Recently in Hardware Category

Yes, I've ranted about my AppleTVs world without end!  Well, apparently, one of them was just completely messed up:  the hardware was bad.  Naturally, it wasn't under warranty.  (I think Apple only has a 90 day warranty unless you spend the extra money on AppleCare.  I always do for computers but hadn't for the AppleTV.)

So, I bought a new AppleTV.  My god!  The thing actually works!  After having been plagued with sooo many issues for sooo long with the other device, I was fully expecting this one not to function properly either.  But it works well!  And I purchased AppleCare for this one.

The only thing that greatly annoys me with the AppleTV:  the largest hard drive you can get is 160GB.  That's ridiculous.  I frankly don't give a rip what Apple thinks, Tim thinks he should be able to store his entire media library on the AppleTV hard drive and not have to clutter up the home LAN with streaming audio/video!  This would also give me another backup for the media files!

I do love being able to stream nearly 10,000 photos and music on the large flat panel TV downstairs for parties—like the one held here at the house last Saturday night.  (BTW:  Bristol Farms does a great job catering!!)  My photos just look awesome on the big screen, if I say so myself!  :)

I've made myself stop wearing a watch.  My iPhone has a clock on it that auto syncs to the network.  And, as I travel so much, that comes in handy.  My iPhone is always showing the timezone in which I currently am located, unlike my watch which requires a manual change.  I've gotten comfy going without the watch.

But this watch, with tiny lasers to indicate the hour and minute hand, would be enough to make me start wearing one again!

I just read this from a blog I follow and had a sickening realization:

You may have heard that I don’t do iPhone or iPad development at this time. That said, it’d be silly to not keep track of what Apple is up to with the platform they care for most." ...

[Source: Install Beta Developer Tools In Sparse Disk Images.] The realization:  Apple's core business has changed.  And I don't like it! A couple of years ago, Apple Inc. changed its name from Apple Computer.  I thought that was exciting.  Now I'm not so sure.  In fact, I'm very concerned.  Apple is no longer a computer company, and it's starting to really show. Apple obviously cares more about its mobile platform/OS than they do their laptop/desktop platform and OS.  I am not happy about that. Sure, I love my iPhone.  I doubt I will buy an iPad.  I prefer to work on machines with some significant horsepower and significant screen real estate.  And the iPad doesn't even have a camera?!  Forget it! I wouldn't care about the huge emphasis on the mobile platform if...

• Upgrades to software for laptop and desktop machines hadn't all but died in the last several years.
  • Cases in point:  Where is iLife 2010?  (Apple made a big issue of rewriting iLife 2010 from the ground up, but only for the mobile platform!)
  • Where is iWork 2010?  (Apple made a big issue of rewriting iWork 2010 from the ground up, but only for the mobile platform!)
  • What happened to iMovie on the iPad?  Where did it go?
  • When Apple finally came out with an upgrade to Final Cut Studio, the new feature set was anything but substantive.
  • Now there are rumors all over the net that Apple has laid off over 40 people from the Final Cut Studio software team.  This can not be good as it probably indicates Apple is abandoning one of the most powerful production tools it ever developed!
  • How many years have we suffered with Aperture 2?  Finally, Aperture 3 is released, but many users are reporting huge issues with the program's basic operability and stability.
• What of any significant improvements in laptop and desktop hardware?
  • Cases in point:  The "new" iMacs have been plagued with screen problems and shipping was completely halted for a time while the issue has hopefully been corrected.
  • It blows me away that I bought my 2 x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon computer about 1.5 years ago, and today Apple doesn't even sell a machine as fast as this "old" computer!  The fastest machine on their site is a 2 x 2.93 Quad-Core Intel Xeon computer!  What's with that?!  Their hardware is getting slower?
  • Where's the innovation in hardware?  Apple has been the leader for years!  With many of the new HD DSLR and video cameras sporting HDMI access, why hasn't Apple added this to the hardware line up?  Instead, my computers today have fewer high speed data access ports than they did 2 years ago!
• One company control of my media access?  Increasingly my heart is saying, "Absolutely no!"

From time to time I whine about Apple's products.  Certainly, they make the best hardware for my money.  But I'm growing concerned that their core business has begun to seriously diverge from my core interests.  Give me faster horsepower!

