup. That meant everything would be lost on the 250GB, leaving the USB connected 120GB as the (potential) master copy. Urgh.

Remember the nice 2GB freeware disk image from OWC? My guess is that when they partitioned the drive to put that on there, they used a bit more “universal” partitioning scheme. Not a big deal, but that’s one thing I’ll remember to look for in the future before trying these kinds of hijinks!

I started looking to see if you could boot a Mini from an external USB drive, and found you could, although almost everything I read indicated that Firewire would work better, and that the USB-booted OS would … run … very … slow. Figuring the only real path I had here was to boot from the USB drive, repartition the 250GB drive, and then recopy from the 120GB to the 250GB, I set about getting that going. The system did boot from the USB drive, and it really wasn’t that bad. A little slow, but since all I was doing was copying the data across, there wasn’t any real processing going on, so no big impact on the copy time.

Knowing that my sites had been down for several hours already, I decided I needed to set up a “Gremlins Are on the Loose” page to handle requests, knowing that the Mini would be down for at least three or four more hours. After a little bit of searching for the location of the system-wide default page (/Library/Webserver/Documents, just in case you’re looking for it), I dropped it into place on the MacPro, and pointed all HTTP traffic to it from the router.

So two hours later, it was time to reboot from the newly GUID’d 250GB drive, and make sure that Tiger was working. The boot seemed fine, so it was off to try the Leopard installation again. Boot the disc and… no GUID issues! Now, it was time to let Leopard do its upgrade voodoo. What’s odd to me is that the DVD media, once you’ve selected all your options, does a self-health check to ensure that its consistency is good before installing. While I appreciate the paranoia, I also appreciate the “Skip” button for this step, and skipped the DVD health check. So almost four hours after I thought I was ready to upgrade, I was actually upgrading. Now I just had to wait another hour or so for the OS to be upgraded!

Unfortunately, after the upgrade, neither my webserver nor mailserver were up and running. 🙁 Well, not running right anyway.

Leopard takes Apache from a 1.x codebase to 2.x, and in the process, changed the directories for users’ individual webserver configuration files. These moved from /etc/httpd/users to /etc/Apache2/users. I’d remembered the files, but forgotten the location and naming convention for them, so they were a bit of a bear to find and scoot from the old structure to the new. Once I did, Apache started, but would bomb on any page that was requested from it. The culprit here was a commented out php5 directive in the httpd.conf file for Apache 2.x. Not hard to change, but was a bit surprised that php wasn’t turned on by default. A quick uncomment, restart, and things appeared to be good on the webserver front.

The mailserver was a little trickier, but the messages in the mail log gave me the answers. For some reason, the UID used for the mail server changed. Not quite sure why Leopard did that, but a little change to a config file and a restart of the mail server, and all was well… I could see the spam floodgates opening! 🙂

However, I still couldn’t send or receive mail from my MacPro.

This one was a little harder to fix. Apparently, xinetd has been dropped with Leopard, in favor of launchd. Well, I’ve never used launchd, so that was a total mystery for me. Thanks to my good friend Google, I was able to find an example plist for my pop server, and that allowed me to get the pop server back up again.

So, from all appearances, things are back to normal at the Deauxmayne, nearly twelve hours (with breaks for dinner, visiting the gallery, etc.) after I began what I thought would be a small update. If something appears to be squirrely, let me know!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Sprucing Up the Deauxmayne

Tonight, a shiny new 250GB hard drive arrived from OWC, which I had ordered to upgrade to webserver (Mac Mini). I’d been holding some memory from my MacBook upgrade, with the intent of installing that in the MacMini when I upgraded the hard drive. Tonight was the night!

