Adding a Mic to a Mac

The other day my buddy Jeff sent me a link to a video someone had put together that was one of the funniest things I had seen in a long, long time:

The Web Site is Down

Warning: you have to have been in an IT capacity to really appreciate the support desk style humor involved. What was amusing about this was that Jeff and I both thought man, Skype (which figures prominently in the video) looks pretty cool. Determined to check it out I decided that I needed to add a microphone to my Mac Pro in order to get this up and running properly.

When I switched from Windows to Mac I had a number of peripherals that were suddenly available. While most, like printers, USB hubs, memory card readers, speakers, etc. just plugged in and worked, my little standard boom microphone didn't. I plugged it into the back of my Mac Pro and it just didn't record sound.

The reason is the back of the Mac Pro has an audio-in port and I mistakenly assumed was a mic-in port. It's actually a line-in and requires a preamp if I wanted to use my standard mic. Since it was a freebie Creative boom microphone that I'd had for years I decided to just plant it on my Ubuntu machine and get a nice replacement for the Mac Pro.

I ran off to my local Best Buy where I've become such a familiar face that they greet me by name. That's never a good sign. I checked out the mid-range desktop mics and settled on the Rocketfish Digital USB Microphone. My needs for a mic are quite simple and the $24.99 I paid for it didn't seem too bad.

I popped it into a USB port, pushed the little ON button on the top and it was ready to go. I fired up Audacity to see what my recorded voice sounded like and it came through loud and clear, though I did need to set the input volume pretty high.

Now with a functioning microphone attached to my Mac Pro I'm going to give Skype a whirl and see if it's as cool as it looks in that video.

Without a voice that sounds like I've been breathing helium that is.

Some cool Firefox add-ons

For the last week and a half I've been trying out Firefox as my primary web browser. Back when I was a Windows guy I switched to Firefox because of the innovations it introduced and most importantly the extensions available for it. Now that I'm exclusively a Mac / Linux guy I figured I would check out the Firefox add-on market and see what's available.

It's important to note that the web browser is more than just a device to view web pages. I personally do a lot of data entry through web pages, mainly with this blog. Since I use Blogger I end up composing these posts using the in-page editor. Obviously if you comment on this blog you will be using a simple text editing surface to enter your comments. This can extend further when you look at online products like those offered from Google, including e-mail, word processing and spreadsheets.

I also do a lot of my development work using a web browser. In some cases it is to simply see the results of the application I am working on and in others I am trying to work out CSS issues or image alignment problems. Fortunately the Firefox add-in space has an extensive library of tools to make life easier.

Given that as an introduction, what follows are the add-ons I found tremendously helpful.

Foxmarks
As I have for many years I use several computers in my daily work. I have my Mac Pro, which is my primary development machine and overall workhorse. I have my new MacBook Pro, which I use when traveling and for taking to meetings. I have a great little Ubuntu workstation that I use for some testing and to host certain external services and goofing around in general. Each of these machines is running Firefox and as a result I have 3 different sets of bookmarks.

Foxmarks is an add-on and free online service that synchronizes your bookmarks. Not only does it keep your bookmarks synchronized it also provides a web site that you can access from anywhere (my.foxmarks.com) where you can view the bookmarks. While this is very similar to the bookmark component that's offered with Mobile Me from Apple, the service is free. Since Mobile Me does not support Firefox bookmarks you now have a way to keep those bookmarks synchronized as well.

BBCode
I spend a fair amount of time in forums and responding to comments in this blog. In these cases being able to insert HTML links, character formatting and image references can be a bit of a pain. BBCode provides some nice context sensitive menu help to formatting. I have used this extension for years and if you spend any time in online forums you will really appreciate it.

Forecastfox
Though I have more sources of weather information than I can shake a stick at I love being able to glance down at the status bar of my current browser window and get a reading on the weather. Forecastfox, something I've used for years, fits that bill perfectly. Not only can I see a little radar view of my area I can click and get access to a detailed AccuWeather forecast.

ColorZilla
One of the challenges in doing web based design is matching up colors perfectly. Sometimes you just need to make sure that your web page's background matches the RGB color of a part of an image. ColorZilla provides a nice little way of "color dropping" any part of your web page and then seeing the RGB value for that.

Once you've selected a color you can copy it in standard formats to the clipboard, making it easy to insert into HTML or CSS.

Firebug
If you do any web development work at all, Firebug is an outstanding addition to Firefox that gives you extensive control over HTML, CSS and Javascript on the web pages you are visiting. Calling this an add-on is a bit misleading; Firebug is so powerful it feels like a full development environment.

So there you have it, my first cut at some great Firefox extensions. I didn't count 1Password, though technically that does appear as an add-on to Firefox. I'm still looking for a decent dictionary reference to replace the fact that Control-Command-D does not work in Firefox. The number of add-ons and themes for Firefox is incredible; well over 5,000 of them. While quantity is no indication of quality, there are several more that I really am looking forward to trying out.

Got a favorite that I didn't include? Let me know!

Living with the MacBook Pro

It's now been a couple of weeks since I bought a MacBook Pro and handed my MacBook down to my youngest daughter. In that time I've used the MBP quite a bit and overall I'm quite happy with the upgrade. The only issue that I've had with it has been the heat it generates, though to a large degree I haven't really noticed it any longer. Either my left wrist has adjusted to being slightly warmer than my right wrist or the Fan Control I installed has helped keep the machine running a little cooler. I actually believe it's a bit of both.

I've now used the MBP sitting on my lap and worked with it comfortably for about 2 hours and I didn't even need to use the Belkin Cooling Pad I bought, though I do still use that every once in a while.

The overall performance of the machine has been excellent and—as I mentioned earlier—I love the display. The battery life from the machine has been very good for me and after a couple of hours on battery with moderate use I'm down to about 45% of my battery charge remaining.

