Monthly Archives: November 2012

Hackintosh goes Kepler – Part I

Hackintosh

More graphics performance.

The bronze Zotac GTX 660 with the geriatric 9800GTX+ in the foreground.

The roar of the tuned V8 in the driveway followed by four loud raps on the door could only mean one thing. Ace computer builder FU Steve was dropping around to regale me with the latest and greatest in the Hackintosh world. When we last saw my Hack, the HP100, it was sporting an overclocked Sandy Bridge i7 CPU running at 4.3GHz, an ancient Nvidia 9800GTX+ graphics card with 512MB of memory, 16GB of 1600MHz RAM and three Dell Ultrasharp displays. Used mostly for my day job of managing money, it is a blast to use with Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS5, never so much as missing a beat.

But FU was not about to leave well enough alone.

“Come on pal, we’re off to Fry’s in Palo Alto to pick you up a Kepler graphics card.”

“Eh! what?”

“Well, if you got your nose out of your spreadsheets now and then you would know that your graphics performance is indistinguishable from a bilge pump. Both suck.”

Well, it seems fine to me, but who am I to argue with a man who eats silicon for breakfast?

“Before we leave, be sure to download a fresh version of 10.8.2 to your MacBook Air. It takes a while and we will be needing it for the fresh system install we will be doing for the new card.”

A brand new roadster graced the driveway of the modest abode, and a question to FU about cost returned an insouciant “Oh!, a few dozen AAPL shares”. Given that the man has been accumulating these since El Jobso was knee-high to a grasshopper, that translates to ‘Free’, or as close as it gets.

“I had the manifolds ported and polished” quoth FU, as he blipped the throttle to the disgust of all within a couple of blocks.

As we hit the tunnel joining the 92 to the 280, FU hit his usual 120, shifting down as we hit daylight on the most beautiful freeway in the US. After the backfires on the overrun I leaned over and asked:

“So Kepler, Schmepler, why do I care?”

“Because, my dear boy, one day you are going to junk those 1680 x 1050 Dells of yours and get a coupla 27″ 2560 displays. Trust me, you don’t want to be poncing about with that 9800 GPU of yours when you do. Kepler cards are Nvidia’s state-of-the-art and they just came out with the economy priced GTX 660, perfect for all who do not do 3D rendering. Your graphics speed will double.”

I buttoned it, visions of vast outlays dancing in my head as we passed seemingly endless miles of real estate on the east side of the freeway, all belonging to that academic powerhouse – and dormitory for half of Beijing – known as Stanford University. Rumor has it that railroad baron and financier Leland Stanford had offered snotty Harvard a chunk of coin to endow a few buildings and scholarships. They had turned their Brahmin noses up at him and his scruffy appearance, so he built Stanford instead. Old man Stanford would doubtless be appalled to learn that his creation was now the leading repository of Chinese intellectual property theft. Rocketing past the radio telescope and the linear accelerator, we exited on Page Mill Road at a brisk 90 as FU slammed on the binders for the left turn onto Page Mill and Fry’s on the other side of El Camino Real.

“Tell me, FU”, I asked, “what do you do when the cops pull you over?”

“Ain’t gonna happen pal. Ever check my license plate? 11-99 Foundation, dude, 11-99 Foundation. You help the cops’ pension fund along and they look after you.”

Hmmm.

Parking in a handicapped spot at the entrance – “They always get the best spots” – FU took a sharp left on entering Fry’s and made for the GPU section.

GPUs at Fry’s.

“I say, FU, shouldn’t I be buying at Amazon? You know how frugal I am.”

“Screw Amazon, mate. Since they started charging us hard-working Californians sales tax, Fry’s has become competitive on price plus we get to rack the V8 out on the freeway.” In truth, it was a perfect California day and there was a light spring in my step. FU was onto something.

“Now here’s the scoop. Nvidia came out with the GTX 660Ti a while back and it’s the bee’s knees for video. But as video is not your thing their latest, the GTX 660, will save you $80 and still double your speed. As for who comes up with their naming conventions I can only think it’s some schmuck in Redmond.”

