$2.539

Well, quad Apple cores, specifically.

Today, Apple announced the machine I was expecting to hit the streets soon: a dual-core, dual processor PowerMac. This box is amazing, with the new dual-core 2.5Ghz G5 processors, and loads of good stuff. My configuration would include 8Gb RAM, a 30″ monitor, and all the goodies I could stuff in there. That’s about $8k — not cheap, and something that can’t happen for some time.

They also announced an upgrade to the resolution of the panels on the 15″ and 17″ PowerBooks. I still wouldn’t mind ending up with a PowerBook someday, to replace the Gateway I’m typing on right now. However, I wanna see if they can cram the G5 processor into the chassis, or if they’ll move to Intel before making a big upgrade to the hardware platform. I think that’s a nice box, and the 17″ model is as light or lighter than my 15″ Gateway. Again, a cool box, but probably a little underpowered compared to the AMD 64 I’m using now. A big difference, of course, is that OS X can use the 64-bit processor, which Windows and the apps I run on it cannot take advantage of.

The last cool announcement is a new piece of code called Aperture. This is a software tool designed for photoediting, and appears to be targeted as a Photoshop-killer. The cool thing — at least from the announcement — is that it is designed for handling RAW photos as part of the workflow, rather than having to go through a conversion step first. That is extremely cool, and could be a big change to the workflow for a lot of us that shoot in RAW.

Neat stuff, and maybe a glimpse of where I may be in the future….

Within the last week, Steve Jobs and crowd from Cupertino announced new stuff: an iPod that supports video, and an updated iMac G5.

I finally got a chance to stream the announcement quicktime today, and I’m just flat impressed.

The iPod with video really looks like a nice beast for photo viewing, and of course, to carry video with you. 150 hours of video on the 60gb unit! For me though, the really cool piece is the bigger screen. It’s 2.5″ and looks huge compared to my iPod. And, of course, they made it smaller — probably 10% smaller than my iPod. Verra cool.

The iMac G5 update is cool too, with a built-in iSight (updated, and better than the original), a thinner case, and a remote control. A remote control? Yup. It’s designed to work with a new piece of code called FrontRow, which looks to be a Windows XP Media Center killer. The code looks snazzy, and the interface is very nice — no surprise there, coming from Apple.

The other thing that was announced was the availability of episodes from five first-run ABC and Disney TV programming. That looks to be cool, and I hope that it expands beyond ABC and Disney, and frankly expands to deliver video from other countries. That’s when this idea will become stellar.

No downside, right? Well, not quite. Now my hardware has been passed up by newer versions, and the newer versions are really compelling. For me though, the iPod upgrade isn’t quite enough. I want a bigger harddrive in the thing — 80gb, maybe even 100gb. For the iMac, well… I’d rather upgrade to a PowerMac and 30″ monitor! 🙂

$2.799

Today the geek news is replete with much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the display on the new Apple iPod Nano. From what I read, the substance used to cover the screen is prone to scratching. The first thing that comes to mind is…. duh!

My iPod 60Gb had scratches on the screen within the first two eyeblinks, and scratches on the metal back came almost as quick. It’s just the nature of the beast. These are not hardened targets, capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. They’re just little plastic doodads that manage and play our music and photos. Just that simple.

Do I wish my hadn’t scratched here and there? Sure — everyone likes things that look shiny and new. But, I’ll tell ya, there’s something cool to me about the occasional blemish and scuff. It screams mileage. Mileage is a good thing. It says you’ve been somewhere. And it says you got back safely. Both are cool concepts. 🙂

So, take the scratches, enjoy the music — after all, that’s why you bought the widget in the first place — and take what life dishes out. You’ll live a lot longer for not worrying about it!

Last night, I tried to bring my photo archive into iPhoto. Why? Well, there’s a very cool piece of software called Galerie that appears it will do what JAlbum does for me.

JAlbum’s been very, very good to me, so why do I need a replacement?

When Apple last upgraded the Java code on the box, it broke JAlbum. When run from the console, JAlbum now thinks, no matter what Java I point it to, that the Java is too old, and refuses to run. Having it run scripted through cron was part of my master strategy for the workflow that puts the photos on the site. Ugh. This event is probably a great argument against automatic updates, but I’d rather that than having an insecure box.

So I started looking around for ways to handle creating web pages for large photo galleries, and I wanted that something to be Mac-centric. Enter Galerie.

This code seems to do an awful lot of what I want, and integrates with iPhoto, which seemed like a good place to organize my photo library. I made a copy of my photo library (100Gb+!!!!) just in case either iPhoto or Galerie did something unexpected to the originals, and set about importing some folders of images into iPhoto.

iPhoto has some hooks for creating slideshows, PDFs of image albums, books, etc. — a lot of very cool things. One downside of iPhoto, though, is that it makes an independent copy of every photo you bring in. For me, that’s a bunch of disk space!

The importing went well, but I was having some trouble with date sorting the new folders inside iPhoto. I did a little search on their help file, and while looking, I found an entry talking about how many photos iPhoto could handle in a single library. And that number was 25,000 — way too low for my needs. As I started researching on the web, it sounds like it really grinds up even a big machine with that many photos in an album. I suspect my little iMac is probably not up to handling that.

Now, you could make a pretty good argument that I don’t need all those photos, and that I really don’t need all of them in the same library. But since I want to keep ’em all, and keep ’em in the same library somehow, that trumps any other argument. 🙂

The final straw was discovering that Spotlight doesn’t seem to see the folders (rolls) in iPhoto. Script integration with Spotlight is my master plan for being able to search through my library from the web without having to write a lot of extra code. I’ve already seen that Spotlight can see the metadata for the images, so that’s definitely the way to handle the image searches…. but it has to be able to see the images!

