Apple

6 Terabytes (TB) of Storage in a Mac Pro. Jealous Much?

/ Adam Nash

Not sure what to say here but wow.

My friend Eric has done it again.  You may remember my last post here about his efforts to get a 320GB Raid 0 array into a MacBook Pro.

Well, he recently ran out of storage on his Mac Pro, and upgraded it with six (6) 1 TB drives, for a total of 6 TB storage.  Check out this configuration:

Not only does he have 6 drives, but he has an optimized configuration, layering both RAID 1+0 over different partitions to create the optimum mix for system boot, scratch, and photo storage:

A2: 20GB partition x 6 = 120GB RAID 0 (striped) fast partition for PS3/Final Cut scratch
B2: 65GB partition x 6 = 195GB RAID 1+0 (striped over mirrored) boot partition
C2: 850GB partition x 6 = 2.5TB RAID 1+0 (striped over mirrored) data partition

For the full article, with benchmarks, click here. If you want to buy some prints of his more famous photos, go to his new web gallery.

Starcraft 2: Blizzard Website Updates

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Quick post, but if you haven’t checked out the new Starcraft 2 website, you are missing out.   I’ve managed to successfully avoid getting roped into World of Warcraft, but I’m pretty sure this one has my number on it.  I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to find the couple hundred spare hours necessary for this one.  I think Blizzard may be the best video game company of all time.

Pixar:Computer Animation as Blizzard:Real Time Strategy Games

Discuss.

Fake Steve Jobs to Join Forbes.com on August 6th

/ Adam Nash

The 14-month quest for the identity of Fake Steve Jobs is at an end, and the answer is somewhat of a surprise.

I won’t spoil it here, but you can read about it directly on the FSJ blog.   The announcement from Forbes.com is here.  The New York Times coverage that outed him is here.

I find the FSJ blog extremely humorous on most days.  It’s a little sad to have the illusion popped.

I feel like he deserves one of those “Real American Hero” spoof commercials for Bud Light…

So here’s to you, Mr. Fake Steve Jobs… 

Adam Nash Gets NAS: The Infrant ReadyNAS NV+

/ Adam Nash / 7 Comments

It has been a long while since I reviewed any high tech device on this blog, but I am so delighted with my new Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ that I had to post about it.

The Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ is one of the new generation of simple, easy-to-setup storage servers available for home and home office use.  Although individual hard drives are getting cheaper every day (I regularly see 500GB drives for $99 on NewEgg now), storage of large media files (like video and DVDs) are outstripping even the biggest drives.

The Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ is a really interesting solution.  For about $600 you get an shiny, empty case, about the size of two large Harry Potter hardcover books.  The case has a plug for power, 3 USB ports, and a single Gigabit ethernet port.  The little server has a cute little LCD, hidden behind a mirror, which displays status in plain English.  The case has room for up to four SATA hard drives, although it will function with only one if needed.  However, the magic really starts when you install multiple drives.

You see, the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ is actually a little genius of a server.  It is built to magically turn multiple hard drives into a single, large volume, with professional-class protection from data loss, and the ability to be accessed from anywhere on the network, by any Mac, PC or Unix machine.  For techies out there, the device seamless handles RAID 0, 1, 5 and “RAID X” configurations. By default, the machine comes configured for RAID X.  More on RAID X in a second.

The Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ offers the amazing feature of data protection.  If any one of the hard drives crash, you won’t lose one byte.  In fact, you can just pop out the drive, insert a new one, and voila, everything is back to normal.  Fantastic for anyone who has dealt with the struggles of trying to back up hundreds of gigabytes of data.

Even better, the “RAID X” virtualization software in the ReadyNAS allows you to start out with as few as two drives, and still have complete data protection.  When you run out of space, you can just add a third drive, and voila, more storage!

This data protection costs you in terms of GB… one drive is utilized completely for protection.  So if you have just two drives, you only get access to a single drive worth of storage.  However, drives are cheap, and losing data isn’t, so these days it is worth.

I have had two major hard drive crashes in the past two years – each one was almost tragic.  The first cost me about 5% of my photo library – that may not sound like much, but it meant whole event albums were lost… (sorry, Rebecca, your prom photos are gone).  The second cost me about 1/3 of my music library, leading to many hours of re-ripping CDs.

