Macs Are Great!

Over the course of the last few years I’ve owned and used four different tablets, three are still working, one has a cracked screen but still works, and one has gone to meet its chip fab. This post is about what I have liked and not liked about them all.

Number One: iPad v1
My first tablet was a first generation iPad with 64gb flash and 3G. For consuming content it is OK, but for creating things, especially posting on blogs and forums, it was always horribly frustrating. Apple sold me this device with 256mb of RAM, this is way the hell too little, and it made using a multi-tabbed browser session absolutely miserable because it would reload the pages when I switched between tabs. I hate it for using a browser, but it is a good navigation device. I also have grown to hate the way Apple is making their products more and more difficult to navigate at the file system level. I finally felt locked in and enslaved using my iPad and wanted out of iOS.

Number Two: Acer Iconia Tab A500
My second tablet was a refurbished Acer Iconia Tab A500. I loved it right away, and I fell head over heels in love with Android Ice Cream Sandwich (not really, I prefer humans, but just barely). I felt set free, emancipated. I can put files on it and take them off without using iTunes, and who does not hate using iTunes? Although my Iconia Tab did not have a 3G or 4G modem and was not ideal for use away from home, I’m usually at home anyway so that was not a big deal. It was faster, smoother, and Android is much more user friendly IMHO than iOS. It was a revelation that I could have a tablet I did not hate using. Then one day it would not boot, just showing the Acer logo at power up. Try as I might to reflash, reset, or restore it there was no success. It’s a brick now. C’est la vie.

Number Three: Nexus 7
The Nexus 7 completely blew away all other tablets I had ever used. It is just barely small enough to hold in my smaller than average hands, it is fast, smooth, well designed, and very pleasant to use. I was down in the dumps about my Acer tablet going belly up, and there it was, right in front of me, and I’m glad I bought it. Mine had Ice Cream Sandwich on it when I got it, and was autoupdated online to Jelly Bean within a few hours. Among my uses for a tablet at home is watching TV via a Slingbox on our LAN, that experience is much better on the Nexus 7 than it ever was on my iPad or Iconia Tab because the Nexus 7 has a fast quad-core CPU. Everything was going along great. I was sitting outside on the deck near a freeway, holding it up to my ear to hear a weather forecast (the speakers on the Nexus 7 are tiny, tinny, and not loud enough) when it slipped out of my hands and fell face first onto a cement deck. I was not pleased. It still works, but the blush is off the rose. So it goes.

DISCLAIMER: I have strong positive associations with Amazon, a family member is an employee, and I was an Amazon affiliate for many years, operating dozens of Amazon linked shopping sites until 2 years ago.
Number Four: Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G

When Amazon announced the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ I was interested because I was used to the larger form factor, and my wounded Nexus 7 has no cell modem. I wanted to completely replace my iPad and the 4G model of the new Fire HD 8.9″ seemed like a good candidate. Jeff Bezos wanted the Kindle Fire HD to be ideal for consuming content, especially content from Amazon. The Kindle Fire HD is locked to the Amazon Appstore, but not nearly as tightly as the iPad is linked to the iTunes store. It is very easy to add apps from sources outside Amazon, but they have made it much easier to shop their app store, no surprises there. I think the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is a big success. I like it even more than my Nexus 7 in some ways, the sounds is the best yet from a tablet, the 4G speed inside the structures atop Geek Hill.

It has an ideal screen ratio (like the Nexus 7) for 16:9 HDTV, and using my Amazon Instant Video access is enormously easy and pleasing. Amazon’s customized version of Android does isolate the user a bit from the basic features of Android by creating a very attractive and pleasant to use interface. It has plenty of RAM, is easily fast enough, although the Nexus 7 seems slightly faster, the only flaws I see have to do with the locations of buttons and connectors. The on/off switch and the volume control are in an odd place, there is no contrast between the buttons and the surrounding also dark case material blends visually with the buttons, they are hard to see and not at all where your fingers might expect them to be. I’m also not impressed with the idea of having the power connector so close to the very similar microHDMI connector – that was stupid. Still, it is my new favorite tablet.