Related articles

• Apple's Desktops to Disappear Eventually? (tastyslate.com)
• Is Aperture 3 sucking up memory? (macworld.com)
• Apple Looking to Bring iPhone OS to More Devices (mashable.com)
• Conspicuous by Its Absence (timtyson.us)

How many times have I cursed the Caps Lock key. I've wished I could pluck if from my keyboard more than once.

Well... turns out, you can with a simple keyboard preference change!

Go to System Preferences and select Keyboard. In this window, click on Modifier Keys...

Now click next to "Caps Lock" and select "No Action". Easy!

Something else just dawned on me about today's announced iPad: all that went unannounced. In fact, I'm concerned.

Where is iLife '10? One of the presenters mentioned that iLife had been rewritten from the ground up. OMG!

The last time Apple's software team re-wrote something from the ground up, they gutted it: iMovie!

What features will we lose? Will desktop machines even get an iLife '10?

Any plans for a new model iPhone this summer as seems customary?

I'm hopeful more news will trickle out from the mothership soon.

And I'm sorry, the word "magical" just doesn't work for me.

You know, I personally think Apple will have a devilishly difficult time beating what they accomplished with the iPhone.  It was transcendent, transformative technology that turned the mobile industry on its head--just as the iPod transformed media distribution and consumption.  Mobile technology will never be the same as other companies still scramble to catch up.

Related articles

• Apple Reveals the iPad Tablet (nytimes.com)

So the iPhone controlled AR.Drone I blogged about earlier (last week) is real. They were showing it off at the CES last week. Here is a video with Robert Scoble talking about it. He say's he will buy one if it comes in under $500. (Jeeze, I guess I would too.)

The new iType, which will be out mid year, is a full size keyboard and charging station for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Cool. I like.

The company will also offer a 2 octave full size piano keyboard for the devices as well.

I guess I'm still a kid at heart! I'm not sure the Parrot AR.Drone is for real if for no other reason: the WiFi signal strength is a huge limitation. The signal just doesn't go as far as this video gives the impression it goes. And WiFi signals are not that portable. You can't just create a network in an open, empty field. And forget ever using AT&T's "fastest" and smallest 3G network! Even if AT&T opened access for this type of data transfer, their network would choke before this thing ever got off the ground.

But the idea is way cool.

This is a clever idea that would have been cool 15 years ago when I had a Palm PDA. In fact, I wished back in the day that someone made one. Instead, I had to buy one of those tiny fold up keyboards like the one you see at the bottom of this post. I'm not too sure a laser keyboard will be a hit today with glowing touchscreen keyboards becoming so prevalent.

The Virtual Laser Keyboard (VKB) is a revolutionary accessory (The only keyboard that operates in total darkness - see the picture below) for Blackberry, Smartphone, PDA, MAC & Tablet PC. The VKB comes with an elegant leather jacket, making it the perfect business / Christmas gift (and just what you want to take out of your inner suit pocket in front of your amazed business colleagues...:-)

In the size of a Zipo lighter and in an outer spaced 'enterprise' style, it uses a laser beam to generate a full-size perfectly OPERATING laser keyboard that smoothly connects to MAC's, Smart Phones, the new Blackberry (8100,8300,8800),Nokia N95 (Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition) and Any kind of PC and Most of the handheld devices (PDA's, tablet PC's)."

(Via I-Tech's Virtual Keyboard - A laser projected full-sized virtual QWERTY keyboard.)

Photo credit: Katsushi

Normally I print up the holiday newsletter on an inkjet printer. It's a horrid affair as the newsletter is always two-sided. Running an inkjet printed page back through the printer, even after its had a full 24 hours to dry, is always problematic: jams, crooked pages, wrinkled pages, out of ink... Not this year!

I purchased a Xerox Phaser 6180 laser printer with a duplexer. It worked like a charm, printing both sides in a single pass. The only problem: as you can see from the thumbnail of the newsletter on the side, it is graphics intense (complete with a graphic of a coffee stain!), and, as a result, I spent 3 days printing out all of the copies for the mailing. The printer had to think about each newsletter for several minutes before printing it.

So I decided to increase the RAM in the printer, hoping that will improve print speed. The printer comes with 128MB of RAM, and it will hold 1.1GB of RAM. But the 1GB RAM card from Xerox is insanely expensive.

