Category Archives: Photography

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

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.

Mountain Lion on the Hackintosh

Hackintosh

Shades of Microsoft.

While I very much doubt Steve Jobs knew an operating system from an operating table, his tyrannical, bullying rule of Apple Corp. ensured a high level of attention to detail on the part of his workers. As the guys on the disastrous MobileMe product team, who are now holding up cardboard plaques at the corner of Atherton Avenue and El Camino Real proclaiming “Will Work for Food”, will attest.

Such were my thoughts when installing Mountain Lion on the HP100 nuclear powered Hackintosh chez Pindelski. The download price was right, as in free, as my 2012 MacBook Air had grandfathered the freebie. Getting the freebie was a mess of passwords and poor instructions for which I had to wait 48 hours, the sort of thing Bill Gates revelled in, but I got there. Installation on the MBA was uneventful and after thoroughly wringing OS Mountain Lion out with all my favorite apps (especially LR 4.1 and PS CS 5.1) I concluded it was time to give the big guy a spin.

The Hackintosh thing requires that a major release be downloaded from the AppStore and the installation files transferred to a separate bootable medium. (Minor releases are a simple AppStore download). Tonymac’s Unibeast transfers the downloaded files together with a bootloader to the partition of choice. Restarting from the new partition saw Mountain Lion installed to my boot partition in some 10 minutes (SSDs are fast!) and a restart resulted in …. another Microsoft moment. Most things worked well, but Mail was a spinning beach ball much of the time and Contacts (the Address Book of yore) refused to show. So I did a second install, identical to the first and found myself in the land of sweetness and light. Shades of Windows.

The CPU is at 4.4GHz, but 4.3GHz is as high as OS X can show.

The first Geekbench CPU performance score was a ghastly 5500 – I expected 15,000 or so on the overclocked Core i7 SandyBridge. A moment later I had installed NullCPUPowerManagement.kext using Tonymac’s Multibeast as well as the HDARollback and Realtek sound kexts to restore sound functions. Another restart and the Geekbench report was back over 15,000 and Cinebench came in at almost 30fps. Slower than the 38 I was getting in Lion, but it may be that the Nvidia 9800GTX+ GPU, ancient as it is, is beginning to show incompatibility issues. Still, for my purposes (LR and PS) CPU speed is far more important than GPU throughput, given the CPU-intensive nature of those apps.

Geekbench and Mountain Lion.

Cinebench with Mountain Lion. CPU speed is shown correctly.

So, overall performance is largely unchanged compared to Lion 10.7.3 and some handy features are added. One note – Photoshop required a large Java update when first launched, which took a few minutes. Now it loads faster than ever, under 2 seconds, and Lightroom remains as fast as ever.

Dictation works well (HP100 has a Logitech USB microphone connected), the Notification capability mimics iOS and obsoletes Growl to a large extent, and the showstopper (on the MBA) is the addition of AirPlay, a feature common to iPads and iPhones for a while. This allows you to redirect video and audio from Mountain Lion to any TV with an AppleTV connected BUT the sending machine must have an integrated GPU for this to work. Thus regular Core2Duo or Core2Quad machines cannot do this, whereas those with an HD3000 (Sandy Bridge) or HD4000 (Ivy Bridge) integrated GPU can accomplish the task. I have no need to do this with HP100, despite the presence of its HP3000 integrated GPU, but having this on the MBA, the ‘sofa’ Mac, is heaven-sent, and will create another crack in the bundled pricing hegemony of the cable TV providers. You can get it on your laptop? You can send it to your TV!

The enhancements in Mountain Lion are mostly cosmetic. It’s 64 bit only so you will be SOL if you use 32 bit apps, and now is as good a time as any to start researching the topic. Given the otherwise modest changes, the ML upgrade is a low risk proposition if you can cross the ’64 bit only’ hurdle.

This is no bleeding edge upgrade, as Apple’s $20 upgrade price indicates, and I suggest it’s a low risk update for Lion users. Stated differently, it’s last year’s Ferrari with some chrome trim strips added. With Windows 8 set to emulate Windows Vista (last year’s Trabant), there has never been a better time to abandon the Evil Empire. Let’s just hope that Tim Cook shows some tyrannical traits real soon and kicks some rear on those installation glitches.

Preserving TRIM with SSDs:

To understand TRIM – garbage management for SSDs – just search the term using the box atop this page. A photographer friend who has just built a fabulous Hackintosh using a Z77 Gigabyte motherboard and an Ivy Bridge i5 CPU advises that preserving TRIM with a user DSDT file requires the following settings in Multibeast:

TRIM and Mountain Lion.

I can confirm these work.