Tag Archives: Apple

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

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

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

Steve to Phydeaux: “Will you quit whining now?!”

After what has seemed like an eternity — especially in dog years, which is a fairly common unit of measure at the Deauxmayne — Apple has *finally* solved the dilemma of how an ’08 Mac Pro crosses the road to get to Mini DisplayPort monitors. The answer is in the cards.

Along with a gazillion hardware announcements, and more than a few software updates, Uncle Steve’s kids announced some love for my beloved Doc Oc. There is finally an option to hang a 24″ LED Apple display off my now-defunct Mac Pro.

The path is through an ATI Radeon HD 4870, which would dent your wallet to the tune of $349. From everything I’ve read, this card is very fast — much faster than the card currently in Doc Oc. However, it won’t ship for 5-7 weeks, and will only work with OS X 10.5.7 (any bets on when that might be released? 🙂 ).

The cool thing is that the card supports both DVI and Mini DisplayPort, which means I can tackle the upgrade in phases, rather than all at once. Buy the card and gain the speed upgrade (in some instances, anyway), and then upgrade the monitor.

Funniest thing about the description on the Apple store?

“ATI Radeon HD 4870 includes two video ports: one Mini DisplayPort and one dual-link DVI port. This allows you to connect both the 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display or another Mini DisplayPort-based display, and a DVI-based display such as the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display.”

Another Mini DisplayPort-based display? There ain’t but one out there, and that’s the aforementioned Apple 24-inch display. I guess that’s future-proofing, but in March of 2009, that reads like humor!

In the new Mac Pro machines, there’s another DVI/Mini DisplayPort card available — the NVidia GeForce GT 120 — but the Apple store doesn’t list that as an upgrade option for the ’08 Mac Pros. ‘Tis a shame, as that card is only $149. For folks wanting to upgrade monitors, but not really needing the extra speed, it seems like this would be a good option. These are also 5-7 weeks out, so maybe that’ll change between now and ship time.

In any case, I’m thrilled that my now-obsolete Doc Oc has been included in the the No Mac Pro Left Behind program in this round of annoucements!

(And BTW, there’s some good analysis of the new Mac Pro, both its shiny and ugly bits, at the websites of digilloyd and Bare Feats.)

CORRECTION: It looks like you only need OS X 10.5.6 to run the new cards, either on the new Mac Pros or old. I guess 10.5.7’s date is still a bit of a mystery. 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Let the Rampant Speculation Begin — The Apple Store Is Down

With the Apple Store down, and the rumors running wilder than Girls Gone Wild yesterday, it appears that there is some movement afoot at the House Steve Built.

New MacMinis, iMacs, Time Capsule, Mac Pros, Airport Extreme… who knows what’s in the bag of tricks this morning. It’s like Christmas in March!

I’d like to see a video card solution for my Mac Pro so I can use the new Mini DisplayPort LED monitors on Doc Oc. I’ve just gotta think there’ll be a solution… aside from “buy the new machine!”

In a few hours we’ll know what up Steve’s sleeve, the anticipation will be over, and I’ll know if I’ve still got something to be grumpy about. 🙂