Tag Archives: computers

Thoughts

Dumping on the Poor: see the video

I wrote about the problem with e-waste and pollution in China back in April, but this topic is worth harping on every chance I get. It’s very serious, and it will affect us as well, in the very near future. The Earth is smaller than we think, and its ecosystem is fragile enough already.

Please watch the video entitled “E-Waste: Dumping on the Poor” (4 min 35 sec). It’s available on YouTube, and it was put together by a journalist called Michael Zhao, who took a trip to China and filmed what’s going on there. I found out about the video from an article in Time Magazine, entitled “Your Laptop’s Dirty Little Secret“. Michael has a website as well, called eDump. The full documentary he made is available here (20 min).

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Thoughts

What's on my desk?

The idea for this post has been sitting among my drafts for a long time. I always thought it’d be a good idea to share how I work and what equipment I use, for the benefit of those of you that want to put together a similar setup. Let me make it clear that I’m not doing this to brag. I realize my equipment is fairly expensive and out of reach for some. Believe me, I’m keenly aware of its cost, and have made certain sacrifices in order to acquire it.

The hardware I have now is the best hardware I’ve had so far, and it allows me to easily develop for my clients, write for my sites, process my photographs and edit my videos and movies. See the photo enclosed below. Each important piece of equipment is marked with a number, and each number is explained in detail.

Here’s what you see above:

  1. 15″ Apple MacBook Pro: I love its dedicated 512 MB video card, and its design and speed. It allows me to focus on my work, not twiddle my thumbs while the computer plays catchup to my commands.
  2. Drobo: I have two of them. I store backups of my photos on one, and my videos on the other. Both of them are shared over my home network, so that my other Mac, a 20″ iMac G5, can access the videos and play them in Front Row.
  3. 2TB WD My Book Studio Edition II drive, running in RAID 0 (striped) mode: WD was kind enough to give me this drive as a gift of sorts, considering the significant problems I had with my 1TB WD MyBook Pro Edition II drive. I think they got tired of my complaining, and sent it to me to shut me up. Well, it worked. This drive has done great so far, and I have no complaints. I plan to write a review for it soon. I’ve been putting it through its paces so far, and it’s held up nicely. I connect it to my MBP through the Firewire 800 port, and I love the transfer speeds.
  4. 250GB WD Passport drive: I bought this last year, and it has been very useful. It’s small, stylish, and it’s powered solely by the USB port. I use it a LOT to transfer big files between computers.
  5. Turbo.264: a nifty little gadget built by the folks at Elgato, it speeds up H.264 conversions significantly. I’ve been putting this through its paces as well, and plan to write a review soon.
  6. mStand laptop stand: I love this stand, and reviewed it recently. It’s the best-designed stand for the MBP.
  7. newerTech miniStack v1: This is the first version of the popular miniStack drive enclosure. It uses PATA drives, and it has built-in FireWire and USB hubs (3 ports each). I use it as a USB hub, and it sits underneath my laptop stand — that’s why it’s not clearly visible in the photo. Both my Drobos are connected into it, and I have a spare USB port that I can use for my CF card reader, etc. If you want to have a better look at this enclosure, you can see it better in my Drobo review, where it appears in both the photos and the video.

As you can see, I aimed for simplicity in my setup. I wanted the most amount of processing power and hard disk space, in the smallest amount of physical space. You’re looking at about 5TB of storage in the photo.

Most of the heavy lifting (in terms of data crunching) happens on the WD Studio drive. I use it as a staging area for video processing, and transfer the finished, edited ones to one of the Drobos. I also use it to store and work with my Lightroom photo libraries. Working with photos in Lightroom from a Drobo is too slow for me, and the WD Studio Drive offers a visible advantage as I process each photo. I then back up my laptop and the WD Studio Drive to the Drobo through Time Machine.

You may recall I initially moved my photo libraries to one of the Drobos because I kept experiencing Lightroom library corruption and thought the WD Studio drive was at fault. As it turns out, Lightroom itself is to blame. Once your photo library reaches tens of thousands of photos (I have over 40,000 photos in one of my libraries), Lightroom will experience library corruption on a fairly regular basis. It’s just an unstable piece of software, and I hope that the next version will be better.

Just a quick note for those of you that noticed it. There’s a wire that runs behind the laptop, along the wall. The photo isn’t crooked, the wire is. I use it to hang small wires or notes to myself on it, and being loaded down with a few toward the center (which is only partially shown in the photo), it appears slanted. Sorry about that. It bothered me, but I wasn’t going to spend an hour or so in Photoshop cloning it out.

