Yearly Archives: 2012

British humor

Photography

At its best.

I stand corrected on my column the other day bemoaning the miserable, humorless, crass commercialism of the Olympic Games.

There was one happy moment in which the BBC excelled itself with this humorous video though, being the BBC, it remains unavailable in the US in clean form. An English friend graciously converted it for me and here it is.

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The glory of London seen from the air is well shown, and the whole thing, right down to the Monty Python moment, is outstanding.

The Olympics end

Photography

And let’s all be grateful for that.

As the McDonald’s Olympics conclude with yet more foreign profits sheltered abroad by our multinationals from the American taxman and its people, I have one admission and two statements to make:

  • My time spent watching this tribute to bad food and Big Pharma was precisely 00:00:00
  • I saw many of the still photographs taken on auto-everything gear with super-everything lenses, which even Grannie could have taken and remain unimpressed
  • The greatest Olympic photograph taken was snapped 44 years ago and it had nothing on earth to do with this sham that purports to be sport

And here it is, from 1968:

Tommie Smith and John Carlos destroy bigotry.

The lord of the Olympics, the American bigot Avery Brundage, had no issue with the German master race and its victors giving the Nazi salute to the assembled crowd in 1936, yet concluded that two black men making a statement of their race’s lot in 1968 was grounds for disqualification. No one remembers that red necked fool today, but Tommie Smith and John Carlos are alive and kicking. And they made a difference unlike any other athlete.

It’s the best thing ever to come out of the Olympics.

Congratulations, however, are due to England, that perpetual underdog in all things competitive. They ran the trains on time, they ordered up good weather and they felt good about themselves, even if their coffers remain empty.

A few from Santa Cruz

Dining, Photographs

Lunch on the wharf.

Take Highway One and watch out for cops until you leave San Mateo County.

On a whim I decided to drive down to Santa Cruz for lunch. It’s a pleasant hour or so on the coast highway and the choice of seafood to be had is great. Why, you can even find the occasional dish which is not deep fried.

At rest.

Too many fries.

Reflections.

Red, white, blue.

End of the Wharf.

Seal.

Even the pelicans are obese here.

All snapped on the Panny G3 with the kit lens.

And this was lunch at Gilbert’s Fire Fish Grill:

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