I visited the guys at mcetech.com and we will show you how to install their OptiBay which is a great alternative to having your DVD drive on a laptop. I promise I made the video size as small as I could without sacrificing quality.
*full disclosure Drobo is a sponsor of the podcast
Data Robotics has just announce some new features to the already capable Drobo FS. Being able to anticipate and deliver on their customers needs, Drobo has added many of the things that Mac users want from a device such as the Drobo FS. The new Drobo Dashboard features seamless integration for multiple user, Time Machine functionality.
This includes a visual interface that lets you control how much space is used. As we know the native behavior of Time Machine is to consume all storage space avaiable. With this Drobo dashboard enhancement, you get to control those parameters. No need to buy third party applications or to spend your time in Terminal using Unix commands. The other wonderful benefits is that multiple users can simultaneously backup to the Drobo FS.
Drobo FS is available now www.drobostore.com. Learn more about the Drobo FS,
We continue our Snow Leopard from scratch series. Today we talk about Quicktime. We also have a review of the Pico Projector, and an interview with Global Delight software. Makers of Viola
My apologies if you were one of the few people that got a partly unedited version of the show this week. There was a problem between the seat and the keyboard.
Tonight’s show is brought to you by:
Help Victor and the show by purchasing items at the Typical Mac User Amazon Store
This show is a member of Friends In Tech
Show Notes:
Apple’s information on Quicktime
Global Delight (makers of Voila, Camera Plus and Camera Plus Pro)
Voila ( use promo code typicalmacuser (one word) and get 25% discount on Voila)
This is a keynote presentation where I give the reasons for me making the switch to SSD and I also review and benchmark, the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE 200GB SSD drive. I compare it to the Hitachi 320GB 7200 RMP I had in my mid 2009 13″ MBP.
Product Reviewed
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE 200GB SSD drive
George Starcher and I talk about how we are using our Ipad, applications, issues and more.
Help Victor and the show by purchasing items at the Typical Mac User Amazon Store
Show Notes:
Based on my own use of iPad since I got it on the first day, I made an observation on Twitter today. I said “I’m using iPad 90% more of the time than iPhone. How about you?” The responses came quickly, and often. You can see some of them below. The consensus seems to be that like me, many of us are using iPad these days and the iPhone has become well… a phone.
My experience has been this.
1. I use the iPad for to run applications, and hardly touch the iPhone apps that I spent so much money on.
2. I have not purchased a single iPhone app since I bought the iPad.
3. I have purchased many iPad apps regardless of the fact that they tend to be about 33% more expensive.
4. When I look in the iTunes App store, I look for iPad apps and don’t even bother with what’s new on the iPhone side.
5. For the first time since I got the iPhone (I’ve had every model so far), I have thought about going to an alternative like the Nexus One or the Droid Incredible
So am I an outlier? Have Apple in releasing the iPad potentially eaten into profits from iPhone apps? Will people like me not buy the 4th Gen iPhone because I have the iPad?
I’m not going to pretend to have the answers to these questions, I don’t. However, if my usage, and the responses to my tweet this morning can be used as a barometer, I think that iPhone and iPhone apps will be taking a back seat for at least a while. What do you think? Please take a moment and write a comment.
I got a big surprise today when I was outside waiting for my wife to come out of a store. I decided to read on the iPad. I live in Southern California and it was about 86 degrees. After eight minutes of use, I got an error. It would not let me escape or go to any other app. Fortunately it did let me take a screenshot. (See picture.)
I suppose with iPad having no fans, I should have expected something like this, but I have not heard or read about this anywhere else. The iPad glass was very hot to the touch. After I went inside for 10 minutes I was able to turn the iPad off and it was fine.
After I got Photoshop CS5 I was a bit disappointed at how long it was taking for HDR photos to process when using the new CS5 HDR Pro Module. I know that CS5 is now a 64bit application and therefore capable of addressing more than 2GB of memory . I decided to ask my Twitter follower their opinion about this. Should I get more memory or a faster hard drive (SSD) Some people said, get more memory it will make a difference when using CS5, others said I should really go to a faster hard drive. I currently have a 7200 RPM 320GB hard drive on my mid 2009 uni-body 13″ 2.53GHz Macbook Pro.
Well since I am in the process of getting an Other World Computing (OWC) an Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD 200GB SATA 3.0G/s Solid-State Drive for review I figured I would also get more memory now and see what difference that made. I had a big fat gift certificate from Amazon, so I decided to use it on 8GB of Crucial memory, for a whooping $388.99 U.S.
Below are the before and after test results of my Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM versus, 8GB of RAM. As you will see the results are underwhelming at best for the money. These are real world results, your milage may vary: and if it does let me know.
As you can see the boot time between the two is a bit better from a cold start, but the actual time form the login screen until to all the icons on my desktop to stop bouncing, is actually worse with 8GB of RAM. I can’t explain this, but I was frankly disappointed with this first result.
This test measures the time it took to start up some of my most used applications. The biggest bang for the buck was in the 12.2 second improvement on the start time of Photoshop CS5. I attribute this dramatic improvement to the fact that CS5 is running in 64bit mode, and because of that, it is able to use the multi core processor, and access most of my 8GB of RAM. This is very beneficial to me, and made me feel better after the disappointing boot tests.
This test took 3 HDR photos chosen in Lightroom 2, and then imported them to the CS5 HDR Pro Module. The time shown is how long it took for the entire process from the moment I press “Merge to HDR in Photoshop,” to the moment the CS5 HDR Modules finished loading. Although I gained 31.3 seconds by using 8GB or RAM, I was not impressed. This same operations took just 43.3 seconds on my 2007 2X2.66GHZ Dual Core Intel Xeon MacPro with 8GB of RAM (I know Apples and Oranges).
Is spending $389 on 8GB of RAM worth it? In this case I’d say …not so far. Perhaps when I add the SSD drive to the system I’ll seem much more dramatic results. Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that until more applications can access RAM, I could have spent the money in better ways. Let me know your thoughts and experiences by writing a comment.
Today Steve Stanger from The MacAttack and I talk all about the process and workflow for DVD ripping.
Tonight’s show is brought to you by:
Help Victor and the show by purchasing items at the Typical Mac User Amazon Store
Show Notes
The MacAttack Podcast with Steve Stanger
Wired Article ‘Burn A DVD on Your Mac’
Ripping software
Mac The Ripper (You need to know the secret handshake to get it) – donationware (required) – Read the Ripdifferent forum carefully
Compressing to burn to a standard DVD
Popcorn Popcorn – (Does not rip commercial DVDs! You need to rip first then use Popcorn)
Note: if your transcoding software offers Decomb (handbrake) or deinterlace you will probably want to use it if you see “combing” artifacts (jaggy looking edges when there’s motion). This happens when a video in interlaced and there is movement in the video (see these pics http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Decomb#combing)
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