Apple

I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.

Finally!

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Tiger arrives!After far too much stürm und drang, UPS finally managed to get their act together and drop my box from Amazon on my desk this morning.

I got home after work, popped in the disk, and hit the fateful “Erase and Install” button. A few minutes later (probably about 15 or so…I didn’t time it, but it went faster than I expected) I was prompted to reboot, and Tiger was up and running.

OS X 10.4

So far, I’m really liking the upgrade. Things are definitely a bit snappier than 10.3 was (I love the fact that each successive upgrade from Apple is actually faster than the prior version). Dashboard I’m not entirely sold on yet…great eye candy, I’ll see how useful it actually is as I keep playing around. I haven’t had much chance to play with Spotlight so far, as aside from importing my mailboxes, I’m running on a pretty clean slate at the moment, so there’s not a lot for Spotlight to work with yet. That will change with time, of course — and even without using Spotlight’s document-searching capabilities yet, it’s proved to be just as capable of an application launcher as Quicksilver was.

Most of the evening so far has been spent downloading the latest versions of the applications I use frequently and getting my day-to-day workspace set up. I’ve only run into two noticeable snags so far:

  1. The most current version of Microsoft’s keyboard driver (I have a nice keyboard I got for free when I was working on the Microsoft campus — unfortunately, it’s one they don’t make anymore) doesn’t appear to support the extra keys on this keyboard. I’d gotten very used to using the handy shortcut keys for ‘cut’, ‘copy’ and ‘paste’, and they’re now non-functional. A little frustrating, as it’ll take some time for me to re-train my muscle memory away from using them.

  2. No matter how carefully I try to back things up, there’s always something that I realize that I’ve forgotten later on. I’ve grown to accept that over the years — it’s rarely anything I can’t live without if I have to, so I’ve gotten used to this element of Russian Roulette when doing a full Nuke and Pave. Unfortunately, this time the casualty was one I’m definitely going to miss: Photoshop (yes, I’m one of the many people who…ahem…’acquired’ a copy of Photoshop at some point). A definite bummer, as I’m not likely to have the $600 to get my own legal copy anytime soon, and I’ve long since lost track of any sources for less-legal means of acquiring software. Ah, well…so it goes, right?

So all in all, a pretty successful upgrade, and I’ve got lots of little nooks and crannies to play in as I poke around. Yay for new toys!

Update: Well, one more issue, this one potentially a little more serious. For some reason, I don’t seem to be able to send mail through either my Speakeasy account or the account on my own mailserver. Not sure what’s going on here.

I can receive message from both those accounts, and I’ve set up POP access on my gMail account, though, so I can at least send messages through gMail, but I don’t seem to be able to send through my @michaelhanscom.com address, which is a bummer. My mailserver’s been a bit tweaky for a while anyway…maybe it’s time to investigate rebuilding that. Oh, boy is that going to be fun…

iTunes “Where Time Becomes a Loop (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Difficult Listening Hour (full mix) (1999, 58:41).

QuickTime 7 HD

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Oh. My. God.

I installed QuickTime 7 the other day, and found Apple’s HD Gallery page where they’re showcasing a few HD trailers and video clips. The trailer for Serenity is available in both 720p and 1080p formats, and even though my system (a dual 2.0Ghz G5 with a 64Mb Radeon 9600 video card) technically doesn’t meet the requirements to playback 1080p, I downloaded both to see how they behaved.

Beautiful. Not a stutter on either one, and the video quality is amazing. What amused me, though, is that my screen (which I run at a slightly non-standard 1152×870) isn’t big enough to display them at full size! The 720p trailer just loses a little bit off of either side, but the 1080p trailer? I can only fit about half of it on my screen at once. Wow.

Quicktime 7 rocks!Just for grins and giggles, I decided to download all the different Serenity trailers available to compare them. I grabbed all four “normal” versions from the Serenity trailer page (small, medium, large, and full screen), the two HD versions from the Serenity HD page, opened them all up at once, and paused each one at 1:02.

(While I was doing this, I started them all playing at once just to see what would happen. Even with all the other versions playing at the same time, the gargantuan 1080i trailer still kept up a very watchable 18fps average framerate!)

Here’s the end result:

version size (MB) fps size (pixels) data rate (kbits/sec)
small 4.8 8 240×104 288.78
medium 8.45 12 320×136 505.18
large 20.98 24 480×208 1259.23
fullscreen 40.4 24 640×272 2363.67
720p 108.33 24 1280×544 6406.26
1080p 138.36 24 1920×816 8182.54

Pretty damn impressive.

iTunes “Tell Me Why” by :Wumpscut: from the album Bunker Gate Seven (1995, 4:11).

