I got Skype working yesterday and was able to have a conversation with a friend of mine over across the pond at jolly old England. Amazingly, the quality was very good, almost as good as a landline and we were using just some cheapo mics. He was on a Windows box and I was on the Mac and everything worked just as Skype says it will. I am using a Telex Digital mic and I will be upgrading to something better in the near future as I want to play with some podcasting ideas.

The Mac has something annoying with it’s audio that I had read about and finally heard it. The output of the audio is about a second behind real time. So with the RadioShark, what I head is about 1 second behind the real radio and I’m told this is true for most audio which drives people crazy in podcasting. My Windows laptop does have this delay or it’s shorter where I can not hear it. So whats up with the Mac? You can’t tell me that a G5 doesnt have enough processing power to do real time audio if my dinky Centrino laptop can manage it.

Oh well.. I always have something to complain about

Whoooweeee… Carbon Copy Cloner works!! Well, I knew it would but it’s always nice when it works the time you really need it. The iMac is now running on a 160 gig internal drive and it took about two hours. the trick to use CCC with Tiger was this:

MAC-G5:~ mikesweeney$ sudo open /Applications/Carbon\ Copy\ Cloner.app/

You are prompted for your password and then rock on. I did run repair permissions using the disk tool and the new drive came right up.

I also modd’ed my console with this command to get the proper scroll bars:

MAC-G5:~ mikesweeney$ defaults write “Apple Global Domain” AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth

I found this in one of the niffty TakeControl books I’ve mentioned before.

Now off to clean out the garage

Ahhh yes.. the smell of money burning a hole in one’s pocket. So this week to help make myself feel better about having to go to a clients’s office at 8am on Saturday to fix an Exchange server, I stopped by the local computer store. Danger! Danger! Oh yeah Baby!! Parts!!! I walked with just a few items that I “needed”. The coolest toy is the “RadioShark” by Griffin.
<br>This widget is way cool! It took less then 3 minutes to install and have the radio up and running. The sensitivity is great! I tuned it to a station that I like (KPCC) which is at the low end of the dial and does not work on all the radios here at the house. The best radio is a shortware set and the worst (surprise to me) is a Sony shortware set. The Shark is in the upper middle for quality. Just a touch of static/hiss but very listenable. The software interface is simple, it looks like a radio (duh!) and the result is you do not need to read the directions. There is an equalizer and the scheduler tool so you can do time based recording. All for just under 60 bucks! Hellva a deal and it works with the Mac (I’m on Tiger) and the PC(did not try this part). In fact, I’m listening to the RadioShark right now

What else did I get? Oh, just a few small hand tools. I am still replacing some tools that some scumbag ripped off from my Explorer in front of my house. And I got a new USB 2.0 hub with 6 ports for the Mac. The brand is “Westinghouse” which I doubt is the Westinghouse of old but it’s nice quality and works very well on the Mac.

Today is upgrade day. I got the firewire drive to boot as the primary drive finally by using Carbon Copy Cloner with a shell and running the disk tool to fix permissions. The fixing was the key to making everything work. I found that suggestion over at LaCie’s website buried deep in some FAQ files. So I have a new 160 gig drive to replace my 80 gig drive. The drive was purchased from SmallDog which are some cool folks to deal with. The order went flawlessly and there was no question that I received a brand new drive as expected, not a repacked drive with questionable history. I made my clone last night and today I will do the swap and then re-clone the drive back to the Mac. This ought to be fun!

And an extra note of interest. I was accepted into the beta program for BakBone software which is my backup software of choice for the enterprise. They support the Mac both as a client or as the console in addition to the traditional Windows and Unix. I am putting together a new server with half a terabyte of disk to back up my systems here. I found a very cool site about building a RAID5 arrary from 5 dollar SCSI drives. Just goes to show that old hardware is still very useful with some imagination.

I just read a story where a group of teens at a high school are about to have their lives ruined with a felony conviction by over zealous administrators and hicktown police. The short version is that the school gave out a few Apple laptops to students as an “experiement” and somewhere along the line, the students got the ‘master password” which allowed them to reconfigure some of the lock down of the Macs. You know where this is going.. MP3s, dirty pictures etc. Big deal.. big surprise. Slap their hands, take the laptop away and send through an ethics class and probably some time off from school. A bully gets ten days for beating the hell out of a fellow student so this should be around the same, Right? Wrong.. the school is pressing felony charges (3rd degree) against the kids. Felony??? Who the fuck are these people to do this? Most people who get caught doing something stupid like this get hours of community service and a lesson on proper ethics. Not destroy a kids professiona life before he/she is even out of high school. I can go and assault a teacher not not be charged with felony.. well, I could but the odds are in my favor of not being charged. I see it all the time around here.