Those events led me to the conclusion that it was worth spending the extra dollars on more robust storage.  Now that we have multiple computers in the house, and devices like the AppleTV, it makes more sense than ever to have cheap, reliable, massive network storage.

The Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ has a lot of professional-class features.  The OS is on flash, and is thus protected from any drive failure.  The LED gives great status, and the device has a lot of file-server configuration tools on it’s web based administration.  You can even plug an addition USB drive into the device to automatically backup the ReadyNAS!  The NV+ is quieter, and has improved technology for compatibility and speed with Mac OS-based machines.   It supports full duplex Gigabit ethernet with large frames, making it as fast as possible for network storage.

I configured my device with 2 750GB Seagate 7200.10 drives, each with 16MB cache.  Over my Gigabit network (I’m using a NetGear 8-port 1000/100/10 Switch), I am seeing speeds of about 500MB per minute, but the ReadyNAS hasn’t finished synching yet, so I expect speeds may improve a bit.  At this speed, I can do an incremental 1-4GB backup easily in minutes.

The machine is relatively silent, louder than a Tivo though, quieter than a PC.  It’s small, and I’ve actually installed it not next to my computer like a hard drive, but on a shelf near my ethernet switch.

When I mount the drive, I see the shares on my PowerMac G5 just like any other server, with 666GB of storage available.  (Yes, weird how the 750GB drives come out that way… just an artifact of the fact that hard drive manufacturers continue to label their hard drive sizes incorrectly, pretending that 1 Kilobyte is 1000 bytes instead of 1024.)  I paid a lot more for the 750GB drives – about $200 each vs. $100 for the 500GB versions.  Still, this gives me room for an additional 1.5 TB of storage over time, and I really think I’m going to need the space.  At this point, my backup needs about 300GB, and I have 60GB of photos, 100GB of iTunes music & video, and 400GB of ripped DVDs… and that’s just right now!

Anyway, I love the device, despite the cost.  There are cheaper boxes out there, but this server lets me start with the storage I need, and painlessly expand over time.   I also considered the Drobo, which is about $200 cheaper, and connects via USB 2.0.  The Drobo has an even better trick with storage – it will let you use drives of different sizes!  Use 2 500GB drives today, and add 2 1TB drives in a year when those are available.   Still, in the end, I wasn’t comfortable with a drive that had to depend on a computer to be used by other machines – I like betting on the future of Gigabit ethernet more than on USB 2.0.

You could always buy a cheap PC, get a RAID 5 card, and try to build this yourself… but when I priced it out, it was hard for me to save much money, and the time & quality of the end result was just not compelling.  I was able to install the 2 drives and set up the ReadyNAS in less than 45 minutes.  It would have been faster, but I of course insist on tweaking the security and network settings.

Anyway, I can’t say enough good things about the ReadyNAS NV+.  It took a bit of work and confidence to get the drives to slide in properly, but it really is a great product.

Apple iPhone: Web Development Site is Now Live!

/ Adam Nash

Apple hasn’t released an SDK for client application development for the iPhone, but they have launched a new website for developers interested in customizing their web-based applications for the iPhone.

Apple Developer Connection: iPhone

The site consists of a link to the beta download of Safari 3.0 for Windows & Mac.

The real detail, however, is in this mini-site for web specifications for development for the iPhone version of Safari – specifications for size, what is and isn’t supported, etc.

Very cool.  There may in fact be a halo-effect around websites that optimize for the iPhone.  Given the buzz around the device and the first true rich-browser experience on a mobile phone, there could be a mutually beneficial relationship between compelling web-applications customized for the iPhone and the iPhone itself.  After all, great applications will make the iPhone feel that much more compelling, and tailored experiences can make those applications the preference of the 700K and growing iPhone users.

Is Safari for Windows Part of the iPhone Strategy?

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Steve Jobs gave the keynote for WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) 2007 today, and as usual it was packed with announcements.

There are so many Apple magazines, websites, and blogs, it feels like a waste for me to repeat the “10 Features of Leopard” that Steve walked through.

If you want that walkthrough, here is a good one.  Apple is also hosting the video of the keynote, in case you want to watch it live.

However, judging by the pure volume of headlines, the press have decided to highlight the last announcement in the keynote as the big shocker of the day:  Safari 3.0 for Windows.