One of the things I didn't appreciate until the last couple of days is the way the display adjusts to the ambient light. When you combine that with the backlighting on the keyboard the MBP is a completely useable machine in very low light conditions. 

The quality of sound from the MBP is also a big improvement over my MacBook or any of the HP or Dell laptops I've had recently. If I have a video or piece of music that I want to share with the family then everyone can hear it quite easily.

ExpressCard 34

About the only thing I didn't quite understand on my MBP was the purpose of the ExpressCard slot on the side of my machine. It's a slick looking little slot with a door that pushes in and smoothly rounded edges. I figured it must be a Mac thing so I did a little research on it.

Turns out the ExpressCard slot is the 34mm version of the PCMCIA card that PCs have had forever. The more traditional format—54mm—is what you tend to see in larger PC based laptops. If you're interested in reading about what this stuff is all about Extreme Tech covered the announcement of this new standard. Five years ago. Still, it's a worthwhile read if you want to understand what this is about.

So what exactly can you plug into this? With USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 there's not a lot you really need out of ExpressCard that isn't more easily handled with a simple external connector. The most popular devices that I found from NewEgg appear to be external SATAII interfaces that provide full 3.0Gps rates.

I can see that a memory card reader—something I wish Apple had just included on the machine—is an option, the Compact Flash format my Canon DSLRs use are too large to fit in the slot. There is a CF reader from Verbatim that fits into the ExpressCard/34 slot but it sticks out a bit. On the bright side it claims to be up to 5x faster than a USB based device. When I transfer photos from a nearly full 4GB CF card that may come in handy.

If you know of a killer ExpressCard use or have experience with it compared to comparable USB based devices (like CF card readers) please comment about it! I would be really interested in finding out if people are getting considerable performance gains using this technology.

Screen sharing with Leopard

It was a beautiful day outside so I decided to grab the MacBook Pro and enjoy the delightful weather out on our screened in porch. I had some online reading to do as I am trying to get a handle on Git, the version control system I am going to be using.

While sitting here enjoying the breeze and working through the Git documentation I remembered that I had left Adium running on the Mac Pro downstairs. Many of my friends contact me through AIM and I usually put up an away message if I'm gone for a while. But I just sat down and got comfortable - getting up seemed like a lot of work to me. I decided that now was the perfect time to try out Leopard's Screen Sharing capability.

For some reason Apple decided to bury Screen Sharing down in the following location:

/System/Library/Core Services

I navigated to that in Finder and then dragged it into my Dock to get easier access to it. Once I had that fired up I simply entered the name of my Mac Pro into the Host window and pressed Connect. I was immediately rewarded with my entire Mac Pro's screen, miniaturized and scaled to fit on my MacBook Pro:

Even my dual monitors were represented. I tried playing around a bit and found it to be quite responsive. I had the option of either viewing the screen in scaled mode or by scrolling it. I found the scaling worked better for what I needed to do. Granted, the menu bar was extremely tiny but I could make out the little Adium icon and quickly set my status to away.

One machine to rule them all

Having accomplished this little mission I thought to myself: I wonder if I can gain access to my Ubuntu machine from the comfort of my screened in porch too? It physically sits right next to the Mac Pro and resides on the same network. I use SSH all the time to remotely connect and run tasks but I had never tried accessing my Ubuntu machine using a remote screen sharing application.

Apple's Screen Sharing program is based on VNC, which I knew was available for Ubuntu. With this little hacking challenge on the table I decided to dig in. First I ran SSH and connected to my Ubuntu machine. Next I followed LifeHacker's nice little four step instructions for getting VNC up and running on Ubuntu—something that could be handled through my SSH connection.

Within a couple of minutes I had my Ubuntu machine ready to be accessed. I fired up Screen Sharing again and entered in the name of my Ubuntu workstation. I got a couple of warning dialogs but within a few seconds I was rewarded with my Ubuntu screen up and running on my MacBook Pro:

The performance of the connection was terrible compared to the performance I got from the Mac Pro, though it was functional. I didn't tweak it at all; I just did it because I could, so I'm sure there is room for optimization.

I don't know why but there is something tremendously satisfying about remotely controlling a machine, especially one you didn't have the ability to control when you sat down. With my little remote adventure out of the way and this blog entry written up I better get back to that Git documentation.

It's not reading itself.

My free iPod Touch

Each member of my family—my wife, three children and I—are heavy iPod Nano users. We never got into the iPods with hard drives because they were just too large. When the first Nano model came out I immediately went out and got one for each of us. We do a lot of travel as a family and figured the iPod would be a great way to help reduce the quantity and volume of "Are we there yet?".

At that point we were all still Windows users, each of us running some flavor of Windows XP and using iTunes on it. The Nanos were perfect for us and regardless of where we fell on the technical proficiency scale they were mastered very quickly.  We imported our CD collections and began buying our music through iTunes. 

Over the years we cycled through at least one iPod each. For my wife, son and I it was because we upgraded to a newer model with more memory, video capabilities, etc.

My daughters were a different story. Either both of them are fond of carrying bricks in their oversized purses or they have a secret pet rock fetish but both have managed to crush the display on their Nanos. My oldest daughter is very pragmatic about it and was quite happy to just take the ones that my wife or son had upgraded from. My youngest however is a gadget fiend and simply has to have the latest and greatest device.

"Daddy, I would love to get an iPod Touch. Have you seen the screens on them? They are SOOOO cool! Can I please have one?"

Ugh. I don't know where she gets this obsession with technology. 

Needless to say she did get an iPod Touch for Christmas last year and happily showed it off to everyone. While I was quite happy with my last generation iPod Nano (no video) because of the tiny size and 8GB capacity, there was a part of me that coveted that iPod Touch.

A free iPod Touch?

