Category Archives: Photography

Perfect Effects 8

Lightroom, Photographs

Free software, impressively engineered.


Click the image for the download.

onOne Software is offering its Perfect Effects application, usually $100, free for a limited time. You can download it by clicking the above image.

I did so and it installs as a plug-in in PS CS5, LR 5.4 and Aperture, becoming immediately available in LR which is my default processing application.

The engineering could not be better. Export a file from within LR’s Develop module and you get a simple display with a large number of effects to choose from. Save the file and it is saved as a ‘.psd’ copy in your LR catalog, adjacent to the original. I especially like the ‘Glow’ effect when subtle hints of age are called for in an image, and you can easily modulate the glow amount with a slider. Selective application of effects is also possible. A nice tool for the working photographer.

Here’s how the application’s display appears:

And here are the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images:


Before Special Effects ‘glow’.


With Special Effects ‘glow’.

Upgrading the Mac Pro 2013 – Part XXII

Mac Pro

An expensive beast.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

The 2013 Mac Pro may still be hard to find but that does not mean the buyer should overpay for the better CPUs available. Paying Apple or OWC a huge premium for a better CPU suggests you have more money than sense, in which case go for it. This piece is not for you.

The nMP adds one feature not available in the oMP – Thunderbolt. This Intel data communication technology is a motherboard-only hardware installation and it is extremely unlikely that the aftermarket will ever see a TB-equipped motherboard for the oMP. So that means data speeds are limited to 600mb/s at best in the oMP (using a PCIe SATAIII card) whereas twice that rate should be theoretically possible in the nMP.

Where the nMP falls down in price:performance is in CPU speeds. The Geekbench chart below is for multi-core performance.


64-bit multi-core Geekbench data.

Given that the oMP can be upgraded with even faster CPUs than the fastest Apple ever marketed, the 4-core base nMP’s CPU performance is poor by comparison. Install a couple of X5680 3.33GHz or X5690 3.46GHz Xeons in your 2009-2012 oMP and you will get Geekbench scores of 30-32,000, which equals the extremely costly $7,000 top of the line nMP for half the total cost of the computer.

The stock 4-core Xeon E5-1620 in the nMP Geekbenches at 14,600. There are currently three ways of getting a faster CPU:

  • Pay lots to Apple for a costlier CPU at purchase of your nMP
  • Pay lots to OWC/MacSales when you send in your nMP for upgrade and they resell your old CPU for which you get zilch. You have to ship the complete nMP to OWC for the upgrade.
  • Do it yourself and save lots of money

Here’s the current data for the available CPU options which are known to work:

All of these CPUs have a Thermal Design Power of 130 watts, which compares to 80 watts (E5520 8-core), 95 watts (X5650, X5660, X5670, X5675 – all 12 core) and 130 watts (W5590 (8-core), X5680 (12), X5690 (12)) for 2009-2012 dual CPU oMPs.

To ensure meaningful comparisons, I have shown all the Apple-bought options with twin D500 GPUs, 16GB of RAM (the $3,000 base spec nMP comes with only 12GB), and a 256GB SSD. So, as you can see, Apple is charging a premium of $3,500 to upgrade from the 4-core to the 12-core CPU. OWC is barely better, charging $2,978 for the upgrade.

The math could scarcely be simpler. First, there is no earthly reason to buy a new Intel CPU. Used CPUs pulled from servers are fine – I lose count of how many of these I have installed in oMPs and have never had one fail. Never. Just avoid Engineering Samples – look for the ‘S-spec’ on the CPU lid, which confirms that it’s the final item.


Model number and ‘S-spec’ on a final production CPU.

Do the CPU upgrade yourself:

You can do the nMP CPU upgrade yourself. There’s a fair number of sub-assemblies to remove to get at the single CPU which is buried deep inside the form-over-function cylindrical case design of the nMP, but patience and care will get you there. Until Apple Service Manuals become available, the iFixit guide is excellent:


Click the image for the iFixit CPU replacement guide.

Economics of the DIY upgrade:

The current data suggest the following is the most cost effective approach:

  • Purchase the base 4-core nMP new with 16GB of RAM – $3,500
  • Purchase a used 12-core E5-2697 on eBay for $2,500 (Must be marked ‘SR19H’; avoid ones marked ‘QDUF’ which are beta test engineering samples)
  • Sell the stock E5-1620 for $150
  • Net cost of the 12-core upgraded nMP: $5,850. That’s $1,150 less than Apple charges.

The warranty issue:

This piece by OWC says the warranty remains valid when you do a CPU upgrade, unless you damage the machine in the process. Beats me if it’s right as I have not read of the principle being tested, so do your own research if a warranty is important to you:


OWC on warranties.

