Crabtree Consulting

Hitachi has a line of external USB hard drives that are appearing now. They are fairly cheap, come in 1 and 2 TB versions, and they are large. (The size is not really a positive…) Anyway, they come with very nice drives inside (The 2TB version has a 7K3000 6Gbps Sata 3 with 64MB cache drive) which sells for more than the external version!

Anyway the problem with these drives is the USB cable! I have three of these drives plugged into an Apple Airport Extreme and all three of them disappeared at different times. After some testing I found that the USB cables seem to fail at the mini-USB end. This is strange to me since I plug these in and never move them, but in each case I was able to replace the USB cable and the drives all work fine now.

Hitachi, if you are listening, replace this cable! You are going to hurt your reputation over these drives and we can buy a much better quality cable for $0.86!

If you want to get a replacement, here is a source:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&cp_id=10303&cs_id=1030302&p_id=107&seq=1&format=2

Toshiba doesn’t include instructions in the projector manual to reset the lamp timer. Instead, they include the instructions with the lamp. That’s fine, unless you buy a generic lamp. And until you reset the lamp timer you will be shown a message every time you turn on the projector warning you that your lamp has reached the end of its life.

On these projectors, the lamp is good for 2000 hours. When the bulb burns out it can explode so it is worth replacing the bulb before it blows. Glass shards and mercury used in the bulbs confirms this.

Here are the instructions:
1. Unplug the power cord from the electrical outlet.
2. Turn the main power switch to the “On” position.
3. Press and hold the “On/Standby,” “Menu” and “Keystone” buttons at the same time. The buttons are on the projector. (The same buttons are on the remote but the reset only works if you use the buttons on the projector.)
4. Plug the power cord back into the outlet while holding the buttons in Step 3. The lamp timer will be reset when the projector receives power.

If you want to connect a hard drive to your Apple Airport Extreme router, you need to format it using the the GUID Partition Table (GPT) and format the partition as Apple Filing System (AFS) journeled. The problem is that Disk Utility formats external drives as Master Boot Record by default.

Here’s how to format a drive with GPT:

•Launch Disk Utility. It’s in Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.
•Choose the drive you want to format from the drive list on the left. Be sure to select the drive description instead of its name.

•Click the Partition tab. (If you don’t see the Partition tab, you selected the drive’s name.)
•Click the Options button. (If no partition exists, click the + button to create a partition.)
•Select GUID Partition Table.
•Click OK.
•Click Partition.

The Apple Airport Extreme supposedly works with drives formatted as with AFS or Fat32, but AFS is recommended.

It is also a good idea to occasionally connect the external drive directly to a Mac and run First Aid on it. (Also in the Disk Utility.)

Have you ever wondered why 720p televisions are still available? Are 720p TVs cheaper? Is that the only reason? Read on for a practical analysis.

720p is 1280 pixels horizontally 720 pixels vertically. 1080p is 1920×1080. The “p” means Progressive Scan which means a full frame (as opposed to interlaced standards like 1080i) and 720p is generally 30 frames per second but can be 24, 25, and 60 frames per second.

Enough with the technical jargon! Which TV should I put in my living room? It is no lie that most 720p sets are cheaper than 1080p sets. Fewer pixels means less bandwidth required to process the images which means less processing power is required. Display panels with larger pixels are easier to produce so manufacturing cycle time is reduced and there are less scrapped panels. That proves that if you are going for the absolute cheapest TV, you’ll get a 720p. But then why are there quality 720p TVs on the market?

A quality 720p set (such as a Panasonic Viera) offers an excellent compromise between high definition programming and standard definition programming. If you don’t like the way your DVDs look on a 1080p TV, they will likely look much better on a 720p. Why? Standard definition programming is roughly 640×480 (the actual NTSC standard is 500 lines vertically) and 720 has exactly double the horizontal resolution (640*2=1280) and not quite double the vertical resolution. This means that every pixel of your standard definition video is going to be extrapolated into about 4 pixels on a 720p set (2 horizontal and 2 vertical). On a 1080p set a single pixel gets extrapolated to approximately 3 horizontal and almost 3 vertical (it is more than 2 but less than 3) which is about 9 pixels!

Stretching a video to use more pixels than the original source almost never looks good. Certainly it looks less sharp but it can also look blocky and edge artifacts can be introduced. Upscaling DVD players do a nice job of stretching the video without adding artifacts but the video will not appear to be as sharp as a high definition video.

It all depends on your source.

We have a collection of kids movies and videos that are on standard definition DVDs and we often watch shows that aren’t in HD. If all you watch are Blurays then you don’t need to be concerned with standard definition at all. And if you only view 1080p content, a 1080p television looks better.

The distance from your TV.

