“A simple hint for the new Quicktime X player. Clicking the fast forward button increases video playback speed to 2x, then 4x then 8x. 2x, however, is a bit fast to watch a video.

To increment by .1x, hold down Control and click fast forward. I find 1.3x speed works well, and is very watchable. This also works for reverse.” (link)

Thought I needed to share that. Saved my day today!

Now that Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) came out Rebecca and I decided to invest in the whole Apple product range we use. Meaning that we needed new versions for the OS, iWorks and iLife. We have 3 Macs so the family package (5 licenses) is the way to go.

This package costs NZ $479 in the Apple store. In the US it costs US $229. Google tells me that that equates to about NZD $330. Ok….so what’s the $109 difference ($41 is sales tax)??? That is definitely a bit much for postage. So this is pure additional profit! For what? Living in NZ??? Is this the living-happily-in-NZ-tax??? I honestly feel conned by Apple. And I certainly wasn’t going to stand for it. So here’s the trick on how to save lots of dough….

Go to Amazon US and get search for Mac OS X there. You will find the family pack advertised for $199 (!!) or even less. Get it shipped to someone you know in the US and then get them to ship it out to NZ. Voila, you just saved $100+.

Apple is a cool company and I love their products and will keep on buying them but if they think they can fund cheap US sales by conning the rest of the world then their outa luck. I think this should even get investigated by the commerce commission. Wonder who I write to there…

Over the next year I predict that I will need another 2-6TB of storage to cope with added data volumes (I intend on starting to film in 1080p resolution which is about 4GB for 15min of video). Currently the largest available drives are 2TB at a cost of about $300. The issue is not with the drive itself though. It is about how and where do I connect the drive to the network.

External USB/FW drives are too slow for real use (they are OK for incremental local backups though). So the remaining solution is some kind of NAS. My HTPC/Mac (see below) will fulfill that function. It is attached via 1Gbps Ethernet and has six drive bays available and a large power supply. The unit already sports a 250GB boot drive and a 1.5TB data drive.  The issue is that with that all the SATA ports on the Atom board are used. So the next drive will have to be attached to an extra SATA PCI card (which will have to be Mac compatible).

The new Snow Leopard also supports wake-on-use. That means the machine will wake on access of a drive. Currently I still need to wake it manually via WoL. Remains to be seen when Snow Leopard (10.6) will be “available” on the Intel Atom boards with all needed features supported.

The issues I have with data in my private home start to mirror what has been happening for quite a while in the datacentres. Not only does that mean I need ever more technical know-how at home to cope but it also means that something like the solution below gets interesting.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

This is of-course too large for private use but it does solve some of the issues you might encounter when building your own NAS.

One other thing that is hugely annoying in NZ is the lack of broadband flatrates. This effectively prevents you from performing sorely needed and large off-site backups. Currently I solve this problem by storing a USB hard drive off site. This HDD contains a copy of the most important data that I have (by no means all the data!).

So, what have you done for your backup today?

[Update] With the upgrade to 10.5.8 the sleep mode breaks. There is currently only a fix for Voodoo kernels but not the plain Vanilla ones. Very annoying this is. Maybe I’ll have to re-install.

[Update 2] I have re-installed to 10.5.6 because that gives me sleep and Atom 330 Hyperthreading. I’ll then wait & see what Snowleopard brings…

First we need to put all the hardware together. Well…actually we first need to take it apart. The case that is. And that then looks something like this:

The case has lots of space and the mainboard can be easily accommodated. You really start to wonder if you can put two Atom boards in here….

The power supply (PSU) that came with the case has a whopping 450W which is about 4-5x what I’ll probably need. And although it is a high quality-low noise dual fan PSU it still contributes quite substantially to the noise level. I will definitely be looking for a fan-less supply in the sub 200W class. If someone has any ideas where to get these please let me know. At the bottom of the case you can also see two additional fans that can be connected up to a mainboard. They are nice and quiet and turn at about 1700RPM. For this PC though they are just not necessary.

So next step is to get the mainboard in…

Now that definitely looks like a waste of space! And if I can redo that PSU I can really fit two.

The board fits nicely and is no problem getting in but as you can see above I have a hydra problem. LOTS and LOTS of cables to connect. Since I haven’t built a PC for years now (at least nothing later than a Pentium III) I was surprised how much more cabling there is.  So here’s the shot with all cabling and drives in:

I know this isn’t the cleanest of cabling but this is kinda a first attempt.So maybe I’ll visit this again at some latter point.

