Category Archives: Apple Existence

My journey away from Windows, and into the light.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

New Gear: MacBook Pro

With the Little-MacBook-That-Could getting long in the tooth, and my desire to help the economy, I have purchased a new 15″ MBP, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

So, if you haven’t heard about the construction, the main body is carved out of a single piece of aluminum, like some crazy person would do with a bar of Ivory soap and a whittlin’ knife. It’s soft on the hands, feels light, and has a crazy nice feel compared to the lil’ ol’ MacBook. However, it seems that it could be a bit more prone to having marrs from jewelry or other metal-to-metal impacts. Still, it’s a sweet, sweet feel.

Tonight I’ve been working on it for an hour or two, with it sitting in my lap, and it definitely feels cooler… generally. My iStat info indicates that the processor temperature is just a little higher than the BlackBook, but I noticed it more in my lap. There are points along the back part of the bottom of the base — near the hinge — that seem kinda warm. It’s not crazy hot, but there are definitely some places where the rig is warmer than others.

Now the screen. The glorious, glorious screen. It’s new tech — an LED screen — and it’s beautiful. The color is really brilliant, the surface is glossy, and I haven’t seen anything yet that wasn’t just flat amazing on-screen. This is the same tech that the new Apple 24″ monitor will have when it’s released in a week or so. It ain’t cheap, but man is it pretty.

From a speeds-n-feeds perspective, this box is 25% faster at the processor complex, 50% faster across the memory bus, and gazillions faster on the GPU side. The crazy thing about the GPU is that the new MBP has two video cards — one “high performance” NVidia GeForce 9600M GT with 512MB of discrete memory, and an NVidia GeForce 9400M with 256MB of shared memory, designed for lower power consumption. I don’t run on batteries a lot, so I’ve got it configured to use the 9600 — dunno that I’d notice the difference, but the battery’s rechargeable. ๐Ÿ™‚

I also really like the backlit keyboard. What I didn’t like was the fact that it was somewhat uncontrollable — it lit up when ever the machine thought it needed to be lit. However, I found a little application out of Germany called Lab Tick that allows me to set the backlighting to the level I want, and leave it there. Way cool.

I’m real pleased with this little box, and it looks like a new love affair in progress. Stay tuned for more!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

It’s Alive!

After 10 hours of data wending its way across the wire from Doc Oc to the new Seagate half-TB, I was ready to try out the new catalog and files on my MacBook. With two machines, it made testing this really easy — try it on the laptop first, fix any catalog problems, and then try it on the Octoputer.

After copying the images, and copying the catalog, I plugged the drive up to the laptop, and found that the catalog was disconnected from the images. I had to point the catalog to the images, but after that, everything was cool.

Shut down LR on the MacBook, move the drive to Doc Oc, and all is well there too. Overall, a very easy operation. I still have some scripting to do to automatically back the thing up when it’s docked at Doc Oc’s, but that shouldn’t be a big deal.

This opens the door to two other portable drive based projects — one for iTunes, as it sure would be nice to have that with me when travelling, and another for my scanning projects. Those I’d like to turn into another LR catalog, making it especially easy to carry that stuff around to relatives to get the skinny on the images.

It’s definitely a new world for me! Now, if Apple would just release a video card for the MacPro that’ll run their new 24″ LED monitor…..

Apple Existence, Photography

New Gear: Seagate FreeAgent|Go 500GB External Hard Drive

Every now and then, I go through a little panic attack as I see all the hardware around the digital darkroom, and I begin to ponder simplifying my digital world. Ultimately, I have a ton of storage needed (easily 2-3TB, including hot backups) for my photos, videos and other digital artifacts, but not that much processor power needed for my normal work, despite having a mongo big octocore beastie under the desk.

So with the new MacBook Pros having been released a few weeks ago, my brain yet again started spinning on shrinking my technological footprint. However, my stalwart partner in crime remained the voice of reason, and talked me off the Luddite ledge.

Still, there are some real good reasons to be down to one machine — at work, it’s what we call “a single version of the truth.” In other words, there’s only one place with my e-mail, master photo library, etc. With the big machine at home, and my MacBook on the road, it’s hard to keep a single version of the truth. I really banged into this when we were on the road in June as I tried to get my e-mail while letting my big machine get it too. A single version of the truth is a compelling concept for me.

Alas, with the permission of my CFO in hand to go forth and simplify, but the suggestion of said CFO that she knows me better than I do, and that I might just rue the loss of my eight-core beauty, I kept the concept of one version of the truth, but decided to tackle it differently. Enter the new purchase tonight.

So here’s the concept, strictly for the photo library. (I’ll tackle the e-mail problem another day.) Get an external drive, export my master library and LightRoom catalog to the drive, and use that copy as the master between Doc Oc and The-Little-MacBook-That-Could. Backups of that data would happen automatically whenever the drive is connected to Doc Oc overnight, and be stored in Doc, which is the copy that Becky accesses from her machine.