It’s not an obvious move.  Now, it’s not that I don’t understand the problem.  Believe me, the relatively small market share for Safari is a real issue.  For most of the time I was at eBay, Safari was not on the official list of supported browsers for eBay, largely because of its unusual implementation of Javascript and DHTML, and because of its minuscule market share.  It wasn’t until 2006 that Safari 2.0 made the list, and that had more to do with the growth of Firefox and the need to target “all modern browsers”.

What non-developers may not realize is that supporting additional platforms always requires more initial thought and a higher level of developer skill.  Originally, when HTML was dirt-simple, there was no real issue with browser complexity.  However, the browser wars of the late 1990s gave birth to incredible complexity in web programming, and that has only gained steam in the past few years as developers struggle to add richer interfaces to their web applications.

As a result, supporting additional platforms and web browsers is a big deal.  Internet Explorer is Windows-only (a move I have long questioned strategically).  Safari is Mac-only (until now).  Thank goodness for Mozilla Firefox, the only real hope of building code once and having it run on a large number of platforms.

Depending on whose numbers you believe, IE has about 80% marketshare, Firefox has 15%, and Safari has 5%.  Different sites have different numbers, because some sites attract different types of audiences.

As a web developer, you could decide to target only IE.  That gets you 80% of the market.  That might work, but it’s not as easy a decision as it was in 2003 when they had 90+% of the market.

Developing for IE & Firefox seems like the right answer, because it gets you 95% of the market, and the nature of developing for Firefox usually means good, clean, standards-compliant code that will also work on Safari.

As a result, Mac users owe a real debt to the growth and success of Mozilla Firefox.  Once developers decide to go “multi-browser”, they usually include Safari for good measure.

So, why does Apple choose to promote “a third option”?  They have no chance of catalyzing the anti-Microsoft, open-source community… they are behind Mozilla (and for good reason).  They have no chance of taking significant share from IE… everyone who can download a separate browser has largely downloaded Firefox.  And if they should take market share from Mozilla, then they have likely hurt the case for non-IE development by fragmenting the market further.

When Apple launched Safari, Firefox was not nearly as robust or successful as it is now.  But I really wondered why Safari 2.0 wasn’t just a Firefox variant… an extension of the Mozilla codebase, hand-tailored for the Mac by Apple (like an official Camino build).

So here is my theory… based on no real information.  I have seen this theory in exactly zero of the articles on the topic I browsed today.

It’s about the iPhone.

It takes a few assumptions to get there, but just ponder the following, and let me know if you think I’m crazy:

  • Let’s say that developing a full-featured web browser for mobile that is differentiated and supported the unique Apple-designed gestures and interfaces for the iPhone required so much customization that you really needed to own the code base.
  • Or, let’s assume that Apple doesn’t want to reveal the source code of some of its browser innovations for the iPhone as a form of proprietary advantage in the mobile space.
  • Let’s also assume that Apple wants a rich set of applications for the iPhone, but wants to bypass the current models for installing applications on cell phones, and WAP-based models for web-application development.  Apple wants rich applications without the strings that come from service providers or the limitations of WAP.

Apple has a bit of a problem now… they need a custom browser, but they want active developer support to build these rich applications.  They need market share… but not PC market share.  They need mobile market share.

Could the answer be a Safari for Windows that runs on Windows Mobile?  Is it possible that Apple would license Safari for Windows Mobile to a broad set of carriers?  It wouldn’t be the iPhone, but it would be a larger audience for web developers to target, and it would be a “stepping stone” for buyers of non-Apple, integrated mobile devices to get a “taste” of the Apple iPhone experience.  Safari for Windows then provides Windows-based developers with an easy target platform for development & testing.

Might be a stretch.  But I wonder if Safari for Windows has more to do with Apple’s non-PC device strategy than some bizarre attempt to take on Microsoft and Mozilla.

Daring Fireball thinks it’s all about the revenue from the search bar… I see that as a perk, but not a major reason to take on this challenge.  $75M in revenue per year is just not a big deal at Apple’s current size… unless they see their growth slowing and are scraping for every dollar.

ZFS: The New Filesystem for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

/ Adam Nash

Just found this article on CNet:

Apple will include ZFS with Mac OS X Leopard, Sun confirms

First thought… Steve is going to be pissed. He hates leaks.