One thing to mention though is the Intel mainboard fan. It’s there to cool the chip-set and not the CPU! This is THE most commented on feature of this board. Why pair a 4W processor with a 20W+ chip-set?! And the fan is annoying. It is loud and should be replaced. I’ll have a look if I can tunnel one of the back fans to it. They’d be perfect and do a quieter job of it.

Up top you can see the installed DVD drive and the HDD on the right. There’s still lots of space left for more goodies. And the final product….

Looks good and is just what I wanted. A lot bigger than the Mini but hey, this is something totally different. The next challenge is installation and getting all the fancy stuff to work. The old DVD player will also lose it’s place once I get 5.1 sound to work. On the lower left corner you can already see the blue power light. I tested the whole hardware installation with a Ubuntu Linux Live CD.

Noise levels are low but perceptible when the room is quiet. Running are the mainboard fan and the two fans from the PSU. When anything is playing the noise level gets easily drowned out. If I can re-jig the mainboard CPU and install a fan-less PSU the noise level should be less than that of the Mac Mini.

My HTPC hardware is now all working and ready for the next phase. See Part 3 in the next days.

Since I have a Mac OS X Leopard family license with two licenses left unused I thought this might really be a good idea. If it is legal I’m not sure (am no lawyer). I do know though that Apple earns on average $2000-$3500 from us every year in software and hardware. I think that warrants me going a little astray for the fun of it.

In the end I just love the tinkering. I think it’s the same genes that are responsible for grown men to play with toy trains.

So what did I do…. firstly I had to get all the components.

1. Intel Atom 330 Motherboard D945GCLF2 (from Paradigm PCs in Wellington – not the cheapest but reliable & quick)
2. 1GB Ram DDR2-5300 (had that already)
3. WD 250GB 7200RPM HDD (had that already)
4. Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-110D (had that already)
5. SilverStone LC16M HTPC case with a Task 450W low noise PSU

The SilverStone case was a stroke of luck. I got it cheap off TradeMe and it was exactly the thing I was looking for. Eventually the hard drive will be exchanged for a 1-2TB drive(s) but I am waiting for the big drives to come down in price a little and for this experiment to work before spending more money. So far I have now spent just over NZ$400 for the set-up.

The  Intel D945GCLF2 mainboard with its dual core 1.6Ghz Atom 330 processor is a sweet little thing. It definitely has its drawbacks. It only has Intel GMA950 integrated graphics, 2GB ram max, only 2 SATA ports, only one PCI expansion slot, no Firewire and the chipset could be more efficient. But it is very compatible with Mac OS X, has a plethora of USB ports (4 x front & 4 x back), is available and is dirt cheap. My research on the Internet said that it definitely wouldn’t do 1080p. Since our TV is 720p/1080i only I wasn’t too worried.

I would have liked to get one of the new Atom + Nvidia ION chipset mainboards but there’s none to have in NZ for a while and their compatibility with Mac OS X isn’t proven yet. I also anticipate them costing NZ$350 and more.

So by last Friday I had all the parts sitting right in-front of me.

(LtR: DVD, HDD, Mainboard, RAM and USB stick)

and the case…

And I must say the case is absolutely divine. It is just the right size. Has space for (at least) 6 hard drives and can be fitted with fans left-right and center. It is solidly built and the front is really nice aluminum. So I set about setting it all up. It would be a challenge to get all the switches, display and other gadgets to work under OS X.

More tomorrow….

Question is, whether it’s worth the money though. NZ$249 (family pack) is a tall order. If you’re like me and are just interested in iPhoto then it’s probably too much and you should hold out for the Upgrade Pack when Snow Leopard comes out. If you can use any of the other programs it’s probably OK to shell out so much money. It’s not really Apples fault things have gotten so expensive but then does that change things for me? Probably not. Let’s see what happens with Mac OS X 10.6.

For me that was always the critical issue with VirtualBox. At work I use VMwae for most of my stuff and on my Ubuntu box I use VirtualBox. So I could never use the same VMs. Now I can! How cool ist that?! So for all those not happy with VMware Player or the VMware Server 2.x here’s your answer. I’d probably also say now that VirtualBox does snaphots too there’s no big reason for going VMware Fusion or Parallels.

I tried GIMP and it didn’t quite catch my fancy. I use it at work where I run Ubuntu but on the Mac it’s a little behind the times (not the features but the interface). So about a year back I got myself Pixelmator. At the time it was still version 1.0.x state. Even then it was already quite impressive. The current version is 1.3.2. Using most of the native and quick Apple CoreImage routines and the ImageMagic tool-set it really offers quite a bit to the amateur image editor. In Q1 2009 there will be the version 1.4 of Pixelmator and I can’t wait to see what goodies were added.