When we bought the MacBook Pro a little over a week ago we were able to take advantage of the promotional program Apple is running for people that qualify for an educational discount. There are benefits that my wife gets from teaching at a public high school and this is one that I enjoy the most. Not only were we able to get a discount on the MacBook Pro itself and Applecare, we were also able to get a free iPod with up to a $299 rebate. Since the 8GB iPod Touch was $299 I figured this would be a great time to get one.

The Touch is an interesting device and a marvel of engineering. The large display on it is simply stunning. After the display the biggest difference between it and the standard iPod line is that there are only two external buttons: The Sleep/Wake—On/Off button at the top edge and the Home button on the face. This is a bit of a challenge because I normally operate my Nano by feel. My thumb feels the click wheel on the Nano and I can pause, change the volume or skip to the next or previous song without ever looking, even when I'm out jogging.

The Touch requires my full attention when operating it however. The position of the controls is handled directly on the touch display, a display that can reorient itself based on the attitude of the device. Hold it straight up (Portrait) and you get slightly different control surfaces than if the Touch is on it's side (Landscape).

For this reason alone the Nano will continue to be my primary music device, at least for exercising. The Touch has many capabilities though, some changing the way I access my primary computers.

E-Mail and Web Browsing

Perhaps the coolest feature of the iPod Touch is the ability to surf the web using Wifi and the internal Safari browser. If you have not seen an iPhone or iPod Touch browsing the web you will be stunned that something so small could actually be so functional. Though it does require a Wifi host to tap into I can generally find them in most of the places I frequent. 

I'm a big Gmail fan and the mail program in the Touch can hook right up to it and provide a highly readable interface to my e-mail. Though I wouldn't want to compose anything of length on the Touch's display based keyboard, it is pretty easy to type on. If you have large fingers it would likely be a bit of a challenge though.

I've found that now when I am upstairs watching TV with my wife I'll keep the Touch handy because it's so quick and easy to check e-mail or pull up a web site that is referenced on the program we're watching. It isn't something I would spend an extended amount of time on but is perfect for that quick reference.

It may be pretty but it gets dirty fast

About the only thing negative I could think of with the iPod Touch is that its polished surface—both the display glass and the chrome back—show every finger print and smudge. Within a day of getting the Touch I went over to my local Best Buy and purchased a DLO Jam Jacket for $21. It provides a rubberized case that ads a little to the bulk of the Touch but in return makes it feel highly ruggedized. 

The small clip on the back of the Jam Jacket doubles as a headphone holder so you don't have to wrap the headphones around the business end of the display. This makes it even easier to just grab it quickly and check e-mail or the web.

Apple comes through again

When we bought the MacBook Pro and the iPod Touch we had to pay for the Touch up front. The $299 was supposed to come as a rebate. I've always hated rebates. The companies that provide them often squirrel out of them by telling you that you didn't include the correct UPC code or you wait for 6-8 weeks and just forget about the darn thing.

Apple is different. When we bought it they gave me a little card and the Apple Store employee told me to go online when I got home and fill out the form. He even offered the use of the Macs on display if I wanted to do it immediately. I ended up going home and filling out the form, a very brief one that basically had me plugging in my receipt ID and confirming my mailing address. It was really simple.

Four days later I got an e-mail from Apple indicating that my rebate was on the way. Today I received the rebate check from Apple. Elapsed time to receive the rebate check: 9 calendar days or 5 business days.

Apple continues to impress me. Not only are they producing cutting edge products that I thoroughly enjoy using, they are running their business exceptionally well.

Safari or Firefox?

When I was a Windows user I went through several generations of browsers. Starting off with Mosaic, then on to Netscape Navigator and finally, since I was a hard core MS guy, Internet Explorer. Of course back then we called the early versions Internet Exploder because the thing would frequently crash in spectacular ways. Over time Internet Explorer improved and became fairly stable, though it had a huge number of security holes that Microsoft could never seem to get on top of.

Once Internet Explorer became the defacto standard on the Windows platform Microsoft stopped innovating on it and focused on fixing security issues. It was about this time that Mozilla put out the first versions of Firefox and suddenly I had a reason to consider something other than IE. Firefox was quick, had a tabbed interface that IE didn't, didn't have the security holes that IE had and was, for the most part, able to present most web pages just as well as IE.

I quickly adopted Firefox as my default browser and for the next couple of years watched as Microsoft slowly realized that they needed to put a lot of effort into their new browser. Firefox always seemed to be one step ahead of IE, adding great new capabilities like skinning, plugins and extensions that were really handy.

Enough Windows History - What About Mac?
When I switched to Mac I figured I would also use Firefox instead of Safari. It was actually the very first application I installed on my new Mac. After playing with both I was surprised to find myself using Safari as my default browser. My use of Firefox was limited to my development work where some of the extensions for Firefox come in handy and the XML viewer that's built in makes life much easier.

What didn't I like about Firefox? It was considerably slower than Safari when loading and rendering web pages. The UI did not feel Mac like, with a toolbar that looked like something from an older Windows application. I love the clean, crisp UIs that Apple produces and while some think that Safari is spartan, I think it's just clean and uncluttered.

Firefox also rendered form components on a web page very differently than Safari. While Safari's pulldown lists and buttons inside a web form looked just like any other Mac UI, the Firefox versions of those buttons looked like something from an old Windows 98 machine; square, gray, flat buttons.

Out Comes Firefox 3.0
The recent release of Firefox 3.0 meant that I wanted to check this out again and see if Firefox deserved a spot as my default browser. I installed it over my previous version and started playing around.

Note: If you are a 1Password fan like I am you will need to open the preferences in it and reset it in the Browsers section.

The first thing I noticed is that it is considerably faster than the previous version. I didn't do hard core testing—just some subjective stuff—but found it to be nearly as fast as Safari. The UI has also been updated, making it look much more like a traditional Mac application. I particularly like the tab and toolbar rendering:


I also found that the web forms that Firefox used to generate are now being presented with traditional OS X looking components. This was a big deal for me so I was quite happy to see that in 3.0.

