Category Archives: Apple Existence

My journey away from Windows, and into the light.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

The Leopard Has Arrived!

My copy of Snow Leopard has just landed on all fours on the doorstep. Less than five minutes after FexEx dropped it off, I have begun installing it on my MacBook Pro. There are rumors running rampant that it could do an upgrade in as little as 15 minutes. When I inserted the disc and began the installation (which had very few options), the installer said it had 45 minutes to go, and now it’s up to 54 minutes. I suspect the 15 minute upgrade will be nowhere to be found. 🙂

Stay tuned for more as I get through the upgrade, and start getting some first impressions.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty

Through some lucky monitoring of Twitter today (before it apparently crashed in fire, flame and swarms of locusts), I saw a co-worker pre-order Snow Leopard, the new version of OS X for the Mac. I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention to MacLand, and didn’t realize we were on the cusp of the new OS dropping.

So tonight, I’ve ordered my little kitty, and am expecting delivery on Friday (based on Apple’s website). I’ve gotta admit, I’m hoping for some performance improvement, especially with Lightroom. My catalog is almost 95,000 images nowadays, and I really do see some odd slowdowns on Doc Oc occasionally. The odd thing about these little slowdowns is that they don’t really manifest themselves as metrics I can see — the cores aren’t busy, the system is responsive, but LR is living in spinning beachball city. I realize I have a crazy large catalog — I’m a bit of a pack rat, and I like searching through all my keyworded files at once — but it’s my DAM solution, and I’m sticking with it. The least it could do is run well on eight cores with access to 16GB of RAM!

Anyway, come Friday, we’ll see just what the new cat’s guts are like…

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Seeing Double

A little late, but I’ve been procrastinating… a lot… lately.

I was in Best Buy last weekend searching for a case for my new Canon G10 (more on that over at CWP… sometime), and worked with a guy who was willing to open packaging for me so I could slide my G10 into a variety of housings. As I talked with him, I discovered he had worked for many of the camera outfits in town, and had done some super-sized Apple consulting gigs, and was a BB Apple dude.

Cool.

I asked after a FW400-FW800 converting plug for my MBP, and we strolled over into Appleland at BB. And what did my wandering eye see… but a 20″ Apple Cinema Display. Now, Apple stopped selling these months ago, and at the price they were retailing for, I wasn’t surprised to see one left on the table at BB. However, I noticed that it had a yellow tag next to it. Discounted? Nobody, nobody, nobody discounts Apple gear… but there the tag was, beckoning that I come by and look. Sure ’nuff, the monitor was discounted 200 bucks! That’s a huge discount, and I expressed some concern about this being the floor model, and not knowing what kind of trauma it’d beeen through. My BB dude walked over to a rack, opened a package with a display connector in it, and fired up the monitor off a conveniently placed iMac. It looked great. He warned me that they probably didn’t have the box or books, but as it sat it was functional, available and discounted. While he went behind the curtain at the store display, I was weighing whether I really needed this monitor.

You see, I’d been wanting a second display for my MacPro, and had settled for a 20″ “square” Princeton monitor for my second. I’d had it for years, but it didn’t profile the best, and frankly, it didn’t look very elegant in its charcoal plastic case as it sat next my 20″ all metal ACD beauty. But, with the recent changes at Apple in their display and display card technology, they’d taken a path less trodden, leaving me in the dust quickly with no upgrade path… unless I wanted to go a pair of 30″ ACDs. Cool, but way costly — I could put a pair of really nice lenses in my bag for what that would set me back.

So I stood there paddling this floor model back and forth… and my guy walked from behind the curtain with a 20″ ACD, brand new in the box, never opened.

After a little mumbling under my breath, I asked him if the discounted price went for this new, boxed beauty. When he said yes, I eeked out “Sold!” and proceeded to thank him profusely, ringing out, and leaving BB like I’d stolen something.

Finally, a great second monitor sits atop my desk, flanking my four year old 20″ ACD. Folks have said that Apple’s long in the tooth on these displays (despite them looking terrific both esthetically and visually), but I, for one, am glad of that, as it’s given me the opportunity to pair mine up. And at a bargain price, to boot.

There is one big difference I’ve noticed. The new ACD is a little cooler than my original — whether that’s a manufacturing difference or just the effect of the years on my older ACD, I dunno. But the old one is definitely warmer. I’ve calibrated them both in the same setting and lighting, and suspect I should do that again, now that the new one has had a chance to “burn in” a bit. For normal work, I don’t notice it, but in dual screen Lightroom, especially working on a black and white image, I can really see the difference.

In any case, I’m happy to welcome this twin son of a different mother into the fold, and look forward to a nice, long relationship with it. 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Printing… Again

For quit a while, I’ve been struggling with my trusty ol’ Epson R1800. Struggling to the point where I’d pretty much decided to kick it to the curb, and either outsource my printing or replace the printer. Replacing the printer has been a tough thing to think about — I’ve got too much indecision between the R1900 and the R2880, and I didn’t want to buy into another set of printing problems if these printers manifested the same printing challenges I’d been having with my R1800. And outsourcing the printing… well, I’m a bit of a control freak with my hardcopy, so that was also tough.

