Macs Are Great!

Last year we expanded our web operations and invested in a 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro. The machine has performed flawlessly and met all of my expectations up until it was upgraded to Leopard. Apparently Leopard places higher demands on the video card, and as a result the fan on the original ATI X1900 graphics card began making more and more noise until it became intolerable.

It had gotten so bad that the tiniest task given to the video card, such as switching between Spaces, would cause the fan to start whining even louder for 10 or 15 minutes.

We found references to this happening as a result of dust buildup on the poorly designed intake area of the video card fan, but on inspection found ours not so clogged at all. We do open our computers for cleaning every 6 months or so, as we live and work in an area subject to powerful sand storms (Macs Are Great comes to you from the Sonoran Desert).

So in an effort to resolve this issue we ordered the new NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT from Apple. Installing this new card as a breeze, and of course it was not necessary to install any drivers or dismiss 5 annoying dialog boxes about unsigned drivers. It just worked.

Once everything was all done, put back together, and working great I discovered another thread on Apple Support that suggested this noise might be caused by the air intake on the card being clogged by dust. Of course I knew that was not the case on my Mac Pro, as I had tried cleaning it to resolve the noise. Then I saw a photo one guy had taken of the dust clogging up his card, and I realized I had failed to see that spot when cleaning mine.

So just now I took the old card out of it’s static bag and examined it more closely.

Ooops! It was so thoroughly clogged with dust that you can’t see the heat sink at all. So maybe it is a perfectly good expensive 512MB video card. My bad. Maybe I’ll be more thorough in the future while cleaning inside my Mac Pro. I think I paid enough for the new card to learn a lesson from this experience

Technorati Tags: Mac Pro, fan noise, video card fan noise, ATI X1900, NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT, Apple, dust buildup, cleaning Mac Pro

                 

Macs Are Great! has tested the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card, a truly unique concept that brings 2012 technology to the 2007 holiday shopping season. This ordinary sized SD memory card contains a wi-fi chipset. After using your Mac or PC to configure it with the details of your open, WEP, or WPA protected wireless network, you simply put the card in your digital camera, and when you take a photo it is automatically uploaded to your computer, a selected online photo service, or both.

We took a few screenshots of the OS X installer as we were setting up the card. It works well sending files via Wi-Fi on a Macbook Pro using an 802.11g WAP with WPA2 password protection. We also setup a free Google Picasa photo hosting account, and uploaded some photos there directly from the camera. This might make a great gift for a geek of the Mac or PC variety.

The manufacturer lists many brands of digital cameras as being compatible, we used a Canon SD950IS. Of course you should expect the added energy required to transmit your photos to have some impact on battery life. You can even buy the card in the Macs Are Great Store.

Technorati Tags: Eye-Fi, Wireless SD card, Wi Fi in Digital Cameras, Review, OS X, MacBook Pro

                 

Recently we created a new website for people with celiac disease, All About Celiac, using a content management system, and designed to act as a news aggregator for information about celiac disease, gluten-free recipes, and gluten free food shopping information. Today Apple has posted our latest widget designed to pull any of 6 RSS feeds from the site.


download

We used Dashcode, as supplied in the Leopard developer tools, to create this widget and it was really quite easy. If you’ve been thinking of trying some lightweight programming, perhaps as a way of getting into more serious stuff later on, Dashcode might be a good place to start. To install Dashcode run the Developer Tools installation package from your Leopard DVD, the devtools are not installed by default.

Technorati Tags: OS X, widgets, Leopard, Dashcode, celiac disease, Apple, downloads, gluten free recipes, gluten free diet, RSS, feeds

                 

Recently I received one of the new aluminum Apple keyboards. It is the full size version with the cluster and it connects via USB. I’ve never used a keyboard in my entire life that I liked more than I like this one. It is fantastic.

I find that I’m able to type faster and with fewer errors, it is amazingly quiet, the spacing of the keys seems almost perfect, and in addition to all of that it has the typical Apple stylish good looks.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Keyboard, aluminum keyboard, review, hardware, low profile, anodized aluminum, numeric keypad

                 

One of the most successful of my various websites is one for people with celiac disease, the Sensible Celiac. In case you did not know, celiac disease is an inherited autoimmune disorder that causes the immune system to attack the small intestine when a person eats wheat, rye or barley. I’ve got it. Celiac disease requires a gluten-free diet. I also sell gluten free food here.

When I installed Leopard I also installed the Dev Tools and Dashcode, and was very pleased and surprised to see how easy it is to make a widget. So I created one for my Sensible Celiac site that pulls the RSS feed from the discussion forum and shows the 10 most recent messages. It’s nothing fancy to look at, and offers only very basic and typical functionality, but Apple has posted it in their downloads section.

If you have ever wanted to create a widget, check out Dashcode, it’s drop dead easy. And if you want to learn more about celiac disease, visit the Sensible Celiac. Check out our over 600 Gluten-Free recipes.