The Firefox team also added a cool searching feature. Click on the down arrow just on the right side of the address box and up pops your standard list of recent addresses. If you begin to type any matches found—both from your history and your bookmarks—appear in the list. It's kind of like a browser specific Spotlight search. Very cool.

There are three key Safari features that I don't have in Firefox though:

1) Dictionary Lookup
2) Drag and drop in web file upload forms
3) Snapback

Of these only Dictionary Lookup is tough to live without for me. Given the advances that Firefox has made I am going to spend the next week playing with this browser to see if it can indeed become my default. Using it for the bulk of the day yesterday leads me to think it has a pretty good chance.

Switching to iPhoto from Picasa

When I switched to Mac from Windows one of the programs I missed the most was Picasa, Google's free photo management tool. Picasa and iPhoto are very similar and perform many of the same functions, including photo editing basics like red-eye removal, cropping, straightening, etc.

Back in March I talked about the basic differences between Picasa and iPhoto. Since then I've acquired my Mac Pro, shut down the Windows machine that used to be my primary photo archive and moved everything to iPhoto. That has presented some interesting challenges.

For many years I had established a pretty standardized model for storing and managing my photos, necessitated to a large degree because I didn't have a photo management tool other than the Windows file system and Photoshop for the first few years. My system was quite simple: I had a folder for each year and within each year I had a folder for each day. A typical folder structure looked something like this:

When I would take new photos I would grab the memory card, put it in my reader on my PC and then just move them to the appropriate folder based on the date the photos were taken. This eliminated naming issues if the auto-generated file names rolled over (an issue in the early days) and gave me a pretty easy way of finding things based on date.

Picasa was great because it supported this model. All I had to do was tell Picasa to monitor my Photos directory and everything under it and Picasa took care of the rest. Everything was indexed from there and all I had to do was copy the files off my memory cards and on to the hard drive.

Switching to iPhoto

iPhoto supports two models for storing photos: they can either be copied into a single library "file" that iPhoto manages or they can be left in their original directory and referenced from there.

Copying the files into iPhoto's library is the default behavior. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this will double the size of your photo library if you use this option and plan on keeping the photos on disk. You can of course just delete the photos from their original location once they are imported or even use iPhoto's ability to suck them right out of your camera.

The other option is to leave the files in the location you started from and have iPhoto reference them from there. You lose the ability to embed ColorSync profile information if you go this route and you really don't want to move those files around once iPhoto knows about them. This is the method I'm using for a couple of reasons.

Sharing Photos on my Network

While Mac has become the platform of choice in our household, my wife and son are still clinging to Windows machines and I still have a couple Windows boxes that are used occasionally, along with an Ubuntu system to round it all out. Sharing photos with all of those machines is pretty important.

If you copy your photos into iPhoto's library you can share them from there, though there is a catch; you have to keep your copy of iPhoto running at all times (in order to share) and the people that want to access the photos must have a Mac and run iPhoto.

Given my multi-cultural network of machines that is not an option. As a result I have a volume on my Mac Pro that contains all of my original photos. This folder is shared on my network in Read Only form so that anyone on the network, regardless of OS, can see them.

The other reason I do this is because there is a pretty good possibility that at some point I will use something other than iPhoto on my Mac to manage my photo library. It may be Aperature, Lightroom or even the rumored Mac version of Picasa. Keeping my files in a neutral storage location—all 21,000 of them—ensures I won't have any problem getting them into my next tool. Even if that next tool is the next version of iPhoto.

Second Impressions - adjusting to a MacBook Pro

Having the MacBook Pro for a couple of days now has led to me liking the machine quite a bit more than my initial negative impression, caused primarily by the heat it generated. The biggest change was the result of downloading and installing Fan Control based on Charles' recommendation.

With Fan Control installed I've settled in on putting the minimum threshold for the fans at 3,100 RPM and have noticed a considerable difference. My CPU core temp at idle is down in the 40°-43°C range most of the day and I don't get any noticeable warmth under my left palm.

Fan Control is added directly to your System Preferences so it integrates nicely. I didn't play with the thresholds, leaving them at their standard defaults. All I did was push the base speed to 3,100 RPM. I don't hear any real difference in the noise the fan generates though the environments I use the machine are not exactly whisper quiet.

I don't know how much of this heat reduction is due to Fan Control and how much is just the result of the machine burning in a bit. I do have a slight concern wearing out the fans on my MBP however. I know that normally machines like the MBP, with tightly engineered components, are designed with certain tolerances in mind and I don't know if running the fan 33% faster than it normally does would dramatically impact the life of the machine.

Heat is the enemy of all electronic components so I'm rationalizing—as several comments to my last blog post have—that I'd rather have a fan that is inexpensive to replace fail than other more expensive parts. 

External Monitors

I tried hooking up a Samsung wide screen display to my MBP and found that the external monitor adaptor is quite tight with hardly any gap for the adaptor housing. My first attempts to even plug it in failed. On inspecting the end of the adaptor I saw that it was very slightly out of shape, the result of cramming it through one of those holes in a desk for routing cables. Once I "adjusted" it back it went in but required a little convincing.

When plugged in I had full access to an external desktop that would make the MBP a worthy competitor to my Mac Pro with it's dual 1600x1200 displays. Performance with the external display was very good and if I only had this one machine I would likely keep the external display on; there is no such thing as too much screen real estate. If you have a MacBook Pro as your primary machine and it spends the majority of the time parked on your desk you should seriously consider getting a nice external LCD monitor as a complimentary display.

Just make sure the adaptor from the monitor is straight and true so that it fits into the MBP clean.