In a nutshell, my printing was horrible. Images were waaaay too dark as compared against my color calibrated screen. This was making for two elements of workflow — one to get the image the way I wanted it on screen, and then monkeying with that copy in order to print it appropriately. Or, I could work the image on my Mac, bring up a virtual Windows XP session, and print from there. Eitehr way, it was twice the workflow, and a bunch of trial and error for each image, leading to wasted ink and media, and a general disinterest in printing my work. What good are my images if I’m not printing them?!?!?

As Vincent Versace taught us at DLWS, we work in service of the print. However, my passion lies in the creation of image, and the tuning of it to get it the way it looked in my mind’s eye, not with monkeying around with print settings to get the print even remotely close to my on-screen image. Printing should just work (or be pretty dang close to just working — I’ll take a endure a little tuning). For me, printing had become a distraction, and was taking me away from the joy of working with my images.

I’d researched this print issue before, and had seen loads of other folks running OS X Leopard having the same problems with their printers, with no real solutions in hand. Then I happened upon a website that pointed to this being a common problem with Macs that had been upgraded to Leopard, rather than having fresh installs. That fit me exactly. I went through the steps on the site — many, many steps — and was finally ready to print. A couple of days of life got in the way, but today, I ran some test prints…

And it was glorious.

Colors looked like they did on the screen. Shadows were good. Bright areas were actually bright again. And now I’m churning out print after print on both matte and glossy media, and once again discovering the joy that’s there when you can hold your image in your hands. There’s a tangible quality to a print that transcends the image itself, and makes it even more real.

Welcome back to the fold lil’ ol’ R1800 — I’ve missed ya.

Apple Existence

iPhone OS Upgrade Is Here!

Well, today was the day — the new iPhone OS was released, and I’ve pulled it down, dumped it on my iPhone and iPod Touch…. and I’ll see whether it was worth the wait.

In a real quick spin through the screens, it doesn’t look or feel much different than the previous version. However, tomorrow will be my first real chance to see any differences, and it’ll be interesting to see what the real-world experience will be like.

In reality, I wish I could get one of the new iPhone 3Gs phones that’ll be released of Friday. After checking with AT&T today though, I’m not eligible for a discounted upgrade until August of next year, and that means a difference of $200 (plus an $18 upgrade fee). It’s a crying shame, as I’d really like the faster network, as well as the higher storage capacity. When I bought my iPod Touch and iPhone, I was moving from an 80GB iPod, and I wanted something with a high storage capacity. And getting away from a hard drive was a good thing. However, the iPhone was only available as big as 16GB, and that wasn’t gonna cut it.

Now, the iPhone 3Gs offers 32GB of storage, and that would allow me to do a little convergence of devices. But…. at $499, I’m pretty sure I don’t wanna be pulling the trigger on that right now!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

iTunes 8.2 Has Arrived, But Whither the iPhone 3.0 Update?

I was thrilled to come home tonight to find that Software Update was bouncing, awaiting me with news of a new version of iTunes becoming available. And on the list of updates? Compatibility with the new iPhone 3.0 OS upgrade. But…. no 3.0 upgrade. Anywhere.

Dunno why I’m so excited about the promised new upgrades for my iPhone and iPod Touch, but for some reason, I’m kinda jazzed about it. I don’t develop on that platform, and I haven’t done enough research to have a real good reason to move to 3.0. But, I know I will, as soon as it’s available.

And I’ll probably find things to complain about. I know me well enough to understand my tendencies!

Apple Existence, Photography

First Geotaggings

While on The Mountain this weekend, I schlepped my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx with me wherever I drove. My intent was to take a bunch of images at Prentice Cooper, and figure out how to get them tagged from the tracks on the GPS. I played with it some while I was on The Mountain, saved my tracks, and then came home.

However, there was an important fact I wasn’t aware of. When you save a track on the Garmin, the timestamps disappear, making the data virtually useless for geotagging!! Fortunately, my MacBook Pro had one of the tracks I used while on The Mountain, so not all was lost. However, I got trapped by another anomaly.

I tried to set my camera to the same time as the GPS. Of course, the GPS time was perfect, but the camera time needed some adjustment, so I set it against a known good time source. What I neglected to do was check the timezones for the two devices. My camera was still on Central Time, but my GPS was on Mountain Time (probably from the Big Drive last year). And my geotagging software wanted to use the system time (Central Time) to line everything up. Combine all that, and you have photos that didn’t tag in the right place, and some images that had no data whatsoever.

Now that I have the times lined up, and using the track from my MBP, I now have some images geotagged correctly. Pretty cool stuff. I didn’t know it, but if you look at an image in Preview on the Mac, you can get additional data about it, some of which is the GPS data. From there, you get a “Where’s Waldo” look at the globe to see where the photo is from, and a button to send you to Google Maps to see the detailed location. That’s pretty cool.