We had our choice of EVGA, PNY and Zotac and I started reaching for the EVGA – the EVGA 9800 having served so well – when FU stepped in.

“Get a life, matey, get the cheapest one. All use the same Nvidia chips, just packaged in different wild colors for the zit set. Here, grab this Zotac at $229. After the $15 rebate, which I doubt you will ever see, your price with CA sales tax will be $235. Up yours, Amazon. Get yer plastic out.”

It was such a perfect day that even FU noticed, never exceeding 85 on the way back, though he did chuck it about a bit on Canyon Road coming back down through Hillsborough, almost taking out a couple of dowagers out for their afternoon constitutional.

“No prob, dude. Inherited wealth. Parasites. Never worked a day in their lives.” was all I could get out of him.

“Now here’s the thing with these Keplers. They are pretty new and a bit of a pain to install, so rather than go through with that we are going to do a clean OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 install on your boot SSD, after checking it’s cloned and bootable to the backup SSD, rather than futz with incremental changes. The long way is always the shortest with these things.”

So while FU proceeded to open the HP100 and pull the 9800GTX+ which has served me so well, he instructed me how to make a bootable OS X installer flash drive using the MBA and TonyMac’s tools, specifically Unibeast.

The new card is considerably shorter, making access to the poorly designed horizontal SATA sockets on the Z68X-UD3H-B3 (rev 12) motherboard easier. Further, though it sports two fans to the 9800’s one, it’s incredibly quiet. Technology marches on. FU took all of three minutes to remove the old card, plugged in the 6-pin power supply to the Zotac, but left the Zotac loose.

“We will boot without a graphics card, using the native HD3000 GPU in your Sandy Bridge i7. Then we will add the tweaks for the new GTX 660 and you’ll be off to the races”.

We repaired to the garden to blow the froth off a couple while the MBA did its thing preparing the flash drive installer.

“The other thing you have to do with the GTX 660 is to be sure to download and install Nvidia’s 10.8.2 drivers. These will come native in 10.8.3 as Apple uses the same GTX 660 in its latest iMac’s (needless to say, these remain unobtainable thanks to another Cook cock-up) and then run TonyMac’s Mountain Lion Multibeast, setting GraphicsEnabler=No in the system options. Forget that and the Hack will not boot. That changes the chameleon.boot.plist file so that it works. After we have HP100 running on the HD3000, we will make those changes, insert the Zotac GTX 660 and off we go.”

I let him ramble on happily, making for another couple of beers. ‘A man has to know his limitations’, as that jerk once put it.

Once the installer was ready, some 20 minutes plus the time to re-download a fresh version of Mountain Lion, it was plugged into an available USB socket on the HP100, booted from and the installation process in the above Unibeast link followed. FU then installed the new nVidia drivers, or ‘kexts’ as Apple calls them, did the GraphicsEnabler=No step using TonyMac’s Multibeast app, restarted and, hey presto! We have the Kepler GPU running.

Here are the theoretical comparison from Hardware Compare:

Thanks to reader PB for the source.

Non-trivial performance increases. Note especially the last metric addressing performance in high resolution applications – meaning with bigger, more pixel-laden displays. This is a key reason Apple has used the GTX 660 in it’s high definition Retina Display MacBook Pro laptops, albeit using the lighter-duty GTX 660M mobile variant. (Can you say ‘overheating’?) In addition to sporting two DVI connectors, the GTX 6600 also has HDMI and DisplayPort outlets so that the USB connector HP100 has used for the third display can be removed and a DisplayPort cable substituted, allowing the enhanced performance to be delivered to all three displays. This remains to be tested.

As the GTX660 uses slightly less power than its predecessor, no changes were made to the stock 500 Watt Antec power supply used by HP100.

The Zotac GTX 660 in the HP100. Lots of room.

I’ll publish test data, including power consumption, in Part II, along with subjective operating impressions using Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS5.

Lone

Photographs

Waiting.

The 180mm Nikkor on the D700 excels at this sort of thing, picking out the lone figure in the urban landscape with ease.

