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The military iMac

Macintosh

Cool at last.

I call my transformed iMac the Military Mac because it is so ugly that only the military could love it.

Simply stated, after replacing the nVidia 7300 graphics card with the 7600 I was no longer able to control the speed of the key fan of the three inside. The CPU fan. If you really feel the need to ask me if I connected it, please go elsewhere. That one cools the CPU, the GPU and GPU diode and the power supply. I tried a second card from ApplePalace.com with the same result, so there must be some deep seated incompatibility between the 7600 card and my 2.16gHz late-2006 C2D Intel iMac which came with the stock nVidia 7300 card. You know, the one Apple refuses to admit fries as soon as you look at it.

As earlier described here, I drilled 87 holes in the back of the iMac while it was gutted, covering them with wire mesh on the inside. These coincide with the placement of the GPU/GPU Diode radiators, the HDD and the power supply.

When I realized that I could not get the internal fan above the base speed of 1,000 rpm I placed a floor fan facing the holes and temperatures, as reported by Temperature Monitor, plummeted.

So I had two choices. Run a variable low voltage DC power supply to the internal fan which had lost variable speed control – a royal pain – or simply slap a couple of large fans on the rear to ventilate the radiators and power supply.

As dismantling the iMac was getting old, I decided on the latter, at least for now. $40 and four cable ties later, I had two small utility fans, running very quietly off the mains, pumping large volumes of ambient temperature air through the ventilation holes with fairly dramatic results.

While I had the case open I also added cooling slots to the power supply plastic sleeve, after first detaching it from the power supply, thus:


Slots in power supply sleeve.


The Military Mac reports key temperatures.
Circled area denotes export of 80 RAW files from LR2 to JPGs on the Desktop.

Easily the most demanding task I have found, as cooling goes, is the export of RAW originals to JPGs out of Lightroom. That works the CPU, GPU and especially the power supply mightily. Look at the stepped rise of the green CPU line circled on the graph – that coincides with the export of 80 RAW files to the Desktop. The rise is easily within spec. That green line falls once the export job is completed. Note also that the other temperatures are largely unaffected, especially the power supply and GPU-related ones. That is indicative of the success of my approach.

By the way, the HDD fan, which I can still control with Fan Control, is set at 2200 rpm and cools a 1tB Samsung 7200 rpm 3.5″ SATA drive, which replaces the bottom-of-the-line Western Digital 250gB one these machines were shipped with. Hey, Apple has to keep up those profit margins. The Sammy retails for around $100 – a great bargain. As you can see, it runs very cool.

Why do I go to all this trouble?

Well, first, I do not like to be cheated, and Apple Inc. has cheated me by selling a faulty machine whose design faults they deny. Back in my old school, when a boy behaved like that, we stuck his head down the toilet, after first making sure no monks were in sight, and flushed. The designer of these deserves no less. I was quoted almost $1,000 to (maybe) repair a 30 month old computer with a short warranty, only to have it fail again? That makes no sense and is a dishonest and a dishonorable business practice. The replacement card cost me $260 delivered to my home in California.

Second, the 24″ S-IPS LCD screen in the iMac is quite superb for photo processing, and I would like to keep using it for a while longer. And it is matte.

Third, based on the hundreds of these refurbished graphics cards ApplePalace.com told me they are selling there must be many other users of these machines who might benefit from reading this. ApplePalace.com told me there is no such thing as a new card – they came clean on that and stated these are all refurbished by Apple, despite their web site stating parts are ‘new’. Hard to know what to believe here.

I had to use two external fans as I could not find one large enough to cover all the ventilation holes. If I cooled only the GPU-related holes the power supply would go into thermal runaway, quickly reaching 160F regardless of room temperature. So I went wild, blew another $18 and added a second fan.

How does it look? From the front the modifications are invisible and the fans barely audible. From the rear? Ugh!


Military Mac, ready for desert duty.

Will it last? I see no reason why not. Do I want to do this again? Please. I have no doubt that I will eventually simply rewire the internal fan to a variable power source I can control and get rid of those ridiculous excrescences, but right now I am in the land of function over form.

Now do you mind? I would like to finally get down to processing some photographs as I joyfully anticipate a world with a fail safe OS and hardware to match, regardless of who actually makes the latter. One things for sure – there will not be a fruit on the front.

Panasonic GF1 – close, no cigar

Micro Four-Thirds

Come on, Panny.

Here’s a good video of the new (almost) Leica killer, the Panansonic GF1.

Almost? Jump to 3:20 in the video and you will see why. Panny totally blew it with the viewfinder, and no real working photographer is going to use a dumb LCD screen for street snaps. So Panny provides a clip on EVF (nice – though no comments yet on how good it is) and promptly destroys the compactness of the camera with the bulk of the EVF.

