Really. Big. Touchscreen.
Engadget has an awesome hands-on video demonstration of SMART Table’s new 50″ touchscreen for Mac (also comes in a 65″ flavor and can be customized if you need something larger). It’s based on Plasma technology rather than LCD and runs in the “thousands” range, which actually doesn’t sound too bad given that most 50″ flatscreens run between $1,000 and $3,000. I see applications for things like a Smart Home or a Family Planner that handles meal selection, scheduling, and so on. Pretty neat and works with OS X!
Here’s a video of the bugger in action:
Picasa for Mac Beta!!!
WHOOHOO!!! This day just keeps getting better and better! Lifehacker had previously reported that Picasa was being ported to OS X and might be seen around Macworld, and that has come true: behold, the Picasa for Mac beta. BOY am I excited about this! The lack of a good photo manager for Mac has really irked me ever since I switched. Sure iPhoto works, but I can’t stand it. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I just don’t like the organization, the layout, the speed…I just can’t stand using it.
Aperture is okay, but it’s a little too much for what I want for basic photo management. If I’m going to edit a photo, I’m going to use Photoshop. If I want to upload a quick picture off my camera, I want to use Picasa. That’s just how I (and evidently others!) like my image workflow. Now I don’t have to use Picasa in VMware anymore, YAY! Here’s a screenshot of the beta running on my Hackintosh:
Be sure to download the Picasa Web Albums plugin as well, which allows you to easily upload photos & video to your free Picasa Web Albums account.
$799 MSI Macbook Air
Well, not a week after selling my MSI Wind (too small for my hands!), MSI has announced a 13″ Netbook, the X-Slim 320. MSI, I love you! Wahoo!! Coming out Q2 2009 between $799 and $999. Some specs:
- .78″ thick (less than an inch!) and 2.87 pounds
- 13.4″ 16:9 screen with 1366 x 768 resolution
- Single-core Atom Z530 CPU (2 watts!!) and up to 2GB RAM (possibly using the Ion platform)
- 4 or 8 cell battery (up to 10 hours)
- 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, 3.5G Network Card, Ethernet jack
- VGA port, 3 USB ports, all-in-one card reader
- Comes in Champagne Gold, Pearl White, or Black colors
Some more product shots:
Some images for scale:
I’m so totally getting one of these. Wow. I doubt it will have a 9400M since it only has a VGA port; I don’t really think anyone wants to see how a 30″ @ 2650 x 1600 would look over VGA. Although, it would rock if it had a full-sized HDMI port! I’m a little disappointed that there isn’t a 4-pin Firewire port (didn’t want to stick it to Apple too much), but that’s really not what this machine is designed for, so no big deal. If they can really hit the $799 price, I think this will be a big hit in the Hackintosh world. $999 is pushing it, but it’s still $800 off the Macbook Air, so that’s pretty good.
MSI also has an upcoming iMac-wannabe called the “Wind NetOn” (what kind of name is that?) which comes in 19″ (AP1900, AE1901, and AP1902) and 22″ (AE2203) flavors. It’s the world’s first all-in-one computer to sport a dual-core Atom and only requires 250 watts to run (20% of a normal PC). The 22″ model supports full HD, which I’m hoping means 1920×1080 and not 1920×1200. If these debut at a reasonable price, these would be great for a kitchen computer or a nice family computer for basic Internet and Office tasks. I can’t wait to get my hands on an Ion and start hacking!
9400m: Now with 100% more win
Check out Nvidia’s 9400m website. They’re advertising that it has 16-cores of graphics and parallel processing horsepower. I spotted this on a press release sent to MarketWatch from Nvidia with some interesting quotes:
“Elemental’s Badaboom(TM) Media Converter accelerates video transcoding by tapping into the power of the massively parallel NVIDIA GeForce GPU and CUDA technology,” said Sam Blackman, chief executive officer of Elemental Technologies. “We’ve seen that the 16-core GeForce 9400 GPU transcodes video up to 10X faster than the Intel Atom CPU alone. Regardless of what CPU you have, for the best video transcoding performance, an NVIDIA GPU is essential.”“Netbooks have exploded onto to the scene, and we are excited that netbook users can now experience full Blu-Ray playback in the smallest form factors with a GeForce 9400 and Intel Atom CPU with the CyberLink PowerDVD player,” said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink Corp.