Now, some information. From the article:

ZFS, which (sort of) stands for Zettabyte File System and was originally developed by Sun, is a huge step forward from traditional file systems. It protects all files with 64-bit checksums to detect and fix data corruption and, as a 128-bit file system, can handle many orders of magnitude more space than current versions of Microsoft Windows, OS X, or Linux. (There is a movement afoot to port ZFS to Linux but it’s complicated by restrictions in the GNU General Public License.)

One of the biggest changes ZFS offers is what’s known as a pooled storage model. What that means is that physical drives become even more removed from logical volumes, and getting more free space simply means plugging in more drives. The file system takes care of the rest for you.

Not that we were hitting the limit on 64-bit filesystems, but it’s worth noting that ZFS is a 128-bit filesystem. It’s always nice to have a filesystem that can support more files than there are atoms in the universe. I like this post entitled 128-bit storage: are you high on the Sun blogs.

Here are 10 reasons to reformat your hard drive to ZFS.

Can’t wait for Leopard… should be more news available soon coming out of WWDC 2007.

Update (6/11/2007):  First Apple said no, now they say they will include ZFS, but only as a read-only file system in Leopard.  Lame.

How to Upgrade Your AppleTV with a 160GB Hard Drive

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

I have posted many times about how much I love the AppleTV, and more importantly, how much my son Jacob loves the AppleTV. But after ripping about 20 DVDs, the original hard drive had just run out of room. 40GB is just not enough.

This afternoon I took an hour and upgraded the AppleTV to a 160GB. The upgrade went pretty smoothly, but I thought it was worth sharing my experience here.

First, instructions. I found a lot of these on the web, but many dated from the original launch, and I found after investigation that they were overly complex. I ended up using these excellent instructions from Engadget, and for the most part, they were complete and easy to understand.

Since I’m linking to the instructions, let me highlight some of the things not typically covered. For example, what did I buy?

I bought the following things:

I love getting new tools, and the Husky Torx set is finally going meet my needs long term. It’s so cool. And you need a T8 and T10 to open the AppleTV, because there are 2 sets of screws. From my old Mac repair days, I had a T10, but not a T8.

I spent a little more on a hard drive case for the old drive because I figured a 40GB portable USB hard drive might come in handy, and this case doesn’t require 2 USB plugs for power and had good reviews.

Step 1: Removing the Old Drive

This went according to plan, except that I ripped the rubber bottom a little when I was removing it. There was no warning about this, so just be really careful when you peel it off. It actually isn’t a big square – it wraps around the edges more than I first thought.

The first set of screws actually come in 2 sizes! Make sure to remember where the long ones go vs. the short ones. It’s easy to tell because when you look inside the box, one set of holes is on posts and doesn’t need a long screw.

Two things are on the original hard drive – a flat, peel off pad between the hard drive and the case, and a small stick-on pad between the hard drive and the internal components. In order to get the hard drive out, it’s best to wiggle the ATA plug free with your fingernails, and then peel the drive free. The instructions didn’t really cover this.

Step 2: Disk image of the old drive

This was much easier than I thought. I just plugged the old AppleTV HD into my new case, and plugged it into my PowerMac G5 running Mac OS 10.4.9. Open up the Terminal application, because as they said in Jurassic Park, “Oh, it’s a UNIX system!”

The drive actually has two partitions: OSBoot & Media. The instructions given by Engadget actually have you back up the entire drive, but since you only need OSBoot, I improvised. OSBoot is only 900MB, and Media is 36GB. Since the copy over USB was handling about 2MB per second, I didn’t have the patience to copy 36GB that I was never going to use.

So, here is the command line sequence that I used:

PowerSmash-G5:~ adamnash$ diskutil list

/dev/disk6
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *37.3 GB disk6
1: EFI 34.0 MB disk6s1
2: 5265636F-7665-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC 400.0 MB disk6s2
3: Apple_HFS OSBoot 900.0 MB disk6s3
4: Apple_HFS Media 36.0 GB disk6s4

This gave me a much longer list, which I’m truncating here. diskutil list gives you the complete list of mounted drives, and most importantly, gives you the actually volume name for your AppleTV drive (in my case, /dev/disk6)

I then modified the “dd” command that Engadget recommends, truncating it to the size I needed:

PowerSmash-G5:~ adamnash$ dd if=/dev/disk6 count=1335 of=/Users/adamnash/Desktop/AppleTV.img bs=1024k

1335+0 records in
1335+0 records out
1399848960 bytes transferred in 1055.788885 secs (1325880 bytes/sec)

So now I had my AppleTV.img disk image sitting on my desktop. Awesome.