As with any hard drive upgrade, the first line of defense is ensuring that there’s a backout plan. For me, that meant copying the current 120GB drive to the new 250GB. I’d purchased an OWC external drive enclosure a while back, just for this project. At around $25, this is a bargain, and will be the eventual destination for the 120GB drive, likely to be used for Time Machine. When I installed the 250GB drive in it, I found a nice 2GB disk image of freeware, courtesy of the folks from OWC. Cool! After a two-hour copy using Carbon Copy Cloner, I was ready to dissect the Mini.

I’ve been in the Mini before, and it’s not a lot of fun to take apart or work inside. It’s built to be a compact, powerful system — which it is — but there’s a lot of voodoo beneath the covers to keep it all together and cool enough to function. I found two sites that speak to the disassembly of the little guy, one here and another here. Both recommend a putty knife to help pry the bottom from the top. In my case, Darla had a nice cake frosting knife that worked just dandy. Carefully going through the steps on the DIY sites, I finally got the thing apart, split the innards in half, and replaced the memory and installed the new drive. After one miscue involving a power cable — always test before closing the covers! — the Little Server That Could was back to serving webpages in no time at all.

Next stop…. Leopard!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Back to My Mac

While I haven’t spoken in this forum about the Back to My Mac functionality that was released with Leopard, I’ve been kinda bummed ’cause I couldn’t get it to work with my home network. I’d thought that this would be pretty cool stuff, especially on the Great American Roadtrip.

I’d tried before we left to get my Belkin N1 Vision to do the right UPnP stuff in order for Back to My Mac to work, but all to no avail. I never quite figured it out, and vacation tasks loomed tall over geekly tasks, so that project fell to the side.

Now, a few weeks after vacation, I’ve found some time to work on this little problem again. First, I made sure that it was still broke. Yup, still broke. 🙁

I found that Belkin had released new firmware for the N1 Vision, so I blasted that onto the router, and enabled the UPnP bit on the control panel. Still no joy. 🙁

I took a gander at my good friend Google to see if anyone had reported success with this router and Back to My Mac. Sure ’nuff, someone had reported the same problem I had, and had the brilliant idea to power cycle the router.

Guess what? It worked. The Systems Prefs panel for MobileMe now indicated that it could configure the router, and all things magic took off. Cool beans.

Now, to start doing a little playing with the new functionality!

Apple Existence, Vacation

GAR: Day Six – Half Moon Bay CA to Eureka CA (356mi)

Teased by the mileage and GPS as being a short driving day, we moseyed around this morning, getting our fill of free breakfast from the Comfort Inn (the chain we’ve elected to try to favor during the trip), and reloaded the Jeep. A week of only pulling/replacing a few items at a time had made for a very unruly interior. With Sio’s stuff all over the backseat, it looked like a teenager exploded back there. A reload was definitely in order!

Part of that timing was around the Apple Company Store at Apple HQ, which opened at 10am. We arrived a little early, but found the doors open, and started wandering about inside. Generally, the hardware/software choices were the same as what was available at other Apple Stores — and the same price! — but half the store was devoted to trinkets…. hats, shirts, cups, pens, pencils, pocketknives. The three of us frolicked in the aisles for almost an hour before finally landing on a basketfull of goodies. A few photos, and we were on our way.

As we left San Francisco, we crossed the Golden Gate bridge. This was a cool trek! I was really surprised at how much pedestrian traffic there was. It seemed like the pedestrian walkway was stuffed with walkers, skateboarders, and cyclists. It was a great way to cap our stay in San Francisco.

The drive through the interior of California on US 101 was pleasant, although uneventful. However, in Petaluma, we did eat at our first In-N-Out Burger. This is a western chain I’d heard of, but never nibbled at. Essentially, it’s a fast paced, short menued hamburger joint with pretty good food.

Also in Petaluma, while refueling, I had a couple of folks asking about the Jeep. One of them had never seen an Unlimited, which was a surprise to me. After some good conversation, we continued on up the road.