One very handy tool is the Highlights slider in Lightroom 4 which is an easy way of taming bright highlights like those in the second snap. This is a significant upgrade over Lightroom 3 and worth the upgrade cost alone, given how digital sensors burn out highlights every chance they get.

Spotted yesterday

Photographs

A perfect day.

Visit San Francisco on days like yesterday and it’s impossible to go wrong for those of the street snapping persuasion. Late sun, partly cloudy, no wind, pullover weather. As the Nikon D700 and 180mm Nikkor f/2.8D is a heavy piece of gear, I usually refrain from lugging along the iPad, but the iPad Mini makes all the difference. It’s a featherweight and makes reading and catching up with the markets over a celebratory beer a pleasure. Much nicer than reading on the iPhone.

All snapped using the 180mm f/2.8D AF Nikkor lens.

The iPad Mini – Part 1

iPad

An affordable, impulse purchase.

While ‘pick up in store’ ordering was not working on Apple’s web site yesterday, I swung by the local Apple Store today at what I thought was the 10am opening hour only to find they opened two hours early and that all the white models had been sold. We macho Hemingway fans have no use for white accoutrements in our lives, so I leave those to the feminine and effeminate set. I was happy to buy a black 16GB model. Judging from the number of tickets the clerk was holding for distribution to walk-in buyers, the store had maybe 50 black variants left. I was one of only five shoppers in the store and we were outnumbered by blue shirts four to one.

José lays on the sales pitch. I was obviously so thrilled that camera shake ensued.

Surprisingly I was subjected to a big sales pitch on covers (real men do not use covers) and on the AppleCare warranty. To read my take on warranties, click here and enjoy the math. I guess the falling margins at Apple Corp. have to be made up somehow.

Both subjectively and objectively I find the price to be too high. Subjectively it prices the Apple ecosystem at $129, as capable – if a tad smaller – competitors’ tablets come in at $199. Objectively I have yet to see a Bill of Materials analysis for the Mini, but given that it uses the A5X CPU from the iPad2 and like innards, with a smaller battery display, $329 is a stretch. Further Tim Cook stated in the fiscal Q4 AAPL earnings call that in the near term margins on the Mini will be below those usually commanded by Apple which rather mystified me. One cause, I am sure, is the costly Lightning connector. This seemingly simple, reversible device – and a vast improvement on the awful 30 pin one in use the past decade – includes a miniature DAC (Digital to Analog Converter). This DAC makes use of older analog accessories possible, though there is still some uncertainty over which ones will work. Any buyer of, say, external powered speakers would do well to wait until his chosen model comes with the new connector. Thus compatibility will be assured and clunky adapters avoided.

One reassuring part of the Apple ecosystem.

While non-Apple users may find it difficult to stomach the $129 premium for entry to the Apple ecosystem, emails like the one above, generated when I was setting the Mini up, are a mighty comfort. That and the knowledge that Apple is not selling your ID and tracking your activity the way the ethically challenged mob at Google does. I typed all the above while restoring my iPad Mini from the iPad 3 backup I had made to iCloud. It took some 12 minutes to setup the Mini to where I could start using it (10MBs broadband), whereupon I was asked whether I wanted to restore all my apps, as used on the iPad 3, to the iPad Mini. (They mean ‘copy’ not ‘restore’ but I let it go). The timing here is a function of app numbers and sizes as well as broadband speed, so there’s no point in reporting that here. The iPad Mini reported 95% charge once it came live. Nice.

The engineering of the backup/restore function would be hard to improve. The directions are clear, the process very simple, the results perfect. That alone is worth the $129 ecosystem entrance price in my book, but good luck convincing an Android user of that. He’s in the “What you never had you never missed” class. Even my home screen picture of Bert T. Border (currently running for the Presidency on a truth and honesty ticket) came over perfectly scaled.

Is 16GB enough? Depends on how many games you load, as these tend to be the biggest users of memory. Some of the more recent offerings (Infinity Blade, Nova) use over 1GB each – but you would have to confer with my ten year old son as to which ones should be on the Mini! I do not play games so cannot advise.