Our Free iPod

An anonymous commenter here mentioned that Apple was having an educational promotion in the US. From June 3, 2008 through September 15, 2008. People that qualify for the educational discount—not just college students as the ad implies—can also get a rebate of up to $299 on an iPod. Since my wife is a public high school teacher we qualified and I (Okay, We) were able to pick up an 8GB iPod Touch basically for free when we purchased the MBP.

We had to pay for it up front but the rebate process is really simple and handled online. While I would love to get an iPhone, especially the 3G version due in July, I'm going to wait out my Sprint contract before I go there. In the meantime I now have a device that can help me see what my web products look and feel like in the iPhone form factor. It won't replace my previous generation iPod Nano as my exercise music device since it's too large for that but it's a great way to check my e-mail while I'm lounging out on the deck and within range of my Wifi hub.

If you qualify for it you should seriously consider taking advantage of this offer. Since I had just bought my wife a new pink iPod Nano for valentines day I didn't feel too guilty about becoming the primary user of it. She thinks it's too big anyway.

Replacing a MacBook with a MacBook Pro

On Saturday I pulled the trigger on my MacBook Pro purchase, going with the base model 15" MacBook Pro directly from my local Apple store. Here are the specs:

2.4GHz

2GB RAM

200GB 5,400 RPM hard drive

Glossy display

My youngest daughter is quite pleased because this frees up my little MacBook for her. I've been steadily working through getting things transferred and installed on the MacBook Pro and every hour or so my daughter pops in and asks if she can take the MacBook yet.

Soon, honey. Soon.

I'm actually a little reluctant to part with the MacBook now. It is after all a wonderful little machine and to a large degree I appreciate it a bit more with the new MacBook Pro getting all of my attention. I even set about comparing them side by side, taking a few pictures along the way.

From a size standpoint the 15" MacBook Pro is still a pretty small machine. Actually a tiny bit thinner than a MacBook it feels quite sleek and the aluminum case feels very solid and durable compared to the shiny plastic case on the MacBook. Though the MacBook Pro weighs in at 5.4 pounds compared to the MacBook's 5.0 pounds that nearly half pound difference feels like a lot more. Finally the width and depth are about an inch larger on each edge for the Pro.

The display on the MacBook Pro is excellent and for me the main reason for the upgrade. At 1440 x 900 I get 26% more screen real estate than on the MacBook, which is actually pretty substantial for such a nominal increase in the size of the machine. The display is a bit brighter on the MacBook Pro too.

Before doing too much I ended up swapping the after-market memory I had placed in the MacBook (4GB) with what was in the MacBook Pro (2GB). That swap was very simple; 3 tiny philips #0 screws on each machine and about 3 minutes of work and each machine was being powered back up without any issues.

My initial impression of the MacBook Pro was not too good though. After firing it up and letting it charge up I started the process of installing my applications on it. At first I tried the Migration Assistant but decided that I really didn't want everything transfered over from my MacBook to the new MB Pro. Since the MacBook was my first Mac I had a lot of "software experiments" on it and I figured I'd just be selective.

One of the first things I installed was iStat menu so that I could monitor the machine as I put it through it's paces. It was a good thing I did because the temperature gauge came in handy.

The MacBook is One Hot Computer

While busily copying files over to the MB Pro I noticed that the case was getting pretty warm, especially under my left palm. After a little while it became more than just warm and was flat out hot, with heated air blasting out of the left speaker grill like a mini-furnace.

I went online and did some research and found hundreds of complaints about the heat that is generated by a MB Pro. I read many cases of people going to Apple to complain about the heat generated by the machines and being told that it was within specification. My little MacBook would get warm when I pushed it hard for an extended period of time but that wasn't too often. In addition the heat was always routed out the rear edge of the case, right at the base of the display. The front area where I rested my palms was never an issue on the MacBook.

I also found more than one instance of Apple personnel telling people that the MacBook Pro is not considered a laptop computer; it's a notebook. What's the difference? A laptop can rest on your lap and be used, a notebook apparently requires a desk under it. Given the heat that the MB Pro was generating for me the only way this thing was going to get parked on my legs was if I was suffering from hypothermia.

Though I don't do it often, I do occasionally like to take my MacBook off the desk and plant it on my lap while watching TV with my wife. The heat that it generated was just not acceptable for the way I wanted to use the machine.

I ended up doing a little father's day shopping and found the Belkin Laptop Cooling Pad at my local Costco for $20. It not only allows you to comfortably rest the MacBook Pro on your legs without sautéing your skin it also has a little USB powered fan the pushes cool air up at the bottom of the machine, helping it stay considerably cooler according to iStat menu. At least now I had a decent solution to my little heating problem.

I used the Belkin cooling pad for several hours yesterday and it does work quite well. The only challenge is that a lot of the spontaneity of simply grabbing the machine off the desk is lost when I also have to reach for the cooling pad at the same time. For people that work for many hours with their notebook computer on their lap this is a great little device though.

Now that I've been running the machine for a little over 24 hours I've noticed that the heat has dissipated to a large degree. The machine still gets warm mind you, especially on the left side, but nowhere near the mini kiln that it felt like initially.

If the machine is running quietly for a while with minimum CPU usage I am seeing the core CPU temperature hover at about 51° Celsius. If I let it run at about 15% CPU utilization for a couple of minutes the CPU temperature pops up into the 63° Celsius range and the keyboard gets a little warm but not uncomfortably so. I'll be monitoring this very closely over the next couple of days.

Keyboard / Trackpad Differences

The two machines have the same basic keyboard layout, the only difference being that the MacBook Pro has two additional dedicated function keys for Dimming and Brightening the backlit keyboard (F5 & F6). Since I had been using F5 as my Spaces key I had to find another shortcut for that. The backlit keyboard function is pretty handy, illuminating the entire keyboard when the lighting conditions warrant it. I imagine this would be very handy while trying to use the machine at night on an aircraft, assuming you have the seat room to really use the machine effectively.

