Tag Archives: Apple

Apple Existence

Guilty Pleasures

I’ve been a fan of music for as long as I can remember, and it seems like I’ve gone to proverbial ends of the earth to get the music I love. However, I’ve always insisted on having the original media — nowadays, that’s CDs. My figuring is that if I have the original media, I can convert the music into whatever format comes next. What I’m coming to find is that there’s a lot of the music I grew up with that just ain’t available on CD.

Enter the iTunes Music Store. I have been finding all kinds of old music — some I’d be kinda embarrassed to fess up to — on iTMS. And at 99 cents a pop, it’s pretty easy to take, and easy to grab the one-hit wonders I remember from days gone by.

However, there’s a fair amount of junk out there too. Many, many of the old tunes are actually re-recordings by the original artists. To me, that just doesn’t count. ๐Ÿ™‚

So, if you see me bopping around with my Touch on, and it looks like the moves are old-school, just ignore me, and pass on by. It’s probably something you’d rather not listen to anyway!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

A Tale of Two Displays, Part Two: A Tale of Two Displays (really!)

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to stop waiting on Apple to pave the road that leads to my new screen real estate. I did a bunch of research — although not very well, as we’ll discover later in this tale of woe — and landed on a pair of Samsung T260 25.5″ widescreen monitors. Generally, they got good reviews, and looked as good as they could at BestBuy, given that every monitor in the store was being driven from a VGA signal with more splits than a high school cheerleading squad. I was planning on a single DVI source, so I knew it’d only get better from what I saw.

I unpacked the two beastly panels, and plopped ’em on my desk. My gosh, were they ever big! I felt like a kid in a candy store as I connected them to Doc Oc, and proceeded to bask in the electronic glory of the two brightly lit beacons on my desk.

My next step (as it should always be) was color calibration. I pulled out my trusty Gretag Eye-One, and calibrated both monitors. The colors looked great to my eyes, although the monitors were pretty bright, so I lowered the brightness a bit to keep the sunburn down. I brought up Lightroom, and began walking through some of my favorite images. The brighter the image, the better it looked on the new panels. And then I hit some low-light images…. and the house o’ monitors began to tumble down.

All my low-light images showed splotches and degradation in the shadowed areas — something I’d never seen on my 20″ Apple Cinema Display. The more I worked to eliminate the problem, the more I began to get concerned that I’d made a huge mistake.

It was back to research, and I learned that the T260’s used a TN LCD panel. Apparently, TN panels use 6-bit color (256k colors), and dither to get to the 16.7m colors that are advertised. And from what I could see, my photos didn’t like that kind of treatment. (For comparison, my Apple ACD uses an S-IPS panel — 8-bit color, and true 16.7m colors without dithering.)

Tail between my legs, battered and bruised, Beck and I took the two Samsungs back to BestBuy for return. Surprisingly, they gave us no guff about returning them, and I didn’t have to get into a philosophical discussion of the religion behind various LCD panels. And, no restocking fee, which I was fully expecting to be asked for.

However, that leaves me back at the smaller screen real estate, but I think that’s a problem I can schluff off until after the first of the year. No reason to rush, and it appears that I have a good deal more research to accomplish! ๐Ÿ™‚

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

A Tale of Two Displays, Part One: What Are They Thinking?

This week, Apple has announced that the new delicious 24″ monitors are ready for ordering and shipping. These are the brilliant-looking monitors that will only attach to MiniDisplayPort enabled devices, which means you can only attach this new beastie to one of the new laptops from Apple. There’s no love for the MacMini or MacPro, both of which are DVI-based machines, nor for the older laptops out there.

On the heels of that announce, Apple also announced that they are discontinuing the 23″ Apple Cinema Display. While this isn’t a huge surprise, the things that are missing are.

What this seems to mean is that if you have a DVI-based Mac — essentially any recent Mac before the latest laptop announcements — the only two monitors available from Apple for you are the 20″ Apple Cinema Display ($599) and the 30″ Apple Cinema Display ($1799). The 23″ ACD came in around $899, and was a nice compromise for folks like me that wanted more real estate than the 20″, but didn’t want to spring almost two-kilobucks for the 30″. For some folks with twenty Benjy’s burning a hole in their pocket, it might’ve made sense for those in the MacPro crowd to put a pair of 23″ ACD screens on the desk for the same price as the 30″. That’s all personal choice however. ๐Ÿ™‚

The key log to breaking this display logjam is a DVI to MiniDisplayPort adapter, something Apple hasn’t announced, and something that no one seems to have created (although it appears Amazon may have some third party dongles). From what I gather in reading other folks’ interpretation of the specs, this kind of dongle is possible, but was just never something anyone needed before. That’s the only way an Apple laptop older than a month will be able to connect to the new 24″ display.

For MacPro users, this would work, of course, but I suspect that the best path here would be a new video card. However, Apple has also not announced any DisplayPort-based cards, and even if they were available out there, I don’t know if they’d be compatible with the MacPro or OS X. And then there might still be the DisplayPort to MiniDisplayPort question — is there an adapter that will go between these two sizes of the same video standard?

If anyone from Apple is reading this — and I know Uncle Steve checks this blog daily — please, please, please get your collective product lines together so I can put the new panels on my MacPro!!!! Doc Oc needs new eyes…

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Laptop Bag Conundrum

When I put the Little-MacBook-That-Could in my stable a couple of years ago, I pawed through every laptop bag I could find until I finally ended up with a Brenthaven. This has been pert near the best laptop bag I’ve ever owned — loads of space to stow cables, adapters, power options and all kinds of other stuff.

Well, the new MacBook Pro won’t fit in my small Brenthaven, so I’m on the prowl again for a new bag. Now BH does make a bag that’ll fit my shiny new beauty, but for some reason, I’m inclined to do something different this time.

So who’s leading the pack right now? Timbuk2 and Booq. They both have gazillions of potential choices, and no one seems to carry them locally, so it’d have to be a purchase based off internet sales sites and opinion sites. Given my last bag purchase experience, I’m not real keen on that, but I don’t think I’ll have much of a choice in the matter.

Any suggestions out there?

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

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.