Pixelmator is not PhotoShop but it is enough for what most people need. In combination with iPhoto I think most of us have all bases covered. Pixelmator has a good chance of becoming a major contender. I hope they keep the price where it’s at currently and cater for the normal Mac users. So go and download the trial version and have a play.

1. Will the financial crisis be over in 2009?
2. How will Obama fare in is first year?
3. Will NZ change due to the National government?
4. Will Apple release a Netbook/Tablet computer?
5. Will Windows 7 continue the XP legacy?
6. Will Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) blow everything away?
7. Will Ubuntu 9.04 bring a renewal of Linux desktop?
8. Will the Ocean levels rise?
9. Will we see the breakthrough for electric cars?
10. Will Israel ignite the middle east again?

So looking forward to it…:-D

A few months ago Equinux was nice enough to send me a TubeStick to trial in New Zealand. I was hoping to be able to watch FreeView (DVB-T) on my Mac. The bad news is that it currently doesn’t work at all. It doesn’t find one channel. I suppose it is because NZ doesn’t use H.264 as an encoding standard but MPG4. As soon as TubeStick supports the codec and works in New Zealand I will post about it and of course let Equinux know.

[Update] Got an email today saying that I’m a little too novice to talk about DVB-T technical things. So ignore what I said above. Fact is that I’ll keep on trying to get it to work. I do want to watch TV on my Mac and TubeStick is still my preferred version.

[Update] I have now tested USB HDDs with my Airport Extreme Base Station and found out that a normal 1Gbit LAN connection to the AEBS is about twice as fast as a WiFi connection. WiFi has a read speed of about 8.2Mbit/s and a write speed of about 6.1Mbit/s. The wired connection gets 15.4Mbit/s and 10.2Mbit/s. Direct USB connection to the drive is about 22Mbit/s write and 33Mbit/s write.

Since installing Ubuntu on my work PC I’ve very happily been using Crossover Office to “emulate“ the M$ software Office 2007 (see below). That does the job very well but…. There are some things that can only be run on a native OS. So I did need some virtualisation that can make this happen. I tried VMware Server and Player but Player is too restricted and Server especially in the Beta version 2.0 is just a dog to run. It is resource hungry to the extreme. So I went to look for some other software and found the newly aquired VirtualBox from Sun. It runs on all OSes it needs to (that would be Linux and Mac and a few more) and is blazingly fast. And all that for free too!

So if you need something virtualised on your desktop look no further than VirtualBox. I think it’s the best program for the price.
For servers and professional use there’s still no contender out there who can match VMware though. On large metal machines they are as good as it gets. Oh and so sorry gamers, there is no 3D in VirtualBox (yet?).

I think sun has a solid product here they can build on. I think in a couple of months/years they will probably try to get some of the VMware market. Also have a lookout for Parallels that is gaining ground fast in the server virtualisation world.

Also interesting are the options in PDF mode. If you set the sidebar to show you thumbnails of the pages you can now re-arrange, delete and insert them. There are also toolbar buttons for adding notes, highlights and the same ovals and rectangles as with images. How great is that? Of-course you can save your changes too.

Install & enjoy some good old HP nostalgia.

A nice feature of Mac OS X Leopard is also the Screen Sharing application.  With a little trick you can call it like any other application and then it asks you for the IP address of the VNC host. Enter the Ubuntu (or any other VNC machine) IP and away you go. Even my two monitors on an Nvidia 8600 graphics card in the Ubuntu system don’t cause a hiccup.

I’m also solving the last little nigglies with CrossoverOffice (mostly by now using Office 2007 instead of Office 2003 …. -yuck-). A couple of days ago I nearly thought I have to give up but now I’m perfectly happy and will stay on Ubuntu at work. Still need to license CrossoverOffice though….have to get that…

Welcome to the nice world of Synergy. This great little Open Source tool allows you to use one keyboard and mouse for an unlimited number of screens. The setup can be a bit complicated but it really is worth the trouble. There’s a funny feeling when you see a mouse move effortlessly between screens of different computers and especially OS’es!!! I think I will never give this one up.

I have it working now between a Vista 2-screen PC and an Ubuntu hardy machine and another setup With Mac OS X and Ubuntu hardy. So if you have more than on machine under your desk don’t waste any time. Go out and try Synergy.