Category Archives: Photography

MacBook Air 2012 – Part I

Macintosh

Much enhanced.

The 2012 MacBook Air.

My two year old MacBook Air has moved to a happy new home and its replacement arrives tomorrow in the guise of the 2012 model. It has proved trouble free, reliable and a joy to use and rarely gets so hot on your lap that you notice.

I wrote about the 2010 model here concluding that it was a decent, ultra light portable with a fine keyboard and decent Lightroom and Photoshop capabilities.

Once again I have opted for the 11″ model owing to its low weight and handy size, but a little more than related statistics for an iPad. However, this time I opted for 128Gb of SSD rather than the minimum of 64Gb, for an outrageous premium of $100 (market price for 64Gb of RAM is $25) and a total cost of $1,100 delivered from Amazon.

The jump in specifications is non-trivial and confirms again that a two year upgrade cycle on MacBooks and iPads is appropriate. For desktops only a Hackintosh makes sense for my heavy use purposes, and you can read all about the one I use by clicking the Sitemap link at the top of this page. Here are the more obvious changes comparing the 2012 model to the 2010:

  • Model MD224LL/A; 2010 is MC505LL/A.
  • 4Gb RAM vs. 2Gb
  • Low power consumption IvyBridge i5 CPU vs. slower and hungrier Core2Duo
  • 1.7GHz CPUclock speed with 2.6GHz boost, compared with 1.4Ghz, no boost
  • Backlit keyboard
  • Intel HD4000 integrated GPU vs. Nvidia GeForce 320M with 256Mb memory
  • HDMI output via adapter vs. none
  • 720p HD Facetime camera vs. SD Facetime camera
  • Sata3 SSD vs. Sata2 SSD

As before only the 13″ model comes with an SD card slot, so an external USB reader will be needed. Either model requires an external reader if you use CF cards.

Options are very costly and include an i7 CPU for a little more speed (2.0/3.2GHz), 8Gb RAM and a 512Gb SSD. None solve economically for this user.

With an anticipated Geekbench CPU speed score of 6,000 (4Gb RAM) the 2012 model should be some three times as fast on CPU intensive tasks like Lightroom and Photoshop as the 2010 model. That’s a huge increase. Cinebench GPU frame rates should be almost doubled at 18 vs. 10. Another large jump. Disk read/write access should be almost 60% faster, as I noted when upgrading my HackPro’s SSD from SATA2 to SATA3.

In the two years since the 11″ MBA was introduced, it has become the entry level for students everywhere, (at least for those who prefer studying to rebooting their Windows machine) with the white plastic MacBook being discontinued. This is a significant market for Apple both on volume and for first time sales, as many users’ first serious introduction to the Mac ecosystem. Thus it’s no wonder that Apple has not rested on its laurels when improving the model. Last year’s Sandy Bridge model offered a big speed increase and this year’s Ivy Bridge builds on that.

Resale value of the 2010 after two years use is some 65 cents on the dollar, not at all bad for a used computer.

Some first impressions and test data soon when I have unpacked mine.

Five years of the iPhone

Computing

Sea change.

I bought mine on day 2, June 30, 2007, in the San Luis Obispo Apple Store for some $500. Ouch! But I consoled myself that, as a money manager it was both deductible, constituting research, and might actually be useful.

Today I use an iPhone 4S for all calls and have no landline at home.

That first iPhone was obvious; you know, like shorting builders’ stocks in 2007 or going long corporate debt when IBM’s was yielding 7% in 2008. There were lots of things it could not do. No camera, 2G only, no App Store, web apps only plus the few it came with. But look at the businesses it obsoleted over these past five years and others which will not be around five years hence:

  • RIMM
  • Nokia
  • Palm
  • Nintendo
  • Landline telephony
  • Hewlett Packard
  • Dell
  • DVDs and CDs
  • Garmin and TomTom GPS
  • Printed books and bookstores
  • Print manuals, flight maps, etc.
  • Point and shoot camera makers
  • Print news media
  • Print magazines
  • Apple’s own OS X, now very much in its last innings

Another in huge trouble is Microsoft, cursed with no credible offering, no attention span and no leadership.

At the same time, iOS created a huge raft of new businesses which did not exist before:

  • Independent software designers
  • Mobile games
  • Interactive advertising
  • Facebook – OK, not all change is good
  • Specialty medical and forensic tools
  • Hand held intelligent industrial inventory tools
  • Interactive video telephony
  • Broadband expansion
  • Mobile investing
  • GPS/war/traffic/weather systems
  • New CPU designs from the likes of ARM
  • 2 billion+ prospective new computer users who will go from abacus to iPhone overnight
  • 10 million making a poor living in China where before they made none

Sure, many of these were around earlier, but they scarcely moved the needle of any metric.

