OSX 10.5.7 is out!

Go grab it.

So far, so good for me. Haven't really noticed any difference so far. I am looking forward to testing the new iCal improvements. I use iCal a lot and am looking for a little love. But, all I really want is a to-do list on the iPhone version. I mean, come on already!
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Using Amazon's S3 to back up your Mac (Jungle Disk)

I have been using Amazon's S3 service to back up all my photos and wanted to write a post about it. When it comes to backing up all those hard earned shots, and family memories, I can be a bit paranoid. I back up using Time Machine to a Time Capsule, the Backup application to an external Firewire 800 drive and now I back up to Amazon's S3 using Jungle Disk. :-)

Ok, you probably don't need to do all that, even if you are a pro photog. And, I am backing up to S3 to get comfortable with it so that, perhaps, I can get rid of some of my other backup assets. First, the cost. At the time of this writing Amazon is charging $0.15/GB of storage per month. Not bad really. If you store 50GB, my current photo library size, it will run you $7.50/month. While you can certainly buy an external hard drive for pretty cheap now days, S3 has several advantages. With an external hard drive you need to purchase them, store them, manage them and hopefully you are storing some of them off site. You aren't keeping all your backups the same place you keep your computer are you? With Amazon's S3 you are keeping your data right along side of theirs. It is distributed across countries, highly reliable (up time) and accessible anywhere. Now, there are......

Now, there are also fees they charge for transferring of data and fees for certain requests made. However, I don't mention these because it is the long time storage that really matters. The amount of time you spend putting your data up there and retrieving it is nothing compared to the cost of the data just sitting up there are their servers. But, you will want to go check out those number on Amazon's S3 site. Currently there is a special going on for $0.03/GB transfer in, but the normal price is around $0.10/GB transfer in. Again, once you get your data up there, you don't pay those numbers.

On to how you get your data up there. The big thing about Amazon's S3 that throws most people off is that you can not interact with it directly. Amazon provides developers an API that you can use to store and retrieve data blobs, as I will call them, but they do not provide any user interface or web page (yet) that you can use to look at, store or retrieve data. So, you need to find some 3rd party application that can do that for you. These applications will take that Amazon API interface and present it to you in a way you, and your applications, are familiar with. For example, they might show it as an FTP site, an external mounted disk image, etc. The good news is that there are many such apps. Some are free, some are not. While I have played with several, I happen to be using Jungle Disk, which costs a one time fee of $20. For $20 you get unlimited lifetime upgrades to new versions and you can install it on as many Mac, Windows or Linux boxes as you want.

Jungle Disk itself is very straight forward, so I am not going to get into it really. It acts just like any other backup software. Which is good, it should be as transparent as possible. You should not know or care that the backup is going up to Amazon as opposed to a local USB disk. There are a couple wrinkles though I will point out. First, you need to setup the Amazon account and tie it with Jungle Disk. You can do this through the user interface of Jungle Disk or through Amazon itself. I first made my account with Amazon S3 because I wanted to play with many different applications for Amazon S3 back up before deciding on one.

The next little wrinkle you will run into is the time it takes to do your first back up. Think days here. I have a pretty fast Comcast Cable internet connection with out 2MB uplink speed. My first 67GB upload took 3 days. So, just be ready for that. Your uplink internet connection simply is very slow compared to your downlink speed. But, after your first back up you will only be uploading new files and files that have changed.

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iMac with ATI 4850 FIX IS OUT!

Run software update and grab the "iMac EFI Firmware Update 1.4". It fixes the freezes on the new 2009 iMacs with the ATI 4850!

Update 1:

Just a quick note. I have played Fallout 3 under bootcamp, World of Warcraft under OSX with no  crashes. Also it seems to run cooler all of the time without any extra noise.

Update 2:

Well, I just put in another 4 hours of Fallout 3 with no problems. The iMac stay quiet under all playing conditions it seems, which is really nice. So, I guess it wasn't a straight heat issue. I also got in another hour with Wow with the graphics setting cranked up to 'ultra'. Not that Wow really pushes anything.

Update 3: 

At 24 hours now and I would normally have had about 3 freezes or more. But I have not had one so far. I really think they got a good fix here. I am very happy with it and am glad I did not take my box in to get it fixed or replaced.

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2009 iMac, ATI 4850 freezing. Is it wireless, not completely.

