Monthly Archives: August 2012

A fortnight with Mountain Lion

OS X

Robust and trouble free.

I published some early performance data for Mountain Lion on the Hackintosh a couple of weeks ago here, having earlier cautioned against early adoption owing to possible incompatibilities with older 32-bit applications.

Thus I determined to run Mountain Lion off back-up drives on three machines – the 2012 MacBook Air and my two Hackintoshes, HP100 and HP10. The latter pair use Gigabyte Z68X-UD2H-B3 motherboards, with Nvidia 9800GTX+ and GT430 twin monitor graphics cards, respectively. HP100 adds a third monitor via a DisplayLink USB dongle. The HP100 sports an i7 Sandy Bridge CPU, overclocked from 3.4GHZ to 4.4GHZ and the HP10 makes do with a modest i3 Sandy Bridge which cannot be overclocked, but serves just fine for streaming market data.

During the past two weeks I have used all three machines heavily at both my day job where I invest money and for processing my pictures using LR 4.1 and PS CS5.

It’s been pretty smooth sailing. All app vendors whom I favor have made sure their apps work with Mountain Lion with the natural exception of Xrite which prides itself on always being last, claiming they need to ‘test more’, even though Mountain Lion has gone through four Developer Previews in the six months before release. But that’s hardly news coming from a monopolist in the field of colorimeters – Huey, Eye1, Spyder – all Xrite, sadly. Still, while they screw around and generally act in their usual inept manner, you can be comforted with the knowledge that the Eye 1 display profiling app works perfectly fine with Mountain Lion, no thanks to Xrite, and likely unknown to them ….

As of today I am switching to Mountain Lion as the production OS on those three computers. It has proved bug free, robust and some of the enhancements are more than just eye candy. The addition of AirPlay, which permits anything on your screen to be routed to your TV to which an AppleTV is connected, is a tremendous value added and has all the TV companies searching for a change of underwear. Notifications and the ability to tailor these easily to your preference, are another great iOS feature which was overdue on the desktop. Safari is greatly improved, which probably says more about how dated it was with Lion, and installing Mountain Lion on a Hackintosh has never been easier. Overall speed may be a smidge slower than with the last version of Lion but it’s no big deal and my experience has shown that Apple generally speeds up a major OS as minor releases come along. CPU operating temperatures are unchanged from those seen in Lion.

I have had only one glitch and that was self-inflicted. The i7 Sandy Bridge overclocks easily up to 4.4GHz from 3.4GHz in stock form and when importing pictures and generating 1:1 previews in Lightroom on HP100, while simultaneously developing the early imports (hey, why wait?) I got a kernel panic. Turning down the CPU clock by some 2.5% to 4.3GHz solved the issue and while I could easily get to 4.5GHz or higher by messing with core voltages and a myriad of other variables in the BIOS, the return on effort and lower life span of the CPU mean I will not be going there. The machine is as fast as can be for my purposes.

So there are two messages from this experience:

  • Once you are satisfied that your favorite apps will work, it’s safe to upgrade
  • There has never been a better time to build a Hackintosh

A few more from Filoli

Photographs

How to live well.

Bell pull annunciator panel in the butler’s pantry.
Even the guest bathrooms had bell pulls!

Outstanding literary taste – WSC’s oeuvre.

Old growth, reminiscent of the exhaust pipes on the V12 Ferrari Formula 1 312 of the early ’70s.

Worn balustrade.

For the Filoli story click here. All snapped on the Panny G3 with the kit lens.

A friend writes: My family has some experience with the Bourns. Mr. Bourn made his fortune in gold up here at the Empire Mine in Grass Valley. They have a beautiful stone house here (Empire Mine State Historic Park) and my dad was a docent and tended the rose garden. My grandmother was a chef for the Bourns, but worked primarily at their San Francisco home. She was an excellent chef and worked for several notable people. When I was growing up, H. Liebes department store was a major store in downtown S.F. My grandmother was Mrs. Liebes’s personal chef and had a room at the Fairmont Hotel. (Mrs. Liebes lived in a penthouse at the top.)

The Pulgas Temple

Photographs

A curious monument.

Drive a mile or so North of the entrance to the magnificent country estate that is Filoli and your eye will be caught by a curious Greek revival temple of improbable proportions, seemingly stuck in the middle of nowhere. The Pulgas Temple is actually nothing more or less than a tribute to the great civil and mechanical engineers who make it possible to deliver drinking water to millions in the Bay Area of San Francisco.