Because the iPhone not only changed how we communicate, while creating a new mobile computer, it gave Apple a five-year lead in touchscreen design with the iPad 1 three years ago. This is what poorly run businesses like HP and Microsoft fail to understand. Nothing about that iPad was rushed to market. By the time you could buy one in April 2009, the user interface had thousands of man years labour invested in it. It did not just happen, and iPad 1 must rank right up there with the Leica M3 (1954) as one of the most perfectly developed ‘Version 1’ models of any machine man has yet made. That iOS has worthy competition from a company which had never made a computer – Google – in the Android OS, is no surprise. By definition, GOOG’s thinking was out of the box. They had no blinkers to discard.

It’s common to see the iPhone and its OS referred to as ‘disruptive’. Wrong. A disruption is when you put down your tea to answer the door for the UPS man. The iPhone was both intensely destructive and creative at the same time. It is a tsunami device, not a storm in a teacup, and it created the world’s largest corporation, Apple, Inc.

The Leica M3, 1954. The previous occasion on which Version 1 was perfect.

The new Kindle – Part II

Hardware

Second try.

Kindle, iPad 1, MacBook Air.

I last wrote about the predecessor to this device a couple of years ago, having returned mine because the UI was about as bad as it gets. The keyboard was indistinguishable from a bilge pump. Both suck, and the page turn buttons on the long sides were way undersprung, so I was always turning pages unintentionally. It’s the only thing I recall returning – OK there was that awful 20mm Canon EF lens – in ages.

Well, the new one – mine is the bottom of the line $79 model – dispenses with 3G, being wi-fi only, and deletes the physical keyboard in exchange for a button-activated virtual on-screen version. An improvement from the execrable to the awful. This makes the device smaller and lighter, as it’s now down to 6 ounces, and the only time you really have to use the clunky keyboard is when first signing in to wi-fi. UK residents pay $138, 75% more, which will serve to remind them not to try and tax our tea ever again. Call it war reparations.

In the US, Amazon Prime members ($80 annually for 2 day UPS on almost everything, plus free movie rentals – recommended) can also get free access to all the Harry Potter books which is enough to make you want to cancel your Prime membership. Still, you don’t have to read this tripe and J K Rowling has no need of your filthy American money. They have enough worthless paper there already, not least in her interminable, glutinous prose-laden novels.

Such a deal.

This is actually a lending library, so I thought I would get off to a good start and borrowed Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short‘ because though I am tall I am also short, if you get my drift. Woo hoo, $9.99 saved already. (Lewis attended my alma mater Salomon Brothers. No, it’s not a Catholic school).

Why am I subjecting myself to this torture again? I want to spend some quality time with our son on the beach and as my earlier piece illustrates, the iPad is useless in direct sun, whereas the Kindle is useless everywhere else. Bright sun is a reasonable bet on California’s beaches, and the prospect of sitting there on me bum like a dope doing nothing would mean early insanity. Swimming? Excuse me, I would rather like to return home with at least two legs attached, rather than with one stashed in the belly of the local Jaws. We are talking Pacific Ocean, here, and those boys gotta eat. Now all I have to do is avoid the discarded hypodermic needles on the beach. So Kindle it is.

The device remains useless for viewing pictures. It automatically downloads software updates unprompted, and did so in my first 30 minutes of use. Nice, if accompanied by more flashing than your local member of Congress in the men’s room at the airport. Unlike your MacBook Pro, there is no telltale odor announcing the fact that you have just fricasséed your gonads, as the Kindle remains perfectly cool.

The weight is so low that it goes unnoticed, one hand operation is a non-event (page turn buttons are on both uprights) and the buttons need a far firmer push on this model, preventing accidental page turning. As before, it comes pre-registered to your customer name and account at Amazon – very nice. Best of all the gadget fits in the back pocket of your Levi 501 button-front jeans, the type Real Men wear, allowing you to do it justice when you next sit down in a forgetful moment.

Finally, not having email etc. means there is no distraction from the old guilt feeling when using an iPad that you have not checked email in the last five minutes or the markets in the last two seconds. That’s not all good, though. Germany loses at soccer, their Chancellor goes berserk and next thing you know the market is up 20% because she was seen making off to the Führer Bunker in the Chancellery with a loaded pistol and a cyanide capsule clenched in her teeth. Well, you will miss that joyous event in real-time if the Kindle is the only gadget you have with you at the time. I suppose there’s always the iPhone and a towel over your head for a quick trade or two while the waves roll in as you twiddle your toes in the sand and broken bourbon bottles.