I read in a review of the printer, when I bought it, that a guy had purchased a 1GB 200 pin DDR2 SODIMM 128MX64 PC2-5300 module for $12 instead of spending the $400 Xerox was charging for the RAM upgrade. So, I tried the same thing. For less than $20 (shipping included) I'm up and running with 1.1GB of RAM in the printer.

I really like the printer. It does a very nice job. And, all of the newsletters are now in the mail.

I have blogged in the past about how much I hate the AppleTVs here at the house. Let me add to the tirade.

With the latest upgrades, neither AppleTV (upstairs or downstairs) will play the photos from iPhoto on any computer in the house.

Ready to work out, watch photos, listen to music... Well, No. Of course not. I've spent the last 2 hours on the phone with Apple.

The calls were a nightmare, beginning with wasting 20 minutes talking about AppleCare registration issues--AGAIN! I pay money for this hassle! Finally I said, "Let me give you a different computer's serial number. AppleTV doesn't work with any of them. I don't want to spend my time today trying to troubleshoot your AppleCare registration issues." I got disconnected.

Then, on the second call, the automated answering system that "can understand complete sentences" sent me to the Mail group when I clearly said I was having issues with AppleTV. Obviously it can't understand even short phrases.

Then the girl in the Mail group sent me to the Wireless group. She worked on the issue a while before escalating the issue up to a higher level of troubleshooting.

She then sent me an application via email that uploaded system information for the engineers so they can see what the problem is within 3 or 4 days.

The next time I hear anyone tell me that Apple's hardware "just works" or says, "it's just that easy," I'm going to burst out laughing in his/her face.

AppleTV doesn't work. It rarely has ever worked for me without some time consuming, frustrating issue.

Quite frankly, I hate the AppleTV.

Two hours completely wasted. Apple should put me on payroll for beta testing their AppleTV product!

I'm currently flying somewhere over Arkansas and was Just watching my TiVo at home in LA. eBay and Delta are providing free WiFi to everyone on the flight. No gimmicks. No email. Just start using it. Very cool.

I'm back home after traveling all week. When I got home, the mail was way beyond out of control. But I was most excited about the arrival of the Magic Mice I had ordered.

Installation was a nightmare on two machines of the three machines because I had installed USB Overdrive. The second AppleCare representative identified the issue. We removed the software and everything installed without issue. So, word to the wise: if you have USB Overdrive installed on your system, you can not install the Magic Mouse software. And, you must use the uninstall software for USB Overdrive to remove USB Overdrive. Simply right-clicking and removing it from the system preferences window does not uninstall it from the system.

I generally don't like using a mouse. I really don't. I much prefer a trackball. I hate running the mouse off of the trackpad yet still needing to move it further and therefore having to pick it up and start back in the center to keep going. With a trackball, you just spin it to get where you want to go.

With two of Apple's largest monitors as my desktop, getting from the far side of one monitor to the opposite far side of the other could involve picking the mouse up and relocating it a time or two. But the Magic Mouse actually works very well for me and doesn't require this.

If I move the mouse with just a little bit of speed from one side to the other, within 3 or 4 inches on the mousepad I can traverse the entire distance of both monitors. This feels rather natural to me as it fits the natural space my wrist will move in one space.

Of course, I really like scrolling up and down, swiping, moving around in an image or web page, and zooming using the mouse. I'm hopeful 10.6.2 will add more gestures like those found on the trackpad of my MacBook Pro.

Rating: Tim Likes!

Everyone grieved the death of the Polaroid Instamatic. Well, grieve no more!

Books are the new internet. Mustaches are hip. The 1990's are "vintage." And analog is the new digital. The future is now. Er, the past future is now? Something like that.

Introducing The *new* Fuji Instax Mini, a generational twist on 'yer Dad's old Land Cam. We like to think of it as Polaroid's little brother. A lively whipper snapper doing his own thing in a new age of instant film.

link: Photojojo - Fuji Instax Instant Camera

The old Polaroid is seen on the left, the Fuji Instax on the right. The later produces credit card-sized instant prints. Now, how cute is that?!

I've been dabbling with fine art printing lately using my new Epson Stylus Pro 3800 which will print borderless on 17" x 22" paper.

First, the printer is not your typical inkjet, just-click-print printer. You have to pay some attention to paper type (and Epson makes some gorgeous papers!), paper thickness, color profiles, rendering intent, print resolution, and such to get an optimized print.

