Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category:
2010 Tech Predictions
It was fun doing this last year. So I thought I would have another go at it and see what I come up with.
Computers:
1. Netbooks/sub-12″ laptops will be even bigger than before because they will finally be useful. Atom/ULV processors, Ion/Tegra graphics, and touch enabled devices will make having a 17″ laptop a bad thing. Oh and used/refurbished laptops might play a big role in killing desktops once and for all.
2. Windows Home server will have a big update (based on server 2008 r2) and will include Windows Media Center backend and Zune software so you can plug your tuners directly into your WHS. This will also allow for great integration in Windows Mobile 7 and begin a new wave of extenders. I don’t think it will be out till Q3/Q4 though so extenders won’t make a push until 2011.
3. Someone will finally offer a true alternative to cable TV. It will probably come from Apple/Netflix/Boxee/Hulu/Microsoft and it will still be an expensive monthly charge but it will be possible to disconnect your cable/satellite. I am thinking Microsoft will begin a Zune Pass for TV which will integrate into Windows Media Center when WHS 2 and WM7 come out.
4. Apple will begin talks of their new OS, Microsoft will stay quiet about what they are working (and ride the good wave of Windows 7) on as long as possible, and Linux will be in a transitional phase while KDE and Gnome both get big updates.
Video Games:
1. Nintendo won’t come out with anything new. They are going to milk the Wii and DS as long as they can and plan for the Wii HD announcement in 2011. Microsoft will do the same with the Xbox 360 but they will probably hint that they are making something new before the end of the year.
2. Sony will hopefully focus on finishing their projects (home, media codecs, 3D, etc.) and open up the PS3 to 3rd party programs in 2010. Things like Netflix and Pandora streaming I don’t think are too far fetched and I really hope to see a decent browser come to the console along with Vudu streaming.
3. A new mobile console will come out. Probably in the form of a phone, but I expect a lot from Microsoft with Xbox Live on Windows Mobile 7.
Cell Phones:
1. Verizon will begin its rollout of LTE and Apple will announce a device for Verizon. I have always thought Apple would not make a CDMA device until Verizon starts rolling out LTE and that will happen in 2010. This also means that the device will work on Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile in the US and many GSM carriers around the world once GSM networks start updates. With a device on Verizon Apple will have a huge hold on the mobile market. It won’t go unanswered though.
2. Android will become number 3 in the mobile world. That is no small feat however. Android is currently the bottom in market share, by a lot. They will win in 4 ways, 1. Cheap devices 2. Multiple options 3. Any Carrier 4. The decline of RIM and Windows Mobile. Windows mobile has already been stagnant for the past 5 months and RIM is losing it’s customers. I don’t think RIM is smart enough to announce something big so they will die off but will still hold a good portion of the market share through most of 2010. Oh, and an official Google phone and a crap load of more updates to the OS won’t hurt either.
3. webOS will gain market share thanks to Verizon but will still fail to make the impact that the new Apple device will. Palm’s only benefit will be that they will be on Verizon first because they will support CDMA. I really hope they come out with a new phone, but if anything I think they will only announce a new phone in Q3 but not release anything new.
4. Windows Mobile 7 will have features built in that will make any iPhone user gelous. I am not just talking about cool games, I am talking about ZuneHD player integration, amazing hardware, and media streaming galore. I think they will integrate with the new Windows Home Server/Media Center and will really make seamless media playback better than ever. Not only that but WM7 will be heavily integrated into social networks allowing you to be always connected to your facebook, twitter, email, etc. even more seamless than Android or webOS.
5. Apple Tablet will be huge at first, and then go the way of the Apple TV. Yes the device will be really cool, yes fanboys/blogs/tech sites will long for the chance to gaze upon the amazing apple logo on the back, and yes it will do really cool things with media playback and music streaming. But if even 1/2 of the rumors are true the device is destined to fail. A ~$800, 10″ tablet you carry around to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, and play games on really just sounds lame unless I was at home sitting on my couch. And in that case I will just use my laptop or get a netbook preferably with Google Chrome for less than 1/2 the price. I feel weird talking about it when it is really only about a month from being announced. But in all honesty, I don’t see how this would be any better than a device you can actually carry in your pocket like say, a Google Phone. Oh and the tablet will have hardware issues in the first generation.