The regular model is $109 and comes without home page ads; you can pay the extra $30 to remove these from the $79 version I bought, at any time. Smart pricing. These ads are referred to as ‘Special Offers’ which is rather like saying the IRS invites you to file an annual tax return. Your freedom of choice is identical. In practice the ads appear on the home page only and are unobtrusive. The first one I got was for diapers …. maybe condoms will be next? Battery life is claimed to be one month which is Kindlespeak for a week, I suppose. You recharge from any USB socket using the provided micro USB cable. Too bad it’s not mini USB – yet another thing to pack. Mine came 40% charged and was up to 100% in an hour using the MacBook Air as a power source, meaning it should recharge in about 3.5 seconds on a desktop machine. Switching wi-fi off is the best bet for battery life and trust me, only true masochists will keep it on for web surfing.

The Kindle continues to suffer from inept synchronization design. Amazon makes much of how a book read on one device, say an iPad, will be synced to the same location on any other, say a Kindle. They call it ‘Whispersync’ and I call it ‘Bollocks’. In practice if you choose to re-read a finished book, no matter which page you leave it at, all devices will think you are at the last page, and there is no ‘Reset’ button. Gee, how hard is that to do? The simplest fix I have found is described here and it works well. I reset my finished book on the MacBook Air, and then all other devices thought I was at the beginning, or whatever location I set it to on the MBA. No biggie, but really, Amazon!

And don’t ever dare hit a footnote reference because it’s back to Bollocksync and all your devices will once again be at the back of the book. Reminds me of my 10 years dealing with US Immigration. (OK Immigration and Naturalization, though there was nothing Natural about the methadone cases behind the counter). Any time you made an insignificant error on one of their interminable forms, it was back to the end of the line. About that time I recall entertaining serious thoughts about joining the Communist Party and lying on my application. I imagine they were running a pool to see who could accomplish this sadistic ‘back of the line’ trick most often. “Yo, Phil, I did sixteen today!” Once such victim in the line in front of me had a fully fledged nervous breakdown when this treatment was visited on her. Needless to add, she was French. I suspect the software designers at Kindle must be the same ones who work on Fuji cameras or INS forms. Neither ever uses what they create and sure as hell none of them are Americans.

There’s also a ‘Shop in Kindle Store’ option which is rather like asking an amputee to use chopsticks. Yup, that keyboard again. Buy your books using a Mac or iPad, then sync the device. Life is too short for the alternative. I challenge you to find the fiction work you want from the catalog of 504,779 titles and counting. This year’s US Budget will make it 504,780.

One special feature is the ability to rotate the screen orientation whereupon, in landscape mode, the device’s buttons take on all the utility value of a eunuch looking for a spot of fun in a harem. Don’t go there. (The landscape mode; the harem’s fine). However, in flipped portrait mode it works well, moving the button pad to the top. It’s not used when reading and the long, side-mounted page turn buttons fall more easily under the fingers. However owing to another bit of coding genius from the chaps at Amazon, the home page advertisements do not invert which is either wrong or inspired. Probably inspired, as the first ad I saw upside down was for AT&T proclaiming the might of its 4G cellular telephony. Upside down it looks more like 1/4G, which is about right.

Finally, there’s a web browser under the mysterious menu choice of ‘Experimental’. After personal discussions with Jeff Bezos, I can disclose here for the first time that Bezos took my comments to heart and that the choice is being renamed to “I just crapped my pants”. I know this as I just looked up this site using the Kindle after a few hours of virtual keyboard input, and it looked like s**t.

Use with cellular wi-fi? No problemo. My iPad has Verizon cellular (the working alternative to AT&T in the US; AT&T is like government – you pay and nothing happens); fire it up, switch on the personal hotspot on the iPad and login the Kindle after seventeen attempts using the virtual keyboard. Works perfectly. You even get that little symbol on the Kindle telling you that magic is happening and this is not your grandfather’s wifi. You know, the kind in every Dell computer.

Hemingway on the Kindle in the sun.
The ability to change font sizes is welcome.

More when I have got through some more Hemingway. But take it from me, this is very much a single purpose device, designed for reading in bright light only. No idea if it does Chinese. Fair bet it does. Anything else, fughedaboutit.

First field test results:

On the beach at Half Moon Bay

Battery life – update July 23, 2012:

I kept wifi off except for downloads, read seven full length books since I bought mine on June 28, and the battery was showing dead with wifi on and maybe 10% left with wifi off. So Amazon’s ‘four week battery life’ is more like three weeks as long as you leave wifi off, which is not so easy, as after switching it on for a download, you have to dig into the Settings menu to place the device in ‘Airplane Mode’ which is Amazonspeak for ‘wifi off’. A full recharge using the USB cable took 2 hours.