After a little more driving, we saw a sign for a drive-through tree. We figured we had to take a look. As it ends up, that was a very, very cool deal. In the bottom of a giant redwood, a 6′ x 6′ 9″ square was carved out, just big enough to drive a vehicle through. Guess how big the Jeep is? About an inch shy of those dimensions all the way around! It was a neat experience, and I’m glad we took the new Jeep through it.

We saw tons of motorcycles today. From what the folks at the drive-through tree told us, there was a big biker party going on about 70 miles south of Eureka. Seems like that’s about when we started seeing fewer in the rear view mirror, and more in the oncoming lanes. Fun to see all the bikes, but they sure must’ve had a big ol’ place to gather so many folks!

We jaunted the rest of the way to Eureka, found our hotel, and slept well after hitting the hay!

Apple Existence, Photography

A Little Coolness

Tonight, I arrived home to find an e-mail from Amy Judd at NowPublic. I’d never heard of Amy or NowPublic, so I was a little surprised at her request. She was writing a story about the PRODUCT (RED) branding concept, and asked if she could use one of my photos of my iPod Shuffle that she found on Flickr.

I did a little poking around at the NowPublic site, and from all appearances, it appears to be grass-roots journalism, aimed at mobilizing the average Joe into reporting on just about anything, from local to national to international stories. I liked the feel of the site, their expressed respect of my copyright wishes for my image, and the fact that they asked before just using one of my images. All good marks in my book, so I said “yes”, added a comment, and now have my first published photo in a journalistic context. Definitely a different stroke for me.

You can see the article here. Look for the slideshow, and you’ll see my image, as well as plenty by other folks. Enjoy!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Garmin and the Mac

One of the challenges with relying on my Macs for almost everything has been the lack of support for my GPS — not by Apple, but by Garmin. I have a Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx, and had planned to pick up Windows XP and VMWare’s Fusion in order to use my GPS on my MacBook.

As it ends up, Garmin may have caught up with the Mac wave.

After having bought the North American map suite, I started looking around to see what the state of the Garmin-Apple relationship was, and was surprised to find that there was some kind of big announcement at the last MacWorld. I started poking around and found the Garmin and the Mac page off Garmin’s site. On it, I found a utility to convert my maps from the PC to the Mac, and a new software project called Bobcat. From what I can tell from a few days of playing with it, it sure looks like it’s able to pull everything I’ve been using on my GPS to my Mac. Way cool.

And, since the only thing I was gonna buy XP/Fusion for was my GPS, that means I saved about $140!!!

Apple Existence, Photography

Genuine Fractals Strikes Again!

Last night, I was working through some images, and Genuine Fractals dropped a tickler indicating that there was an update available. I’m pretty gullable, so I almost always update as soon as something tells me it wants to. I left the code downloading all night — it’s only 50MB (plus or minus), but their download site is (and has always been) very slow.

Today, I go to install the new code, and it tells me there’s no previous version. Since this sounded very familiar, I looked around the Deauxmayne, and found how I’d tackled this before. Sure ’nuff, the same problem with Leopard still exists, and the same workaround still works.

One nice thing about writing all this stuff down — even if no one else is reading it — is that it saves me time and trouble in the future!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Deauxmayne Doin’s

Ya know, there’s nothing like instant gratification. A close second is almost instant gratification. This afternoon, I had three doses of almost instant gratification.

Yesterday, I pulled the trigger on ordering a 320GB harddrive for The Little MacBook That Could. With that upgrade, there’s really nothing else I need to do that little beastie. I got the drive from OWC, who specializes in all kinds of Mac upgrades and goodies. Along with the drive, I ordered an inexpensive external housing for use in transferring data around from the old 120GB drive to the new 320GB drive.

The cool thing about ordering from OWC is that I am close enough to them (as UPS drives) that I can order something before 6pm, use regular shipping and always have it waiting for me when I get home from the work the following day. Cool.

I opened the box, and set to installing the 320GB in the external enclosure, attaching it the MacBook after installation. The MacBook had no problem seeing the drive. So far so good.