Step 3: Create New Drive

This was a lot more command line fun than I thought. Engadget’s instructions here were spot on. Since Engadget actually doesn’t explain the steps in plain english, here’s what you are actually doing:

  1. Moving the old disk image to the new hard drive
  2. Deleting the “Media” partition, since it’s too small
  3. Creating a new “Media” partition that is as big as your new drive will allow
  4. Formatting the new “Media” partition as HFS+ Journaled
  5. Deleting any Spotlight directories from OSBoot and Media

Through it all, I became really impressed with gpt and diskutil as command line operators. Very powerful.

Step 4: Install New HD in AppleTV

This was really easy. The key for me was to put the sticky pads from the old HD on the new HD first, then reattach the IDE cable. Once that was done, I screwed the HD in place onto the base. I then put the base back on the AppleTV, and put in the 4 screws that hold it together. I then re-applied the rubber.

Step 5: It’s Alive!

I rushed it back to my bedroom and hooked up the power & HDMI. Worked perfectly, and now has 145GB of space for media. Basically, it acted like a brand new AppleTV, so I did have to walk through setup and connect it with my iTunes. But it just worked.

Epilogue: Do I recommend this?

Ironically, Apple started selling a 160GB AppleTV this week for $399. That’s $150 over the $249 for the 40GB version. So why would you ever do this?

I thought about this today, and basically, the only reason you’d do this is:

  • You already have a 40GB AppleTV
  • You love to play with command lines and hardware

Fortunately, these both apply to me. Your mileage may vary.

I’d rate this install as harder than installing a new hard drive in a laptop computer, but only because of the rubber and the command line fun.

How to Mount your Blackberry Pearl 8100 MicroSD on Mac OS X

/ Adam Nash / 39 Comments

Infuriating.

I bought a 2GB MicroSD card for my Blackberry Pearl, so I could store pictures and music on the device more easily.

I love the Pearl, but as you know, RIM has had a tortured history with Mac-compatibility. Thankfully, the Missing Sync for Blackberry, by Markspace, is a very good solution.

However, I had one last problem. My MicroSD card was not mounting on my Mac as a USB storage drive. Infuriating! I went through pages of Google search results, and no luck. I downloaded a freeware app, called Mount Me X, and no luck.

If the drive doesn’t mount, you can’t synch music or pictures. Drat!

Suddenly I had an epiphany.

I went the Blackberry and entered the password on it to unlock it.

Bingo. USB drive mounted, with no problems. Everything works fine now.

I guess Mac OS X doesn’t know how to get past the unique RIM security feature. The Missing Synch does, however, so it’s strange to me that it doesn’t unlock the phone for you. It asks for the password anyway, when it syncs.

In any case, I hope this post gets indexed and helps some other poor soul out there, in need of help.

The answer is – unlock the Blackberry Pearl 8100 manually with your password before plugging it into your Mac.

This has been a public service announcement.

Update: I have moved on, and given up on the Blackberry completely.  See this post: Goodbye, Blackberry.  Hello, iPhone.

How to Mount NTFS Drives on Mac OS X with Read/Write Access

/ Adam Nash / 17 Comments

Elliot, this post is for you.

A couple of weeks ago, I got really irritated with the whole Mac/Windows thing.  I had purchased a USB hard drive with the intention of using it as a backup drive for both Mac & Windows machines.

Unfortunately, I discovered that Mac OS X cannot write to NTFS volumes – it can only read from them.  I then discovered that Windows XP has lost the ability to read or write to HFS+ drives (Windows 2000 had it).

Well, I am here to say that there is a pretty cool solution for mounting NTFS volumes on Mac OS X.  Interestingly, it comes from Google.

The MacFuse project on the Google Code site is a BSD-license open-source project that lets you use any FUSE-compatible file system on Mac OS X.  FUSE (File-system in USErspace) originated on Linux, but apparently the port to Mac OS X has been live for a while.

NTFS-3G is the open source project that implements NTFS support for FUSE.

