Tag Archives: software

Reviews

Synkron and I don't see eye to eye

I’ve been using Synkron lately to keep several directories synced up across a couple of external drives — a backup of sorts, just in case one of the drives decides to kick the bucket. I’ve also been cleaning up my drive, and something drove me bonkers: I couldn’t figure out why, in spite of my best efforts to clean up the drive, I couldn’t get 100GB free or more on my MBP (total HD size is 250GB). It just didn’t make sense; after all, I’d been able to do it just a couple of months ago, before I filled up my drive with photos from Austria and Romania. Why couldn’t I do it now?!

I decided to download Disk Inventory X, a drive space analysis tool based on WinDirStat, which I’d already used on a couple of Windows machines. What do you think was the biggest culprit on my MBP’s hard drive? The Synkron cache.

It was eating up 30.6GB of my space, without me even realizing it…

Look, Synkron, you may have a nice, shiny icon, and you may be able to put a nice GUI on rsync or subversion (not sure which you’re built on), but I’m sorry, when you can’t clean up after yourself or at least take up less space on my drive, you’re no good to me — into the Trash you go.

If you’re using Synkron as well, and you’ve noticed your free space shrinking inexplicably, you may want to give Disk Inventory X a try, and to consider whether another utility to sync your files may be a better option. I’m not ruling out Synkron completely, and I hope that its developers decide to fix this cache issue at some point.

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How To

Get iMovie '08 to import 3GP files

I recorded a few video clips with my wife’s mobile phone today, and when I tried to import them into iMovie ’08, I found out that I couldn’t. Apparently, I’m not alone, because if you do a search for this on Google you’ll find there are plenty of other people with the same problem.

Fortunately, there are two ways to work this out, but neither is necessarily obvious. Pick one of them:

  • Open up the clips in Quicktime. I was able to open them up and play them right away. Now, export each clip as an MP4 file. You must specifically select File > Export, then select Movie to MPEG-4 from the Export drop-down menu. Don’t just Save the clip, because it’ll package it as a MOV file, which iMovie ’08 will still refuse to import. You must Export it as an MP4 file. You may also be able to export to other formats, but MP4 is what worked for me.
  • Open them clips in Turbo.264, then export them to some format (try Apple TV or iPod Standard, for example). There’s a catch here though. If the resolution of the clips is too small, Turbo.264 may not be able to convert them, and will give you an error. Best stick with Quicktime then.

Now open up iMovie ’08, and go to File > Import Movies, browse for them, and import to your heart’s content. That’s it!

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How To

If Time Machine doesn't work…

… and you get the little exclamation sign within the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, and Time Machine will not back up your Mac any more, then here’s what worked for me, twice so far:

  • Reboot the Mac.
  • Before doing anything else, go into the Time Machine drive, locate your Mac’s folder inside the Backups folder, and look for a single file that starts with a date and ends like this: .inProgress. Move it to the trash.
  • Tell Time Machine to “Back Up Now”.

That’s it. It should start backing up again. But if it doesn’t, you may want to visit the Apple support forums and see what worked for others. Some are saying you’ll need to toggle the backup disk to None, then back to the usual backup drive.

➡ Updated 8/14/08: Make sure you delete the .inProgress file once you move it to the Trash. If you can’t delete it, do a Get Info and make sure you have Read & Write privileges to it, then delete it. It may take a while to delete it, but let the Finder finish the job, don’t cancel it. If you don’t delete that file from the Trash, Time Machine may continue to give you errors and remain unable to back up your Mac.

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How To

If iMovie '08 crashes…

You can try bothering with the preferences files, or the codecs, or the color profiles, as the forums tell you to do, or you can do the following:

  1. Go to your home folder > Movies > iMovie Events. Locate the folder with the last clips you imported. Delete the iMovie Cache and iMovie Thumbnails folders.
  2. Restart iMovie. For most of you, that’s all you’ll need to do.
  3. If it still crashes, that means one or more of the actual clips themselves weren’t closed properly by the video camera (perhaps you ran out of battery, space on the card, etc.). Open them up in Quicktime (if you have Quicktime Pro) or some other application (like the software that came with the camera) and snip 1-2 seconds off the end of each clip. Save them, then delete the iMovie Cache and iMovie Thumbnails folders (in case iMovie re-created them).
  4. Now restart iMovie. It should work fine now.

A few words to explain some things:

  • If a movie clip doesn’t open at all from the Finder, then it is corrupted. Perhaps only its header is messed up for some reason. At any rate, I have not yet found software that will fix those movie clips. I searched enough, and only found spyware that promises to do it.
  • If a movie clip opens and plays fine in Quicktime, but iMovie crashes when trying to import it, then its ending is corrupted, as explained in step #3 above. Cutting 1-2 seconds off the end of the clip in some software other than iMovie will restore its ending and let you import it without crashes in iMovie.
  • The method I described above has worked reliably for me on three occasions now, and this is after I wasted hours on the phone with Apple Support. It only occurred to them to let me re-import video clips after having me try all of that other stuff, including a re-install of iMovie ’08 and also the creation of a new account to see if the problems re-occur there. Pointless. I say go to the root of the problem and take care of it right away, don’t beat around the bush.

Hope this helps you too.

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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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