HP100 – keeping the i7 cool

Hackintosh

The optimum setting.

Computer builder FU Steve writes about overclocking, heat management and power supply selection:

* * * * *

Having had a few days to experiment with the Core i7-2600 Intel CPU in the HP100, replacing the excellent i5, I set about varying overclock settings to see where the sweet point lies for Thomas’s HP100 Hackintosh.

The willingness of these CPUs to be overclocked falls, like most populations, on a Bell curve. Most will go to some decent OC, some will not, some will be superstars.

From much of what I have read the stock 3.4GHz speed is easily increased to 4.4GHz (+29%) simply by changing one setting in BIOS, the frequency multiplier. Thereafter things get tricky.

Here are my findings with settings for a stable running CPU; Geekbench results are shown also:


Intel Core i7-2600K overclocking table.

As is clear, the law of diminishing returns kicks in rapidly beyond 4.4GHz with Thomas’s sample of the i7. Go from 4.4 to 4.5GHz, a barely noticeable 3% Geekbench increase, and the idle temperature rises 8F. Go to 4.6GHz, a further 3% Geekbench improvement, and the temperature jumps another 11F, or 19F warmer than at 4.4GHz. After that the temperature rise:speed trade-off worsens quickly. You have to start juicing the core voltages significantly, Bclck is maxed out at 1005, and heat skyrockets. This is not consonant with a long, hard-working life for the CPU which, at $280, is the costliest part in the computer case.

Vcore will be set by the BIOS to 1.36 volts if you leave that setting (in “Advanced Frequency Settings”) at ‘Auto’. However, for maximum stability, override the Auto setting and set it to 1.385 volts. The maximum permitted by Intel is 1.50 volts, so it’s not like you are over-stressing anything.

Optimal setting? 4.4gHz, Vcore 1.385 volts, all other variables at default, failsafe BIOS settings, aftermarket CPU cooler.

In high stress scenarios, such as ripping and compressing a movie file, you can add 70F to the core temperature, so at 4.4GHz the temperature rises to 169F. Intel publishes exhaustive technical data on its CPUs, and you can find the following table in its 2nd Gen Intel® Core™ Processor, LGA1155 Socket: Thermal Guide which makes for fascinating reading:

Thermal table for the 2nd generation Intel i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge CPUs.

The maximum power consumption of the desktop Core i7 is 95W, at which point Intel specifies a case temperature of 72.6C (162.7F). Case temperature (the outside of the CPU) is 22F lower than CPU core temperature (the inside), which is where the temperature sensors used by apps like Bresink’s Temperature Monitor (free download) reside. So Intel’s maximum of 162.7F becomes 184.7F as a safe limit temperature as reported by Temperature Monitor.

In the following 24 hour chart I show temperature for all the cores. The small spikes half way across are for Carbon Copy Cloner running overnight SSD and HDD back-up jobs at 2am and 3am. The peak here is 129F – no biggie. The massive spike at the end is where I used HandBrake to rip a 4gB DVD movie and compress the result to H264 format for playing on an AppleTV2. The process took all of 11 minutes, by the way, and as you can see from the data, all eight cores of the i7 were working hard. There were several LR4 and PS CS5 sessions in the 24 hour period illustrated, but they barely register any heat increase. This is a mighty testimony to the suitability of the HP100 for still picture processing.

24 hrs, concluding with a movie rip/compress.

Ambient temperature was 75F when ripping the movie. The Core temperature rises to 169F, 15.7F below the Intel recommended core maximum of 184.7F. That’s slim headroom, but very safe, owing to the variable speed fan fitted to the large Coolermaster 212 CPU cooler – all of $28 and the best money you can spend on your Hack. Ripping movies with the ineffectual stock Intel cooler is a bad idea. For that matter, ripping movies on any iMac or, worse, MacBook Pro or MacMini, where cooling is severely compromised in the interest of sexy looks on the sales floor, is a positively rotten idea. Hey, it’s your money but be warned. Other than the MacPro, Apple’s hardware is simply unsuited to prolonged movie processing.

Here then is how my Hackintosh HP100 is set with regard to CPU speed and cooling. I use an Antec Sonata III case with the stock 500 watt power supply and two 120mm case fans – these can be manually switched to H/M/L.