Do you want a 1080p television because it is “better” but are planning to buy a 40″ or less? You’ll need to consider the distance that you sit from the television. At a distance of 10 feet, you won’t be able to tell the difference between 720p and 1080p viewing a 40″ TV. Your eyes just can’t discern the extra detail, but they can see the artifacts and poor extrapolation of standard definition content.

My recommendation: choose a quality 720p plasma for general TV viewing. Less artifacts provide a more pleasant experience.

* Lots of details were left out of this document such as upscaling satellite receivers, 720p plasmas that use rectangular pixels and have a native resolution of 1024×768, video game systems and using the TV as a computer monitor. However this post was intended to be a very general guideline using empirically derived data for the average TV viewer. 1080p is a very good choice at the expense of older formats. 720p is a great compromise.

Oh Apple, so many of us trust your well thought-out products and don’t complain when you remove features. After all, if you remove it, then we must not need it!

Apple, if you ever read this post, please consider adding your Disk First Aid utility to the Airport Extreme so USB hard drives can be checked and repaired. These partitions get damaged when the power goes out or from other events and there is no way to repair them (except for connecting directly to a computer… very inconvenient.) So please Apple, add the ability for the Airport to repair disks. Thanks.

The official way to get MacOS 10.7 Lion is to download it from the App Store or buy a computer with it preinstalled. What if I want to make a bootable DVD? Here’s what you do:

Download the installer (almost four gig!) from the App Store.
Once finished, CTRL+click and choose Show Package Contents
Open the Contents folder
Open SharedSupport and find InstallESD.dmg
Right-click (CTRL+click) on InstallESD.dmg drag it to a convenient location (such as the Desktop)
Fire up Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities)
Click Burn, select InstallESD.dmg from your convenient location and click Burn
Find a recordable DVD disc and pop it in the optical drive (yes, you need an optical drive to do this) and click Burn

Not only does this give you a backup of the download (so you won’t have to download it again), but it also gives you a handy way to install Lion onto another Mac you own. (Legally Apple allows you five installs to machines with the same Apple ID.)

Upgrading to MacOS 10.7 (Lion)? My battery lasted about half as long as it used to once I upgraded. I went to Utilities -> Console and had a huge list of messages in the system query log. I found that Little Snitch wasn’t compatible with Lion and kept “respawning” every 10 seconds. Then I found that Adobe Air was being denied access to a file it wanted to read. I removed Little Snitch and Adobe Air and my battery life is again excellent. Watch out for incompatible programs!

If you decide to upgrade to Lion, ProPresenter won’t work right away.

I upgraded and ProPresenter crashed immediately. So I went to the Renewed Vision website and downloaded the latest version (4.2.5). This version would hang on boot up every time I tried to launch it. I had to fix it by deleting the Renewed Vision App Support folder. Lion now has this hidden. Quit ProPresenter. To locate the folder, click on the desktop and press Command-Shift-G. Then type: ~/Library/Application Support/. Then delete the “RenewedVision” folder.

Now it works!

Here is one of the high speed pitching analysis videos that I shot for the Westerville Warhawks.

By filming from two angles and recording at a high frame rate, we can analyze the mechanics of your athletes. For more info, click here.

Apple tends to fit many Macs with small-ish hard drives. Now to be fair the Mac apps also tend to be smaller than Windows equivalents so you may not need a bigger drive. But if you work with a lot of media (pictures, videos, music) you’ll run out of space eventually.

So how do you replace the hard drive in a Mac? I’ll show you:

- First, use Time Machine to make a backup of your system. This can either be to a USB external hard drive or to a network drive. (You might be able to use a Firewire drive too, but I’ve never tried.)

- Once the backup is complete, it is time to replace the hard drive. Now there are way too many configurations for me to explain exactly how to replace the physical drive. In my unibody MacBook Pro, I remove the screws on the bottom, take the bottom panel off, and the drive is right there. You’ll likely find a similar configuration for other modern Macs. Look around on Youtube for instructions for your specific Mac model. Keep in mind that you will likely need a jewelers screwdriver set and you may need some tiny torx drivers.

- Once the new drive is installed, boot the Mac using the MacOS system disc. Open the Disk Utility and select the new hard drive on the left. (If the drive has an existing partition, be sure to click on the drive, not the partition.) Then click on “Partition” at the top. Click on the Options button. Choose GUID and click OK. Then make sure to select Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and click Apply.

- Once done with setting up the new drive, open Time Machine and restore the backup. If you used a USB external drive for the backup, it should easily find the backup and restore it. If you stored it on a network drive, you will have to connect to the network and mount the drive to restore the backup.

Give it several hours to restore but once it does you will be up and running with your new hard drive! (And if something doesn’t work you can pop the old drive back in since none of the data was harmed.)