Technorati Tags: Leopard, widgets, dashcode, RSS, celiac disease, gluten free diet, Sensible Celiac, Apple, Downloads

                 

For years we have been using SuperDuper to create bootable clone backups of all of our Macs. Each Mac has its own external hard drive reserved for backups, and in the event of a massive failure we can be back up and running quickly. The author of SuperDuper is hard at work on a Leopard compatible version, but I did backup each of my Macs under Tiger before doing any upgrades.

As I have been working on this blog entry I’ve been doing my first Time Machine backup on my Mac Pro. It does use a fair amount of CPU, but with 8 cores to play with, no worries.

The new Time Machine feature in Leopard has a different intended use. While SuperDuper does a fantastic job of creating a bootable emergency recovery system, Time Machine is intended to give you a way of falling back to earlier versions of a document, or recovering files deleted unintentionally. I’m using both methods right now. I bought a Fantom G-Force MegaDisk Triple Interface (1tb model linked, I bought the 1.5tb at NewEgg) and I’m currently backing up my internal RAID array to it using Time Machine.

Time Machine is designed for use with an external hard drive, so it is best suited for use with desktop Macs, but you certainly could devote an external drive to a Macbook or Macbook Pro and simply connect it when you are at home or the office, wherever the external drive is kept.

The real advantage of Time Machine is its informal version control capability. With the source for over 70 websites, and over 30,000 digital photos on my system, I have lots and lots of files that change frequently. While this web server always has the most current version of my web content there are times when I wish to refer to an older version. Time Machine checks your entire hard drive once every hour and backs up every file that has changed in that hour. Files from previous days are preserved for a month, and files from previous weeks are preserved until the backup drive becomes full. At this point Time Machine will prompt you to choose to delete some old backup sets or switch to a new backup drive. Since you just enable the feature and the backups take place automatically thereafter, your butt is pretty well covered.

Once SuperDuper has been updated to work with Leopard, I will certainly still make periodic bootable backups of my system in order to be able to get back up and running ASAP. I’ve also learned in the past the hard lesson that it is best not to rely completely on just one backup strategy.

(buy Leopard now)

Technorati Tags: Leopard, Time Machine, SuperDuper, backup strategy, Apple Mac, Mac Pro, G-Force Megadisk, external hard drives, OS X, new features, CPU utilization

                 

I’ve been anxiously awaiting Leopard, and over the weekend I upgraded 3 of my computers, a 20″ CoreDuo iMac, a 2.2GHz Macbook Pro, and my super mega 8-core Mac Pro. Each upgrade went very smoothly, and so far I have not found any installed applications that no longer work. I was looking forward to using Spaces as a replacement for YouControl Desktop and it is fantastic. Mail is clearly faster, Safari is very much faster, Safari no longer seems to leak memory.

I’ve got a 1.5 terabyte external drive coming that will be used with Time Machine to backup my Mac Pro. In the meantime I setup my iMac to use Time Machine to an external 250gb drive.

The changes in Finder are welcome, I especially like the way it lists other machines on the local network, making it easy to move files from one machine to another.

Pleasant Surprises

There was so much buzz about big changes that a few of the really nice refinements almost escaped my attention. Preview has really come of age. You can now resize images and use a whole bunch of image correction tools that were previously only available in programs like iPhoto. It’s fantastic and still extremely fast and lightweight, programming at its best IMHO.

And in the new Safari when you use Command-F to search the current page the found text is highlighted in a brilliant yellow color, no more staring at the page for 2 minutes trying to find the highlighted item, this jumps right out at you. As you can see in the sample image, I was searching for the word Intel.

The new Dock has really got the eye candy thing going as widely reported, it’s very nice.

I’m seeing no downside at all to this upgrade, if you are sitting on the fence and waiting to hear real world reports before you decide, put me down in the plus column. Using my Macs is now even more pleasant than it ever was before.

I also installed the developer tools, including Dashcode. With it I was able to create a widget for the forum at my site about celiac disease, the Sensible Celiac, it was trivial. See my widget described and grab a copy here if you are interested.

Technorati Tags: OS X, Apple, Leopard, operating system, upgrade, Safari, Preview, applications, compatibility, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, iMac, dev tools, Dashcode, widget, celiac disease

                 

In response to user feedback received in email, we have designed and programmed a pair of simple Automator scripts into a package we call JPEG Consolidator. There are two versions, one will copy all of the files it finds, and the other will move files.

By default these scripts will search a specified path recursively for files with names ending in .jpg, and depending on which script you run either copy or move them all to one place. I’m releasing these at no charge under the terms of the GPL (included), with a ReadMe and a How To file inside the package that provide complete details. You can download a Zip containing an installer here. The installer will place a new folder named JPEG Consolidator in your applications folder. Source code is included, modify it at will. Please remember, it’s not my fault.

You could use these to move files of any type, they are designed for maximum flexibility. Enjoy!

If you Digg, would you Digg this, or Stumbleupon, or something? Thanks.