So, I have been playing with my iMac, trying to figure out why it keeps freezing up on me under OSX and crashing under boot camp. Like many other owners of the new 2009 iMacs with the ATI 4850 graphics card I have been suffering from numerous freezes and crashes. I thought it was heat related since I never hear my fans speed up as things get hot. So, I downloaded a fan control program and cranked it up. However, while trying to do a Jungle Disk back up to Amazon s3, it hung again, twice. So, freezes and no backups. Great. This is with wireless on. So, I book into boot camp and turn off the wireless adaptor, since I don't need it to play games. I still get crashes. I will have to say though, that the crashes don't happen as often. I was able to play for a few hours at a time, before I turned off the wireless adaptor, it was 30 minutes at most.
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iMac/ATI 4850 lockups, GPU heat problems?

Yup, I am seeing lockups now pretty often on my early 2009 ATI 4850 iMac. It seem to happen when the graphics card, GPU, get up above 65 degrees C. I have never seen it get above 70 degrees yet, but it doesn't seem to take much over 65. I had 2 complete lockups in OS X today( EveOnline and Safari) and 2 crashes under boot camp (fallout 3).

According to AppleInsider: Apple may already be aware of the issue. Some of those calling the company's support line have heard from technicians that there are numerous reports and that a fix is in the works, possibly arriving along with the looming Mac OS X 10.5.7 update. Some are being offered replacement systems after unsuccessful troubleshooting.
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iMac with ATI 4850 Causing lockup in Aperture/corrupt Database

So, I am now regularly getting crashes in Aperture 2. My old iMac has been running Aperture for over a year with no crashes at al. This is new behavior with my new iMac that has the ATI 4850. It starts with strange graphics glitches that look like colored lines running across the screen, see full size photo above. These are usually off green in color and usually run horizontally. The can be from an inch or two long to the width of the whole photo. These will appear only in some photos, not all. After a while of that it is only a matter of time before the whole machine freezes and you have to power off. Doing this while editing photo is causing me Aperture database corruption which, while so far has not caused a loss of photos, does take forever to rebuild the database. Not good for trying to get any work done.




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iMac ATI 4850 Crashes and Graphics Problems (glitches)

So, I am not starting to see problems with, what I think, is the ATI drivers for the ATI 4850 in the new iMacs. Look at the picture upper left in this post here and look at the upper right corner. See that greenish line, it isn't part of the image. That picture is part of a screen shot taken from within Aperture 2. I have seen that with other images, If I exit and come back into Aperture it is gone. The line moves around too and grows and shrinks in size for different pictures. I am also seeing crashes and freezes....

I am also seeing crashes and freezes in OSX now. I was using Aperture and had moved to a new picture when the whole system just froze. No response from anything. I had to power off the iMac and power back on to recover. I, again, am seeing more crashes in boot camp, this time in Fallout 3, had to reboot.

OSX 10.5.7 is due at "any time now(TM)". Lets hope they roll out new ATI drivers for both OSX and boot camp.  Here is a picture of the full aperture session.

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Aperture and ATI 4850 iMacs

So, I have been using my new ATI equipped iMac for a few days now and have done a good amount of photo editing using Aperture 2. I am very happy with the performance. My library, right now, is about seven thousand pictures (all 12.1 MP). On my old iMac I use to have lots of stutters and pauses while I adjusted certain sliders. That has all gone away now. I don't even have to use 'preview' mode while traveling between photos, I just let it go ahead and load the RAW masters for each photo. That is fast. Now, I have never used Aperture on a MacPro. I guess that would be even nicer. But, I don't get paid for taking photos so I can't really justify that. However, unless I start working on video (come on 5D Mark II!) I can't imagine needed a stronger box.

Now, everyone is talking about the glossy screen and....



Now, everyone is talking about the glossy screen and photo editing. Again, I am no pro, and I am just getting into soft-proofing for print labs, but I love the glossy. My old iMac had a matte finish. The glossy screen just looks SO NICE that I can find a way to work around any color problems I might run into. The glossy screen is great for everything else I do like games, photo slideshows (they rock glossy) and everything else OSX related. I don't have problems with reflections like I thought I would. So far that is. At work, I have 3 or 4 19" matte monitors and I sit next to a window. I always have to keep the window closed because of reflections, so I am bothered by them in general.