Anyways.. the story can be found here.

Nothing like stupid people in places of power to really screw things up. Oh yeah.. we have a Govt based on that

I spent last night working with the Apple Remote Desktop Client for Windows and I have to say that I’m impressed. Not only is the screen fairly fast on the refresh/updates, but the sound!! I streamed my Musicmatch tunes for the better part of 3 hours and I could not tell I was streaming the music from the PC using any kind of remote software other than the tunes are coming from my Mac speaker. Now, I need to fix that since I have much nicer speakers on the PC than I do on the Mac but that involves getting down on the floor and into the dust bunnies so perhaps a bit later.

I dont know about you but I’m currently dragging a open external drive case around so I can swap drives in and out for a varity of reasons. I just found this firewire adapter which looks pretty promising to be cleaner and easier than my current half a case which is pretty tacky at a customer’s site. It also comes with USB support and Firewire 800 so all worlds are covered. I plan to write to them and see if the FW400 version will boot a Mac because my half a case will not.

A way cool site that I just wasted a few hours at is called “Hack a Day” And it is alot of fun to poke around at. All kinds of time consuming hacks to read about and to day dream about. A few I’ve seen elsewhere but a few were new to me. As a fan of the new MAKE magazine, this sort of site just sucks me into the vortex of wasting time

I’m still pissed about the AirPort card being such a pain in the ass with my Linksys router but I have a new WAP54G which is just a plain ol’ AP with a power hack to try this weekend. I’ll be surprised if it works but hey! who knows .

The printers after all the struggles have been very reliable, even the Epson has kept it’s colour profile which is unlike Windows where it was a constant struggle to keep the profile right, everything kept shifting to magenta.

I just ordered a new 160 gig drive to replace my current 80 which is wayyyyyy to small for any kind of video work as I found out recently making a couple of DVDs of a HBO mini-series for the inlaws. This brings up a new point. It used to be to record a show for the inlaws required nothing more than punching in a VHS tape and making sure the recorder was set for the proper time. No mess, no fuss. Now, with the advent of DVDs and the death of VHS, I have to record the shows on my homebrew PVR, transfer the MPEG2 files to the Mac, Convert to DV stream, add a pretty menu and then burn a disk. This is progress? I dont think so.

Some word is sneaking out on the new Intel-Mac at ThinkSecret. It seems that Windows loads fine aside from Windows being broken on the 23 inch dispay. No surprise there given my own experiences with Windows on my Dell M700 and 6000 wide screens. And those were from Windows OEMs and it still did not work right until I hacked the reg. But, alas, Darwin whinned about installing on a non-Apple supplied Intel hardware platform. But as with all security, this too will pass

I found a couple of cool “booklets” at takcontrolbooks.com. These are chapters available for purchase of 5 bucks per which is a deal. Delivery is electronic PDF format and the layout has been optimized for screen ready. The writing is clear and concise with excellent graphics.

The book I’ve been using this week is called “Take Control of Customizing Tiger” and offers a wealth of ideas for tweaking Tiger both using it’s own tools and using third party applications. A part that was a favorite of mine is the discussion over managing open windows. A “feature” in tiger which I dont care for is that when I click the center wheel(F9) to see all my windows and then click on the one I want, Tiger does not stack the application windows based on the active window I selected. Sometimes the next window I need is several windows down in the stack which is very annoying. So I found out in this booklet, there are a few tools to help me with this “problem”. That right there is worth the 5 bucks. But, I found more than this one piece of help so I’m way ahead in value vs. dollars spent. I wish all my books were such a value

Other booklets available are:

• Taking Control of upgrading to Tiger
• Take Control of Users and Accounts in Tiger
• Take Control of Sharing Files in Tiger
• Take Control of Mac OSX Backups
• Take Control of Whats New in Word 2004

You should check out the site and see what is being offered, they have some great stuff and they are a bunch of good people that deserve our support.