But the prints look amazing! Naturally, it helps to have glorious subject matter to print! (I was just havin' some fun with the self portrait which has very interesting results on premium matte paper.)

Printer Rating: Tim Likes!

Everyone knows I'm a technology addict. Therapy would be far less expensive.

So I have purchased a new Withings scale in the hopes it will motivate me to eat more healthfully and exercise more often. (Since I've added the insulin pump, my A1C is in the normal range, but I have gained 20 pounds over the past 3 years and just feel fat.)

The scale measures your weight and your BMI. It tells me how many pounds of my weight are fat. (Dreadful) It sends my weight to my online profile and my iPhone so I can see a graph of how well I am proceeding to my goal. I could even share my graph here on timtyson.us, but... well, how to say this succinctly... not a chance in hell!

Actually, though I really want to lose 20 pounds, I'm just barely outside a normal weight (a mere 2 pounds) for my height, and my fat mass is within the normal for my height range. I suppose the reason I'm not happy with my weight is that my lean body mass is near the bottom of normal for my weight. So I need to have more of my weight be muscle mass instead of fat.

The new scale looks very sleek and works amazingly. I stand on it for about 10 seconds and get a digital readout of total weight, lean mass weight, fat mass weight, and BMI. Within a minute the data is on my iPhone and online profile. Very cool.

I must confess to being among the first to purchase the new scale in the United States. Withings has been selling them abroad for some time now and just opened up the US market.

Scale Rating: Tim Likes!

Several years ago I purchased a pair of Ultimate Ears headphones (earbuds) for my iPod, the DoubleFi. I thought they were crazy expensive at the time, but I loved them. They had two speakers (high and low frequencies) and sounded awesome.

As a first generation sound isolating earbuds product from Ultimate Ears, they had a few issues. Getting them to fit in their case wirhout bending them could be challenging at times. (They are designed to bend but then must be reshaped to fit your ear.) The wire was so very thin and flimsy I feared I would accidentally break it or pinch it in two with the case. And the wire around the ear that allowed the earbud to form fit was a bit problematic. In fact, over time the metal of this wire became exposed and would easily scratch the back of the ear if you weren't careful when putting the earbuds around the ears.

I replaced the earbuds a few weeks ago with the TripleFi 10vi earphones with voice capability. The voice capability means the earbuds included a mic on the wire of the right earbud. Additionally, the earbuds have a tiny control button built in to the wire. The button will pause/restart playback, advance the song, and initiate voice control.

This product was about twice the price of the DoubleFi I was replacing. I was once again reluctant to spend so much money on earbuds. Would three speakers really sound any better than two? Would I be able to discern any difference at all?

The answer is a resounding yes. I love these earbuds! Ultimate Ears has addressed all of the previous issues I had noticed with my first pair. So, not only do these sound clearer with a more expansive sound field, they wear better, have an improved case, ear fit, and thicker wire--not too thick, but not at all flimsy.

The built in mic is not just convenient for making phone calls, which I couldn't do with my previous earbuds. I also use it regularly for voice control of my iPhone.

I recommend these earbuds. Pros: They are comfortable and have superb sound quality. Cons: They are expensive.

I posted about this technology which was a competition entry that is now actually in development by Light Lane. Here are some pictures followed by a YouTube video of a product beta test.

In the next 12 - 24 hours some major changes will take place here at timtyson.us. We are talking heavy construction. I've decided to upgrade timtyson.us to MovableType 4.25. I've been using MovableType 3.36. In the past 24 hours I've had a crash lesson in the huge differences between the two.

Additionally, my hosting service contract needs to be renewed in less than two weeks. I've been using DreamHost for years. I've been relatively happy with them through the years. But lately their servers have been running slower and slower and frequently dropping my connections as they attempt to add every human on the planet to one of their server plans. And I must have received a dozen or more emails from them asking me to upgrade my account to a private virtual server (or something like that). The upgrade costs more but provides the user with more server resources. They tell me my websites demand a lot of server resources.

After doing a good bit of reading, I've decided to switch hosting services. I'm in the process of migrating all of the sites I manage to mediatemple. (If for no other reason, mediatemple has an awesome web design team!) So, in the next 12 - 24 hours (give or take a dozen or two), timtyson.us will be hosted on their grid service server farm. I'm hoping for better server response and greater reliability.