This lovely site has packaged together DMG installer versions of each for easy installation on Mac OS X.  (Please note: only do this if you are running Mac OS 10.4 or later, and are somewhat technically savvy)

Amazing.  It just works.  In fact, I’ve only hit one glitch.  If you fail to put away your NTFS volume properly on Windows (using the Safely Remove Hardware command), NTFS can get itself all locked up, and unable to mount properly.

Now, let me give due credit to this blog post for helping me find this solution.

Also, it’s worth noting that the write performance isn’t speedy right now.   The teams contributing seem to know this, and are working the issues.  As a result, I wouldn’t use this solution to make NTFS your default volume format for files.  However, if you need simple read/write to the occassional NTFS volume, this looks like a good answer.

Why Apple can’t ship decent NTFS support for Mac OS X is beyond me.  And why Microsoft can’t support HFS+ is also beyond me.  Given that there are tens of millions of machines out there who create and use each of these volume formats, I would say that it clears the bar of “important enough” to support.

Update (6/3/2007):  A brief warning.  Apple just released a security update that is currently not fully compatible with the ntfs-3g files.  My PowerMac was unable to read UDF (video DVDs) until I removed these files.   I’m sure a fix will be out soon, but be careful.  This thread on Apple Discussions captures the solution.

Blizzard Demos Starcraft 2 in Korea

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

When you play video games, you always remember the ones that absorbed huge blocks of time from your life. Starcraft was one of those games for me.

Well, it looks like the next great game from the company that brought us World of Warcraft will not be another Warcraft title or massively multiplayer game. Instead, they have taken the wraps off of a Starcraft sequel. The Starcraft 2 website is live!

For those of you who don’t play these types of games, Starcraft is a strategy game where you control armies of one of three species: Human, Zerg, or Protoss, and it’s a basic “mine, build & fight” kind of game. This one, however, was so well executed that it became the basis for professional competition in Korea, and a world-wide phenomenon.

The Blizzard games have inspired hundreds of copycat titles, but it’s an extremely hard problem to balance the design of the different races, units, resources, economics, technology and gameplay. In fact, it’s almost an impossible problem. Blizzard, however, does it better than anyone.

Here is a good write-up on the debut and press conference Q&A on GameSpot. Here is another one on Inside Mac Games.

Better yet… here is the CGI announcement trailer for the game, as debuted in Korea, on YouTube:

Here is a great video of the actual gameplay… notice again. Three key races (Terran, Zerg, Protoss) and a much better model of air/ground interaction.

Going back over 15 years, Blizzard has repeatedly demonstrated their ability to develop games that are outstanding in design and execution. What Pixar is to computer-animated film, Blizzard is to modern video games. As another hallmark of an exemplary shop, they deliver their titles for launch on both the Mac & PC simultaneously. You don’t see them complaining about time to market or cost. They know that a game of sufficient quality will pay for itself many times over, and with Blizzard’s track record, they always do.

I’m very excited to play this game, although I realize that in the modern Battle.net era, I will be hopelessly outclassed by other players before I even get the DVD home and installed 🙂

Update (5/22/2007): Nate has a post on this as well, and he found more great YouTube videos of the gameplay presentation.  I felt like I was getting a 20 minute tutorial on Protoss unit deployment.  Colossus!

Fun With a Two Year Old

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Being the parent of a two year old is a lot of fun. Jacob is extremely cute, and now that he has started talking, I find all sorts of simple pleasures in what he decides to say.

For example, my son is likely one of very few two year olds to clearly articulate when he wants to play Nintendo Wii, as he will say “Wii” and then run to the drawer where the Wii-motes are kept.

Jacob also is a huge fan of “Apple TV”, and will say so and then run to the bedroom waiting for us to play one of his favorite movies. We have about half of his favorites ripped to iTunes now, and he knows it.

Besides, it turns out that “Apple TV” is the combination of two things Jacob already knew how to say. “Apple” is his favorite snack and juice, and “TV” is unfortunately also a favorite of his.

Jacob’s vocabulary isn’t huge yet, although he does suprise us with full sentences now and again. Two year olds often love to repeat the same word or phrase over and over again. As a result, I’ve made up my own little game where I make up a joke around the phrase Jacob is repeating, and then he says the punchline.

Example:

Jacob: “Apple Juice. Apple Juice. Apple Juice.”

Adam: “Jacob, what do you call Mac-users who go to synagogue?”

Jacob: “Apple Jews”

🙂

Two year olds are fun!

