I have two graphics cards in my 1st generation MacPro which allow me to drive three monitors. I originally bought the machine two NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video cards because the two other choices were not really good choices (one was very expensive, and the other was a card which suffered from overheating). At the time the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card was considered respectable, which is another way of saying that it worked fine is a little pokey and was going to be EOLed momentarily.
Last week Apple released an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card upgrade for the 1st generation MacPro and I bought myself two to replace the two NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video cards. The card originally released only works in the 2nd generation MacPro (PCI express v.1 vs. v.2 issue.)
One of the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video cards died after one day, the MacPro just did not “see” it anymore. The machine would boot fine but never detected the card, and the fan on the card was continually spinning at full speed, usually a good sign of a bad problem.
I called Apple and they told me that this was not a supported configuration. They first told me that this was a power draw issue which seems odd since the card is rated at 110W and Apple claims that the PCI express bus supports “300W for up to four PCI Express graphics cards”. Then they told me that it had to do with PCI express lanes, yeah right… what next, Aperture does not use the GPU to help with photo processing… oh wait, they did not know that either…
It came down to this, it just wasn’t a supported configuration. I had no choice but to replace the dead NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card with one of the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video cards.
One thing I learnt is that if you have two video cards in a 1st generation MacPro you should put them in slots 1 and 4 to get the best bandwidth out of the cards. You can also use a utility called “Expansion Slot Utility” which is located in “/System/Library/Core Services/”. This utility allows you some control on how the PCIe lanes are apportioned between the PCI cards in your MacPro. This does not apply to the 2nd generation MacPro though, that generation manages that automatically (what did you expect, they are 2nd generation!!)
A while back I wrote that Safari tabs could be moved around in a window as well as between windows on Mac OS X.
It turns out that you can do the same in the Terminal application on Mac OS X.
Of course, it was mentioned as a new feature in Leopard.
I was happy to read the review of Apple’s Time Capsule by Robert Mohns for Macintouch.
What really interested me was not so much Time Capsule but the fact that disk I/O was very much improved on the original Apple Extreme Base Station. I had run some disk I/O benchmarks on it and was pretty slow.
ps - Macintouch is a must read for anyone who owns a Mac, it is updated daily, there is a wealth of review and help information as well as
I attended the Mobile Monday iPhone SDK Party on monday 24th. The event was fun but packed. I am not sure the Apple folks knew what they were letting themselves in for when they allowed this event to be held in their store.
The Mobile Monday web site has pointers to various recaps of the event along with pictures.
A good friend pointed me to an article about the event on “the Onda by Antonio Rodriguez“, one thing in the article jumped out at me:
…it turns out that the using the radio to send/receive IP packets is relatively cheap from a power perspective, especially when compared to running the CPU at Safari-induced speeds or even keeping the display on for prolonged periods of time.
My experience with power consumption on the iPhone point to a few things which are power hungry. Bluetooth should go to the to of the list, for some reason leaving that on and having a headset paired with it really suck the electrons out of the battery. Second on that list should go Safari and the YouTube application, both are CPU intensive. And third on that list is Wifi which seems to be always on even when the phone is sleeping.
ps - the first presenter at the event was someone called Jonathan A. Zdziarski (also known as “NerveGas”), who recently published an article entitled “The iPhone SDK: APIs Apple Didn’t Want You to Know About“.
I have been looking for a utility like this for a while.
Mac laptops have a strange way of sleeping. Unless the battery is close to being completely depleted they will just go to sleep as opposed to hibernate (by hibernate I mean that the contents of the RAM are saved to disk and the machine is actually shut down.) While this may see like a good idea, it does not work well if you want to change the battery without having access to power as the Mac does not go into hibernate mode in a predictable fashion.
So what I have been looking for is a way to make my Mac laptop go into hibernation predictably and I think I may have found it. SmartSleep is a control panel which allows you to control if and how you Mac laptop goes to sleep and/or into hibernation.
Some interesting insight on the Apple design process outlined in a presentation at SXSW by Michael Lopp (by way of Apple Insider).
What is really interesting is this part of the process:
Paired Design Meetings
This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.
Where you open up people’s thinking (going crazy) and let their imaginations run wild, and then focus on what can actually be delivered. It is hard to see each process not feeding into the other.
I have been enjoying learning about Aperture 2.0. It has been a great help in rescuing my photos which usually don’t look that good.
I have found a couple of sites to be helpful. Apple’s own tutorials are good though I have gotten more than a little sick of the intro music. Ellen Anon has a weblog dedicated to Aperture tips and tricks. And I have recently started listening to the podcast “This Week in Photography“.
It looks like Sun wants to put Java on the iPhone.My initial reaction was “why”. From what I can tell, the SDK is pretty good, though it does require you to learn Objective-C (in itself not a bad thing, the people who use it generally love it), and adding Java would add another layer of stuff between the application and the device itself when you really need all the performance you can get.
Upon more consideration I thought “why not”, it will be interesting to see how well (or how poorly) Java works on the iPhone.
I have been having a lot of fun with Aperture (which I bought a few days ago), and reworked a selection of the pictures I took on my last scuba diving trip.
