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

This year I received a Canon SX230 HS as a birthday gift from DH. Yesterday we took it out on a hike through world famous Palm Canyon in Palm Springs, CA. I was stunned at the superb job this camera does at finding optimum white balance and exposure settings. Standing among mixed spots of deep shade and Noon sun on white sand in the bottom of the canyon the camera still did a superb job of showing the colors in shaded tree trunks. I have never before used a camera that does such a fantastic job of capturing subtle grades of light between extreme levels of brightness and shade.

The GPS function is a joy to use also. At one point when we were hiking through a narrow canyon passage with limited view of the sky I had to change the battery, this camera will eat batteries like candy whenever the GPS is on, after I had changed the battery the camera was not able to get a position fix right away because of the narrow canyon walls. As soon as we could see a more normal arc of the sky the camera did quickly acquire a position fix. I was carrying a GPS datalogger as a backup in case the GPS function in the camera failed to satisfy, but it was not required.

The other thing that impressed me with this camera was the optical performance of the lens, features are great, but in the end if a camera does not take good photos there is no use having it. The lens in the Canon SX230 HS is the best I have ever seen in a pocket sized camera, and it has a 14X optical zoom to boot. I was using it yesterday on our hike and it did not disappoint. Judge for yourself.

For size comparison I took a photo of the SX230 HS next to my also very nice Canon SX 110IS.

I’m pleased beyond my expectations with this camera. If you buy one get one or two extra batteries. It uses the existing Canon NB-5L battery and I already had a few for use with my Canon SD950.

PROS:

• Built in GPS!
• Surprisingly sharp lens
• Astoundingly clever white balance/exposure
• 14X optical zoom
• Fits in a jeans pocket

CONS:

• Eats batteries like candy
• Costs about $350

RATING:

You can see the entire set of test photos on my accounts at SmugMug, Flickr, Picasaweb or on this server at Steve’s Photos.

written by Steve Rider

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

Two and a half years ago I bought a 15″ Apple MacBook Pro. It was the first model released with an LED backlit display. I’ve had very good results with the notebook until recently. About 2 weeks ago it began locking up after being used for a while. At first I thought it might be just overheating so I started using a laptop cooler with fans. But just a few days later it failed again and would not work properly since.

In this failed state the Apple logo shown during bootup appears much larger than usual, as does the rotating gear, as if it did not know the resolution of the display. Once the MacBook Pro reaches the point in the bootup process where the splash screen with the login dialog box should appear the display goes dark and stays that way. Connecting an external display brings no joy, as it never displays anything. Resetting the PRAM did not help, nothing seemed to help. Booting from the Snow Leopard DVD did not help. Booting from a bootable external backup drive created with SuperDuper did not help.

Fortunately for me I did buy the AppleCare Extended Warranty when I bought this MacBook Pro, and it is still in effect until June of this year. The Apple Support rep quickly agreed with my conclusion that there is a problem with the video hardware, and a ship it back to us box is on its way here to my remote desert physical location.

I had a concern, though, about all of the personal and business data stored on the machine. While no doubt Apple hires trustworthy people with no criminal intentions, there was data on that computer that could be used, for instance, to log in to this server as root (I own this server). And there was source code for some of my ~130 websites too, some of which had secret key information for certain APIs that I use. I’m a stickler for security so this was a troubling issue for me. However, because Macs Are Great it was easy to resolve these concerns. Here is what I did.

I connected the MacBook Pro via Firewire to my Mac Pro, and booted the MacBook Pro into Target Disk Mode, and used SuperDuper to completely back up the hard drive to yet another external drive connected to my Mac Pro. Then I started Disk Utility and used it to zero out the entire hard drive in the MacBook Pro. Next I used my Snow Leopard DVD to install Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro while it was still in Target Disk Mode (you can do this and it does work) rendering it very much like a brand new out of the box unit – except for the being broken part.

I’ll be pleased when I get my MacBook Pro back, in the meantime I still have my cute little MacBook, and tomorrow I’ll be ordering my iPad.

UPDATE: Less than 48 hours after I dropped off my MacBook Pro at FedEx I had it back, repaired, with a new mother board to correct the video problems. I’m quite pleased!

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: AppleCare, Broken Mac, hardware problem, Install Snow Leopard, It's dead Jim, MacBook Pro, no video, Target Disk Mode, zero out hard drive

Recently our trusty old HP laser printer began displaying a cryptic series of blinking lights instead of printing pages. Since the printer was already 7 years old and was cobbled onto our wired LAN using an unreliable print server module, we decided it was time for a new printer. I wanted direct Ethernet support and a price under $200.

It came as a surprise when I saw a Samsung printer listed as not only having built in Ethernet (as well as USB) but also duplex printing. The next question in my mind was whether it would work with a Mac. Well, not only does it work with a Mac, it nearly installed itself.