So, I have the hardware now, and only have to work through the conversion process. However, I do have one concern…. speed. With the little laptop drive inside the FreeAgent, and connected at USB 2.0 speeds, I could see where there might be a potential bottleneck. However, it’s rare that I do massive big things to the catalog, and LightRoom 2 performs pretty well, so that might be ok.

Stay tuned as I build out this little experiment of technological terror….

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Of Lust and Disappointment

Today, Uncle Steve made good, and announced new goodies from the Mothership. In other words, new Apple products were released.

The lust? Well, that’d be the new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. They’re just stinking beautiful, and loaded with the power to back up the beauty. I love the idea of using LED panels — I’ve heard a ton about their color correctness. Of course, how good that’ll be will depend on how the machine is designed. Faster processor, faster graphics, faster memory… what’s not to love?

And now my disappointment. I was following the announcements as they were being made this morning, and was thrilled to see a 24″ LED panel with a built-in iSight camera. The price isn’t crazy high, and is way more real estate than my 20″ Apple monitor. But…. (and there’s always a “but”)

It appears that the new monitor will only work with the new laptops — I can’t hang it off my octocore MacPro beauty sitting under my desk. What kinda design is that? And frankly, the troops are restless enough about the $900 price tag. Combine with no path to connect it to the MacPro line, and you’ve got some unhappy campers.

Count me in that number.

I would loooove to put an LED monitor on my desk, especially with more real estate, but the reality would seem to be that Apple has turned its back on the guy who’s invested a buncha scratch in a pro workstation, and instead focused on supplying a big ol’ monitor that has the same feature set as the only machines — the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros — that support it. (Yeah, yeah, there’s probably an adapter to hook it to the Little-Macbook-That-Could, but definitely not to Doc Oc.)

Apple has some of the sweetest panels out there, but the Cinema Displays have essentially been frozen in time for four years, and the Dell’s are starting to look pretty attractive. Essentially the same panel, but at about 60% of the cost. With that math, a 24″ really high contrast monitor (LCD, not LED) is sitting around $700.

Once last complaint… because I know The Steve reads this! ๐Ÿ™‚

With the new announcements, the 17″ MacBook Pro will become defunct. No new 17″ MacBook. That also means no Apple laptop can use a 30″ Cinema Display at full resolution. Again, it almost seems like the pro user, power user or serious hobbyist has been left out in the cold with the new announcements.

The new laptops are sexy — no doot aboot it — but I’m really questioning where the product lines are headed, and am more than a little concerned for my little empire here at the Deauxmayne.

UPDATE: It looks like Apple has a cable (for a C-note) that will allow all the new laptops to drive the 30″ Cinema Display at full res. That’s cool. I’m still waiting for a way to connect the new 24″ monitor to my MacPro!!!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Dumb ‘Ol Safe Apple

Like a good doobie, I applied the Apple security update last night. Little did I know that one of the fixes would debilitate the mail server. It kinda looked like a firewall problem, and after poking around a TON, I finally found that the security update had (apparently) made a change to my Postfix configuration.

Now, I can claim some responsibility for this little outage, as I didn’t look at the notes for the update before applying them. Guess I’ve got a little too much trust in Apple.

Anyway, it’s working again, so now the spammers have another target available again. ๐Ÿ™‚

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Something Yellow This Way Didn’t Come

Last week, I hinted that there might be a new iPod Nano in my future. A yellow one, in fact. I even put the mock ups of the engraving as a teaser. That didn’t exactly happen.

I’d ordered a yellow Nano over a week ago, thinking that I’d have it before this week end. It kept not shipping, and not shipping, and not shipping, so on Thursday, I grimaced in pain, and cancelled the order. Now I didn’t know what to buy — a 16GB Nano or a 32GB Touch. Off I went camping Thursday night, still twisting over what to buy.

Come Saturday morning, I drove to the Apple store after confirming they had both models in stock, and even driving into the parking garage, I still hadn’t made up my mind. After spending the better part of 30 minutes with the Apple dude, I walked out with an iPod Touch.

It’s a nifty little box… small, light, and has a huge screen. Frankly, I’ve been spending more time getting video material ready for it, as opposed to music. It’s definitely gonna be a different world for me — I’m used to having every piece of music I own with me, and 32GB simply won’t give me that.

So far, I’ve got nothing but good to report on the little device, and it looks like my most listened to music is gonna fit. The biggest bugaboo has been video. Videos that used to work on my 5G 80GB iPod don’t seem to wanna work on the new device, and videos formatted for AppleTV out of TubeTV no longer seem to wanna work with the new gear. It’s just a guess, but I’d venture there’s some kind of flag being set somewhere that’s disallowing this. We shall see.