The other difference is that the keys themselves are more like a traditional laptop or desktop keyboard; both my MacBook and aluminum keyboard on my Mac Pro have the same "chicklet" style layout with smaller flat buttons that have a slight separation between each key. Since the physical arrangement is identical there is no real adjustment, though using the countered keys on the MacBook Pro is actually quite nice.

Finally the trackpad on the MacBook Pro has a few more options than my MacBook did. While the MacBook's trackpad supported two finger scrolling and right click emulation, the MacBook Pro adds pinch and expand, rotate, swipe and additional tapping support.

Looking Ahead

When I asked the Apple store folks whether I could replace the hard drive myself and still keep the warranty valid the answer was no. If I wanted to swap out the hard drive I would need to use an Apple authorized service center; the store in Tysons Corner, VA does not offer that service. They told me that if I did have the hard drive replaced properly then everything would be covered under warranty except the new hard drive.

I'm going to see how well the 200GB drive I have holds up for now. I've still got a lot of free space left right now and as long as I keep my video footage over on the Mac Pro and limit myself to a subset of my music and digital photo collections I should be perfectly fine.

When the 320GB / 7200RPM drives become available I'll see what it would cost to get an authorized dealer to install one. If it's not too bad then I may go that route. I'm also adopting a wait and see attitude on the heat issue. I'm not sure if this is just something you live with on MacBook Pros or if my machine has an issue that I'll need a Genius to take a look at.

Finding and setting up a UPS for a Mac

With summer weather fast approaching on the east coast I decided it was time to get a new Battery Backup device (aka UPS) for my Mac Pro. This decision was hastened by my experience a couple of days ago when the power dropped during a thunderstorm and my Mac Pro—unable to communicate with my Tripp Lite UPS—dropped from lack of power.

To my surprise I found through comments on my blog that OS X has built in UPS support, though just not with the older Tripp Lite I owned. I also got a few comments from folks on the blog and in e-mails recommending a couple of different Battery Backups and I did some more research on the topic. Though several vendors have products in this space APC seemed to consistently bubble to the top, both in end user ratings on sites like Newegg and with editorial reviews. I had owned APC units in the past and had very good luck with them.

APC even has a great tool for determining which UPS class is best based on your power needs. Armed with this knowledge I decided that I really wanted a 1500VA / 865Watts class device. According to everything I read this gave me more than enough capacity to get through 5 to 10 minute long outages and continue to work, even while running the quad core Mac Pro with dual 20" LCDs. If the power went out while I was away then the APC would be able to tell the Mac when the batteries were in a low state and perform a graceful shutdown.

The number of options from APC is staggering so once I determined the rating I wanted I looked for price points and availability. I targeted a $200 price point and found that my local Best Buy had the BX 1500 LCD in stock for $199. Newegg was a bit cheaper but when I added in shipping costs and the delay in getting it my local store was a better option.

The BX 1500 LCD is a pretty large UPS, weighing in at a healthy 30 pounds. It has a bright red LCD up front that can cycle through some basic stats on the health of the device and even the power draw from devices attached to it.

On the back are 6 battery backed outlets with surge protection and 2 that only offer surge protection.  Two of the battery backed outlets are spaced in such a way that you can fit the larger adaptors favored by peripheral devices like cable modems and external hard drives.

Lately my area has been experiencing some power fluctuations; this UPS has a technology called Automatic Voltage Regulation (AVR) that reportedly will help during those times. 

My UPS came out of the box fully charged; all I needed to do was open the case, connect up the leads for the battery and it was ready to go. It also came with a little "Data Port" connector and cable so that it could talk to the Mac Pro. This is a non-standard USB cable with normal USB connector on the computer side and an RJ45 connector on the UPS side.

The downside to the BX1500LCD is that APC does not offer replacement batteries for it right now. The batteries are designed to last for about 3 years. I did a little hunting around and found an aftermarket vendor named Arizona Batteries that claims to sell replacement batteries for it. APC also has a trade-UPS program where you can turn in your existing APC UPS and get 35% off the retails price from them, though shipping on such a heavy item may be a factor.

The Software Side

Once everything was plugged in and the Mac Pro fired up I saw that a new icon had appeared in my menu bar:

The only thing that was a little odd was that the indicator on the menu didn't know how much time I had left on the battery, though it could tell me what percentage of charge I had remaining. If the power drops then the menu bar icon changes and then was able to tell me either what percentage of battery power was remaining or how much time I had left on the batteries.

When I opened preferences I could now choose between settings for the Power Adaptor or UPS.

Of the three settings the one that seemed most useful was shutting down when the time left on the UPS was X minutes; I set mine to 3 minutes, figuring that would be plenty of time to close everything up and leave a little room to spare, yet allow me to work for a bit if I wanted to keep going.

PowerChute Personal Edition 1.3.4

APC actually ships some native OS X software with the system called PowerChute Personal Edition. It is a plugin that gets added to your preferences panel. I decided to try it out and see if it would add anything that I didn't have with the native OS X features. It did not. I would not recommend installing it.

Time to Test

A Battery Backup is really easy to test; just pull the plug on it and see what happens. First off, there is an audible alarm on the UPS and another on the Mac. The two fans on the UPS suddenly started running - something they don't do when under regular power. A large warning window pops up on the Mac and tells you that you are now running on battery and to save your work.

The indicator in the menu bar changes and now is able to tell how much power is left in the batteries as a percentage as well as how many minutes it thinks you have. Though there was no load on the machine it immediately dropped to 17 minutes of predicted run time.

I didn't push it too hard, putting it back on power after a few minutes. Even though it was only off power for about 2 minutes it took a full 15 minutes to recharge to full strength.  A fully depleted battery should take about 16 hours to recharge.

Though this is a rather long article for something as simple as a UPS it really was very easy to install and I'm really pleased that OS X was able to recognize it without having to install any additional software. If you plug your computer into a cheap little power strip today you should seriously consider getting even a minimalist UPS because of the surge protection it affords.