Oh man…I can’t WAIT for Snow Leopard, Grand Central, and OpenCL! The Ion is going to be an incredible asset to the Hackintosh scene…carputers, digital jukeboxes, inexpensive desktop PC’s, file and media servers, kitchen computers, super netbooks…the possibilities are endless!
512mb Sapphire 3870 driver
Just installed my shiny new 512mb Sapphire HD 3870 video card (p/n 100225L). Works very nicely! Simply unzip the hex file to the Video folder in your Uinstaller package and install. This method uses EFI Strings based on mitch_de’s release at InsanelyMac. I have a previous article on why the 3870 is better than the Quadro for Apple Motion, so if you’re in the market for a new card for video editing, the GDDR4 Sapphire 3870 sells for only $99 at Newegg. Full QE/CI support too!
The driver doesn’t have much in the way of power managment to control the GPU fan speed, so you pretty much just get “full blast” or “off”. You can overcome the noise issue by picking up a GPU cooler. Arctic Cooling has the ACCELS1 Rev 2 for $29 on Newegg. They also make a pair of clip-on fans for $9. Don’t forget some quality cooling paste! I like Arctic Silver 5, which sells for $6 a tube (enough for plenty of applications and can be used on your CPU too!).
The only bug I’ve encountered is if you’re installing from DVD - I get a scrambled screen upon booting without the driver installed, so you either have to setup the hard drive first from another Mac and install the driver beforehand, or temporarily use an Nvidia card with VESA mode to get to the desktop and install the driver before swapping out.
MSI Wind Package released
Got an MSI Wind? Try my BOOT-132 package: (for BIOS 1.0A)
A few notes:
- I sold my wind; the keys were too small for my fingers. This will probably be the only package I release for the Wind.
- This package doesn’t include the leaked Realtek drivers (I was using a 3rd-party Wifi card and didn’t need them).
- This package doesn’t include a BootCD (I installed Leopard from my Mac desktop via SATA).
EFI-X Legal Discussion
Macintouch has a good review of the EFI-X chip on an EFI-X USA-supplied computer. At the end of the article, they have an excellent legal discussion covering the following points:
- Is the EULA binding?
- Product Tying
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act
- How do these issues affect the EFI-X USB Boot Module?
Personally, I don’t want to see OS X released for general consumption. Supporting a vast array of hardware means that crappy drivers will be written and that OS X will turn into Windows, i.e. unstable. I would like to see the EULA changed to allow non-Apple hardware to be used, however. As long as I buy my own copy, I want to be able to use it however I want. Thus far, Apple really hasn’t done anything to hamper the work of OSx86 hackers…from Tiger 10.4.1 to Leopard 10.5.6, it’s been pretty smooth sailing. Using PCWiz’s tools, I can install Leopard from my Mac desktop to a bare drive and have a complete, fully-working 10.5.6 system in 15 minutes. Obviously Apple isn’t trying to hard to lock up their system to keep hackers out.
I think the primary issue here is that Apple is a hardware company, not a software company, and sales of pre-made OSx86 computers like those from Psystar is taking away from their business. That’s a fairly weak argument in light of wanting the EULA changed to allow non-Mac hardware to be used, but Apple has only gone after Psystar thus far, not EFI-X…and EFI-X isn’t selling pre-made Mac clones. It’s a tricky issue. Technically Apple IS a monopoly, despite what the courts say: they have full control over the Mac market, who sells what products and who is authorized to sell them, and the fact that there are no legal Mac clones currently on the market. If that isn’t a monopoly, I don’t know what is.