I remain unconcerned as CPUs very rarely fail. Fans, graphics cards, disk drives, even memory sticks – all of these are likely to fail far sooner than a CPU. That’s where you will most likely claim under warranty.

Other upgradables:

1 – RAM:

Memory upgrades are already available from OWC. Other suppliers will doubtless follow. Four 16GB 1866MHz sticks will cost you $850 or so at OWC, replacing the four 4GB sticks in the stock machine. Alternatively, go to B&H and pay $225 less for Crucial RAM of like spec. Replacement is a trivial process – unplug the old, plug in the new and you are done.

2 – Solid State Drives:

Conventional 1TB SSDs from Samsung run some $450, but these will not fit in the nMP. Apple uses a proprietary connector for the internal SSD, which is retained with but one Torx T8 screw – a trivial replacement. Here are the Apple options:

Until aftermarket options become available the best thing here is to simply wait if you really must have a huge SSD. Given that the best use of an SSD is for the OS and applications I am somewhat mystified why anyone needs 1TB, even with large scratch disks. Further, there’s nothing to stop you using an external SSD in your overpriced Thunderbolt enclosure as a super fast boot and apps drive. But paying $800 for a 1TB internal drive makes little sense.

Panasonic Leica 15mm f/1.7 MFT lens

Micro Four-Thirds

An interesting addition.

It’s not available in the US yet, though B&H already lists it:

The real comparison here for street snappers is the stellar Olympus 17mm f/1.8, which I have been using for a few months now. Regular readers will have noticed that the predominant gear byline for most of my recent street snaps published here is “Panny GX7, 17mm Zuiko” and the reasons are the same I noted in my original review. The fastest AF focus ever, unbelievable flare reistance into the sun, lovely color rendering and excellent optical quality at any aperture. The 17mm Zuiko is very much my “where have you been all my life?” lens.

So this new Panny-Leica optic has its work cut out in the competitive landscape. Fair, it’s a tad wider at 30mm FFE compared with 34mm FFE for the Oly and, truth be told, my brain is hard wired for 35mm after decades with a Leica M2 or M3 and a 35mm Summaron or Summicron attached.

But the point here is that it is heart warming to see so many lenses and makers in the MFT system – Panasonic, Olympus, Leica, Voigtländer with others like Bower/Rokinon joining the frey. And it’s ridiculous to argue that the $600 asked for the new 15mm optic is high. Have you priced Leica’s MF Summicron for the M body recently?

I was going to run a piece in late 2013 on the Panasonic GX7/Olympus Zuiko 17mm f/1.8 as the greatest street snapper combination yet, but decided to hold off until I had more experience with the outfit. Unless there is something very special indeed about the new Leica optic, expect to see that piece run in December, 2014.

Meanwhile, the hegemony enjoyed by Canon and Nikon in pro DSLR ‘flapping mirror/vast bulk and weight’ applications addresses an ever narrowing field of specialization. If you need very shallow depth of field and routinely print larger than 18″ x 24″, there’s still good reason to go with the big boys. But for everyone else, MFT solves. APS-C seems increasingly pointless to me – most of the bulk of FF and none of the pluses of MFT.

Conflicted advice? Hardly. I use a Nikon D3x/D2x and a host of legacy MF lenses, mainly because it’s fun and the investment is amortized. But light and jolly this gear is most certainly not.

The Computer History Museum – Part II

Dining, Photographs

The modern era.

Part I is here.

Many of the rooms in the Museum address the modern era, which I think of as being anchored by the introduction of the two landmark home computers, the Apple ][ and the IBM Personal Computer. The Apple was more than I could afford so I bought the IBM PC in 1983 and it was modern in the sense that it used disk drives, albeit low capacity floppies, had a modem and could accept expansion cards.

But before that, in 1981 I splashed out $1,795 for the best computer I ever owned, the Osborne 1. Purportedly portable, it weighed 23 lbs.


My first computer. The Lee Felsenstein designed Osborne 1 of 1981.

The small CRT screen was supplemented with a $100 plug-in 10″ green on black one, the stock display being pretty much unreadable. Two things made this machine special. First, it was cheap by the standards of the day – the software alone came to the price of the machine if bought separately. Second, it came with a ton of said software. In addition to the lean and mean CP/M operating system, it included the Supercalc spreadsheet application (a clone of Visicalc, the first spreadsheet), Word Perfect for word processing, Basic and most importantly, Ashton Tate’s dBase II.

The Ozzy had 64KB (yes, 64KB) of memory, CP/M taking maybe 28KB of that, and as the applications were tightly written with much assembler code, things just zipped along. It never locked up – something Windows would fix for the ensuing decade of misery. If your spreadsheet or magnum opus was too large disk swapping would kick in, using the second of the two 360KB, one sided floppies. The other floppy drive was used to load the OS and app of choice, one at a time. This was before the days of graphics, so despite these limitations speed was not an issue. After a few months I added a 300 baud dial-up modem for the early days of the Internet. You can see one below the left hand floppy drive, above. It was slower than molasses.