Interestingly, one of the mediatemple data centers is less than 5 miles from my house in El Segundo, California. With my fiber connection, transfers have been singeing the wires around here!

So why even bother tell you about this? Well, when I change the DNS setup for timtyson.us, my site may be unavailable for a short period of time as the new DNS information propagates across the world. Not to worry, my site will be back up. The little 4.4 earthquake that just rumbled the house didn't do me in.

And you may also find links that might not work or other unanticipated issues. Let me know when you find an anomaly. I hope to have anticipated most things, but doing two major changes like this at the same time is probably unwise if not completely crazy!

timtyson.us will initially have a completely new look and feel as I rework all of the style sheets that make it appear the way it looks now. The "Pick a Theme" style switcher will initially not work at all. Retooling that code will be the last step in the migration and upgrade process.

So fingers crossed! The transition has already been underway for over 24 hours! I'll start the DNS migration soon! Things will be rough around the edges for a while, I'm sure.

I have two of Apple's 30' displays running on my desktop machine. I tend to work late into the night (early in the morning, depending on how you look at it) When I am working late, I dim the monitors so I don't feel like I'm kneeling before the throne of God. The brightness is too much with no ambient light in the room.

Problem: I have a devil of a time finding where the cursor is lurking in the night. Which monitor is it on? Where is it on that monitor?

I needed a utility that will enlarge the cursor, and it would be nice if it would allow me to jump to the corners instantly as well. (I use corners to "do things" like put the monitors to sleep.

Well, I found the solution to one problem, the biggest problem for me, at any rate. Under System Preferences ➜ Universal Access ➜ Mouse and Trackpad one can adjust the size of one's cursor! Lovely! I had no idea.

It adjusts the size of all of the cursors, including the spinning beach ball and the hand. When the hand tool appears and the cursor setting is at largest, I feel like the hand of God is reaching out to touch me. Sorta creeps me out, so I settled on the half way mark!

Here you can see the actual size of the cursor with the setting at half way. I can actually find it now with ease.

Below is a screenshot of the relative cursor size on the large screen when set to Normal. Can you even see it? What if it were 3 in the morning and your eyes were tired and blurry???? And I cheated and placed it in a really bright area of the screen for additional contrast.

Then we have the relative size with the new setting: half way on the slider. Now you can find it.

AT&T and the Ma Bell monopoly... Hmm...

I recall the difficulty my grandmother had attaining her phone service after my grandfather died, and she moved into a maintenance-free apartment. The newly split up phone company set the stage for innovation but confused and frustrated her simple efforts to get a phone. In "the old days" you just made a call providing the new address and date of move. But in the days of divesting upheaval, she bemoaned the difficultly of just getting a physical phone, a phone line, a wiring service plan, deciding on the calling feature set, picking a calling plan... I recall seeing in her face how difficult this was for her at that time in her life.

I dabble a lot in the digital world, but I suspect that the changes I will be forced to confront when I am the age my grandmother was when she was trying to wrangle with new phone service, will be far more daunting. I already find myself more frequently and more intensely annoyed by the onslaught of digital noise in my life, by the rapid upgrade and update paths, by the latest digital venture. I seem to spend increasing amounts of my energy abating distractions. The younger crowd finds this all so energizing. I am increasingly put off.

This morning (or would you call it tonight) I read this thought-provoking and well-written article in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Johnson. For those who love to read physical books, this digital transition may well put you in a completely different world from everyone else. Will it be a better world of greater clarity, insight, and meaningful possibility or just more overload, more fragmentation, and more disengagement? Will this inevitable transition bring greater wisdom or simply the micro-monetization of the word. Yes.

Hopefully these little citations will entice you to read the entire article, linked at the bottom.

...the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years. ...

Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. ... Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet. ...

[With the eBook reader] the bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. ...

... an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and ... the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for... attention.

... print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading [thinking??]. ... when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against ... distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

The Kindle [an eBook reader] in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has no dedicated client for email or texting... No doubt future iterations ... will make it ... easy to jump online...

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. ...

Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (... every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning. ...

... a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore.. ...

Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote ... instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper. ...

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention. ...

... citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. ...

... will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. ...

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. ...

For centuries, we've had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down ... The Kindle doesn't even have page numbers ... because the pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose to read. ...