Other:
1. 3D in TV’s will have a big push. There are finally standards to allow for it and sales will be slow at first because there won’t be much content and prices will be ridiculous. Interest will rise when cable providers announce 3D cable TV offerings for launch in 2011.
2. Retail stores will begin to push online sales and start to lose services because consumers are getting smarter, or at least more resourceful. With Amazon having as big of a year as they did, stores like Best Buy, Barns n Noble, and Sears just can’t rely on people coming into their stores as much.
3. The Automotive industry will finally push for a standard in electric/hybrid cars. With so many companies going out of business, automotive makers can’t stay fragmented for long. They will have to agree upon something or they will lose to a up and coming company like Tesla.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Mostly I feel 2010 will be a year of recovery and not innovation. Although necessity is the mother of invention so maybe I am wrong.
2009 Predictions Follow-up
I thought I would follow up on my predictions for last year and see how I did.
Computers:
1. Multitouch – While this didn’t make as big of a push as I hoped, hardware development is very slow in a recession, there have been announcements of hardware coming out in 2010 that defiantly take advantage of multitouch inputs. Project Natal and the PS3 motion controller did surprise me though.
2. Linux Market Share – I cannot find a good answer on this one. But lets just say market share boomed but not where I thought it would. Android and webOS are both Linux based devices that saw a huge jump in market share from where they were in 2008. And there were also reports of Linux having a 30% market share in netbooks. Those numbers are good enough for me to say this is confirmed!
3. Microsoft Solutions – Windows Mobile was a failure still because WM7 got pushed back, the ZuneHD made huge progress and if weren’t for apps would be preferred over the iPod Touch in the tech world. Just the fact that I had 4-5 people ask me about the Zune this year makes me think it was a success. A year ago if you said Zune nobody knew what you were talking about. Windows 7 was a success but I think more than anything Microsoft no longer is the joke of the tech world, Apple is. Just getting their reputation back was a huge success for them.
Video games:
1. Wii – No it didn’t crash, sales are still relatively strong but with addons upon addons for the console and no new games that are any good. This will remain a console that collects dust in peoples entertainment centers.
2. PS3 – Totally confirmed! With the launch of the PS3 slim and a couple big games that finally came out sales jumped tremendously. From what I could find the PS3 actually surpassed the Xbox 360 in worldwide sales. And that is saying a lot considering how much the US and Europe loves the Xbox 360 and how much of the market share that accounts for.
3. Online play – Was it key? Not anymore than previous years. But the PlayStation Network is growing in popularity, and usefulness, and casual Xbox 360 games even needed to sign up for accounts for Netflix streaming, which I think is lame BTW.
4. PS3 3D – It is later than I thought but it is sill coming.
Other:
1. DTV transition – Wow, that was uneventful. I guess people were more prepared than I thought. It also helped that a good portion of OTA users switched to cable or satellite.
2. Streaming video – While this probably wasn’t because of the DTV switch. Many online video sites flourished, and some failed.
3. OLED – Besides a few mobile devices, OLED was unheard of in 2009. I blame that on the recession, that crap is expensive to develop. All in all though, there was no projector built into a laptop and pocket projectors just started coming onto the market. Stupid recession.
4. New site – Nope, didn’t happen. Twitter really took off but nothing to surpass the growth of facebook. Although MySpace is finally bleeding users.
How-to Modify the Default User Settings in OSX
After my post on modifying default user settings in Vista I thought I should follow up with how to accomplish a similar thing in OSX. For OSX there is only one way to accomplish this, and that way is the manual way.
Just like with the manual way in Vista set up two user accounts, your local admin and a template user. Change all the settings you want for the template user and then restart and log in as admin. To copy the files to the default user you will need to open the terminal and follow the commands below.
Local admin isn’t enough, you will need to actually be using the terminal as the root user. If you don’t have root enabled you can find out how to enable it here.
sudo su
The English.lproj is the default user directory for any user that uses the English language. All we are doing here is copying the English.lproj folder and its contents to English.lproj.bak. For these important files ditto is better than cp because ditto will preserve the “resource fork” using the –rsrc option. It is also a good idea to keep a copy of this default user somewhere else besides just this computer in case something happens. I would recommend zipping up the English.lproj folder and storing it on a backup drive somewhere.
cd /System/Library/User\ Template/
ditto –rsrc English.lproj/* English.lproj.bak
Now that we copied a backup we can remove all the files/settings in the old English.lporj directory. If you accidentally delete the English.lproj folder (instead of just its contents) you can create it again with mkdir.