I can tell there’s some goodness in the data from the geotagging effort that I haven’t yet begun to tap. I kinda feel like I’m getting to the party late on this technology, but I think I’m becoming a quick study.

So which software am I using? Right now, GPSPhotoLinker seems to be getting me the most mileage, but I suspect HoudahGeo will buy me more usefulness for images for which I have no data. The batch processing from GPSPhotoLinker is slick, and really hums right along. HoudahGeo is integrated with GoogleEarth, and I suspect that’ll make it pretty easy to tag the old trips.

Watch for more fun and games as I figure out how to exploit this new technology! (Well, new to me, anyway.)

Apple Existence

A Little Mail Trick

OK, so I’m probably the last guy on the planet to figure this out.

I’ve been struggling with a couple of mail-related issues with my iPhone. I had been connecting to the same mail account with my iPhone as I have with my home machine. Every now and then, the two mail clients would collide at the mail server, and make one or the other not very happy. Nothing fatal, but nothing wonderful either.

However, the bigger thing was that I was getting spammed to death on my iPhone. The OS X mail app does a pretty good job (augmented with a few rules of my own) at keeping the spam at bay, but the mail app on the iPhone lacks the anti-spam technology that my home mail client enjoys. For a long while, I was getting almost no spam on my iPhone, but there was a cost — I was blocking LOADS of country-specific domains and IP address ranges that I would never expect to get e-mail from. However, I recently ran into an issue with a developer whose mail was getting /dev/nulled at my mail server due to the broad nature of my spam swatting. Once I turned that off, my poor little iPhone was exposed to hundreds of available Russian singles, pharmaceuticals that I didn’t even know existed, and information from so many banks that I didn’t know I was affiliated with. In a word, spam.

So how to fix it? Well, fixing it at the mail server would be the best answer, but as I started getting into that, I started discovering just how little I understood about mail transport mechanisms, and how much I really didn’t care to learn that much about them. With that off the table, that left doing something at my home-based mail client that would somehow filter my mail before it hit the iPhone. There’s lots of folks out there doing circuitous sending and resending between their mail server, Google’s GMail, and then back to their home mail servers. That also had a bit of a learning curve, especially when doing it from the mail server.

My last idea was to let OS X’s mail app filter the mail, and after it’d passed the gauntlet of simple rules at the server, and complex rules at the client, it could be forwarded to a super-secret special mail account for the iPhone to hit to get a less spam-filled mail flow. That worked…. except that every e-mail looked as though it came from me, which was a less than stellar solution, especially if I wanted to respond to mail from my iPhone.

I was playing with my mail rules again, trying to set up some methods to figure out which of them were working the best, and I saw a little drop down on my rule to forward stuff to the iPhone’s mail account. In addition to forward there was a “redirect message” option that would send the message along to the iPhone’s account while preserving the look and feel of the message, making it seem like it was sent directly to my iPhone. Wunderbar!

And a side benefit of this approach is that my iPhone and OS X mail app are each banging away at different mail accounts, so there’s no collisions at the mail server for either one. I like my technogoodies to have a smile on their little electronic faces!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

The Patient Survived!

Doc Oc has his new OS and apps loded. Yahoo! In this entry, I’m gonna try to capture the things I’ve modified/augmented, so next time I have to do this, I can deal with it from a documented position.

My basic plan was to keep things clean, only installing things I use, and trying hard to avoid importing settings and drivers from the old boot drive, which takes the Migration Assistant out of the mix… generally.

  • >Documents and Stuff : I have loads of this kind of thing… ya know, Apple commercials, some images (not my photo library; that’s on another spindle), genealogy stuff, etc. Migration Assistant seemed like it would move all this, but I really wanted to do it myself, as I’m not comfortable with Migration Assistant’s scope, and knowing just much it would copy.
  • Mail : Mail is a biggie for me. I archive waaaaay too much mail in my mailboxes, and it’s always been one of those things I’ll fix “one of these days”. Today is not that day. So how to get my mail setup manually? I copied /Users/me/Library/Mail and /Users/me/Library/Mail Downloads to the newly installed OS image. I also copied /Users/me/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, and after getting everything over, I opened Mail, and there was everything. The only thing that wasn’t in place was my passwords, which isn’t a big surprise.
  • Adobe Applications : I fully expected CS3 to bark about being reinstalled on the same machine, but apparently it was smart enough to figure it out. I saw several other apps that somehow knew their license serial numbers, and worked well. In fact, the only app that I had to “deactivate” and “reactivate” was Genuine Fractals 6.
  • iTunes : I have had challenges in the past with moving my iTunes library around. This go ’round though, I had no problems. I use an alias to point to the library location, and once I repointed that, iTunes was all smiles.

At this point, Doc is happy again, although I’m sure I’ll run into things here and there that aren’t quite as they were. However, all things considered, I’m happy with where things are right now… Especially given all the “learning experiences” that were part of this!!