Since I do have an Android tablet setup to use the Google Play store I have the option to sideload apps I legitimately own between my Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7. I was not at all thrilled with the idea of my browser traffic being routed through a proxy server run by Amazon (or anyone else) as happens with the Amazon default browser Silk. (I do like Silk soy milk, but that’s a different blog) So I sideloaded Dolphin Browser from my Nexus 7 into my Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G and now the world is a good and happy place.

Similarities and Preferences

Both the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G are clearly very well made and purpose designed products. Both are truly excellent IMHO. They both have brilliant, lovely high resolution displays. I slightly prefer the temperature of the Nexus 7. It is the best handheld display I have ever seen on any product, and the one area where the Nexus 7 outshines the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G, but only very slightly. The Fire HD display is crystal clear, and you might have to touch the screen with your eyelashes to see a pixel, they seem to have faded into invisibility. The Fire HD backlight seems just the tiniest bit too warm, with an almost imperceptible yellow tint. Both displays seem to have nearly 180 degree field of view, no problems there. They both work outside in the shade at Noon letting you still perceive some colors, in full sunlight they lose apparent contrast and are not pleasant to my very old eyes.

Summary

This was nothing like a review, which would have matched a current iPad against the Droid devices. It’s more a tale of the evolution of the tablet market over the last few years, as viewed from my experience. Bottom line, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G beats the Nexus 7, but both are very fine devices. The Kindle has better speakers and it has been optimized to do exactly what a tablet does best, provide you an observation portal into the world. I do not miss the Apple App store, my Droid tablets do whatever I need. Dropbox on Droid rocks. iCloud, who cares?

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Acer Iconia Tab A500, Amazon, iPad Gen1, Jeff Bezos, Nexus 7

I was among the many people affected by the late Steve Job’s reality distortion field on the day he introduced the original iPod nano. Fortunately I still had mine kicking around in a drawer this past weekend when I got an email from Apple, unsolicited, saying they thought they should give me a new iPod nano because mine has a battery that might do odd things like bursting into flames.

I found it, entered the serial number in a form and it was confirmed that my nano, ordered before the reality distortion field had worn off, was within the range of serial numbers affected by this recall.

Speaking of batteries bursting into flames, a federal agency used a Chevrolet Volt in a side crash test, and 3 weeks later the car burst into flames, a la battery fire. GM has responded that the instructions for handling their electric car include a procedure to discharge the high power battery after a collision like the deliberate crash test. If the feds had drained the battery pack as instructed the car would not have burst into flames.

Bursting into flames is arguably the worst possible failure mode for a battery. I respect the fact that Apple took the initiative in their case, and in the case of the Chevy Volt it highlights the importance of emergency response personnel knowing about the special handling for hybrids like the Volt or all-electric cars.

Battery packs bursting into flames will likely become a more serious problem as we are surrounded increasingly with more and larger battery systems.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple, first-generation, iPod, nano, recall

There are quite a few innovative and useful features in OS X Lion, the new Apple Mac OS, but the newest version of Apple Mail is not one of them. We’ve never liked the dumbed down interface in the iPad mail client, and when Apple chose to make Mail just as simple it left my heart cold and sad.

I do not wish to be protected from useful information, for example the email address in the To: field. I have multiple email accounts on multiple providers and quite often I’ll receive a terse message sent by a person who has no grasp of context. For cases like that I want to know which of my email addresses the message was sent to in order to figure out what they are going on about.

If you find the new Mail interface as dreadful as I did you might get some relief by selecting Classic view in Mail preferences, but that still left a product that was dumbed down, with ugly, too large fonts in the sidebar, and otherwise a source of constant frustration.

After a few hours of trying this and that I have now settled on a commercial email application called MailMate which is going to save me the hassle of reverting my system back to Snow Leopard.

If you have not installed Lion yet *please* make a bootable total system backup first on an external hard drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (I like SuperDuper) because if there is something you do not like about Lion it will make going back to the way things were just a matter of a few clicks and then a bit of waiting.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple Mail, Lion, Mail, MailMate, OS X, OS X Lion

In June of 2009 I purchased a 15″ MacBook Pro. I have used it virtually every single day since then, going through two batteries and one replacement mother board all under the Apple extended warranty. It has been very good overall, but recently it began locking up when warm as it had once before when the graphics chipset failed.