Life with a 320GB Raid 0 Striped Array in a MacBook Pro

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

I couldn’t help but provide a link to this great article by my friend Eric on his experience tricking out his MacBook Pro laptop with two 160GB hard drives, and configuring the machine as a 320GB Raid 0 Striped Array.

I’ve posted here about Eric before. He is a professional photographer, with a specialty in underwater digital photography. He also runs the website wetpixel.com professionally.

What you may not know is that Eric has a storied history with the Mac. Eric was a PC-focused freshman when he came to Stanford, but during his years on the farm he relented and ended up working on Macs. He even did an internship with the famous Apple Technology Group, in that last summer before it was killed.

Eric went back to PCs at the end of the 1990s, being extremely rational about his technical needs and the advantages at the time of the platform. But every now and again, maybe once every year or two, I’d catch Eric seriously considering going back to the Mac. Well, he finally did it a little while ago, and he’s been working off a MacBook Pro.

Eric is a pretty tough cookie to please when it comes to computers, and he demands a lot of performance out of his machines. He also really focuses on his specific needs as a photographer who travels the globe constantly.

So, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see the pickup of Eric’s article on a lot of sites. On Lifehacker, I take some delight in seeing Eric referred to as “Mac user Eric Cheng“– it’s nice to see Eric publicly wed to the platform.

There has been a lot of discussion on Digg about the merits of running Raid 0 on a laptop. Personally, I wouldn’t question Eric when he gets into the zone like this on an upgrade. The stats in his article are pretty compelling, as are his experiences running Windows XP in Parallels on the upgraded machine.

My favorite comment of his, however, is directed at the Digg comments:

Some folks on the second Digg page are saying that it’s stupid to use RAID 0 in a computer, because there are “no real world benefits” and because it’s too dangerous.

I disagree. My machine is clearly running much faster, and it doesn’t seem to be running that much hotter. The fans still only spin up with high CPU usage. Battery life has always sucked on the Macbook Pro, and the estimates of losing 10-15% seems to be accurate so far. Finally, I back up frequently onto bootable, external media, even when I’m on the road, so losing my internal volume wouldn’t be catastrophic. At home, my system backs up automatically to NAS every night. The only problem is that I would have to work off of an external drive, if the RAID failed. I’d have the same problem even if I wasn’t using RAID.

I used to use a Thinkpad T-series notebook, which was a great machine because it allowed the use of two hard disks at a time in a supported, modular way. I loved that thing.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I’d love to hear about the negative Digg commenters’ personal experiences with running RAID 0 in a notebook. I’ll bet none of them have ever done it, and are speaking without any facts to back up their claims.

Cheers to Eric for his super cool MacBook Pro and for standing his ground.

In case you missed the link at the top, Eric’s article on adding RAID to a MacBook Pro can be found here.

AppleTV Upgrade Kits from WeaKnees: 160GB for $249

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

So, in case you missed my earlier post, I got an AppleTV last month and it is just awesome. For a 1.0 product, phenomenal. I think Apple is really onto something here, but that’s a topic for another post.

One of the biggest criticisms of the AppleTV has been the relatively small 40GB hard drive. The AppleTV can stream video content from your computer, so it doesn’t actually need to download everything. But, it can’t stream photos or music (yet), and so if you have a big media library, you can get into an issue where you are micromanaging which content will appear on the AppleTV and which won’t.

I’ve used the AppleTV to be a personal, video-on-demand solution for my son, who at 2 1/2 man-handles DVDs to the point of destruction. I’ve ripped most of his movies to iTunes using MacTheRipper and HandBrake, so he has his own video library easily accessible

My son Jacob (who is 2 1/2 years old), loves the AppleTV. In fact, it’s one of the few phrases he’ll reliably hit on in the morning.

However, each movie takes up about 1-2GB, so we’re already maxing out the storage. There are instructions online on how to swap out the drive, but WeaKnees goes one better.

For a fairly small premium, WeaKnees will swap out the drive for you, and hand you back a 160GB AppleTV. Or, if you haven’t bought one yet, you can buy one new from them for $549.

I became a WeaKnees fan in 2002, when I realized that while I could upgrade Tivo drives myself, it wasn’t worth the time & effort. Just buy the drive pre-formatted from WeaKnees, and do the rest yourself.

Definitely worth checking out.