Then I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner to do the drive copy from old to new hardware. This piece of software flat rocks. The author distributes in a non-crippled fashion — which is great if you suddenly hear a drive clicking or have some other harddrive disaster-in-the-wings. CCC did a dandy job of duplicating the data onto the new drive, even making it bootable. Now it was time to take the MacBook apart and swap drives.

This is the point where I have to tip my hat to OWC. They have terrific installation videos and manuals for doing everything I’ve needed to do to all my Macs. Really top notch.

So I begin to take the MacBook apart, and get the drive into my hands…. only to discover that the screws are torx. A big fat “D’oh” eminates from the congregation. I don’t have a torx set anywhere (I checked). As it was already 8pm, I frantically checked Best Buy’s website to see if they carry anything like that. Surprisingly, they don’t. That was a shocker. Becky suggested calling Home Depot. I figured if they would talk with me, they wouldn’t have a clue what I was looking for. However, they did talk, they did know what I wanted, and I went to buy it. I picked up a Husky 8-in-1 torx set, and decided to pick up the matching 8-in-1 phillips/slotted set. The torx went down to a T4, and the phillips went down to a #000 — good sizes for working on the little stuff, and seemed to be solidly built.

After getting the old drive removed from the drive tray, I installed the 320GB into it, slide it in, and put it all back together. I hooked up the juice, hit the power button, and crossed my fingers. After a small heart attack moment — it sat on a gray screen a loooong time before the Apple logo popped up — the thing booted, and looked normal. The only weird thing was that the drive wasn’t named the same as it was. I didn’t know if the apps would care, so I changed it to the default “Macintosh HD” name. I hit a couple of apps to ensure that things were working, and all was well. As I write, I’m scanning slides again, and from all appearances, it appears that the MacBook has no idea that it’s had it’s brain swapped.

My second impulse buy yesterday was the Garmin City Navigator NT North America map set for my GPS-60CSx. I’d never bought maps for the old GPS-60CS (stolen a while back), but had always wanted to play with them. However, the old unit didn’t have a lot of storage — 56MB, I think — and that really seemed to limit the usability of the add-on maps. However, the new unit has a card slot, and I’d already dropped a 2GB Micro-SD card into the thing in preparation for one day buying these maps. With that size card, I knew I could put the whole set on the unit.

The maps require a Windows machine for installation, and that meant using Becky’s machine to get them on my GPS. I started the installation, and finally hooked up the GPS via USB. On the old unit, you had to really make sure you had good batteries in it, or you hooked it up to power, as connectivity off the unit was serial, I believe, and that sucked the juice. The new one seems to be able to draw juice from the USB connection, letting you leave it connected as long as the USB port is hot, with no drain on the batteries. That’s cool.

I’ve got to admit that the process for getting the maps on the unit was not well-defined. I had to define a map set, and then start the transfer that to the GPS. After about 90 minutes of work, the maps were on the GPS, and all was well with the world.

And lastly, in the not-so-immediate-gratification department, my copy of Office:Mac 2008 arrived. I ordered it last week, and had been led to believe that it would be another month or so before I’d see it arrive. I guess the slow boat from Redmond to St. Louis got a little boost, and I was the beneficiary of a little surprise. I’ve installed it, but haven’t really started playing with it yet. I do notice that the icons look different than the old version — nice touch, I suppose. For me, the biggest thing I wanna play with is Entourage, and to enjoy the Universal Binary version, rather than having to always run Office under Rosetta.

When I first switched to the Mac, I picked up Office:Mac 2004 and had used Entourage quite a bit for my mail functions. My perception at the time was that it seemed to handle spam better, and was more versatile with rule-based mail activities. It’s been about two years since I’ve used it regularly, so it probably deserves another look after the rewrite.

So big doin’s at the ol’ Deauxmayne tonight, and probably more goodies in the offing. Stay tuned!