Category Archives: Apple Existence

My journey away from Windows, and into the light.

Apple Existence, Entertainment, Geek-Speak

iPod Habits

Having my iPod has dramatically changed how I listen to music, and how much I listen to music.  That little device is like crack and caffeine, all rolled into one.  I can’t start my day at work without having some music going — sometimes harsh stuff, sometimes bubblegum, but it’s *always* there.  And throughout the day, my Sennie’s are on my head, and someone’s music is cranking through my head.

A couple of observations though….

This thing really lends itself well to short-attention-span listening.  I’ll find a track I haven’t listened to for a while, and while looking for that, I find others I haven’t listened to for a while.  I’ll start listening to one, only to flip to another before that one’s done.  More proof that I’ve got ADD!  🙂

I also find that I don’t know the newer music I add as well as the older music.  That may just be that I’ve had more time to get familiar with the older music — it’s been around longer.  However, I think there’s a difference in listening style that may have nothing to do with the iPod or digital music in general.

In the old days, I’d get down to K-Mart, and could only afford to buy an album every now then.  My collection was small, and I would wear the grooves out of the discs.  I had music on all the time, just less of it to choose from.  It was nothing for me to be up all night, with a stack of vinyl on the turntable keeping me company through the night.  I knew what was coming when, even down to where to pops and crackles were on the vinyl.  (In fact, there are a few songs that I still expect to hear pops from at certain points — I guess early training runs deep!)

Now, I can buy music whenever I want, and when I do, it becomes part of much larger tapestry of tunes I listen to.  And, instead of listening to everything I own a lot, I stage music for moods, or tasks, or because something external reminded me of a particular track or artist.  That’s probably why my iPod habits are so bad — too many choices, and really no opportunity to get as intimate with each as I might’ve a long time ago.

I guess that’s not the worst problem to have, eh?

Apple Existence, Photography

iPod Photos

And, in other developments tonight….  I’ve finally purged enough material off my iPod that I can now carry the contents of my “favorites” folder on my iPod.  Cool!

I’m very impressed with the quality of the teency little display — a newer iPod (with video) would be better suited for displaying images, but the display on this little thing is nice enough.  At best, it’s just another means to help me “Sit, Look, Listen. Let Go. Relax. Enjoy. Repeat.”

At least, that’s what the back of my iPod says I should do!

Apple Existence

Dry Spell

It’s been a while since I’ve added to the Deauxmayne. Work’s been a bear, and it’s just sapped every ounce of juice I’d normally use for creative playing. In fact, I’ve only just tonight gotten around to cleaning up some stuff in the photo archives that’ve been begging for cleanup for a good long while. Maintenance sucks, but it’s a necessary evil.

I did grab some new software over the weekend: Comic Life Deluxe, iLife ’06 and Virtual PC. Here’s the scoop on those.

Comic Life Deluxe allows you to put a comic strip twist on images. You can add balloons of speech, special effects (like the old Batman KA-POW effect) as well as applying comic strip filters to images to make them look like real comics. It’s a cool tool, and one I’ve been looking at for a little bit. Sure, it’s fluffy, but sometimes fluffy is good, and it’s real easy to use.

iLife ’06 is a pretty major upgrade to iLife, and includes upgraded versions of the old code, along with some new stuff. The big influence for me to get this was support for 250,000 images now in iPhoto. Realistically, I wonder how well that will work, but that’s a whole lot better than the 10,000 images supported in iPhoto under iLife ’05. That alone could help with my cataloging and maintaining my library. The other real cool thing is new, and it’s called iWeb. iWeb is used for publishing web content — photo pages, blogs, and more. I’ve not had the time to generate a lot of material with it, but it sure looks like it may be a key to making good photo pages for the site. I’ve had to keep jpg versions of every photo in the library that was shot in raw, just so JAlbum could see them and create pages for them. OS X natively supports raw, and its tools do too. So, my thinking is that the combination of iPhoto and iWeb could help keep the photos on the site, and up to date. Time will tell!

Lastly, Virtual PC allows me to run a Windows XP session on my Quad. Why is that important? Well, in my support role at work, I need to be able to VPN in, and that just isn’t possible without a recent version of IE, and that just doesn’t exist for OS X. With this code and XP Pro (which came with it), I look just like an XP client running IE, and our work network knows no different. It’s very cool, and works extremely well. With that, my Gateway laptop can be recycled into someone else’s hands, and I can wait for the right time to move into a Mac laptop (once the 64-bit multicore versions are around — probably late this year or early ’07). There’s definitely no rush on that — my bread and butter, Photoshop CS2, doesn’t yet have a native version for Macintel platform.