But, it’s a good monopoly…because Apple has full control, their results are spectacular. They have beautiful hardware that works perfectly with their software. Their software is extremely stable. They foster a good sense of community. If Mac clones were to flood the market, I think that community would be lost and the brand would be diluted…instead of Apple being associated with expensive but quality hardware, they would associated with every other run-of-the-mill boxy computer on the market. I don’t think I want to see that happen.
Apple Drobo
9to5 Mac is reporting that Apple is developing a Home Server with the following features:
- MobileMe coupled with Dynamic DNS (Internet-accessible)
- AFP file sharing for backups and file storage
- iTunes sync (including sharing with iPod, iPhone, and AppleTV)
- ARM-based hardware (not Leopard Server)
- Plug in modem directly
- Power saving features
- RAID 5 option with multiple hard drives
I would buy this in a heartbeat. I’ve been wanting something like that for a loooooooong time. I currently have a FreeNAS server, which is great for archiving files and sharing iTunes, but it’s tricky to deal with as far as keeping up with Apple software updates (i.e. iTunes). I quit using it for Time Machine backups over the network on my file server altogether because the backup situation keeps changing. One server to rule them all, I say! I hope this is revealed at Macworld, but 9to5 Mac is saying it’s not likely.
Here’s what I’d really like to see, although chances are it will never happen:
- ZFS in place of traditional RAID
- Hot-swap drive bays
- More than 4 drives - perhaps a “mini” size and a “jumbo” size that supports 10 drives
- Ability to function as a standalone server (not soley as a router)
I think the further simplification of digital media and file management would be extremely beneficial to everyone. I probably have 10 computers running at my place with no real centralized sync other than my FreeNAS file server. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have a spiffy little device like this to ease the pain of digital media management. Please Apple, build and release this!
Sync your iTunes Libraries
How to sync your iTunes Libraries between multiple machines:
- Buy Syncopation ($25, 5-computer license)
- Install and configure on each Mac
- Enjoy!
Syncopation from Sonzea automatically syncs your music between up to 5 Macs running iTunes (iTunes lets you authorize up to 5 machines for purchased music). It can sync Music, Movies, Podcasts, and TV Shows manually or automatically. It supports 2 modes:
- Peer-to-Peer
- Master Library
Peer-to-Peer means that every computer syncs with every other computer. Changes made to any computer in the system will be made to every other computer in the system. So if you buy a song on your desktop, it will automatically be synced on your laptop. Likewise, if you rip a CD on your laptop, it will automatically be synced to your desktop. Effortless multi-machine syncing.
But what if you have a huge library? That’s where Master Library comes in. You select one computer to act as the “music server”. Changes made to the server will be made to every other computer in the system, but not the other way around. In fact, local changes made on non-server computers may be overwritten when the Master Library server is changed. You can also add content from other computers to the Master Library manually, just not automatically like Peer-to-Peer mode.
So Peer-to-Peer mode is basically “sharing” mode, where all the computers sync with the changes on all the other computers, while Master Library mode is “mirroring” mode, where all of the other computers mirror the contents of the Master Library. Master Library mode is nice if you want to build a media server to act as your master collection system for a central method of managing your media collection. If you’re at school and buy a song on your laptop, you can simply use the drag-and-drop feature to add the new song to the server when you get home.
Download here (demo)
10.5.6 Status Update
Finally figured out my issue with the 10.5.6 update - my video card was causing the kernel panic at boot (modded Quadro FX 5600). My guess is that Apple put something in 10.5.6 that detects and disables video cards with modded ROMs. I’m sure we’ll find out more information as more people with modded cards update to 10.5.6. For now I’ll just revert the card back to an 8800GTX.
Anyway, I’m working on the v1.1 update for the Leopard Soup 2.0 guide, which includes instructions for 10.5.6. Once I get everything tested and sorted out, I’ll make a new thread on InsanelyMac. I’ve also split the video tutorial into separate sections. This way you can just watch the DVD install or the Hard Drive install video based on which method you are planning on using, instead of having to sit through the whole thing.