rm -rf English.lproj/*
Here we are just copying everything from our user we set up to the user template folder. Replace “rothgar” in the below command with the username you gave your template user.
cp -R /Users/rothgar/* English.lproj/
This final step will change the owner and group of the files and folders inside the user template to what they should be. All of the default user files should be owned by root and the group wheel.
chown -Rv root:wheel English.lproj
Those are all the steps needed to modify the default user. It would also be a good idea to reboot the computer, log in as admin, and check/repair disk permissions on the drive just to make sure everything is correct before you take an image of the computer. If everything is correct you can test out your settings with a new user and if everything checks out delete your template user.
Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or problems with the process in the comments.
Is stripping DRM illegal?
Of course the easy answer is yes, and I know that when you buy DRM’d music (or even non-DRM’d CD’s) you technically don’t “own” the music. You just own the rights to play the music.
I thankfully have never bought a single song from iTunes but their announcement about paying to free your library of DRM got me thinking. If you can pay Apple to have your DRM removed and that is completely legal, why can’t you just remove the DRM yourself using freely available programs and not have the fear of the RIAA thundering down on your door with a search warrant.
Of course if you are not sharing the music you probably have no fears of a RIAA lawsuit (seeing as they don’t sue individuals anymore), but if you arn’t going to get sued why is it illegal? What problem is there with you playing the music on any device you choose? Why should there be DRM at all anymore? And why the hell would anyone pay Apple $250 for 1000 songs they already own just so they don’t have restrictive DRM?
I just don’t get it. Perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments. I still, to this day, have never purchased anything with DRM (excluding DVD’s, games, and Blu-ray movies of course) and I have had no problems finding any song I have ever wanted.
My guess is that DRM in music won’t be around much longer and I for one am glad to see it go. I am still not sure how subscription based services will survive.
My 2009 predictions
I have never done this before but I thought I would take a swing and making some predictions at what I think is going to happen this year with technology.
Computers:
1. Smaller, faster, better. Duh. That is obvious but I think there will be some big improvements in “alternate” input for computers. Apple is rumored to release a multi-touch imac. Windows 7 has multi-touch support and is just waiting for hardware/software to take advantage of it. In 2009 I expect to see the biggest improvements in multi-touch software. Games will probably be first, with the iPod touch and iPhone helping with lots of ideas, and then we will get some cool browser and media solutions. I for one would love to see cooliris with some multi-touch support. After multi-touch will probably come touchless input but I don’t think that will gain a lot of ground in 2009.
2. GNU Linux will gain at least 1% (double) market share (putting it up to 2%) before the end of the year spearheaded by Ubuntu. At this point I believe every major computer retailer (except Apple of course) offers GNU Linux on at least 1 model line, and when people see the boot speed and stability improvements of the next Ubuntu release more and more people are going to start “giving it a shot”.
3. 2009 will be the year of Microsoft solutions. I know Apple is gaining on Microsoft’s market share and they still will for a good part of 2009. But I don’t think market share ever really tells a full story. All I hear about now is how Apple is the coolest thing since super cooled capacitors, but I sense a bit of a change in the wind. I think Windows 7 will launch in 2009 and will greatly restore faith in Microsoft as a company. I also think that the next version of Windows Mobile will finally catch Microsoft up in the mobile platform market. The Windows Mobile OS won’t surpass what is currently out with Android or iPhone but it will make it respectable in what it can do and how it looks. I also think that the Windows Home Server market will gain popularity and the Xbox line will continue to grow. Finally, I think Zune sales will skyrocket (mainly cause Zune media player will be in Windows Mobile 6.5). Right now the Zune is in spot 3 behind Scandisk and Apple. I think as more and more people become unhappy with their iPods but they don’t want to upgrade to iPod touches or iPhones they will turn to the Zune. Last I checked Zune had 5% market share, but by the end of the year I see that number doubling to 10% of the mp3 player market. A big jump but it is truly a worthy mp3 player in my book.
Video games:
1. The Wii will crash. They have enjoyed a crazy amount of sales for far too long and they haven’t come out with any good software for months. I am so glad this day will finally come because I haven’t liked the Wii from the start. They will quickly be outsold for a few months by the Xbox 360 and the Wii will drop in price (my guess is to ~$180). Either way it will be hard to recover and it will probably just die out until Nintendo unveils the Wii HD or something ridiculous. By this time the Wii will not be “the console to have” and most people will finally see the console for what it truly is.