So, some new toys to play with, and hopefully some fun stuff, too. And along with that comes the big projects of coverting the old home videos to DVD, scanning the old slides and negatives, and trying to womp my digital life upside its virtual head, while at the same time trying to get my new business venture off the ground.

As I typoed once, I am a gluton for punishment! 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

News of the World

Today’s a big day in MacLand — Steve Jobs is on the stage right now delivering the Gospel according to Cupertino, and it looks cool so far. New OS, new iLife (including updates to iPhoto that will get my attention — 250,000 images in a single library, which will be enough for me for a while), a new iMac based on a dual-core Intel processor that is allegedly 3.2 times faster than the old one, and a promise that the whole hardware platform will be on Mactel before the end of the year. Dang — had those things been announced, I might not have bit on the Quad. OK, OK, I probably would’ve bit on the Quad anyway, but I can act like I wouldn’t’ve! 🙂

Of course, with my shiny new machine and the announcements today, that means my OS and iLife are already “old”! Wonder if there’s a cheap upgrade path for recent purchasers?

One of the things I’ve been harping about is the lack of native code for the new Mactels. Well, it looks like Apple will “dual-head” things for a while — a universal binary that will work on both Mactel and PPC. That’s cool, especially given my concern about the performance of Rosetta with hogs: Photoshop CS2, etc. In fact, even Steve Jobs indicated that PS may not be good enough for professionals under Rosetta. Sounds like Apple’s making the decision I made to pounce on the Quad a little tougher to justify, but for PS alone, I still think I made the right decision, and can’t imagine being on any other platform right now.

On another note, I also found a really cool Lightroom primer at Luminous Landscape. This article just underscores how much I wanna play with this code. Read through it, and see what you think. For me, I believe this will be product that will manage to do things the way I want to, and still give me the features I want.

Apple Existence, Photography

Lightroom

In this morning’s e-mail was a blurb about Adobe’s competitor for Aperture — named Lightroom.

From what folks are saying, if you look at the video and adverts for Apple’s Aperture, they are essentially the mark Adobe is trying to hit with Lightroom, albeit with a lesser system footprint needed on the Mac side. (Aperture doesn’t exist for the Window platform, although Lightroom will.)

Myself, I have a preference to have this workflow tool fit in nice and snug against Photoshop CS2, and Lightroom should do that. While Aperture will let you use CS2 as your image editor, and allow you to open things from within it using CS2, I’m not yet convinced that the integration between the two products is as tight as I might want.

So, this morning I pulled down the 140Mb file that includes the Lightroom public beta and a bunch of samples, and I’ll start playing with them this weekend. Hopefully, Lightroom will be everything it’s cracked up to be, and something that I can begin using to publish the photo archive for the site.

Nice birthday prezzie, eh? 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Seven Days

I’ve now had the new PowerMac Quad for seven days — one full week of enjoyment and amazement. Quite frankly, I’ve not had as much time to do some of the cool things I’d like, but that’s ok.

However, as I’ve been playing tonight, I started to notice the fan noise…. just a bit. So, I started poking around on Google to see if this was common, or just me. As it ends up, there’s a lot of folks yapping about the fans in the big box. Well, they’re a little noisy, but not horribly so, and way less than the noise from some of the old Intel rigs I’ve owned over the years.

Would I prefer it were quieter? Well sure. I also want a machine that will work via telepathic commands too, but…. 🙂

During my searches, I found some blogs detailing the experiences from other early adopters of this cool technological beastie:

  • Jim Frost has his Quad, and his experiences sound like mine, and it certainly sounds like what he’s using it for aligns well with where I’m headed. Great benchmarking of real world photo application functions, too!
  • Alex King ordered early, had big ol’ delays, and finally got his. Poke around a bit to see his out-of-the-box experience. It’s worth reading, especially his software list. He elected to do RAID 0 inside the box, something I’ve thought about, but haven’t pulled the trigger on.
  • Adam Tow had all kinds of problems getting his Quad to come up correctly. Looks like the biggest part of his challenge was 3rd party memory that didn’t play well in the box. I’ve got some third party Centon memory in mine, and it seems to like it well enough.