Hope this helped give you some ideas! If you have any questions, let me know.

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How To

A new lease on old hardware

In 2003, I bought an HP OfficeJet 7110 all-in-one, a big, boxy monster that did (and still does) printing, scanning, faxing and copying. I’ve barely ever used it to fax, but the feature is there in case I need it. Now I’m using it over our wireless network with an Apple AirPort Express, and it works great.

HP couldn’t wait to retire this model. A year after I’d bought it, I had a hard time getting support for it, in spite of the fact that I’d bought an extended support plan. Less than two years after I’d bought it, HP had already discontinued it. They stopped developing the drivers for it sometime in 2003 or 2004. The development for Mac drivers stopped at 10.4 (officially) but more likely, at 10.3. I used their drivers on 10.4 and there were serious problems. Switching accounts, for example, disabled printing, and it couldn’t be re-enabled unless one restarted the computer. I complained numerous times to HP, via tech support, via messages to their executives, but no one cared. Basically, HP’s support is horrible, and my experience was no different with the OfficeJet 7110.

Fortunately, I found a way to get more use out of this dinosaur without needing to buy a new printer (yet). Back in 2005, I purchased an Apple AirPort Express, a small device that does quite a few things. One of them is printer sharing. You plug in a USB printer, and it will share it wirelessly.

I’d wanted to do this ever since I’d bout the AirPort Express, but there were no usable Bonjour/network drivers for the 7110. With the introduction of Leopard, however, the story changed. Quite a few CUPS drivers came pre-loaded with the OS, and one of those drivers was built exactly for the 7110.

A couple of weekends ago, I took a half hour to relocate our printer and its stand, plug it into the AirPort Express, and install it on both our Macs via Bonjour. This was after I’d joined the AirPort Express to our existing WiFi network through the AirPort Utility. The whole process is fairly easy to do, except changes to the AirPort Express may require a reset or two before they commit properly. This may only be a bug with the older version that I have (from 2005), and it may not affect the newer versions of this device, like the 802.11n that just came out.

Now our printer is networked reliably and it’s usable immediately from both our Macs, which is something that wasn’t possible before. It’s not tethered via the annoying USB cable, and we don’t have to deal with its bulk next to our desks. Although the drivers are print-only, when we need to scan something, we simply take my laptop over to it, connect it via USB, and scan to my Windows XP virtual machine, which runs on VMware Fusion on top of Leopard. This is because the XP drivers are the only ones that still work reliably for this printer.

What also satisfies me is that I get a new lease on old hardware. I don’t have to go out and buy something new to get the functionality I need. I already spent good money on working hardware, and thanks to Leopard’s built-in printer drivers and AirPort Express, I get to use it years after HP decided to discontinue it and force people to buy new printers.

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Reviews

A glimpse at the new Snow Leopard from Apple

Snow Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X, was announced at the 2008 WWDC in San Francisco. It’s an important release for the following reasons:

  • Builds upon existing technologies and perfects them. It introduces few new features, but will allow Apple to really focus on delivering a very good OS by developing further the technologies introduced with Leopard. I for one am glad to see Apple slow down their frantic development cycle. That sort of rhythm can’t be sustained and leads to burned-out employees.
  • Optimized for multi-core processors. Truth is, most applications and operating systems aren’t optimized for multi-core processors. They’re not even multi-core aware. So while multi-core technology is here to stay and has already made it into all processor makes and models, applications are still hobbling along, relying on built-in chip technology for a sort of multi-core experience, not the real thing. I’m glad to see Apple pursue this seriously and make it easy for developers to build their apps for multi-core systems.
  • OpenCL programming. You know about OpenGL, right? Well, OpenCL will let developers take advantage of the amazing processing power of graphics cards (measured in gigaflops) to do computations previously reserved only for graphics applications. To get an idea of how powerful graphic card processing has become, have a look at FASTRA, a supercomputer built with 8 GPUs.
  • RAM limit raised to 16TB. I did a double take when I read that. I first thought they were talking of 16GB, which would have been impressive, but also a misprint. The Mac Pro can do up to 32GB right now if I’m not mistaken. But 16TB, wow! That’s amazingly high for RAM. Most machines don’t even have that much hard disk space, much less memory. That’s going to be very useful when building supercomputers with Macs. Keep in mind that 32-bit Windows operating systems (the prevalent ones on the market) STILL have a 4GB limit on RAM. Microsoft’s 64-bit OS versions (XP and Vista) are not usable yet, because there are plenty of compatibility issues with drivers and applications. For a clarification of this point, make sure to read my comment below.
  • Quicktime X. Apple’s venerable Quicktime will get an overhaul which will make it much more efficient, and will allow it to support more audio and video formats. Perhaps now we can look forward to Quicktime movie exports taking less than 24 hours? 🙂 Joking aside, I like Quicktime, and I hope it sticks around for a long time.
  • Faster Safari. It will use a new webkit that will make it 53% faster. Nice! I should mention that all the JavaScript used on AJAX-heavy pages like Google’s Gmail or Apple’s new MobileMe is what’s slowing down our browsers. The new Safari webkit is supposed to be able to render JavaScript a whole lot faster.
  • Native support for Microsoft Exchange. In spite of grumblings from various Apple fans, this is a biggie, and it will finally ensure that Macs play nice in Microsoft Shops. In addition to being able to network properly on Windows domains, which they could already do, now they’ll do exactly what Outlook is able to do on PCs, without having to bother with the kludgey Entourage. Mail, Address Book and iCal will communicate directly with Exchange, making it a whole lot easier for corporations to use Macs instead of PCs.
  • Faster OS, smaller footprint. Apple promises the new OS will work faster overall, and will also take up less space on our hard drives. Amen to that. OS bloat is not a welcome thing (just look at Vista), and a faster OS is always a good thing.
  • No support for PowerPC processors (source). According to documentation handed out to developers at WWDC, Apple will indeed break with the PowerPC line on this Leopard upgrade, as rumored. That means my iMac G5 won’t be able to use it. By that time, it’ll be outside its projected 3-year lifespan, but still, it would have been nice…