2. The PS3 will jump in sales. I already see this at my work. Two of my co-workers who previously bought Wii’s finally want to either A. Play real video games again or B. Watch Blu-ray movies. Their obvious choice was the PS3. Although the price is a big jump, people will finally realize all the features you get out of a PS3 and will start buying them mainly for Blu-ray players and eventually for gaming systems. The PS3 will also start to gain popularity because the Xbox 360 will run out of juice (aka. storage space) and the PS3’s potential will finally start to be tapped into. Sony will begin to push out better programming tools and maybe even Valve will come to the dark side and program their own crap for the PS3.
3. Online systems will be key this year. Xbox Live is fantastic but costs money. More and more people are getting tight on money and Xbox Live will probably suffer because of that. The PSN has been mediocre at best, but at the cost of free I think more people will sign up for this than ever before. Also Nintendo will realize the error in their ways in not offering a online service and will make plans for it with the Wii HD.
4. I think the PS3 will offer 3D gaming to some extent. Most people don’t realize their Samsung HDTV can display the 3D content and the market is ripe for the picking. I think the PS3 will be the only console that can really handle the amount of power it will take and storage space to contain 3D content.
Other:
1. February 17th will be a very dark day for a lot of people. Best Buy will be crowded as hell, and people will be very upset their antenna doesn’t work anymore. The biggest impact will be in low income/minority neighborhoods. There will probably be some bill passed to make sure they are not forgotten about in the future. HDTV sales will continue to decline until after February 17th when they will get a small kick in the pants until the economy levels out.
2. Because of the DTV transition online television distribution systems will benefit. Hulu, Vudu, Boxee, Apple TV, Windows Media Center will all see a lot more users than ever before. It is going to be a big quantity over quality issue but the amount of free content online will win in the end. After online distribution systems gain some ground they will start to push better quality to the users.
3. Displays are going to rock. Not just TV’s either. Laptop displays, computer monitors, projectors are all going to improve. OLED will make a big push (“organic” isn’t just for your foods) and I think we will probably see some sort of built in projector for a laptop this year. Pocket projectors will also finally become something worth looking at.
4. The internet will have a new awesome site. There will be some new MySpace/Facbook site for 2009 and it will include all the other sites in one. It will finally truly be able to combine your online accounts (at least social accounts) in one place. I have a feeling this site will be run in some way by Google (or at least bought by Google in the end). I think the first step to this will be Google NOT buying Facebook. If they do buy them then there would be no point in making an all inclusive social site. Their new site will easily tie in with YouTube, Blogger, Google Calendar, etc. The next step would be for Google to buy Twitter.com. As more people don’t have time to blog, they will turn to Twitter to allow them to blog on the go.
Well that is it. I know it was a heck of a lot of reading and I thank you for reading it (or at least skimming it). I will hopefully follow up 1 year from today to see how these predictions were met.
Let me know your predictions in the comments or if you agree/disagree with any of mine.
Enable “path view” on top of Finder window
I saw this at The Unofficial Apple Weblog and thought it was nice because I hate that you can’t see what folder you are in by default.
Open a terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
And you have your location at the top of the window. I don’t even have a Apple anymore but this still may be useful in the future. Only works in OSX 10.5.5+
Why the Mac Mini sucks for MythTV/PVR
I bought the mac mini for a few reasons:
1. It is very small and very quiet
2. It looks good with my AV equipment
3. There are a lot of accessories that match the looks of the mini
4. It came with good enough specs for video playback and recording
The main problem I had was dealing with the small/slow hard drive. So I wanted to upgrade that but here are some of the things I ran into.
First of all, the Mac Mini had almost everything I wanted (and some things I didn’t care about) built in. I wouldn’t need to add any features to the device unlike other small computers I was looking at. Most other small computers came with almost everything I needed except one or two thing, built in IR for a remote or firewire. These were requirements for me. I know I could have used a USB -> IR adapter but I wanted this computer to look a little less DIY than my last MythTV. And not having firewire seemed too complicated to try and add my own through expensive adapters.
My goal for the Mac Mini was to upgrade the internal hard drive and use an external 1 TB drive. 