Many thanks to the folks that commented on this blog and directly to me in e-mail about which UPS to go with.

iStat menus 1.3 - improving an already excellent tool

One of my favorite applications was improved today when iSlayer released iStat menus version 1.3, a free utility for OS X. If you haven't already downloaded and installed it I can't recommend it enough. It's a great tool for monitoring the health of your Mac and I've used it as a quick-glance diagnostic tool whenever I want to see if something's amiss.

The obvious changes to 1.3 are in the UI for configuring the menus. The screens have a cleaner graphical treatment and the controls are organized a little better, especially in the calendar configuration area:

There are also a number of bug fixes and additional minor features in this release. If you aren't using iStat menu then by all means, click here, download it and install it. While you're at it you may want to look at their Dashboard widget as well: iStat Pro. Between the two I can see at a glance what is going on by looking up at my menu bar, click on it to dive in a little deeper, launch Activity Monitor from it if I see something I'm curious about or simply open my dashboard and get a comprehensive view of the health of my machine.

Like iStat menu as much as I do? Consider donating to these guys. It's money well spent and rewards some people for creating a really valuable utility.

Become a Safari power user

I spend a lot of time in Safari which is my browser of choice. I would like to share the resources I've come across to improve the Safari browsing experience. Even though I've talked about a couple of these in bits and pieces before I wanted to create a single comprehensive post that covers Safari across the board; tips, helpful sites and some usage techniques.

Setting up Safari

Before we begin there are some settings that you should check. Open the preferences (Command-,) within Safari. In the General section I have my browser set to open links from applications in a new tab in the current window. Though I do occasionally use multiple Safari windows it's pretty rare - I much prefer to keep it all in one window and leverage the tabs. Under the Tabs section I also have Command-Click open a link in a new tab and do not select tabs and windows as they are created.

Even with these options set, some web applications—Gmail in particular—manage to open links in a new window. Apple added a terminal command into Safari 3.1 that addresses that issue. Open a terminal session and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Once that's done you must close down Safari and restart it in order for this to take effect.

Another thing I always turn on is the Status Bar (Command-/). When I hover over most links it will show me where the link leads and I get an idea of what's going on as pages load up their contents.

If you are a technical user or developer you may want to turn on the Develop menu, located under the Advanced section. This will add a Develop pull down menu between Bookmarks and Window in the menu bar. It gives you some access to a couple of cool features I discuss below.

Finally, I have have my middle mouse button set to open a link in a new tab in the current window, similar to Command-click. This is usually controlled by your Keyboard and Mouse settings under the system Preferences. Since I use a Logitech mouse and USB Overdrive I change the setting from that screen.

Making the most of tabs

I love tabs in browsers. It is far and away the best thing that's been added to the browsing experience since web browsers were initially introduced. I rarely have multiple browser windows open, preferring instead to use as many tabs as I can. If I conduct a search or am on a link rich web page I will often just use the middle mouse button—or Command-Click—and open every link that looks interesting. They populate in the background while I continue reading what's in front of me. Only after I'm done with the page I'm reading will I start to explore the subsequent tabs that were created.

As with many people in the internet age I have developed a mild form of attention deficit disorder, popping from topic to topic without focusing on content. This model of using tabs has helped me become a bit more focused.

Key Keyboard Shortcuts

Lately I've been trying to use the keyboard more in Safari, especially when I have the MacBook balanced on my lap. Safari supports a number of handy shortcuts, though the ones that I've found valuable are the following:

Keystroke	Action
Command-L	Jump to the address bar
Command-T	Create a new, blank tab
Command-Option-F	Jump to the Google search box
Command-F	Open the find utility for the current web page
Command-Shift-[	Previous tab
Command-Shift-]	Next tab
Command-W	Close current tab
Command-Up Arrow	Top of page
Command-Down Arrow	Bottom of page
Option-Up Arrow	Scroll up one screen
Option-Down Arrow	Scroll down one screen
Control-Command-D	Load the live dictionary on any word under the mouse*

*Yes, I know it's not a Safari thing; works in any Cocoa application as well. I just use it most often in Safari.

There are other shortcuts listed in Help but these are the ones I've found the most helpful.

Bookmark Management

I use the Bookmark bar, which is just above the tab line, for my most common destinations. I always rename items after I've dragged them there to keep it as short and sweet as possible. I also create pull down folders on the Bookmark bar for each of the key areas I focus on: Technical resources, Mac Stuff, Family, Work and Development. In many cases I'll add sub folders under these as well.

For some reason I have not found much value in the Bookmarks menu bar. I think this is a function of having multiple monitors and sometimes my Safari window is on my second monitor while my menu bar is permanently fixed to my primary monitor. This way my browser list is always close at hand.

Using the Develop Resources

If you turned on the Develop menu in the menu bar there are a couple of interesting things you can do. I mentioned before that you can fake some web sites into thinking you are running a different browser. But if you are a web developer or interested in what's really happening behind the scenes of a web page you can access some powerful inspectors through the Develop menu.

Loading up the Web Inspector will give you a highly structured view of the underlying HTML that makes the web site work. Here is an example of what my main page looks like:

In addition you can load a Network Timeline that displays all of the elements on the current page and how long they took to load:

If you are building a web site or helping someone troubleshoot a problem area the Network Timeline is a great resource for figuring out where the bottlenecks are.

Add-in Resources

There are really only two add-in resources for Safari that I've found really helpful. By far the most helpful is 1Password. You can read my original blog post about it but I will say again it's a fantastic utility and I highly recommend it.

In addition I also use Inquisitor, which adds some enhanced searching functionality, essentially making the Google search box perform much like the in-site searching features on Apple.com. I also have more on Inquisitor in a recent blog post.