... until we figure out a standardized way to link to individual pages ... books are going to remain orphans in this new [digital] world. ...

Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters. ...

[Source: How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com]

I eat up more hard drive space than I eat chocolate, and that's saying a lot!

I never have enough space! I've been wanting terabyte drives for my laptops for years now. When I purchased my latest laptop five months ago, I ordered the largest hard drive available for the machine: only 320 gigabytes. What?!

Even while I am vigilant about purging unneeded files, I am forced to continuously play this ridiculous data juggling game on external hard drives that must travel with my laptop wherever I go. Why can't I just have a 1 terabyte drive on my laptop to make it truly a portable all-in-one device?! It's not even as if a 320 gigabyte drive is anywhere near sufficient for my needs.

1. I offload all of my music, podcast, TV (I'm a Lost junkie), and movie files from iTunes (a total of 260 gigabytes after deleting all but the 10 most recent TED presentations) onto a separate external 500 gigabyte drive.
2. And I offload all of my application support files (photographic clip art, music loops and instrument sample files, production-based royalty free music purchases, and Final Cut Studio support files, themes, etc.) for production work onto a 250 gigabyte hard drive that is completely full and needs to be replaced with a 500 gigabyte drive before it explodes.

Now that I shoot only in camera raw, a single photo and its 1:1 preview render consumes over 30 megabytes of disk space; so, I only store photos from my current photo shoot on the laptop hard drive. As soon as I get home, I take the photos off of the machine and import them to my desktop machine, which has access to 8 terabytes of disk space. My current photo library exceeds 160 gigabytes. My last photo shoot exceeded 30 gigabytes. I really need another external hard drive to make this export/import process substantially faster.

I have had friends suggest I consider cloud storage solutions like Amazon's S3. Not only am I not keen on renting hard drive space, even with a fiber connection here at the house, data transfer rates exceed my concept of painfully slow--so slow as to be useless. I actually now use the cloud to do an offsite backup of my most important data. At a blazing upload speed (for a home) of 15 megabytes per second, the initial upload has taken over two months and is still going strong!

Perhaps I'm the exception and work with far more multimedia files, which gobble up disk space, than most people. But I really believe that today's data storage options are the weakest link in the digital workflow. Solid state drives are now all the buzz. While they are faster, they are far too expensive when compared to disk storage and therefore have even greater capacity limitations.

I'm frustrated.

At any rate, I'm posting a link here to two pages about Mac laptop hard drives. This link contains this excerpt:

MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and Mac minis use a 2.5-inch SATA drive, while PowerBooks and iBooks use a 2.5-inch ATA/IDE drive-SATA and ATA interfaces are not interchangeable. Likewise, recent Apple desktops (the Intel iMac, Mac Pro, iMac G5, and Power Mac G5) use a 3.5-inch SATA drive (the Mac Pro uses a SATA II drive), while older desktops (the iMac G3 and G4, and the Power Mac G3/G4) use a 3.5-inch ATA/IDE drive. O

And this link contains currently available 2.5 inch SATA hard drives of varying capacities and drive speeds. While the prices seem reasonable, the largest size as of this writing is 500 gigabytes.

If anyone has a better solution than I am using, one that is working comfortably for you, please share!

This would force me to upgrade to a new model!

These "lightbulbs" are in fact speakers. But, if they really wanted to impress me, the sound energy would provide light from the speakers as well! From Boing Boing:

Castiglione Morelli is the latest designer to toy rudely with our expectations of thermodynamic energy transfer.

Evidence is beginning to appear that suggests that all of the cameras in our surveillance society do nothing to cut down on violent crime. Yet we are spending vast amounts of money on them to make feel as though we are safer. This video from Seattle I Am is clever and thought-provoking.   

With face recognition technology finding its way now into consumer applications (like Apple's newest release of iPhoto--a really cool product upgrade), I think we are beginning to see that when face recognition technology converges with the ever present surveillance camera, we can easily create an American Gestapo that spies on innocent citizens with ease and facility and with no oversight whatsoever. With little of no effort a person can be tracted in realtime by a computer system aggregating his/her face from all of the video surveillance captured by the ever-present cameras. I personally find this alarming. Big Brother, 1984, is here.

And no, don't ask me to trust my government. The past 8 years have demonstrated in very stark terms how quickly our freedoms can be dismantled by government.