Gilbert and Sullivan review Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

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The Safari browser now subscribes to R.S.S. news feeds,
And its “private browsing” mode conceals the tracks of online deeds.
There are archives now, and log files, when you send or get a fax;
You can make the pointer bigger on those Jumbotron-screened Macs.
You can start a full-screen slide show from some photos on demand;
And the voice that reads the screen aloud can lend the blind a hand.
There’s a password-phrase suggestor meant to make yours more secure,
And the Grapher module draws equations simple and obscure.
Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk –
You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.
There’s a lot of miscellany, lots of spit-and-polish stuff,
But it works and doesn’t slow you down – and these days, that’s enough.

— David Pogue, in the New York Times

(via adavies42, on /. — I originally didn’t notice the poem in the NYT article thanks to their horrid online formatting)

Happy Birthday Macintosh!

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I’m a bit late to the party on this one, unfortunately, but the Macintosh turned 21 years old today.

Even better, there’s one heck of a birthday present to the Mac community out on the ‘net now: the long-lost video of the original introduction of the Mac by Steve Jobs.

21 years ago today, on January 24th 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh. And we’ve seen that 1984 wasn’t like 1984.

What we’ve never seen indeed, was the big day itself. Lots of historic stuff has been preserved – images, texts, even sounds, and the saga has been told on and on. However only very few people have actually seen how Steve Jobs pulls the first Mac out of this bag, how the Mac introduces itself to the public, Steves biggest grin ever, and how he is obviously overwhelmed by this moment in the Cupertino Flint Center.

Fear not, faithful Mac believers. We have found it. We have found what seems to be the only copy of a public TV broadcast on that very day. It was recorded and preserved by Scott Knaster, the “legendary Mac hacker”, as Amazon puts it. Scott kept the tape (a NTSC Betamax III longplay) for 21 years since he keeps everything. Andy Hertzfeld saw it when he wrote the story ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’‘ on folklore.org. From there we followed the hints, and that’s how we found it.

We worked with Scott to convert it from NTSC to PAL, we’ve polished it, cleaned it, huged it and digitzed it. Here it is. It goes back to the people who’ve made the Macintosh, and to the world. The complete material of about 2 hours is returned to Scott, Andy and the folklore.org people, and this weblog will report the story of the “missing 1984 video” in detail. We’ll release other clips in the coming days, so bookmark and check back.

But now, Ladies and Gentlemen: please welcome – the 1984 Macintosh introduction video. A travel back in time…

(via MeFi)

iTunes “Gimme Shelter” by Sisters of Mercy, The from the album Some Girls Wander By Mistake (1983, 5:58).

Who are you?

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So.

You’re the head of a highly secretive company.

You’re known for being temperamental and very mysterious.

The goods your company produces are highly popular, but they’re developed in secret.

When they’re introduced, they’re invariably accompanied by much anticipation, a media blitz, and fans worldwide salivating over the newest products.

Who are you?

Read more

6 year old webserver

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While talking with Prairie about how Macs generally tend to have long lifespans, I looked up the original introduction date for the 350Mhz Blue and White G3 that acts as the webserver for my site, and found out that it was originally introduced on January 5th, 1995 1999.

That’s just a few days over ten six years that this machine has been around, and it’s been running pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the four years that I’ve owned it (I bought it used in February of ’01). It’s still going strong, too, chugging right along day after day.

Not bad…not bad at all.

_Wow_, I’m a dork. I really don’t know how I managed to confuse ’99 and ’95 when I was looking up the date, but apparently I did. Thanks to Dan for pointing that out.

Six years still isn’t bad, though…

iTunes “Walking on the Sun (Geek In Highwaters)” by Smashmouth from the album DJ Goodies (1995, 6:12).

Mac mini (and more)

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Only the sketchiest details so far, ganked from MacRumors’ live update page, but…

Mac Mini

  • Mac Mini
  • very tiny
  • quiet, fw, usb2, video out, ethernet – very very tiny
  • pizza box style
  • analog, digital video out
  • comes with Panther & iLife 05
  • half as high as an iPod Mini, surface of a little dish
  • coming 1st half of 05
  • 1.25 Ghz G4
  • another at 1.4 Ghz
  • most important new mac ‘ever’
  • available Jan 22
  • prices for mac mini: \$499 and \$599
  • \$499 with 1.25 G4, 256, 40 gig, Combo

[Update:]{.underline}

Okay, everything’s done, and Apple’s website has been updated.