So I’ve given up on using iPhoto for cataloging/archiving of my library, although I expect I’ll still use it for select tasks (slideshows, PDFs). That probably nukes me out of using Galerie too, although I’ll have to dig a bit deeper to see if it can handle things outside of iPhoto’s odd storage arrangement.

Today’s search: A piece of Mac code that will handle very large photo libraries!

When I first migrated from the big honking tower server to the little Shuttle box earlier this year, I was amazed at how much quieter my office was. I hadn’t realized what a deafening roar that big ol’ thing put out.

Now, I have finished migrating to the MacMini, and I’ve just turned off the little-Shuttle-that-could, and the office has gotten bastoudingly quieter. I hear just the faintest fan whirr from the iMac, and a little bit of drive and fan white noise from the Mini and hard drives.

(BTW, when you use postfix from Apple, be sure to look at the inet_interfaces line. They have that set up really screwy for a mail server!)

Can you hear me now? Good. I can hear me now, too. 🙂

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Despite what the site has been displaying, no, I haven’t been listening to Chumbawumba constantly for the last two weeks.

I had problems with a firewall setting on the server, and that disallowed Kung Tunes from sending the recently played, so it looked as though I couldn’t find anything else to listen to. Good thing it wasn’t stuck on some dreck! 🙂

In any case, that part of the puzzle is solved, and now it’s on to the mail server and getting it moved over, too. Once that’s done, I think I can unplug the linux box, and be entirely over on the MacMini. Cool, cool, cool….

$2.999

Kevin had a video conversion project for me. He’s doing a site for The Lovell Sisters, a young trio of sisters who’re making a name for themselves in the bluegrass scene. They were recently on TBS, and after some talks with TBS, Kevin was able to secure the VOBs for the performance. He wanted them to be converted to MOV files for inclusion on their site.

Here’s how I did it.

First, I used OpenShiiva on the iMac to convert from VOB to MP4. I wanted the files in MP4 format so I could do rudimentary editing in iMovie HD. This went really well. Key item here: Be sure to click the Encode audio button on the Audio tab — without that, there’s video, but no sound. 🙂

Then in iMovie HD, I made projects out of what would become the two clips on the site. After cropping where needed, I did File|Share and clicked on the QuickTime icon. I set Compress movie for to Expert Settings, and clicked Share. After filling in the file name in the Save exported file as dialog box, I selected Movie to QuickTime Movie in the Export field, and selected Broadband – Medium for the Use field. That gave me a starting set of conversion parameters.

I clicked the Options button, and in the Movie Settings dialog box that was presented, I clicked the Settings button in the Video section. I changed the Compression Type to Sorenson Video 3 (the default setting never would display correctly on a stock Windows XP box), set the Frame Rate to 15 fps, set Key Frames to Every 75 frames, set the Data Rate to Restricted 220 kbits/sec, and the Compressor Quality to High. I clicked the OK button.

I made no further changes to the Movie Settings dialog box, and clicked OK, and then clicked the Save button on the Save exported file as dialog box. About ten minutes later I had my video clip, and it seemed to work on both the iMac and my stock Windows XP box.

Woo-hoo! This Mac Life rocks!

Just got a call from the Apple Store at West County, and my iMac is ready for pickup! Yay!

Guess I know what I’ll be doing today, eh? 🙂

$2.399

Well, my experience this morning with the Apple service side was pretty good, on balance.

I packed up the iMac G5 last night, and schluffed it out to the truck and through the mall this morning, landing at the Apple Store at West County right at 10AM. At that time, the Genius Bar was already booked solid, and my appointment was to be at 11.20AM “worst case”. They gave me a pager and I walked the mall. And walked the mall. And walked the mall. I showed up at 11.20AM, to find that I was still three down on the list, and the list had only moved by two folks in the last hour or so. Ugh.

So I stood and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, around 12.30PM, my name was called, and we started trying to figure out what was going on. As it turns out, the symptom that I read about last night on the Apple site was not what was going on with my iMac. (That problem is about capacitors blowing, and my mobo wasn’t the right kind for that — guess that’s why they have you bring it to the store to figure out the problem, eh?)

After figuring out that the thing was powering on by itself when power was applied, and doing a little work under the hood, the Genius Bar dude decided it was either a power supply or mobo problem, and is ordering both. ETA for return is September 10th, but he thinks he’ll beat that. The impressive thing? They do the work right there, and don’t ship the systems off. That’s hugely comforting!

So, I’ll be using the Mini or the Gateway for the next couple of weeks until the iMac is back. I’ve got a little Mitsubishi LCD on the Mini — Beck’s old one — and I can’t get over how tiny the monitor is compared to the iMac’s 20″ widescreen!

$2.419

Tonight, I’ve been working to get the MacMini up as the web server, and I think I might have accomplished just that. I’m very sure that some things are not gonna work like they’re supposed to. Just sit back, relax, and I’ll try to have the plane under control shortly. 🙂

However, the iMac has bit the dust, and I don’t know why. It was working during one commercial break in Battlestar: Galactica, and on the next, there was no video, and the fan was the loudest, fastest and hottest I’d seen. Nothing I’ve done has helped — changing which outlet it’s plugged in to, unplugging the power for a while, etc. I started poking around on the web.

It appears that Apple has a known issue with serial number ranges into which mine falls. The issue is not very well described at the Apple site, but it has to do with hazy problems of video, or power, or both.

So tomorrow, it looks like I’m off to West County Mall’s Apple Store to hopefully have them tell me what I can do. I’ve had the thing just barely three months, and I really don’t want to have to go through an ordeal to get back up and running. It’ll be interesting to see how this part of Apple works — the sales side has been great. The proof is in the service!