To sum up, I don't think I will ever go back to a matte screen again, that is how good the glossy makes everything look, even if it is a distorted view of reality. I will reconsider if it ends up getting in the way of photo print lab stuff, but in that case I would probably just run a second monitor with my iMac that is matte.

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Do I secretly have OSX 10.5.7?

So, I ordered a new 2009 iMac, 3GHz, with the new ATI 4850. Now, I, along with everyone else who ordered one, had to wait 6-8 weeks for it to get shipped. While Apple never said anything officially, I wrote, in previous posts, that I suspected the wait was for them to get new ATI drivers in the kernel of OSX to support that new card. So, we had to wait for the public release of OSX 10.5.7. So, last Friday when I got an email from Apple saying that had shipped my new iMac, I just assumed that OSX 10.5.7 was out the door. But, when I received my new iMac that was the first thing I checked and it still says 10.5.6. However....

However, I have been noticing some differences between my new iMac and my old one sitting right next to it. For example, the preference pane is different between the two. On my new iMac the power pane is all in one instead of two separate tabs like it is on my old one. Plus, the obvious, that my new ATI card is running fine (and really really FAST). I guess the only way to tell for sure is to wait for 10.5.7 to come out and see if I get hit with the expected 400+MB download (10.5.6->10.5.7 upgrade) or if it comes across as something very small, like a simple string change.

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Gaming with the iMac, ATI 4850 and BootCamp

So, I got my new 24" iMac all setup, backed up and patched. The very next thing I did was get BootCamp installed. For those that don't know, that is how you run Windows (XP or Vista) on an iMac natively, in its own partition and at full speed. Basically, games. I installed Supreme Commander, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Fallout 3, BioShock, World of Goo and Portal so far. On the OSX side, I installed World of Warcraft and Eve Online. Read more to find out my initial impressions of game playing on these iMacs with the very nice ATI 4850.

I have had only (only?) one lock up so far. It was under BootCamp (Windows XP SP2) running BioShock. However, before it locked up it was SO beautiful. I am running it at full resolution, 1900x1200 wide sreen, with every single bell and whistle turned on and getting very very good frame rates. Looks so nice compared to my old iMac. My only gripe with it is with the mouse sensitivity. I am not sure why, but if you up the sensitivity of the mouse, the movement of the graphics, as you pan around, gets a bit 'jagged'. Setting the mouse sensitivity to 1, no boost, makes it go away. Not too big of a deal for me, but I generally like to crank it up. I don't remember seeing this when I played it on my old iMac, but I had to have a lot of the graphics options turned down there.

Next up was Microsoft's Flight Simulator X, with Service Pack 2. This is another game I ran extensively on my last iMac. On that old machine I had to turn down most of the graphics to get decent frame rate. Not a problem since I used it mostly for IFR training, so all you saw was grey clouds. On the new iMac with the ATI 4850, I have turned up the graphics to Ultra High settings and drive it at 1900x1200 with no problems at all. I guess all that rain and clouds will look really good now. :)

I also ran Fallout 3, which looked very nice and had no problems at all. Again, every graphics option is set at the highest and it runs smooth as silk. Very nice.

I am going to hook up my 32" HDTV to the new iMac as a second monitor and use it in Supreme Commander. I will post another separate article on that since I will be also using the 2nd monitor for Aperture 2 and other OSX based apps, not just games.

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New iMac with ATI 4850 is here!

Well, Its here, and it is HEAVY. Now I just have to get it home and do the whole migration assistant thing. Well, I actually have a couple choices for getting all my apps and stuff off of the old iMac. I have a the old iMac and a Time Capsule backup of it. So, I can take my apps and data (20 GB of music and about 70 GB of photos) from the Time Capsule or from my old iMac. In addition, I can boot my old iMac like normal, or boot it in 'targeted disk mode', which just makes it look like any other external hard drive. Now, for both of these options, I can choose to connect my new iMac to the other machine via USB, FireWire 800 or ethernet cable. Not sure which one I am going to do yet. I hear that USB is the slowest for sure. But, I have hear different reports as to which is fastest between the ethernet cable and Firewire 800. I will let you know which I go with, how much data I transfered and how long it takes. More photos below.

Also of note, if you have the modern Intel iMac/MacBooks, you don't need an ethernet cross over cable, you can just use any old random ethernet cable and the macs will auto-detect what kind it is. Pretty cool

Here is a comparison to my last iMac ( 20" white original Intel ).