Funny: On the iPod shuffle page, there’s a picture of the iPod shuffle next to a pack of gum, with a caption that reads “Smaller than a pack of gum and much more fun.^[2]^” When you go to footnote 2 at the bottom of the page:

  1. Do not eat iPod shuffle.

Funny: On the Mac mini Design page is the notation, “Keyboard, iPod mini, dock, hands, AirPort, Bluetooth and PC sold separately.”

Macworld 2005 Keynote

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The keynote for this year’s Macworld starts in about an hour. I won’t be able to ‘liveblog’ it as I have the past couple of years, as little things like work and Apple’s decision not to stream the keynote are getting in the way.

Rumor roundups have been posted on MacRumors and Think Secret — we’ll see how many of them come true once the press is allowed to start talking.

13 Free Songs from iTunes

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Have an iPod? Want some free music from iTunes?

iPod, meet iTunes.

  1. Back up any data on your iPod you don’t want to lose.
  2. Use the iPod Updater application (usually in /Applications/Utilities/iPod Software Updater, or it can be downloaded from Apple) to do a ‘restore’ on the iPod, resetting it to factory defaults.
  3. Launch iTunes.

And that’s all there is to it — upon launch, iTunes will flip over to the iTMS and offer you thirteen free songs. Here’s what you get:

  1. Blow It Out – Features
  2. All At Sea – Jamie Cullum
  3. Sunshine to the Rain – Miri Ben-Ari
  4. Lonely – Akon
  5. Golden Touch – Razorlight
  6. Every Time You Go Away – Brian McKnight
  7. Bigtime – The Soundtrack of Our Lives
  8. Laura – Scissor Sisters
  9. She Said – Brie Larson
  10. Just Anotha Shorty – O’Ryan
  11. Sleeping With the Lights On – Teitur
  12. Reach Out, I’ll Be There – Michael McDonald
  13. TKO – Le Tigre

No idea on how long this offer is good for, whether the selections might change at some point, or whether you’ll like the selections enough to make it worth your time. I figured, hey, free music, why not?

(via Accelerate Your Macintosh!)

iTunes “Laura” by Scissor Sisters from the album iTunes New Music Sampler (Universal Motown Edition) (2004, 3:38).

DVD-R? DVD+R? Argh!

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In theory, according to Apple’s promotional literature, iPhoto is supposed to be able to handle up to 25,000 photographs in its library without a hiccup. I’d love to know what kind of hardware they were testing that on, because I’ve got around 7,000 photographs in my iPhoto library and it quite frequently brings my 2.0Ghz G5 to a standstill, if iPhoto doesn’t crash out entirely.

Annoying.

So, part of last weekend’s running around was picking up a small spindle of recordable DVDs so that I could back up the older photos and pull them out of my iPhoto library. Prairie and I hit Best Buy and found a spindle of fifteen recordable DVDs for about ten dollars.

Yesterday, I grabbed all my photos up through 2003 (only about 2.5Gb out of the 4.7Gb available) and told iPhoto to burn the DVD. It asked for a blank disc, I put one in…and it popped it right back out and asked again for a blank disc. “That’s odd,” I thought, and put the disc back in. This time iPhoto went ahead and started chugging away, and I didn’t think more of it.

Until iPhoto finished burning, and the disc never mounted on the desktop. I started trying to figure out what was going wrong, and then some small part of my brain kicked in. “Wait a second…aren’t there a couple different DVD formats?” Sure enough, I’d picked up a spindle of DVD+R discs, and the Superdrive in my G5 uses DVD-R discs. Crud.

I’m just glad the discs weren’t terribly expensive, and I’ll just chalk it up as a learning experience. Thanks to an Office Depot just a few blocks away from my apartment, I now have a spindle of 25 DVD-R discs (for only \$9.99, too — the sale goes through Jan. 8th, and that’s a pretty good deal, as their spindles of 50 DVD-Rs are priced at \$40), all my photos up through 2003 are successfully burned onto one disc, and most of 2004 (Jan-Nov is all that would fit on one DVD) is merrily burning away in the background as I type this.

Boo to the industry for having two competing and incompatible formats, though, especially so similarly named (one is “DVD ‘plus’ R(ecordable)”, and one is “DVD ‘dash’ R(ecordable)”, I guess, though it could just as easily be read as “DVD ‘minus’ R(ecordable)”, which is even more confusing). If I hadn’t had some vague memory of reading about the different formats at some point in the past, I’d probably just have assumed that there was something wrong with my computer or the Superdrive, and been a lot more frustrated and aggravated than necessary.

iTunes “I Sit on Acid ’96” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1996, 4:31).