Come on, Panny! Dump the built in flash and replace it with the EVF. Then, finally, all of us Leica M refugees from the film days will have what we want. It has been a long wait. As it is, the bulk of the camera is much the same as my G1 once the EVF is clipped on and I somehow doubt the clip-on EVF will be as good as the superb EVF in the G1. (See the link in Comment #1, below).


Add the clip-on EVF and the bulk is the same

There is some good news, however. The 20mm f/1.7 is finally available, rumored to be $400 – not bad for an f/1.7 if it’s anywhere near as good as the excellent kit lens. At a 40mm equivalent full frame focal length, it should prove to be a wonderful street lens, especially if it’s as fine optically as the 14-45mm kit optic. And there’s a 45mm Leica macro for close-ups, though the Canon 5D and 100mm macro I use is just fine for my purposes. And, at $900 for the Panny macro, I would far rather have the full frame Canon whether with IS (see yesterday’s column) at $1,000 or without at $600. At almost four times the sensor size in a 5D etc. compared to the G1, you know where to go if very large prints are your goal. If all you want is web publication, a $100 point-and-shoot is more than you need in any case.

Meanwhile, just imagine the consternation and finger pointing at the competition, because the GF2 will likely get it dead right with a proper built-in EVF and an even better sensor. “But Yamamoto san, you told me this micro-four-thirds thing would never catch on. And you, Kazuki san, said that Panasonic is clueless about making cameras. Now what do we do?”

Something governments everywhere could learn from. There is no time in the history of mankind when competition did not accelerate the move to excellence. The GF1 may be flawed, but you can bet it is has the competition jumping.

One final thought on body dimensions, compared to the greatest rangefinder camera of the film age and one I used for 35 years:

GF1 (no lens): 119 x 71 x 36.3mm
Leica M2 (no lens): 138 x 77 x 33.5mm

Add a pancake 20mm to the GF1 and a 35mm Summicron to the M2 and …. well, you get my point. And only one of these has auto-everything and digital technology, making it faster in every respect. And net image quality in the Panny is superior – whatever compromises were made in the design of the kit lens are more than offset by the superiority of the digital sensor compared to film. How do I know this? Because I have gone back in my archives and compared images – not something any of our modern ‘experts’ seem capable of doing. And the sensor in the GF1 is identical to that in the G1 so if you can live without a proper viewfinder, the GF1 may be for you. For the rest of us the G1/GH1 is ideal for now.

Merry jumble

Photographs

Interesting living.

Here’s the charm of a big old city at its best.


G1, kit lens at 45mm, f/5.6, 1/2000, ISO 100

Quite who would want to live among this ramshackle jungle I cannot imagine, but the city is a better place for not tearing this sort of thing down only to be replaced by some concrete silo. Spotted by sticking the lens through some old wire fencing in North Beach. I have yet to figure out how that red framed door at the top works.

Canon 100mm Macro-L with IS

Lenses

The Macro finally gets IS.

While I find Canon’s announcement of yet another APS-C camera, the 7D, underwhelming – who needs yet another ‘me too’ DSLR? – this did catch my eye:


The new 100mm f/2.8 ‘L’ IS Macro

I have had nothing but good experiences with the existing (non-L, non-IS) macro which seems almost impossible to improve on optically, but the addition of IS is a welcome feature. Price is rumored to be around $1,000, or twice that of the non-IS lens. If your macro photography is tripod-based, I would find it hard to see spending twice as much on this lens, as IS is wasted in tripod work. Further, from a definition perspective, I find that making razor sharp 18″ x 24″ prints from my non-IS macro is trivial and see no reason why these would not scale just fine to 30″ x 40″, based on what I am seeing on the screen of my 24″ iMac.

So the new lens may be better on paper, but how much better than my experience can you get? Worth thinking about. Some recent snaps with the non-IS Canon macro (using Helicon Focus) appear here.

DPReview has the scoop.

The netbook Apple will not make

Hackintosh

$300 and ideal for the traveler.

A friend, fellow photographer and frequent reader of this journal contacted me the other day asking whether I would be interested in sharing his experiences running OS X on an inexpensive netbook computer. He has, of course, paid Apple for the software but as neither of us are lawyers (we prefer to make money in more moral professions) he was a tad concerned that his anonymity be preserved before the $30bn+ cash hoard at Apple Inc. came crashing down on his head in the guise of a life sentence for breaking some inequitable agreement or other. As he added, somewhat acidly, there is no reciprocity here – users have no redress when Apple denies generally know faults like graphics issues caused by overheating in late-2006 iMacs. Heads they win, tails their customers lose. Like me, he uses Apple hardware exclusively for photography, though unlike me he does this for a living, and has many Macs at home and work.

“No problemo”, quoth I, “there’s a little thing called the First Amendment to the US Constitution which protects journalistic sources. So why not write your piece pseudonymously and I will be pleased to publish it?”