I decided I need to replace it with something newer and more reliable. For the longest time I could not decide if I should get another MacBook Pro or go with a MacBook Air. I kept comparing prices and build configurations between Apple, Amazon and MacMall. I knew the MacBook Air was pretty nice because I gave my husband one for Seasonal Holiday Gift Man Day in December. He loves it. But i wanted to be able to edit websites and use graphics applications on my portable too. It came down to a choice between a 13″ MacBook Pro or a 13″ MacBook Air. Because the MacBook Air uses an SSD and the 13″ model sports the same 1440 by 900 pixel display resolution as my 15″ MacBook Pro it was the leading contender, but the MacBook air is so expensive!

Then I found a MacBook Air that was maxxed out option-wise for sale as a refurbished item on the Apple Store. That was the deciding factor.

I have had my MacBook Air about a week now and I love everything about it. It is definitely faster than my MacBook Pro was, disk access is blindingly fast as one might expect from a solid state drive, and the higher speed RAM no doubt helps too. My website editor of choice, Coda, loads and runs faster.

I was able to migrate my MacBook Pro to my MacBook Air by using SuperDuper to backup the MacBook Pro, then using Migration Assistant to bring it all in. I still have over 100GB free space on the amazingly fast SSD.

I see no dead pixels or any other reason that might explain why this piece of techno-art was sold as refurbished, but I saved big bucks.

I am completely satisfied in every way. It is lighter, faster, has a better keyboard and has much longer battery life than my much more expensive MacBook Pro. It does not get as hot, it rarely uses its fan, and when it does it is much more quiet. I recommend the MacBook Air with no reservations whatsoever.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple Store, MacBook, MacBook Air, Migration Assistant, Refurbished, replacement, Reviews, SSD, SuperDuper, upgrade

I received Snow Leopard today and have upgraded an older MacBook, a MacBook Pro, and my Mac Pro with no problems at all. It was the easiest operating system upgrade I’ve ever done. I now have a lot more free hard drive space on my two notebooks, making room for more movie and TV files in iTunes.

As expected Snow Leopard is much faster, especially Safari. I also notice it is faster in Mail when I switch from one mail folder to another. Even my Mac Pro is notably faster.

I’m very pleased
[tags]Snow Leopard, OS X, Apple, Mac OS, upgrade, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

will be releasing Snow Leopard on Friday and I have every intention of installing it ASAP. I intend to start with my main workhorse computer, my 8-core Mac Pro, on which I do all of my website development work. I ordered the 5-pack to include some of my other Macs too.

In preparation for the upgrade I’ve just started a complete backup of my 4 drive RAID 0+1 array using SuperDuper! so that I can boot back up immediately if it all goes horribly wrong. I still use Time Machine and SuperDuper! as a combined backup strategy. I have no intention of losing any of my over 2 million data files.

I’m not expecting trouble, but knowing I’m prepared no matter what happens reduces the stress involved with an OS upgrade.

Among my other computers are an original first Intel MacBook, still running Tiger, and a 15″ MacBook Pro. I think I’ll upgrade the MacBook to Leopard today so that it can be then upgraded to Snow Leopard.

I understand that the Snow Leopard upgrade set being offered on Friday requires Leopard be already installed. People not already running Leopard can buy a box set that contains a full version (not just an upgrade) of Snow Leopard along with the excellent iLife and iWork packages. $149.99 might seem like a lot of money until you compare it to what it would cost for another operating system and comparable applications, imagine buying an OEM copy of Vista with MS Office and some photo package from Adobe, it would almost certainly cost $500 to $1,000 depending on versions and any student discounts. And that would not include an analog of Garage Band either.

Price comparisons are moot anyway for my purposes, Apple produces the operating system and hardware I prefer to use, so I will continue to do so.
[tags]Snow Leopard, Apple, OS X, 10.6, release, Mac Pro, upgrade[/tags]

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: 10.6, Apple, Mac Pro, OS X, release, Snow Leopard, upgrade

One of the most successful of my various websites is one for people with celiac disease, the Sensible Celiac. In case you did not know, celiac disease is an inherited autoimmune disorder that causes the immune system to attack the small intestine when a person eats wheat, rye or barley. I’ve got it. Celiac disease requires a gluten-free diet. I also sell gluten free food here.