These quotations from the document embedded below:

Violent incidents  do not decline in areas near the cameras relative to areas further away," added the study, which noted the cameras helped police bring charges against six people accused of felony property crimes. "We observe no decline in violent crimes occurring in public places."

Wired, in their post that got me thinking about all of this, states that...

the report did show that, over the past two years, property crimes such as burglary and muggings dropped an estimated 24 percent in areas within 100 feet of San Francisco camera locations.

This might solve talking to a person who never looks at you in an iChat video conference.

An Apple patent suggests that we may see the iSight camera move from above the display to right behind it.

[Source: Apple files patent for an iSight behind a display]

My new Canon 5D gobbles up an impressive 21.53 megabytes every time I snap a picture. So the size of the data card in the camera matters--a lot. My daily record for shooting was over 1,700 shots at Point Lobos after a tremendous storm stirred up the Pacific Ocean in an impressive way. Shooting in RAW on a 16 gigabyte card only lets me capture just over 500 images on a card.

I just purchased 2 Hoodman 16 GB UDMA cards that come with a lifetime warranty. I asked the manufacturer (they're a local company) when 32 GB cards would be available. She said, "This summer, about June." Apparently the new standard has a 2 TB data capacity. When considering the fact that the Canon 5D will also shoot HD video at 1080i, I can see a need for large storage capacity.

I also suspect, as portable storage media gets more affordable, we will see the death of the computer hard drive in the not too distant future.

The format of future memory cards, SDXC, just announced by the SD Card Association - of which Panasonic is a founding member - allows data storage in capacities between 32GB and 2TB.

That's 2 terabytes, folks: about as much storage in one thumbnail-sized device as I have in every computer and external hard drive in my home added together. That's also as much data that's on forty 50GB double-layer Blu-ray discs. Panasonic notes as much in its press release -- is the company teasing the potential demise of Blu-ray before the format even properly lifts off? The spin goes something like: SDXC will allow "consumers to conveniently store more data, helping them to experience a true High Definition digital lifestyle."

[Source: The 2TB memory card arrives // Current]

I put myself on a waiting list for the Canon 5D Mark II back well before Christmas because I was told that even then I should not expect to receive the camera before April! Well, to my delight a box arrived yesterday...

After charging the battery, I rushed down to the ocean and shot my first pictures with it at sunset. The top two photographs are completely un-retouched and were shot at late sunset last night. The bottom picture has just a tad of work done to it in Lightroom and was shot this morning at sunrise.

I didn't use a tripod with any of them! This camera handles low light amazingly well (and even has an ISO setting that extends up to 1600, though it did produce a grainy result last night in very low light).

First shots:

First impressions of the new 5D:

• I like the feel and sound of the camera. It's not as loud as my EOS 30D. It's probably all in my head, but it sounds more sturdy.
• I especially like the info display on the back of the camera which makes reading the camera settings much easier for me.
• I love the idea of the self-cleaning sensor! I just hope it lives up to the task over time.
• I've decided to commit to shooting in RAW with this new beast, and at 21 megapixels per shot, the file sizes are shocking! I have typically kept many of my not-so-perfect pictures for various reasons. Not any more! Those suckers hit the trash immediately after import!
• I first started shooting in both RAW and JPG. However, when I saw the elephantine file sizes last night, I decided to make the switch to 100% RAW. No more JPG! I'm concerned that the significantly larger file size has some serious storage issues associated with it. My Drobo is already 75% full. And importing and working with the photos will also take longer. This will definitely impact workflow.
• I like the larger display on the back of the camera combined with the ability to use the scroll wheels/dials to get to information and change settings quickly. This feels much more intuitive.
• While I am now at a point that I rarely use the quick presets on my 30D, I at least knew what the icons meant. They made sense visually. The icons for the CA Presets, as they are called on the 5D, leave me utterly cold. I haven't a clue which one I would use in a pinch as I would have to find the manual to see what the icons mean every time I would go to use one. Yuck!
• But, by far and away, Tim likes!

By now everyone is familiar with the Zune fiasco. At the end of the year, tens of thousands of Zunes mysteriously quit working. Microsoft is scratching its head trying to figure out why and assures the loyal customer base a solution will be in the works as soon as they can determine what killed "the iPod killer."

I say, "rest in peace!"