At the entrance.

The temple itself surrounds a large grate which looks like a ventilator for the water flowing below:

The Pulgas Temple.

The whole thing terminates in a large rectangular pool, inviting to swim in, if not permitted:

The pool and cypresses.

The water rushing down the aqueduct to the large reservoir west of the 280 freeway is shown here:

Aqueduct.

And here’s the whole story:

Commemorative plaque.

Worth a side trip should you be visiting Filoli.

All snapped on the iPhone 4S.

If it can go wrong ….

Photography

…. it will!

I wrote about Paranoia as the only logical mechanism when it came to backing up some three years ago. Following up with details of my quadruplicate back-up plan I felt I was pretty safe.

Nanny nanny boo boo.

Then the tailor incident happened.

It was nothing to do with photos but the concepts – redundancy, failsafes, backups – are identical. You see, this one involved starting the car ….

I have owned my car, bought used as I always let some sucker pay for the depreciation, for almost a decade. I thought I was pretty smart about redundancy and access. If I left the key at home and lost the house keys I had this little marvel:

The Lexus wallet key. “Not for ignition”.

I kept this little hummer in my wallet and thought no more of it. Lose the regular key and, hey presto!, you are up and running so long as you do not lose your wallet. Even if you lose your car keys.

And lose the car keys I did. My boy and I dropped off a jacket at the tailor’s and proceeded home with the house Border Terrier, as good an egg as ever put four sets of pads to the sidewalk, looking forward to a nice lunch. But there was just one snag. I had left the house keys in the jacket at the tailor’s. Bah! says I to Winston, the fruit of my loins, no problemo chum. The Old Man is always prepared as, with a flourish of sheer insouciance D’Artagnan would have envied, I whipped out my 25 year old Hartmann leather wallet (OK, credit card holder) and procured the Magic Key. Yup, Lexus’s best.

Swagger was definitely present in my demeanor.

“Watch this”, quoth I, as I proceeded to pop the key from the little holder thingy to the boy’s all around astonishment at his dad’s evident genius in all things mechanical and logical. I inserted same in the door and invited the child to rest his behind in the passenger seat. Stand back, Winston, says I, we will be back at the tailor’s in a trice as dad floors it and we hit 0-60 in under 6 seconds on residential streets and hang the cops.

So confident was I that I handed the poncy wallet key to the child and instructed him to start the beast, as he always does. (He’s my Voice Activated Remote. Not cheap.) The starter fired up with that resolute commitment to all things efficient and Oriental, churned away merrily for a good twenty seconds and …. nothing happened. No burning rubber, no 0-60 in under 6, no nothing. Truth to tell, the boy’s demeanor was not a happy one, his confidence in his father severly shaken, questions about birth certificates and DNA preying on his mind and the OM sitting there wondering where he had erred in his grand plan of life. ‘Crestfallen’ does not begin to decribe my greatest fan. Indeed, his crest was somewhere around his ankles, ready to join mine in the gutter.

Not a happy moment.

The car maker, in its infinite wisdom, had determined that the wallet key would get you in out of the cold and damp, but that was the extent of its function. Start the car? Please. They do that now with microchips in the holder, but we are talking a Frugality Special here, a Y2K. No, no.

Bugger.

I had made a huge, inexcusable error of logic. I had failed to test my assumptions.

So we get on the iPhone, call the tailor and plead that he extend his closing time by 10 minutes while we beat the world and Olympic record for the 800 meters to retrieve the car key.

Just one small nicety. The house key is attached to the car key. Without the car key we are doomed to a weekend in the back yard, shooting rabbits and squirrels for sustenance and drinking from the garden hose while feasting on bloody dandelions for dessert.

The tailor, a nice warm man from wonderful, warm Greece, hears our pleas, delays for 10 minutes as asked, and after a massive coronary (mine) we have car and house keys in hand.

Which brings us back to backing up.

If it can go wrong it will. Study those diagrams in my second link above and think hard. Really hard. Because there has to be some combination of circumstance which will destroy my work of a lifetime, the thing that means so much to me. My pictures. And when you find the holes in the schema, please email me. I can always put in more failsafes, and would rather not depend on the home times of the tailor.

Meanwhile, I keep a real car key, the one with the chip inside, in the trunk. I can open the latter with the wallet key once inside the car. Of course, knowing the Law of Sod, the battery in the trunk key will have died and it’s back to dandelion dessert. Gee, I miss the days you could hot wire cars.