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!
Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...