First impressions? A beautifully made device which feels far better in the hand than the chintzy and insubstantial iPhone 5. The iPhone 4/4S has the Leica feel; the 5 is a point-and-shoot by comparison. The Mini is very much in the Leica/pro-Nikon class of build. It’s easily held in a hand span when in portrait mode and the fit and finish are a delight. Weight is half that of iPad 3.

Screen definition is excellent – the same number of pixels as iPad 1/2 crammed into the smaller display, meaning excellent definition and allowing all existing apps to run unmodified. The font sizing in default apps like Mail is a tad small for these tired, old eyes (I’m 60, going on 20). Is the screen noticeably worse than the Retina Display in iPad3? Not to my eyes. Pixels are invisible on both.

Do you need to wait for the cellular model to reach stores? Depends. If you have an AT&T or Verizon (not sure about Sprint) iPhone you can use it as a cellular hotspot ($10/month AT&T, free on VZ with the base data plan, both support up to five devices simultaneously) to broadcast a cellular broadband signal, allowing any ‘tethered’ device like an iPad or MacBook to get on the web using the iPhone’s data plan. In that case a cellular version of the iPad is a waste of money. If, however, you have no hotspot access – and despite what you read wi-fi is still only sporadically available in civilization and not at all in the deep South – then a cellular model is the right choice. But you can wait for that as the acclaimed master of the Apple supply chain has made sure they are not available. Just like iPhone 5 and the new iMac. Nice work, Mr. Cook. The iPhone’s hotspot is turned on in Settings->General->Cellular->Personal Hotspot->On. You can choose your own password if the supplied one does not meet with your approval. On the iPad go to Settings->Wi-Fi and choose iPhone as your Wi-Fi source. For use on the road remember to turn Bluetooth on. When thus ‘tethered’ the usual Wi-Fi fan symbol will change to a pair of chain links in the status bar atop the display.

The iPhone’s hotspot in use on the iPad Mini.

In figuring how much memory you need in your iPad or iPad Mini, remember to allow 2.3GB for the operating system. The 16GB version has 13.7GB of storage available. If you buy a Microsoft Surface RT (that’s the crippled one, the full one remains unobtainable – Cook must be moonlighting) you will need some 14GB of space which is why the base model is 32GB. Nothing changes in Redmond, it seems, and code bloat remains the order of the day.

What this review cannot cover is any comparison with other makers’ tablets. I am tied into the Apple ecosystem with all my devices so have zero incentive to use Android, and know nothing about it. The value of the Apple ecosystem far exceeds any savings on cheaper Android devices. Further, it will be a cold day in hell before I use any tablet running a Microsoft operating system.

In Part II I cover cannibalization issues with the full sized iPads, performance and, of course, the cameras (like iPad2 and 3, there’s a front facing one for video calling and a rear facing one for taking pictures. It’s the latter that is of interest). I also address many of the things which are wrong with the iPad Mini. Suffice it to say that on a first acquaintance the iPad Mini fills a valid place in the product line from Apple and is a whole lot easier to carry than the already slim and slender full-sized device.

Leicameter

Hardware

As hood ornament.

Spotted on Harrison Street in the Mission District the other day:

D2X, 16-35 AF-S lens.

One of the more unusual hood ornaments but irresistible given that a like device had found a home on my Leica M3 for some 35 years while I struggled with exposure before the days of automation. It never let me down, and as it used a selenium photovoltaic cell which needed no batteries, it never ran out of juice either.

Here’s mine just before I sold it in 2006, in rather better shape. These were made by Metrawatt under contract to Ernst Leitz.

I recall paying GBP 7.50 (ca. $18) for mine at the Wallace Heaton store on Old Bond Street in Mayfair in 1971, and sold it in 2006 for some $50. Mustn’t grumble. The store to the gentry, Wallace Heaton is long gone, but I’m sure my Leicameter is making a Leica M user happy to this day. Contrary to popular opinion, selenium cells do not die from too much light exposure. Their biggest killer is moisture seeping in past cracked rubber seals in the innards. A fine technology.