Category Archives: Geek-Speak

Geeky spaces lie within — be careful where you step!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Update on Snow Leopard

I’ve committed Snow Leopard to Doc Oc, but not without a few things to ponder.

Despite it’s 64-bit yellings and screamings, the OS is designed to boot in 32-bit mode out of the box. How big a deal is that? Well, I don’t really know. There’s loads of rantings out there talking about whether it matters or not. I look at it this way: if my OS is 64-bit capable and my hardware is 64-bit capable, why wouldn’t I run in 64-bit mode? From Apple, there’s no way to permanently change which way you boot. But, there’s unofficial ways. Here’s one. MIssion solved.

That leads me to my color calibration puck. I have an Eye-One Display2 from X-Rite (well, it was GretagMacbeth when I bought it), and it appears that the code that runs it only runs under Rosetta, which means it’s PowerPC code, not Intel. I never realized that, and wouldn’t have except that Rosetta isn’t installed by default with the OS. I’ve read about the puck not being detected, but I didn’t have that problem on the MacBook Pro, and now it’s all nice and calibrated.

All in all, things have gone pretty smoothly, although I won’t do the server for a couple of weeks — gotta bake the new goodies on the gear!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Forty-Five Minutes

Yep, 45 minutes to install Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro. Not bad, in the big scheme of things. However, there are some warts.

The first is that the reminder application from X-Rite that prompts me to profile my screen every now and then requires Rosetta to run. Boo. The other is that iStat Menus is not yet Snow Leopard compatible (per their site).

Neither of these are show stoppers for me (although I’m curious if I can calibrate my monitor with the current X-Rite software; there does not seem to be any mention of any issues with a quick look on X-Rite’s site).

Stay tuned kids… Doc Oc is next!

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, 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!

Geek-Speak

Hunting Dinosaurs

Have you tried to buy a VCR lately? You’d think I was hunting up some dinosaur matter to create my own Jurassic Park. Wally World, Sam’s, Target, Best Buy…. no dice. Amazon has a few — a few — but it seems like most of them are through third parties, and I’m more than a little leary about buying something like that from some guy selling out of his garage through Amazon.

What’s the deal? There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of home video tapes out there that needs to be converted to digital media of some kind. Without a source player, those old VHS tapes might as well be fodder for skeet shooters… or 160KB 5¼” diskettes. With the recent demise of both of my VHS monsters, I’m left with about 40-odd tapes that I’d like to convert to digital media, and preserve off to something a bit more future proof and less prone to magnetic manglement.

I’ll get there, but I thought I should future-proof my plight, lest some wary reader sometime next week see this, and wonder how us cavemen got along.

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!!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Doc Oc Is on Life Support

After spending most of the day trying to diagnose what state my MacPro was in, and continuing to wonder how I got there, I think I may have an answer.

Long, long ago, I had a Quad G5… (ok, so it wasn’t that long ago) and I believe my 1TB drive was created/installed there first. An apparently, it wasn’t partitioned as a GUID drive, but as an Apple Partition drive. All well and good, except that you allegedly cannot boot an Intel-based Mac from it. Empirically, that doesn’t seem to be the case, as I’ve been doing it, but I think that’s why so many things have been scrambled — extended attributes on system files, zero-byte system files, and loads of other really bad things. As I said before, bad juju.

Now, I had I not skrogged the original boot drive, I’d be sitting pretty — just repartition the 1TB drive, re-clone, and I’d be set. But, sitting where I am, I figured I’d try a reinstall of Leopard over the top of my current installation, and that’s when I discovered the partitioning woes. So, with no good, usable source, and no way to reliably fix the myriad system problems I’ve introduced, I’m left with the unattractive option of doing a fresh install.

I’m not totally against fresh installs. I mean, it’s pretty easy to accumulate loads of junque installed on the OS, so freshening things ain’t a bad thing. I’d just rather do it under better circumstances. I’ve been carrying a lot of these apps, data and stuff around ever since my first iMac G5 about four years ago. Badly quoting Adama from the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, “Don’t underestimate the power of a clean start.” I’ve gotta agree.

So tonight, it’s a clone back to the original boot drive. Tomorrow, I’ll entertain myself with a fresh install, and then begin to re-install my power apps — Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. — after letting the crazy machine do a boatload of updates.

Hopefully, I’ve learned a few things. This recovery? It’ll be fun. Really.