Image used courtesy of Apple, Inc. More information about Snow Leopard can be found in Apple’s original press release, and on the Snow Leopard website.

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Reviews

Meet the replacement for .Mac: MobileMe

I mentioned in yesterday’s iPhone 3G announcement that Apple had secretly purchased the domain me.com for an undisclosed sum of money (in the neighborhood of 11 million). It came as no surprise to Apple fans when we found out that MobileMe was the replacement for .Mac. Users had griped for years about .Mac’s lackluster performance and puny space available (1GB for $99/year last I used it).

So, other than the new domain name (personally, I liked the .Mac domain), how’s the new service different?

  • More space: 20GB for the same price ($99/year for individuals and $149/year for a family pack). Additional space is $49/year for another 20GB or $99/year for another 40GB.
  • Push… everything: Apple has upgraded their .Mac email service and calendar and contact syncing to “push” technology. I don’t really see what’s different here when I compare it to .Mac, except the syncing is seamless and faster. And oh, now it works with PCs/Exchange as well.
  • Great web interface: Apple outdid itself here. .Mac had a web interface as well, but it was slow and kludgy. The new web interface behaves like desktop applications and looks really, really nice. Not sure how fast it loads on regular broadband connections, but we’ll find out soon, won’t we?

That’s about it, really. The bulk of the effort went into the better, cross-platform syncing and the innovative, beautifully-designed web interface. The additional space was long overdue.

Existing .Mac members will be upgraded automatically to MobileMe, and their existing subscriptions will be transferred over to the new service when it becomes available on July 11.

What’s the draw to MobileMe? For me, it’s the Back to My Mac service, which was introduced alongside iChat Screen Sharing in Leopard. It wasn’t enough to get me back when .Mac was overpriced and underfeatured, but it may be enough now that MobileMe has more space and is better designed. For iPhone users, it’s the obvious integration and contact/calendar syncing between the phone and the computer(s).

In terms of web storage space, the 20GB isn’t really that big of a deal for me. There are PLENTY of companies out there that offer more space. ADrive, for example, offers 50GB for free, and they’ve worked reliably for the past several months that I’ve used them. Dropbox, although it offers less space for free, has incredibly nice integration between Macs and PCs, and lets me share files seamlessly from computer to computer, or with my friends.

What I have to wonder about is Gmail. Given the partnership between Apple and Google, I’d have hoped that Google products would be better integrated into MobileMe somehow. It seems they’ve still been left by the wayside. They work, but not quite. I still can’t sync my calendar appointments properly from Gmail to iCal, and still can’t sync my contacts properly from Addressbook to Gmail (unless I have an iPhone or iPod Touch). Even Gmail’s IMAP interface in Mail leaves a lot to be desired. After using it for a few months, I switched back to POP3.

That’s annoying. I suppose it may have had something to do with Apple’s desire to keep building on their existing products and to develop an Apple-designed web interface (which is quite different from the spartan design of Google’s products).

Images used courtesy of Apple, Inc. More information about MobileMe can be found in Apple’s original press release, or on the MobileMe website.

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