There is also a collection point on the web for Safari plugins called PimpMySafari.com. Inside of that site you will find a number of add-ons for Safari with nice little summaries and feature lists.

Wrapping it up

While I covered all of the things I've learned about making the most out of Safari over the last four months I'm sure I missed something. If you have a specific tip that you think would help folks please add it in the comments below. I mentioned at the beginning that this would be a comprehensive list and I'm pretty confident that if I missed anything one of the many people that have been helping me will chime in and fill in the blanks.

Apple releases 10.5.3 - how the update went

I saw this afternoon that Apple has released the 10.5.3 update and decided that I would update my MacBook. The update itself is 420MB in size and took me about 20 minutes to download using my Verizon FIOS connection. I simply did the Apple / Software Update... route and let it download and install it.

Before I did that I forced Time Machine to do a "back up now" to make sure I had a current picture of my Mac. Once the download was complete it spent some more time doing installs (about 5 minutes or so), then prompted me that it needed to reboot the machine.

The reboot process ran about 5 minutes (spinning gear) before it prompted me to log in. Once that was done I was up and running, though not everything was available immediately. The Dashboard was not available initially and a quick look at iStat menu showed some pretty heavily sustained CPU and disk activity. Dashboard came back after a little while but Spotlight was still out until 12 minutes in because it was "indexing the backup".

I have a 1TB MyBook drive attached via USB that I run TimeMachine against. Since I have a 320GB HD in the MacBook that means a fair amount of data to reindex.

Once Spotlight became available the CPU went on another work bender with MDS and MDWORKER cranking pretty hard. These are used by Spotlight for reindexing and made the machine a bit sluggish while they were working. It was still useable mind you, just really busy.

A full 25 minutes after my reboot the machine was still cranking away with indexing tasks; both MDS and MDWORKER using a sustained 20% CPU. I'm watching my MacBook as I write this on my MacPro and at 38 minutes in the machine is still going through peaks and valleys of CPU usage.

While it's probably safe to shut down the machine or put it to sleep while the MDS and MDWORKER process is happily working away I wouldn't recommend it. Best bet is to perform this upgrade when you can let the machine sit and bake for a while - plan on an hour - then letting it complete everything.

If you have any feedback on the 10.5.3 release that would be of help to others please add it in the comments below!

Update: Over an hour later it's still busy indexing away. Note the iStat results:

Final Update: It took a little over 2 hours for the machine to finally settle down and complete the reindexing process.

Really Final Update: It appears that this was related to having an attached USB based WD MyBook drive (1TB), which I use for Time Machine backups. When I upgraded my Mac Pro the indexing after the final reboot lasted a couple of minutes with very low CPU impact.

Taking Quicksilver for a spin

I've now been blogging about my Mac experience for nearly four months. In that time I've had one product consistently recommended to me by the readers of this blog: Quicksilver. Initially I was getting so many recommendations for different products to try that I couldn't keep track of all of them and Quicksilver was one I would get to "some day".

As the weeks went by I continued to get Quicksilver recommendations. Finally I decided to look into it a bit more. I went to the web site and started to poke around. I scanned through a couple of tutorials and was basically a bit overwhelmed - while Quicksilver could be used as a simple Spotlight replacement it also had a huge number of plugins that would provide enhanced functionality. I like my Mac because it's simple, not complicated, and Quicksilver looked like it would take a fair amount of work to just get configured properly. I watched a screen cast from a now defunct web site that contained 10 minutes of a fast talking walk through just to get Quicksilver installed and configured and that reinforced it for me.

Back to the shelf for Quicksilver.

Well, not long after I wrote my last post about Spotlight I started to have second thoughts about using it. I've now seen my Spotlight index get corrupted 3 times. If you are using Spotlight for searches - which is what it's designed to do - and it can't find what you are looking for then you can assume one of two things: either the item doesn't exist or your Spotlight index is corrupt. Since both of those situations give the same results it's hard to trust Spotlight. As Pecos Bill noted in some recent comments, hopefully this will be addressed in 10.5.3.

Instead of waiting around for that possible event I decided to give Quicksilver one more try. My initial goals are not very ambitious; allow me to quickly launch applications without touching the mouse, find documents that I have on my local hard drive and search through recent browser history. I know Quicksilver can do a lot more than that but for my purposes all I really wanted to do was replace Spotlight for now. Once mastered I'll look into using more functionality.

Launching Applications

This was about as easy as it gets. Quicksilver is FAST; it loads quickly and has this uncanny ability to present the application I want to run after 2-3 letters. The text model is a little different than Spotlight since the letters you type will disappear after a second - there is not a text entry field. Make a mistake? Hit backspace just once and everything you type up until that point is gone. In practice this is not an issue for application launching - at least not for me - because it always seems to find the right app.

Searching for Documents and Browser History

Again, the results I received were nearly identical to the way Spotlight worked for me. It quickly found the documents I was searching for provided they were in my list of "watched" folders. Searching for documents is a bit odd without a dedicated search box though. Any fat fingering of the search string and it's time for a do-over. I'm also finding that if I hit a period while in the middle of a query the searching stops and the only way to get back into search mode is to hit the Quicksilver activation keys twice (close and reopen). 

There are clearly some quirks to work through here but I can see the value in this.

Bonus feature - the clipboard history

There was one plugin that I did try out and start to use - the Clipboard History manager. This little gem will keep track of the last X items (I have mine set to 9) you copied to your clipboard and allow you to select and paste them easily. I simply activate Quicksilver and then hit Command-L. Up popped my list of recently copied items; all I need to do is double click on an item from that list and it's pasted into the focused window below or press the number next to the item on the list. Very handy.

In summary Quicksilver looks to be a blessing to people that simply love to use the keyboard. If you are keyboard inclined at all and would like an alternative to touching the mouse when doing all but simple transitions between applications then Quicksilver looks like it can be quite powerful.

Make Spotlight find your kind of files