  • Rear case exhaust fan – L.
  • HDD case fan – M.
  • CPU 120mm fan – variable – attached to Coolermaster 212 CPU radiator. This fan spools up instantly when the CPU heats up.
  • Intel Core i7-2600K CPU – overclocked to 4.4GHz.
  • BIOS CPU warning set at 176F – this will flash the temperature display from Temperature Monitor in the menu bar.

If overclocking you should experiment with frequency multipliers. Assuming you are using an efficient aftermarket CPU cooler, start by taking the stock frequency multiplier setting of 34x to 38x for the i7, the maximum supported by Intel’s warranty. Then take it up in steps of 2x, doing a Geekbench and Cinebench GPU run each time. The former will report CPU speed, the latter measures GPU speed and is also a good stability test. Once you get a Kernel Panic (grey screen with warnings) in OS X you know you have reached the simple adjustment limit and need to revert to the last stable setting, and you are done.

A note on ambient temperature. My measurements disclose that a 2F rise in room temperature results in a 1F rise in idle CPU core temperature. The above movie rip/compress was at an ambient temperature of 75F. At 95F ambient (we get that a few days a year in the Bay Area, and have no air conditioning) that means the CPU will be 10F warmer, meaning a peak temperature of 179F when ripping/compressing a movie, still within the 184.7F safe limit.

Preliminary measurements on the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display disclose that this is an exceptionally hot running machine, probably owing to the over-spec’d display, something no one needs in a small 15″ screen. And it doesn’t even have a DVD drive. I dread to think what its temperature runs once you connect an external DVD burner for ripping movies.

Determining power supply needs:

It’s easy to overlook the need to correctly specify the power supply when building a high performance Hackintosh. There’s an excellent free calculator at Outervision Extreme where you simply input your components to determine the wattage needed. Not all watts are the same. A cheap PSU with light windings and chintzy transformer iron cores will overheat and compound heat management and stability issues. Good brands include Antec and Thermaltake. I have used both extensively with no issues and many builders to whom I have recommended these remain happy. Here’s my output after using that calculator:

The result suggests that HP100 is bumping up against its limits with its 500 watt PSU, and that a beefier power supply may be called for in the interests of cool running and stability. Mercifully, the upgrade involves a few screws and a couple of connectors, and less than $100. There is no beating stock PC parts for price and reliability.

* * * * *

Thank you, FU, for that timely update, coming on the heels of your sterling work (FU is English, after all!) on the recent HP100 CPU upgrade.

Lightroom 4 rocks

Lightroom

A non-trivial improvement.

When Lightroom 4 first came out I pooh-poohed the improvements. The book module, restricted to Blurb as a printing house, was no big deal and the code bloat was awful, with the app some nine times the size of Lightroom 3.

The GPS mapping feature is OK but needs more work (trip route indication based on file times would be a start) and a global change to the new 2012 process for one’s picture catalog would be insanity. Some of the changes are significant and you risk messing up hundreds of hours of processing work. However, credit where’s it’s due. For the right image LR4’s ability to recover highlight detail where there was none is extraordinary, matched by its enhanced capabilities in the shadows.

Limekiln, 5D, 24-105. LR3 left, LR4 right.

For many users the enhanced capabilities of LR4 obsolete HDR with its clunky processing cycle and default ‘awful orange’ look. HDR is increasingly the province of the Kinkade Set which never saw a piece of kitsch it did not like. For those new to Kinkade he is the drunken letch – now mercifully deceased – who gave the world crap for the wall in abundance. You can search his name because I’m damned if I’m printing his garbage here. The man makes HDR look good.

But Adobe didn’t leave 4.0 alone. The Bokeh Cabal was going on about how some lenses were rendering out of focus detail with purple color fringing, even though LR fixed the in focus bits well. Adobe calls this ‘lateral chromatic aberration’. So they added an enhancement in LR 4.1 to fix this. I paged back through my catalog to some images snapped on the Panny LX-1 which, though it has a decent Leica lens, opts for purple fringing at every opportunity. Sure enough, Adobe was telling the truth. Their enhanced chromatic aberration correction really works.

For photography LR4 is the single biggest improvement I have seen in ages, increasingly obsoleting add-ons and Photoshop itself, the latter restricted to the occasional round trip to fix leaning verticals or to add blur or to erase Cousin Vanya, and so on. And while Adobe’s corner office seems to have frequent difficulty telling its ass from its elbow, there is no denying that their crackerjack software engineers are the bees’ knees. Too bad Apple has abandoned its original constituency of creative users, as ADBE would be chump change for AAPL and a great fit.

As for processor efficiency, LR4 barely moves the needle on CPU temperature when processing; Aperture, in its defense, does permit you to brew your tea on the keyboard under like conditions, at half the price of LR. Neat feature, that.