Questions, comments, complaints, thanks? Leave a comment!

Technorati Tags: free software, OS X, find JPGs, consolidate JPEGS, copy JPEG files, Move JPEG files, freeware, GPL, Steve Rider, Macs Are Great!

                 

Having felt recently that my Dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac was getting a bit outmoded, I decided to invest in a machine that would be so fast it might outlast any other I could buy, so my attention turned naturally to the 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro, possibly the fastest desktop computer made today. Looking at the prices that Apple charges for RAM and hard drive upgrades, I decided to order my new Mac Pro with the minimum RAM and disc and do the upgrading myself. I wanted the Apple Raid card so I could setup a fast, redundant disk array, and I wanted lots and lots of processor cores. I ended up ordering a Mac Pro in this configuration:

• 3.00 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• 1GB 667 DDR2 FB DMM ECC-2×512
• ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
• 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive
• 16x SuperDrive DL
• Airport Extreme & BT 2.0+EDR
• Raid Card
• Apple Keyboard & Mighty Mouse
• Mac OS X
• Country Kit

I then went to Newegg and ordered 4 Seagate 750GB SATA drives, and 4 sticks of 2GB Fully Buffered ECC RAM by Transcend. The RAM was explicitly described as suitable for Mac Pro, and several reviewers were pleased with its performance in their machines.

The RAM and hard drives arrived a few days before the Mac Pro, and I decided I would open up the new computer and upgrade the RAM and hard drives before it was ever powered up. Back in the day I built many PCs, and I started repairing electronic devices for a living in 1968, so I have no fear of tinkering inside a computer.

On delivery day I saw that my new toy was out for delivery at 5:34 AM, but it did not arrive until exactly 8PM. The poor FedEx guy looked like he was ready to collapse from working so long. I got out my camera and took a series of photos as I unpacked and upgraded my Mac Pro.

Adding or replacing a hard drive in a Mac Pro is as easy and simple as it could be. You just slide one of the drive carriers out, each one is numbered, and use the provided screws to mount your SATA II drive to the carrier. There are no cables to connect, the connectors on the drive mate with the motherboard when you slide the drive back into place.

The RAM was even easier, just pull out a RAM card, plug in your DIMMs, and slide the RAM card back into place.

I removed the original hard drive and RAM, replacing them with my larger, bigger, faster selections.

Since the only hard drives in the Mac Pro now were the ones that I had installed, there was no operating system available and I had to install it from the provided DVDs. But first it was necessary to create a RAID array on which the OS would be installed. When you buy the Apple Mac Pro RAID card, for the ridiculous price of $999, you get to create a bootable RAID array.

I chose to create a RAID 0+1 array, meaning that my 4 750GB drives would give me a nominal 1.5TB internal storage, in fact once it is all initialized and formatted it worked out to 1.36GB, plenty for onboard storage, even with my 70 websites, 38,000 high resolution digital photos, and 8,000 MP3s. Plenty!

Once the RAID was created and the OS was installed the last step was migrating my applications, settings and files from my old G5 Power Mac. This was so easy it ought to be illegal. All I had to do was boot the Power Mac into target disk mode, by holding down the T key as it booted, then connect the two machines using a firewire cable. Because of my billions and billions of web pages and digital photos it took 14 hours to transfer my data, but once I finally got to use my new Mac Pro it was and still is amazingly, mind boggling-ly fast. I mean fast. I mean wicked pissa fast. How about hard drive write throughput for 2MB files of 506MBps? iPhoto runs faster, Adobe/Macromedia Dreamwrecker runs faster, Photoshop seems as fast as Preview - well almost as fast.

I’m very, very pleased. Yes, it was expensive, but I use my desktop computer more than I do anything else so I do expect to get my money’s worth out of this investment. Photos are here.

Technorati Tags: Mac Pro, hardware, RAID, upgrade, OS X, 8-core, Xeon, Intel, Apple, Mac

                 

Wal*Mart has begun to offer music downloads, but if you are using Mac OS X you’ll have to downgrade to the world’s least secure operating system first.

Using either Camino or Safari, try accessing the music downloads page at WalMart.com, and you’ll get this idiotic error message.

“We’re sorry, your operating system is incompatible. To provide the best download experience, we can no longer support Windows 98, ME or NT. Please visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP. Visit our Help section for complete system requirements information.”

What it should say is, “We’re sorry, your operating system does not automatically install malware.”

Here I thought I finally might be able to buy something at Wal*Mart that was not made by political prisoners in China. Usually the only thing one finds at Wal*Mart is land-fill futures made of polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, or styrofoam.

Apparently the highly skilled IT department at Wal*Mart global headquarters realizes that OS X can not be used to download an MP3 file, so they are protecting their customers - from spending money at WalMart.com.

What a bunch of useless wankers!

Technorati Tags: Wal Mart, WalMart, Wal*Mart, music, MP3, malware, online shopping, music downloads, Safari, Camino

                 

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