I got Carbon Copy Cloner to work using a workaround listed on the site by running it from the command line. The “drag and drop” from Desktop to CLI is a way cool feature. But, the #(*#( firewire drive still wont boot. I think it’s just the cheapo firewire case I have. So it’s time to backup and format the LaCie unit which has been on Windows for the past two years.

The DVD software while very limited does work very well so long as you keep to the limits. I got two new books on iMovie/iDVD and Final Cut Express. The iMovie is the “Missing Manual” guide and it’s pretty well written and illustrated. The quality of the book is just like the Mac, high. The FCE book is one of the Visual Quickstart Guides and it is not as clearly written as the Missing Manaul but still full of very good info and pictures. Now I just need the time to really read through them

I have to say that I am still impressed with the overall quality of the Mac vs. the typical PC. The software is amazingly good. Aside from my quibbles over the #^#&AirPort card and the printing. But I have yet to crash the overall OS.

Visio is another matter. I have yet to find a application that works well enough as a sub for Visio and I use Visio ALOT. I have a couple to try that claim they can import/export Visio so I guess we will give it a try. Right now I have “OmniGraffle” loaded up and while it’s easy to use, no Visio support. Correction, they claim to be able to export Visio XML in the beta so I just loaded the beta and we will find out.

For iPhoto which I really dislike, I LOVE Picasa on Windows, I found “Portraits and Prints” which comes close to filling the gap. Not completely but close. Its easy to use and offers a nice range of print options and styles which is more than I can say for iPrint.

Do you have some Real Audio files or Windows Media Player files that you want to use in iMovie. What? Apple did not give us a way to use these ubiquitous formats? Shame on them but no matter.

Hot damn… I just install a new copy of iLife with iDVD and the burner software sees the ancient HP 300 DVD external burner just fine. Excellent news for my swelling Mac budget. So much for a low cost test I was able to create the DVD straight from iMovie and then burn it. The result is one very happy daughter which makes for a happy dad.

The AirPort still sucks wind and now I’m really starting to wonder if I may not have a hardware failure?

At the store yesterday getting software and books, I found a LaCie 512 GB external hard drive. Damn, half a terabyte on the desktop. So how does one back up their data now with these kinds of drives? In the real world, an LTO3 drive will set you back about 3K and thats only good for 400GB on the tape. Buy two and mirror? Fine till the house gets knocked down by an earthquake, slides down the hill or turns to ashes. Which is why tape is still so appealing. It’s very portable, in some cases we have all read about recently, too portable. I can see where internet storage of key files will possibly become “the way” to store crucial data. Upload to a trusted (that is the key) data site and it’s safe and relatively secure. Apple has the idea with the iDrive on mac dot com. But, even with high speed access, it can be painful to upload anything other than small files. Can you see trying to upload a DVD worth of files? 4 gigs? I dunno about you all but my download is 3Mb but my upload is capped to 384K.. ugh. And I have it good compared to many around here. Dialup? no way.. you are screwed with a capital S.

Well.. off to work and another dime

We had the acid test of the iMac today. Over the past two days we ripped about 20 DVDs of different movies to get 5 seconds here, 10 seconds there and so on to build a music video for my oldest daughter’s film project. We used mactheripper to get the raw files and then we used MPEG Streamclip to clip out the parts we needed and to save them as MPEG. We used iMovie to build up the video with the various clips and finally used Quicktime to compile it all down to a DV file. I learned that iDVD is going to be a must have unless I can find something else that ties into iMovie or Final Cut Express. NTI’s tool does not which really bummed me out. At least I’m able to back up all the files using NTI’s software.

On the plus side, the iMac found and used an older HP 300 DVD external DVD burner I had sitting around. The burner was always a pain with Windows as Windows would never see it without the junky HP drivers and all the crap that HP made you install. Tiger just picked it up and went, yep, a DVD burner, cool. Impressive.

With all the ripping, burning, editing, the iMac never once crashed, hung or otherwise gave me fits unlike my Windows box which crashed all the time with video software or went very, very, very slow with the encoding. I’ll never use a PC for video again, never, no way, not ever again.

I’m working with Photoshop on the Mac and it’s faster then my Windows version but they are very close. I never had CS crash on Windows but it did tend to lag some. The real problem was printer profiles on the PC. Windows could never get it right or keep it right. The iMac is alot closer but too dark in contrast out of the box. I need to do it right and see how close I can get. At least the magenta is not way over the top like Windows was. Even after real installing the printer drivers several times.