The printer arrived with a cryptic sheet with visual-only instructions for inserting the toner cartridge and attaching the included duplex adapter. Then it was just a matter of plugging in an Ethernet cable and a power cord, and finally turning on the power. That was the hard part.

On my Mac Pro two rooms away I brought up the Add Printer dialog in system settings. My Mac asked me if it was the Samsung printer it saw that I wished to add (yes, I do love using OS X). The Samsung printer uses Bonjour to announce its presence to Macs. We were also able to use IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) to setup a PC running Solaris to use the new printer. It is a PostScript printer.

Of course for those who have not yet escaped from using a Microsoft operating system there is also a CD with drivers and you can play the reboot game.

The printer supports automatic two-sided printing without any options or difficult setup. On the Mac you simply select the Two-Sided checkbox in the print dialog and it handles everything else.

I’m completely satisfied with this printer, and was very pleased to pay less than $200 including tax and shipping. Woo hoo! Poor HP.

[tags]Laser Printer, Samsung ML-2851ND, Duplex printing, under $200, Mac friendly, Bonjour printer, Network printer[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

I resisted as long as I could. I kept telling myself that since I was home most of the time I had very little need for a smart phone. My husband has had an iPhone for over a year now, but I kept resisting, content with having 5 Macs and 4 iPods.

What finally did me in was a recent trip back east to visit my kids and my grandson. My daughter was having a fatal problem with her existing cell phone, it would only hold a charge for a few minutes. She asked me if I would go with her to the AT&T store so that she could look at a new phone. The conversation turned to the fact that my husband (her third Dad) had an iPhone and she wondered how much it was costing him per month.

My husband was back in California, so I typed out a text message asking him about how much his iPhone was costing. When I hit send I discovered that my cheap T-Mobile prepaid phone had no service at my daughter’s house, so we just went to AT&T and she got a 3G leftover iPhone for under $100. This left me still not having an iPhone while my über-geek programmer husband had one and my Registered Nurse daughter had one.

Last Friday I phoned my local AT&T store and they said they had no 3GS iPhones in stock, but I could come in and order one. The helpful clerk asked which model I would choose if I could have any of them at all, and I said “Well, I’d love to have a 32GB 3GS in white, if you had one.” So he went into the back room and a few minutes later came out with a white 32GB iPhone 3GS, which I bought fast before anybody else saw it.

Gosh, what an absolutely wonderful toy! I’ve been tracking my trips to the store using GPSed and listening to local police radio with Police Scanner. I guess I have about 90 Apps total on my iPhone now, plus a gazillion songs from my iTunes library.

I’ve added a new Apps page to our Apple downloads pages maintained here at Macs Are Great. I really ♥ my new iPhone.

[tags] 32GB iPhone, iPhone 3GS, GPSed, Police Scanner, Apple downloads, iPhone apps[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

Last year we expanded our web operations and invested in a 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro. The machine has performed flawlessly and met all of my expectations up until it was upgraded to Leopard. Apparently Leopard places higher demands on the video card, and as a result the fan on the original ATI X1900 graphics card began making more and more noise until it became intolerable.

It had gotten so bad that the tiniest task given to the video card, such as switching between Spaces, would cause the fan to start whining even louder for 10 or 15 minutes.

We found references to this happening as a result of dust buildup on the poorly designed intake area of the video card fan, but on inspection found ours not so clogged at all. We do open our computers for cleaning every 6 months or so, as we live and work in an area subject to powerful sand storms (Macs Are Great comes to you from the Sonoran Desert).

So in an effort to resolve this issue we ordered the new NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT from Apple. Installing this new card was a breeze, and of course it was not necessary to install any drivers or dismiss 5 annoying dialog boxes about unsigned drivers. It just worked.

Once everything was all done, put back together, and working great I discovered another thread on Apple Support that suggested this noise might be caused by the air intake on the card being clogged by dust. Of course I knew that was not the case on my Mac Pro, as I had tried cleaning it to resolve the noise. Then I saw a photo one guy had taken of the dust clogging up his card, and I realized I had failed to see that spot when cleaning mine.

So just now I took the old card out of it’s static bag and examined it more closely.

Ooops! It was so thoroughly clogged with dust that you can’t see the heat sink at all. So maybe it is a perfectly good expensive 512MB video card. My bad. Maybe I’ll be more thorough in the future while cleaning inside my Mac Pro. I think I paid enough for the new card to learn a lesson from this experience

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple, ATI X1900, cleaning Mac Pro, dust buildup, fan noise, Mac Pro, NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT, video card fan noise

Recently I received one of the new aluminum Apple keyboards. It is the full size version with the cluster and it connects via USB. I’ve never used a keyboard in my entire life that I liked more than I like this one. It is fantastic.

I find that I’m able to type faster and with fewer errors, it is amazingly quiet, the spacing of the keys seems almost perfect, and in addition to all of that it has the typical Apple stylish good looks.

[tags]Apple, Keyboard, aluminum keyboard, review, hardware, low profile, anodized aluminum, numeric keypad[/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