I recently needed to access the GUI of my Mac at work from home. Alas, Apple Remote Desktop Sharing was turned off.
Here’s how to turn on Remote Desktop Sharing from the command line. This assumes you have Remote Login (SSH) turned on in system preferences. If not, you’re hosed. Continue reading
Reader Charles asked a great question after reading my post about hiding a mounted disk volume on the desktop. He asked, in a nutshell, how to cause Mac OS X to not automatically mount a volume. Basically, Charles wants to leave his bootcamp volume unmounted when in Mac OS X. As it sits, Mac OS X automatically mounts all non-removable drives at startup. Continue reading
The mission:
Spend no more than $100 to equip your iSight-less Mac with a web cam, mic, and software necessary to do screen, audio and video capture. Oh, and make it easy. Continue reading
Apple’s Mail.app utilizes a SQLite database to manage the mail index. In my case, that’s approaching 10,000 email messages. Constant deleting and moving wreaks havoc over time on this database, resulting in slow-downs and hiccups (or, in the worst case, failure). You can force Mail.app to rebuild its index, resulting in much snappier performance, a reduction in glitches, and a substantial savings in space. Performing this action has caused my mail folder to shrink in size from 780 MB to 363.9 MB. Continue reading
Apple’s new AppleTV appears to have been modded by several early adopters, who have gotten file-system access to the device (surprisingly easily), and enabled it to play XviD, AVI, FLV, DivX, 3ivX, and every other media type supported by Perian. Continue reading
So, you’ve installed Apple’s Boot Camp, partitioned your hard disk, installed Windows XP, but now you have the Windows volume showing up on your Mac desktop. You can hide it (but keep access to it), by doing the following: Continue reading
The energy saver preference panel in Mac OS X offers a simplistic approach to managing energy saving settings, such as sleep time for the computer and disks. A user might think that by deselecting “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible”, the drives would be prevented from spinning down. This is not, however, true.
As everyone with an external FireWire, USB or internal RAID array knows, these disks will spin down after 5 minutes of being idle, regardless of whether the aforementioned check box is deselected.
What is a computer user to do when confronted by this wholly unexpected (and dare I say, ‘illogical’) situation? We’ll use Mac OS X’s UNIX underpinnings to change this behavior, using the pmset command to set all drives to never spin down (no, that’s not ecologically friendly). Continue reading
Are you a Mac transplant? Perhaps you’re new to the Mac after spending time in the Windows world? Whatever the case may be, you may find the keyboard characteristics on the Mac confusing, or you may just prefer how certain keys function in Windows. For example, do you like how pressing the Home and End keys in XP moves the cursor to the beginning and end of the line? Take heart. Changing the default keyboard action of Mac OS X is an easy task.
Continue reading
Here’s a quick way to resize a large number of photos using a built-in feature of Mac OS X, that also generates a web page while it’s at it for an easy photo album.
In Finder, click the “Go” menu, and select ” (shift-command-G), then copy in this path: /System/Library/Image Capture/Automatic Tasks/. Alternatively, you could open your hard drive and navigate to it.
Once there, you will notice ten automated tasks. The one we’re interested in is “Build Slide Show”. Double click on it to launch it. Notice that it’s icon is now in the Dock.
We’re going to use photos stored in our iPhoto library. Alternatively, you could use photos stored anywhere. Open iPhoto, select the photos you wish to process, and drag them to the “Build Web Page” icon in the dock. Presto. The script processes the images, and builds a web page for you, opening it in Safari (or your default browser).
You can derive the location of your resized photos and the HTML by looking at the URL, beginning with the word “Photos”.
All to often I hear people tossing about performance specs they’ve read off peripheral packaging, as if it were gospel. In particular, in my professional role dealing with media creation, I continually run into people claiming USB 2.0 is “faster” because the marketing-speak from Intel claims theoretical throughput greater than that of Firewire. Well, tune in and I’ll demonstrate why that just isn’t true and why Firewire is the choice of professional video editors.
Contrary to widely held beliefs, propped up by the theoretical numbers marketers like to bandy about, USB 2.0 is far inferior in terms of the kind of performance required for external disk storage, not just for digital video use, but for general use as well.
While marketers like to tout USB 2.0 throughput as 480 Mbps versus FireWire’s 400 Mbps, what they don’t discuss is the built-in inefficiency of the USB 2.0 architecture, which substantially reduces actual sustained throughput (the kind you want for disk storage and video editing).
Technically speaking, Firewire uses an architecture in which the peripherals negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control data transfer. This peer-to-peer arrangement works well because the devices are independently intelligent. USB 2.0, on the other hand, uses a master-slave architecture, wherein the host computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control). It is this flow-control that is a critical determinant in the actual performance of the device.
A great example, presented by PC Magazine, reveals USB 2.0 is not 40 times faster than USB 1.1 (as promised by comparing the “rated” throughput), but merely 2 to 13 times as fast1. Not only is that a wide discrepancy in the rated throughput, but also in actual performance. This is due, fundamentally, to the flow-control architecture.
Want real world numbers? Here they are (courtesy of qimaging.com):
Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show:
Read Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0
Write Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0
As you can see, the performance gap substantially widens as you move from large numbers of small files to small numbers of large files. Because video editing generally consists of utilizing large files, you can see why Firewire 400 is the substantially better interface. Then, consider Firewire 800 and you should be sold on the choice of Firewire for video editing.