So we we though long and hard about a suitable nom de plume and came up with F.U. Steve. My buddy is named Steve and the initials are those of one Francis Urquhart of the BBC’s splendid ‘House of Cards’, a gripping TV series about a crooked British Prime Minister who will do anything for power and fame.

I thought it might be best to present this piece as a Q&A to show the decision process and technical challenges involved in making a $300 netbook behave like an Apple laptop. Or better.

TP: Why bother hacking a cheap netbook to run OS X? Jobs has said that Apple will not make such garbage and certainly not for that price.

FU: It’s a simple question of fitness for purpose. As you know, I refuse to use Windows – life is too short. I needed a really light travel computer for web and email use and did not need the bulk and weight of a MacBook at $1,000+, not to mention the very poor heat management which would fry your lap. Then there’s the non-user replaceable battery. Of course there was always the MacBook Air but the price asked for that is ridiculous. The once nice thing about the Air is shared with most netbooks out there, though, and that’s the lack of an optical drive. I don’t need that for my intended uses.

TP: What about the hacking bit? Isn’t that difficult?

FU: Well, there’s a large hacker community out there with many sites dedicated to specific computer models. After a bit of research I decided on the MSI Wind U100, model 279US. There were several reasons. It is well supported for running OS X, comes in white or black and needs a minimum of hardware changes to make it truly usable with OS Leopard. I bought mine a year ago from Amazon for $429 with the six cell battery which gives you 5 working hours. At 2.8 lbs it’s lighter than the MacBook Air (3.0 lbs – ed) and comes in at 3.3 lbs with the charger. A vinyl travel case is included in the price as is Windows XP which I immediately erased. Today, you can find new ones on the web for under $300. For hacking I used Msiwind.net which is a wonderful resource, though you have to wade through a fair bit of dross to get to the gold.

TP: What was the toughest hacking aspect?

FU: Once you have located and downloaded the key files you have to instal the kernel extensions (“kexts”) required to make the Wind run – kexts are Apple’s equivalent of device drivers in Windoze. Most importantly you need one for the Intel GMA950 GPU screen driver to enjoy the Wind’s full 1024 x 600 screen definition – the screen is widescreen format, 16:9, and ideal for watching movies. Search about a bit at Msiwind.net and it’s all there.

TP: How about hardware changes?

FU: Simple. First you pry off and swap the ‘Windoze’ (=Command) and Alt keys to replicate their positioning on a Mac keyboard, to the left of the space bar.

Then you remove the rear cover (8 Philips screws) and replace the Realtek wi-fi card with a used Apple Airport card bought on eBay for $20 or so. While the Realtek works OK with an add on application, it’s bog slow starting up and you don’t get the Airport ‘fan’ indicator in the menu bar which I am so used to. Further, the included card is poor at detecting favored networks. Just search for “Apple Airport Extreme Card MA688Z/B” on eBay – the card is actually made by Broadcom. Apple doesn’t ‘make’ anything, as you know. You need to pop out the HDD (one screw) to release the old card (another screw) and remove the two antennae – it takes seconds to do.

The stock HDD is 160gB which is more than enough for the intended uses for this netbook, but I replaced it with a 500gB Hitachi because …. well, because I felt like it!

Finally, stock RAM (667mHz DDR2) is 1gB but you can load her up with up to 2gB. I had a 500mB stick lying around so inserted that in the one open slot, for a total of 1.5gB.

International travelers may like to buy an aftermarket power supply with exchangeable tips, as I did. Another $30 or so to eBay.

TP: So what’s it like to use? I mean, there must be a lot of compromises at that price?

FU: To cut a long story short, I sold my MacBook after 6 months with the Wind. It’s that good. The screen is as good or better, it’s matte not glossy, the stock Intel Atom CPU runs far cooler than the C2D in the NutBooks and the Intel GMA950 GPU will easily drive a 1680×1050 external monitor using the included VGA out port. The only shame about the latter is that there are no screw receptacles to hold the clunky VGA cord in place, but you can easily drive a 24″ LCD computer screen or a big screen TV if that’s your thing. The GPU in the Wind (which is identical to that in earlier MacBooks) outputs much more definition than your LCD TV can provide, so you are not limiting yourself.

The keyboard is perfect for touch typing and I added a cheap protector to keep it clean. I only wish it was backlit, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.

The built in webcam works fine with Skype but not with iChat – you can get a picture but the Wind community is still struggling with sound using the built in microphone. To use iChat I use a Bluetooth earphone/mic in a USB socket (the Wind has three) and it works fine, bypassing the internal microphone.