When I installed Leopard I also installed the Dev Tools and Dashcode, and was very pleased and surprised to see how easy it is to make a widget. So I created one for my Sensible Celiac site that pulls the RSS feed from the discussion forum and shows the 10 most recent messages. It’s nothing fancy to look at, and offers only very basic and typical functionality, but Apple has posted it in their downloads section.

If you have ever wanted to create a widget, check out Dashcode, it’s drop dead easy. And if you want to learn more about celiac disease, visit the Sensible Celiac. Check out our over 600 Gluten-Free recipes.
[tags]Leopard, widgets, dashcode, RSS, celiac disease, gluten free diet, Sensible Celiac, Apple, Downloads[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

For years we have been using SuperDuper to create bootable clone backups of all of our Macs. Each Mac has its own external hard drive reserved for backups, and in the event of a massive failure we can be back up and running quickly. The author of SuperDuper is hard at work on a Leopard compatible version, but I did backup each of my Macs under Tiger before doing any upgrades.

As I have been working on this blog entry I’ve been doing my first Time Machine backup on my Mac Pro. It does use a fair amount of CPU, but with 8 cores to play with, no worries.

The new Time Machine feature in Leopard has a different intended use. While SuperDuper does a fantastic job of creating a bootable emergency recovery system, Time Machine is intended to give you a way of falling back to earlier versions of a document, or recovering files deleted unintentionally. I’m using both methods right now. I bought a Fantom G-Force MegaDisk Triple Interface (1tb model linked, I bought the 1.5tb at NewEgg) and I’m currently backing up my internal RAID array to it using Time Machine.

Time Machine is designed for use with an external hard drive, so it is best suited for use with desktop Macs, but you certainly could devote an external drive to a Macbook or Macbook Pro and simply connect it when you are at home or the office, wherever the external drive is kept.

The real advantage of Time Machine is its informal version control capability. With the source for over 70 websites, and over 30,000 digital photos on my system, I have lots and lots of files that change frequently. While this web server always has the most current version of my web content there are times when I wish to refer to an older version. Time Machine checks your entire hard drive once every hour and backs up every file that has changed in that hour. Files from previous days are preserved for a month, and files from previous weeks are preserved until the backup drive becomes full. At this point Time Machine will prompt you to choose to delete some old backup sets or switch to a new backup drive. Since you just enable the feature and the backups take place automatically thereafter, your butt is pretty well covered.

Once SuperDuper has been updated to work with Leopard, I will certainly still make periodic bootable backups of my system in order to be able to get back up and running ASAP. I’ve also learned in the past the hard lesson that it is best not to rely completely on just one backup strategy.

[tags]Leopard, Time Machine, SuperDuper, backup strategy, Apple Mac, Mac Pro, G-Force Megadisk, external hard drives, OS X, new features, CPU utilization[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

I’ve been anxiously awaiting Leopard, and over the weekend I upgraded 3 of my computers, a 20″ CoreDuo iMac, a 2.2GHz Macbook Pro, and my super mega 8-core Mac Pro. Each upgrade went very smoothly, and so far I have not found any installed applications that no longer work. I was looking forward to using Spaces as a replacement for YouControl Desktop and it is fantastic. Mail is clearly faster, Safari is very much faster, Safari no longer seems to leak memory.

I’ve got a 1.5 terabyte external drive coming that will be used with Time Machine to backup my Mac Pro. In the meantime I setup my iMac to use Time Machine to an external 250gb drive.

The changes in Finder are welcome, I especially like the way it lists other machines on the local network, making it easy to move files from one machine to another.

Pleasant Surprises

There was so much buzz about big changes that a few of the really nice refinements almost escaped my attention. Preview has really come of age. You can now resize images and use a whole bunch of image correction tools that were previously only available in programs like iPhoto. It’s fantastic and still extremely fast and lightweight, programming at its best IMHO.

And in the new Safari when you use Command-F to search the current page the found text is highlighted in a brilliant yellow color, no more staring at the page for 2 minutes trying to find the highlighted item, this jumps right out at you. As you can see in the sample image, I was searching for the word Intel.

The new Dock has really got the eye candy thing going as widely reported, it’s very nice.

