Posts Tagged “mac”

Since my devistating review of the Camangi WebStation I’ve had some time to think about what my vision is for the soon to be announced Apple tablet.  This isn’t a prediction of what I think it will be, but rather a look at what I hope it will be.  Of course I originally wrote this about two or three weeks ago and since then there have been many rumors and speculations about what the tablet will be.  And by now we have a lot of clues as to what it will be.  And of course it’s very likely that in two days we’ll know exactly what it is, at least it’s initial itteration.  But hit the link and read on to what iWant it to be.

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With less than 30 days until WWDC I’m starting to get anxious about what new Apple iGadgets might (or might not) be released.  Will Steve Jobs be back from his curious sick leave to unveil the next big thing?  Or will it be another disappointing and uneventful keynote?  The rumors have certainly been flowing recently and whether they’re based on anything real or are just wishful thinking on the part of a few fan boys, they’ve got me hopeful that my dream mac might be in my hands soon enough.  Either way, what might be has been enough to make me hold off on upgrading my first generation iPhone – hoping that I’m only a month or two away from that third gen iPhone hardware to go along with the 3.0 iPhone software.  But what will this new iPhone be?  And what of this controversial mac tablet?

About 2 months ago I was mocking up my own concept for a mac tablet when real life got in the way of blogging.  Since then I’ve blogged very little.  I’ve also seen (on other sites) a couple of very cool mockups, one that would be completely awesome but is at least a few years off due to it’s flexible OLED design, and another that is extremely close to what I was planning.  Whipping up a fake now would be completely academic.

Being somewhat of a fan boy myself it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between my wish list and what I expect will really be released.  But here’s my take on WWDC 09… Read… »

This week I sold my old G5 along with a 23″ Cinema Wide Display, a BlackMagic card, Sonnet Tempo eSata card, and a Sonnet Fusion 500P populated with 5 x 500GB hard drives. It was a complete edit system including lots of fast storage, but as part of my “out with the old – in with the new” theme, it all had to go.

Hindsight certainly is 20/20 and I like to review technology after the fact to reflect on how well it worked. Overall my G5 was a great machine and it was difficult to let it go. But a couple of the components were very hard to let go: the monitor, and the storage…
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One of the coolest little products I saw at CES was the Webbie HD camera from Sony. While I’m not a fan of the name (the manual calls it the Mobile HD Snap which is much better), this pocket sized tapeless cam shoots 30-frame HD video at either 720P or 1080P. It’s clearly targeted to those wanting to upload clips directly from the memory stick to YouTube. Even the name suggests that it captures web-quality video. But it DOES shoot in HD. So what’s the down side?  What’s the quality really like? Read… »

Apparently I’m not the only one with a blown ATI X1900. It might be because I never cleaned out the dust build up. My card was worse than the one shown at xlr8yourmac (see link). This week my monitors started turning off after a few minutes of use. Upon inspection we found a small burn mark on the card. So we ordered a replacement, an ATI Radeon HD 3870 Mac and PC Edition which sounds like a good card.

Inside the package is the card, an install disc and the note shown above that says “Install the Mac software before the hardware.” How is it possible to install the software before the hardware when my current card is blown? Read… »

I’ve been working day and night over the holiday weekend on my iphone app. I suppose normally I would just close my laptop lid in between sessions but this weekend I was trying to stay motivated to keep working. So my laptop was left on most all weekend. Two important points: One is that I’ve been using it in this configuration (pictured) with the extra keyboard and mouse.  Second is that I have a cat. And while I hate love her, she is a very annoying cat. Every few minutes she’ll try to either sit on my lap or on the keyboard and even as I write this I have to keep telling her to NOT WALK ACROSS MY KEYBOARD. I think she likes the heat it gives off and many times I’ve come home to find that she’s deleted stuff, moved files around, etc.  (UPDATED 12/2/08) Read… »

The other day I discussed Apple’s move to DisplayPort on the new MacBooks.  Their other big news was that they completely dropped firewire on the MacBook, and only have firewire 800 on MacBook Pros. In blogger terms this is old news (over a week ago) and has already been discussed to death by many other sites. Yet for me it is still something that has to be considered at a practical level. Like it or not firewire is on the way out and I have a lot of firewire drives.  On the other hand, my brand new mac pro still has firewire and I’ll be able to use these drives for years to come.  So the wheels are turning and I’m studying different solutions.

Every few years that old Moore’s Law kicks in and new hard drives come out that double or more the capacity of the old ones.  My MOA is that whan I worry a drive is about to die, I typically copy the entire contents of the old drive into a folder on the new one.  By now I’ve done this several times over and inside a 1TB drive I might have a folder which contains a old 250GB drive and inside that I have a folder that contains an old 100GB drive, inside which I have a folder with contents from several powerbooks ago. But now it’s time to organize things better and upgrade to some serious storage.

But what storage solutions are right for my home system? What will give me the most speed, the highest capacity, and reasonable data protection for the best price?  Of course these questions can’t be completely answered without first knowing what the various applications for the storage are.  Over the next few posts I want to show some different options that I’m considering.  I also want to talk some history and review the various drives that I have now and use at home and at work.  This discussion will take several days. Read… »

You may have noticed this ad on my sidebar for the Sony HD-RTG1.  I hand picked that ad because it seemed like a great semi-pro video camera.  It is reasonably priced, records HD video to a memory stick, and is small enough to fit in your pocket.  It might not be as professional as a higher end camera, but it seems like a good backup camera or b-camera.  Rob Kelly used it on a recent realty shoot to get extra footage.  The size and convenience makes it perfect to get shots that would otherwise be missed.

The video file format is AVCHD. How does that fit into a pro video producer/editor’s workflow?  It seems to be becoming the consumer format of choice for all the new cameras.  How do we deal with this footage?

On a recent outing Rob shot some footage for me with his HD-RTG1. The clips created have a .MTS extension.  With other video cameras you end up with a folder full of .AVI or .mpg clips.  But with AVCHD cameras you get an entire BDMV folder structure that looks suspiciously similar to that of a BluRay disc.  Just in case I needed it, I copied the whole directory structure to my drive. (well, mostly)

Lets define the rules of the game: Read… »

In keeping with the current theme, here’s a video of me installing a new hard drive in a G4 Powerbook. At the start of the video all the screws had already been taken out.

This was my wife’s couch computer.  I sold it to a buddy for almost enough to completely pay for it’s replacement: a hacintosh Dell mini 9.  It’s ordered and should be here middle of November.  Not sure why it takes so long – something to do with it being built to order.  But more on that when it comes in.