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iMacs with the ATI 4850 are shipping!!!

I just got an email that says my new iMac with the ATI 4850 has shipped! So, they are on their way folks.

that must also mean that OSX 10.5.7 must be available now or in a day or two. So, keep checking your software update to get all the yummy updates.

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Full Frame Digital Cameras and the Megapixel Race

So, when I first got into this money pit called photography I get myself a Canon 450d (xsi). It really does more then I need right now except for the form factor. Now that I carry it all the time I find that it is too small of a camera body to be comfortable in my hand. So, I am looking for a replacement. The problem is that I want some newer camera, with a sensor cleaner and a big bright LCD display on the back. For canon, that means a 50d or 5d mark ii. However, while the 50d is reasonably priced I think they have just gone too far with 'selling megapixels'. Take a look at this data [original data from The Digital Picture] to see what I am talking about:

Model FOVCF Pixel Size Megapixels

Canon XSi / 450D 1.6x 5.2µm 12.2

Canon 50D 1.6x 4.7µm 15.1

Canon 40D 1.6x 5.7µm 10.1

Canon 5D Mark II 1.0x 6.4µm 21.1

Canon 5D 1.0x 8.2µm 12.8

Now you can see what has been happening with the newer cameras, the per pixel size has been decreasing rapidly. The only thing this means to me is more noise and less saturated colors. I don't need that. At 12.2 MP my XSI already is already good enough to print out 12"x18" with no trouble at all. I am sure it can go much higher, 20" or even 30", but I print at Costco Photo and I can't print larger then 12"x18" and still pick them up in the store.

So, I am stuck with either getting a cropped sensor 50D, which has crossed the 5 micro meter barrier or a full frame 5D Mark II which costs $2600 street right now. I am sure the price will come down on it, but not for a while. The 5D Mark II is still flying off the shelves and they can't keep them in stock. So, I am looking at about 6 months before the normal Canon price drop (or used ones show up).

The 50d has only 90% of the pixel size of my current 450d and only 82% of the 40d is replaces. I see people already complaining about the colors captured by the 50d. So, I am kind of stuck. I feel like I should just wait for the megapixel wars to get over and the manufactures to get back to competing on the quality of the captured images. Both the original 5d, around $1499 used, and the 40d, around $900 new, have great images, great noise levels and colors. But, they both lack some of the modern features I want.

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New iMac with the ATI 4850 Graphics Card

So, the day Apple announced the new iMacs I ordered one. I customized it a bit, off of their web site by upgrading it to a 3 Ghz Core 2 duo and upgrading the graphics card to something I can use for gaming and Aperture. The problem is, as soon as I did that the ship date went from 24 hours to 4-6 weeks! Man, I hate waiting. Anyway, as best as I can figure out, the problem lies in the fact that they do not have drivers for the ATI 4850 in the kernel yet, so we have to wait for the next version of OSX to get released. That version will be 10.5.7. I have seen steady releases of 10.5.7 to developers, almost every week. So, no doubt it will be ready soon. My order status still shows April 14th, 2009 as the ship date; happy tax day it will be!
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Sunsets and Mohawks

It was a nice warm evening out on Alki beach in Seattle. I wish I had a flash then, but it turned out nice with the colors in the sky and all.

It was taken with a canon 450d(XSi) and I think my 'nifty fifty'(50mm f1.8 prime lens). The original is hanging in the Gutenberg, but I will sell you a full size copy of the above is you want.

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Earth Hour a Real Bust.

[Photo by Ellen Banner of the Seattle Times, until I can get mine up]

So, a friend and I went up to Kerry Park here in Seattle to take some before and after pictures of Seattle. Big let down. If you don't know, Earth Hours is where cities around the world turn off their lights from 8:30-9:30PM local time. Also, if you don't know, Kerry Park is the spot to take pictures of Seattle, you have the Space Needle and Mt. Rainier in background (during the day). It is where all those famous postcard pictures are taken of Seattle. Anyway, at 8:30 the Space Needle went dark, that was about it. I think the Wa-Mu tower was dark, but I think they started that way as it looked dark when we got there around 8PM. Pretty lame attempt at Earth Hour for a city that is suppose to be really green.

Besides, I froze my butt off up there standing by my tripod that hour we were there....

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Welcome

Welcome to "A to the 420K".

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