As there is no optical drive (as with the MacBook Air) I rip movies to an SD card (not available on the Air) and simply insert the SD card in the Wind’s reader, using the free VLC application to watch the movie. 8gB cards will hold a lot of information for a few dollars. Plus, with a 500gB HDD, I can put lots of movies on the hard drive for watching on those coast-to-coast flights. The 6 cell battery is good for two full length movies with earphones in use, provided you don’t crank the screen up to maximum brightness. Because the Wind’s speakers are simply horrible (like the NutBook’s), I plug in my headphone of choice and use one of the scripts on the MSIWind.net forum to toggle them on. The sound is excellent, used in this way. You can use your iPhone/iPod earbuds at a pinch, but I prefer a pair of Sennheiser over-the-ear headphones for the best sound.

The stock speed of the Atom CPU is 1.6gHz but, if you are running connected to the mains, a quick touch of Fn-F10 will overclock the chip to 2.0gHz for a speed increase of 25%. MSI provides for this in its BIOS and it’s safe and causes no heat rise. The other day I was using the Wind overclocked in a 92F room and the internal temperature never rose over 117F. Try saying that about your NutBook!

TP: Any other mods?

FU: Well, just one. A nice skin from iSkin to my own design gives me the netbook Jobs refuses to make because he simply cannot sell it for a huge mark-up against the very competent competition from MSI, Toshiba, Dell, HP , etc. It’s not that he’s a greedy jerk – we all know that – it’s the way he excuses it (“we don’t know how to make a $500 computer”) that gets me mad. Anyway, the skin has been tons of fun. I constantly get asked about it in cafeterias and airport lounges and adopt a cool attitude of “I’m sorry, but I really cannot talk about it”. One jerk deserves another, I reckon. I’ll start wearing a black polo and sneakers next – not!


FU’s iSkin in place on the MSI Wind. CA DL for reference

TP: What applications are you running on your MacBook Nano?
FU: First I’m running OS Leopard 10.5.6 – updates make no sense (and are tricky on this hacked machine) and 10.5.6 is rock stable. There were no meaningful improvements in later versions and Snow Leopard only creates new incompatibilities. In addition to all the usual apps – Mail, iCal, NetNewsWire for news feeds, Safari, Address Book, MobileMe (great for synching calendars, mail and address books with my other Macs), Preview, iTunes and iPhoto, I also run the current version of Lightroom. No kidding. Here’s a screen shot – as you can see it’s perfectly usable on the 10″ widescreen:


Lightroom 2 on the MacBook Nano

I wouldn’t want to run it all day, but for a quick preview and back-up of my pictures on a field trip and some light processing, the built in SD/SDHC card reader is perfect for this sort of thing. In my business I use several Pentax DSLRs which all use SD or SDHC cards; if your camera uses CF cards, you will need a plug in USB card reader for those.

TP: Fascinating, FU. Any final thoughts?

FU: Mr. Jobs says Apple does not know how to make a sub-$500 computer. Seems that MSI has been making them for a couple of years now at a quality level equal or superior to anything from Apple. Tell that to the Apple zealots who have never tried one yet decry all netbooks as ‘garbage’. Nice to have such stupidly loyal customers, huh? Maybe Apple could learn something from MSI? And you know what? When my MSI fails (it shows no signs of doing so after a year of heavy use and no respect – so much for the Apple premium) I’ll go out and buy another for $300. Or maybe four. That’s still less than one MacBook Air and I won’t have to worry about anyone stealing it. I hope!

TP: Thanks, FU. What’s next?

FU: Well, as you have discovered yourself, Macs are nothing more than industry standard hardware packed in a pretty box with lousy internal design and very poor life expectancy, at least for the newer machines. The electronic part that invariably fails is the only one designed by Apple and made by Foxconn (how appropriate!) in China – the logic- or mother board. Like you, I am struggling mightily to keep my late-2006 24″ iMacs – I have three – running (the one where Apple denies there are any problems) and two are showing the same signs of incipient graphics failure that recently forced you to change out the graphics card in your machine. I’ll likely have to do the same soon but the whole thing has me thinking. As you can see, I have a big investment in Apple hardware.

As Apple makes a great OS that can be made to run easily on industry standard hardware in a well ventilated box, and given that I have shoveled in excess of $20,000 down Apple’s greedy maw in frequent replacements of their poorly made hardware over the past few years, I fancy a desktop Hackintosh is in my future. At least I can write these losses off in my business unlike most regular users. Performance of the new machine would be well in advance of anything offered by the MacPro at one third of the price, with superior reliability and all components cheaply replaced or upgradable. Reliability is my primary dictate – these are working tools, not fashion accessories. And, like you, Thomas, I have paid for the software. Many, many times.

TP: Thanks, FU Steve. I’m sure my readers are eager to learn more. Please share that project with us when it is under way.

FU: Glad to, and thanks for the space.

Update: Check the first Comment to this piece for a very simple installation on a Dell Mini 9. The Dell has a smaller screen (9″ vs. 10″) but that may be more than offset by the ease of installation for many less technical users.