And now, with Kung Tunes functional again, you can all read what I’m listening to…. enjoy the trip.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

JAlbum vs. The Powermac and The Money-Go-Round

So last night, I upgraded to JAlbum 6.1. This version is touted as being multi-processor aware, and a little smoother to work with.

It was, and it was.

I set up a job to run through about 11,000 photos in the 2005 archive, creating new pages, thumbnails…. everything. You could watch the counter drive onward an upward at a much improved pace over the iMac. On the iMac, it was about five seconds per image. On the PowerMac, it was about 2-3 seconds per image, and this was happening on multiple processors — I think as many as three of the four. Astonishing performance.

Unfortunately, there are still some glitches with JAlbum 6.1. I still encountered two java out of memory errors along the way. I just restarted the album build, and it took right off, so no issues there. I’ve been reading about some ways around that though — one is to invoke from a script that uses the java command line memory allocation parm (JAlbum by default will use no more that 256Mb), and the other is to change an XML properties file somewhere inside the app. That’d be the best answer, but I don’t yet know how to do it.

Anyway, the new machine and new code rocks, and I think I’m back to getting good albums posted!

(BTW, as a note, there are occassions where the image can’t be displayed when the thumbnail is clicked on. I know why, and just have to fix the code. Patience! 🙂 )

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

New Gear: Apple Power Mac G5 Quad

Yeah, I’m an idiot. I bought bigger gear. Story of my life. So sue me! 🙂 (Poor Darla!)

Last night, I finally finished the chess moves that would allow me to put a dream workstation at my desk: a PowerMac G5 Quad. Two dual-core 2.5Ghz G5 processors are steaming along inside the brushed aluminum case, and are making merry inside my creative world. To that, I added an Apple 20″ Widescreen Cinema Display — the same size and resolution as my iMac that is now redundant.

Last night, Sio powered the thing up for its first light, and I began the process of moving my iMac’s brains into the shiny new canvas of the PowerMac. That process was incredibly easy — the migration path involves connecting the two boxes via firewire, and it takes care of the rest. About 3.5 hours later, the PowerMac was mine. The only thing I’ve noticed that wasn’t quite right was my hostfile, which was easy to change. A very impressive migration! And with this machine, I can keep all the photos and music on the internal SATA drive, rather than a firewire attached PATA drive. Verra nice.

Frankly, with the new monitor on the desk, my workspace seems less cluttered — something Beck also noticed. It’s nice, and allows me to have a little more elbow room on the glass desktop. I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon re-cabling and trying to clean up my office. Both are daunting tasks, but I’m making headway, and expect to be in good shape later in the week.

So, it’s faster, easier photoprocessing and overall snappy performance for me. I can’t wait to try JAlbum with this rig. The creator of JAlbum has created a multi-processor aware version, so I expect that building the photo part of the site will be much less painless!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Video iPod

I’ve been really faunching for the new iPod that supports video. I keep saying that I would wait until the hard drives were larger — I think 80gb or larger is a real possibility, given where the drive technology is right now. In fact, I’m a little surprised that this didn’t happen with the new announcement.

I’ve been trying to find out a little more about the box — aside from reading Apple’s spin sheet. Finally, I found something on Playlist that seems to address this little device directly.

The good news? Battery life is now about 20 hours when playing music (playing video, the battery life is about three hours). The video out reportedly looks real good when piped to a real TV. The dock connector is the same, so the dock on my iMac oughta still work, as should the dock connector in my truck. Oh yeah, and it comes in both white and black now, just like the iPod nano.

The bad news? Well, no more firewire data transfer, although you can still charge with that. That’s a bummer, especially for a device that wants to play 200Mb files (TV programs). Also, no more remote control port. That means that the remote control in my truck wouldn’t work with it. That’s a crying shame too — driving along the road seems like a perfect application for remote control of the iPod.

I was also trying to find out if I can put my own movies (home video, or DVDs I own) on the little guy. The answer is an emphatic yes. Apple even provides a documented procedure to show you how. Cool! So now your favorite poker training video can accompany you on your trip to Las Vegas. 🙂

So, to upgrade, or not? Well, I’ve got mixed feelings about it. The bigger screen would be great, especially for photo viewing. I don’t see me watching video on the little screen, but ya never know. The smaller size is appealing, but the loss of remote control and firewire data transfer both seem like mistakes — although probably needed to make the device smaller, and simplify support. Of course, that means that one of the things I was also holding out for — a firewire media reader for the iPod — will probably not be realized.

On balance, I think the plusses slightly outweigh the minuses….