Stay tuned as I play with all the goodies this thing’ll do!

Apple Existence

The Reports of My iPod’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Twenty-four hours after I believed I had cratered my iPod whilst trying to restore it resale, it appears to have come back to life, fully functional, and back at factory defaults. Here’s what transpired.

From iTunes 8, on both my MacBook and MacPro, I tried to restore my 5G iPod to its original state. From both machines, I got the message Ipod could not restore. An unknown error occurred 1418. And after the last time it happened from the MacBook, the iPod would no longer function. It acted as through the firmware or hard drive were corrupt, leaving the iPod in a state where it couldn’t be seen by iTunes, and couldn’t be seen by either of my Macs or Darla’s Windows XP machine or my VMWare XP environment. After a lot of frustration, I wrote the thing off as a loss.

Tonight, Apple had an OS upgrade sent out, and I thought it’d be worth a try to see if that upgrade would help any. It didn’t. I saw the same things. I googled my error message, along with some other pertinent keywords, and I found someone describing how a hard drive replacement is done in an iPod, and he mentioned Disk Mode.

Disk Mode allows the iPod to act like a portable hard drive to the OS, and was mentioned by Apple as one way to help force a restore of the iPod. This guy had figured out the hidden iPod command keystrokes necessary to do a hard reset of the iPod (Select+Menu), enter diagnostic mode (Select+Play/Pause) and enter disk mode (Select+Prev).

I decided to confirm that things were working ok, and entered diagnostic mode. Sure enough, everything seemed to check out, so that ruled out anything insidious like a hard drive or logic board failure. (BTW, eventually, the diagnostics will eventually ask you to plug in a firewire cable. The 5G iPod isn’t supposed to support firewire, and I gave away all my iPod firewire cables years ago, so I couldn’t comply. I just did a hard reset at this point, and figured everything was ok.)

Upon the reboot from diagnostics, I held down Select+Prev…. and there was Disk Mode! I plugged the iPod into the MacPro, and the MacPro promptly complained about the hard drive being in some funky unformatted state. This was the first time in 24 hours that my iPod had been recognized by any system. Leopard was even nice enough to offer to format the drive, which I politely declined, favoring instead to let iTunes manage putting the Hands of Steve on my iPod, exorcising its demons.

I cranked up iTunes, and it promptly told me that I appeared to have a damaged iPod, and that it would be happy to restore it. I allowed it, iTunes starting shoveling bits down the USB cable, and in just a couple of minutes, my iPod was whirring happily, charging, and being the happy little dude it used to be.

This was quite the recovery for me, as I had really written this iPod off, and just lucked into finding the right information I needed to recover. I guess the lesson here is to make sure all your homework is done! Now I have an iPod to sell, and can recoup some of the costs of….. waitaminute! I can’t talk about that yet! ๐Ÿ™‚

Apple Existence

And Then There Was One

In preparation for what’s-on-the-horizon, I set about trying to restore my 5th gen iPod to factory settings, thinking that I would try to sell it this week. That was not a pretty experience.

From both Doc Oc and The-Little-MacBook-That-Could, I consistently got an error message (#1418), indicating that this iPod could not be restored to defaults. Not a huge big deal…. until on the last attempt from the MacBook, my iPod apparently cratered. ๐Ÿ™

Near as I can tell, it tries — real hard — to reboot itself every few seconds, only to fail, and repeat. Do while more electricity. The drive doesn’t appear to be bad — there’s no cute icon indicating a sad ipod, which might indicate a disk failure — the thing has just lost it’s brains, and doesn’t know what to do with itself.

Unfortunately, in that state, it can no longer be seen by iTunes as an iPod, or either Windows or Leopard as a mass-storage device, so I think it’s done.

That leaves my iPod Shuffle as the only functioning iPod in the Deauxmayne. RIP 5th gen iPod. You went before your time.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Dai-sy, Dai-sy…. Give Me Your Annnnssswerrrr Doooooooo

The Little-Macbook-That-Could endured the equivalent of a heart transplant tonight. It’s battery went tango-uniform sometime yesterday (or the day before), leaving the MacBook a vegetable unless the power feeding tube was attached.

Weird thing was that the power cable indicated the battery was charged, while the laptop couldn’t even see the battery, much less charge it.

Tonight, a quick run to the Apple Store confirmed my suspicions: my battery had converted from a nice lithium-based piece into a nice piece of toast. After a little checking, I was informed that I wasn’t eligible for a battery-replacement program that’s running around out there, and shortly thereafter, the forceps entered my wallet, and I walked out with a new Macbook battery.

I wasn’t thrilled, but after 22 months with this machine, I guess that wasn’t a horrible deal. Still, with that money, I coulda bought one of the new iPod Nanos announced today! ๐Ÿ™‚