I’m seeing no downside at all to this upgrade, if you are sitting on the fence and waiting to hear real world reports before you decide, put me down in the plus column. Using my Macs is now even more pleasant than it ever was before.

I also installed the developer tools, including Dashcode. With it I was able to create a widget for the forum at my site about celiac disease, the Sensible Celiac, it was trivial. See my widget described and grab a copy here if you are interested.
[tags]OS X, Apple, Leopard, operating system, upgrade, Safari, Preview, applications, compatibility, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, iMac, dev tools, Dashcode, widget, celiac disease[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

Having felt recently that my Dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac was getting a bit outmoded, I decided to invest in a machine that would be so fast it might outlast any other I could buy, so my attention turned naturally to the 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro, possibly the fastest desktop computer made today. Looking at the prices that Apple charges for RAM and hard drive upgrades, I decided to order my new Mac Pro with the minimum RAM and disc and do the upgrading myself. I wanted the Apple Raid card so I could setup a fast, redundant disk array, and I wanted lots and lots of processor cores. I ended up ordering a Mac Pro in this configuration:

• 3.00 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• 1GB 667 DDR2 FB DMM ECC-2×512
• ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
• 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive
• 16x SuperDrive DL
• Airport Extreme & BT 2.0+EDR
• Raid Card
• Apple Keyboard & Mighty Mouse
• Mac OS X
• Country Kit

I then went to Newegg and ordered 4 Seagate 750GB SATA drives, and 4 sticks of 2GB Fully Buffered ECC RAM by Transcend. The RAM was explicitly described as suitable for Mac Pro, and several reviewers were pleased with its performance in their machines.

The RAM and hard drives arrived a few days before the Mac Pro, and I decided I would open up the new computer and upgrade the RAM and hard drives before it was ever powered up. Back in the day I built many PCs, and I started repairing electronic devices for a living in 1968, so I have no fear of tinkering inside a computer.

On delivery day I saw that my new toy was out for delivery at 5:34 AM, but it did not arrive until exactly 8PM. The poor FedEx guy looked like he was ready to collapse from working so long. I got out my camera and took a series of photos as I unpacked and upgraded my Mac Pro.

Adding or replacing a hard drive in a Mac Pro is as easy and simple as it could be. You just slide one of the drive carriers out, each one is numbered, and use the provided screws to mount your SATA II drive to the carrier. There are no cables to connect, the connectors on the drive mate with the motherboard when you slide the drive back into place.

The RAM was even easier, just pull out a RAM card, plug in your DIMMs, and slide the RAM card back into place.

I removed the original hard drive and RAM, replacing them with my larger, bigger, faster selections.

Since the only hard drives in the Mac Pro now were the ones that I had installed, there was no operating system available and I had to install it from the provided DVDs. But first it was necessary to create a RAID array on which the OS would be installed. When you buy the Apple Mac Pro RAID card, for the ridiculous price of $999, you get to create a bootable RAID array.

I chose to create a RAID 0+1 array, meaning that my 4 750GB drives would give me a nominal 1.5TB internal storage, in fact once it is all initialized and formatted it worked out to 1.36GB, plenty for onboard storage, even with my 70 websites, 38,000 high resolution digital photos, and 8,000 MP3s. Plenty!

Once the RAID was created and the OS was installed the last step was migrating my applications, settings and files from my old G5 Power Mac. This was so easy it ought to be illegal. All I had to do was boot the Power Mac into target disk mode, by holding down the T key as it booted, then connect the two machines using a firewire cable. Because of my billions and billions of web pages and digital photos it took 14 hours to transfer my data, but once I finally got to use my new Mac Pro it was and still is amazingly, mind boggling-ly fast. I mean fast. I mean wicked pissa fast. How about hard drive write throughput for 2MB files of 506MBps? iPhoto runs faster, Adobe/Macromedia Dreamwrecker runs faster, Photoshop seems as fast as Preview – well almost as fast.

I’m very, very pleased. Yes, it was expensive, but I use my desktop computer more than I do anything else so I do expect to get my money’s worth out of this investment. Photos are here.
[tags]Mac Pro, hardware, RAID, upgrade, OS X, 8-core, Xeon, Intel, Apple, Mac[/tags]

written by Steve Rider