Suffice it to say that after a few months use I was expert in word processing and spreadsheets, decent in Basic and a wiz in dBaseII. Disk swapping meant you could store pretty large databases on the floppies and the application was very competent indeed. It’s fair to say that I learned 75% of what I needed about computer use on the Ozzy, as things only got simpler down the road. The remaining 25% was Photoshop and related, a few years later. The practical knowledge gleaned from using the Ozzy was worth orders of magnitude what I paid for the machine.


The two floppy IBM PC – my second computer.

While the Ozzy was still pretty much a hobbyist machine, the IBM PC was polished and finished when first sold. Where the Ozzy had the feel of a garage build, the IBM PC was made to very high mechanical standards – over-engineered really and a bargain at $1,565. That’s $6-7,000 in today’s money. There was a costlier XT version with a 10MB hard drive, but that was more than I could afford. I added an orange on black 12″ display and a 9×9 pin Okidata dot matrix printer which jammed faster than a Catholic priest chasing an altar boy.

Working at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street at the time, a like machine arrived and sat gathering dust for several months before I pulled my finger out and wrote some handy Basic routines addressing security positions and valuations. The Ozzy had taught me well. Within a year there was one on every desk, all running Lotus 1-2-3.

It’s amazing to recall how slow the clock speed of the Intel 8088 CPU in the IBM PC was. Just 4.77 MHz, single core. I’m writing this on an upgraded 2009 Mac Pro whose twin CPUs run 24 virtual cores at 3.33GHz – some 700 times faster per core. But the modern machine, though it processes any sort of graphics and audio you can throw at it with aplomb, really is not much faster in real use. Back then, tight code was a requirement given the limited memory available. Now it’s an irrelevancy.

Moving on we came on the Game Room where Winston got absorbed in the many early consoles and game machines on display, not least the very capable Atari. There’s an early Pong machine on display and all it does is present two bats, one to each player, and a bouncing ball, which goes ‘pong’ when you hit it – not as easy as it seems. Many bars installed this at the time and many quarters were wasted by patrons playing this inane game.


Winston in the game room.

Finally, Google has a couple of fine displays, one for Google Earth on five large LEDs:


Finding home using Google Earth.

Another lets you sit in one of the Google StreetView cars, atop which is mounted a nine lens camera – eight around and one to the sky:


Google sees all, whether you like it or not.

The remaining displays, replete with PDAs (PalmPilot, anyone?), cellphones and modern PCs, leave me cold. How excited can you get about cell phones, the original iPhone apart?

What is missing?

A room devoted to the sheer hilarity of the many predictions made about technology would do well to discourage speculating about anything further than a week out. Here are some of my special favorites – obviously Doofus must take pride of place here:

  • “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share”. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO (April 2007)
  • “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”. Ken Olson, president Digital Equipment Corp (1977)
  • “Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop.” Time Magazine (1966)
  • “The ˜telephone” has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” Western Union internal memo, 1876.
  • “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
  • “The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most.” IBM executives to the eventual founders of Xerox, 1959.

Compared to those the daily pap you see in the MSM about the stock market is supremely credible and accurate.


Winnie 4 years ago with the iPad1 – not making any predictions..

Dining:

After visiting the Googleplex down the road we drove back across the freeway on Shoreline Boulevard into the town center on Castro Street in Mountain View, a city which was virtually unknown until Google came along just 15 years ago, somewhat defying the Luddites’ conviction that technology destroys jobs. Now Castro Street is lined with chic restaurants and stores, including three (!) bookstores. You know, hard covers, paper, numbered pages and so on.

We had lunch at CrepeVine, which offers a bewildering array of crepes. It’s directly opposite Books, Inc.:


A bewildering array of crepes.

I went for the Tuscany with chicken on a savory crepe, whereas Winnie opted for a truly disgusting looking toasted cheese kids’ sandwich with fries. Pure glop. $20 for the lot and we sat on the sidewalk under heat lamps. My son was the youngest person there, amidst an algorithm of Googlers, and I the oldest. The distinction we brought to the assembly is that neither of us has a boss, nor ever will.


Hustle and bustle at lunch.

Sated, we chatted about our Museum visit and Winnie gave it a “Totally awesome” rating, a modern adaptation and corruption of the language of Shakespeare which translates to ‘Bloody Good’ in the mother tongue.


Totally Awesome! Winnie at the Crepevine.

The Computer History Museum is unreservedly recommended, even for Luddites.

All snapped on the Panny GX7 with the 17mm Zuiko and typed on my Universal Turing Machine.