The reason for this was storage and speed. The internal hard drive in the Mac Mini is only 5400 rpm and while that works fine for web pages and word documents, when reading and writing large media files all day it just would not be fast enough for the task. One option was to install the OS on the internal hard drive and use a external hard drive just for storage over USB but the CPU overhead of USB and the read/write speeds would just not cut it (internal SATA II is over 6 times faster than USB 2.0/Firewire 400). There also is no firewire 800 port so that wouldn’t work either. I tried following a walk through that someone else already did with a mini hard drive upgrade but apparently Apple has updated their device since this was done and adding a hard drive the same way is no longer possible. If this worked for you on a post Nov 2007 Mac Mini please let me know in the comments. The problem I had was the Mac Mini would never detect any hard drive outside of the chassis. I tried with multiple cables, hard drives (2.5″ and 3.5″) but never once was able to get OSX or Ubuntu installed on the bigger hard drive.
To break it down, the reasons the Mac Mini actually sucks for building your own PVR are these.
1. Slow (low storage) hard drive
2. Expensive features that are not needed but you don’t have a option but pay for. (OSX, iLife, Apple tax, etc.)
3. Hard to upgrade processor and memory
And these are the reasons I picked the AOpen over the Mac Mini.
Mac Mini uses a older 945GM chipset with 667 Mhz vs. GM45 chipset with 1066 Mhz, it uses a more power hungry 65nm (T5600/T7200) processor vs. 45nm (T8100 or any socket p processor you want), and GMA950 GPU vs. GMA X3100. Not really big deals considering both should have the ability to play back most 1080p content. But having updated specs just make things a little easier, and the ability to upgrade helps make the PVR future proof…well almost.
For anyone interested, here are some pictures of the steps I took to make the Mac Mini NOT work with an external eSATA 1 TB hard drive.
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Sata to eSATA adapter. I was sent the wrong adapter and Microbarn would not accept the fact that this was a female SATA to male eSATA cable when I needed male to male. Even after sending them this picture. P.S. don’t order this, order this. |
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Adapter plugged into the Mac Mini SATA riser card with a male to male sata adapter I had to buy extra thanks to Microbarn. Maybe I just don’t understand male and female connectors.  |
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SATA cable run inside the case. This wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. See the picture above for what it looked like coming out of a slightly modified Kensington lock hole. |
Let me know how a Mac Mini is working out for you as a PVR or what other machine you bought as a substitute in the comments.
Create user template in OSX
After my last post I realized I have never explained (or documented for myself) how to create a user template in OSX. The best how-to I found was on Jim Epler’s Blog which I found via google. Here are his steps slightly modified
1. Tweak your default account including setting dock, clearing cache, recent items, etc.
2. Restart and login to the machine as admin.
3. Issue the following commands in the terminal:
:~root# cd /System/Library/User\ Template/
:~root# sudo ditto -rsrcFork English.lproj/* English.lproj.bak
:~root# sudo rm -rf /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/*
:~root# sudo cp -R /Users//* /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/
:~root# sudo chown -R root English.lproj
:~root# sudo chgrp -R wheel English.lproj4. Restart, log in as admin and repair permissions before creating a new account to see if it worked.
Now all your new users that log into the machine (including mobile users) will have these same settings as your template user.
OSX 10.5 keychain and user templates
We decided to have our Apple computers joined to our Active Directory server so we have a little more control and our users have a little more continuity and features when using different machines. We also finally figured out how to set up a user template similar to Windows default user profile. A problem we ended up with was our user template had a blank password for the keychain access but we need our users to have their keychain password be the same as their login password. If the keychain passwords do not match, the keychain keeps popping up every time they need to use a password stored in the keychain.
To fix this you can simply delete the login.keychain file from the /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/Library/keychains/ folder before a user logs in or you can just deleted the login.keychain from the /User/
I just wanted to help with this problem before too many people got stuck with this like we did.
Leave me a comment if it worked for you or if you have any problems.
How to restore a Apple computer to factory defaults
I occasionally need to set up a Apple computer to act like it just came from the factory to give to a new person or to sell it. There are 2 ways I found to do this. The first is with the original install disk that came with your computer. But honestly who still has those around?
The second is as easy as deleting one folder and two files.
All you have to do is boot the mac into single user mode (command+s at start up) and enter the following commands at the terminal you are presented with.
mount -uw /
rm -rf /Users/
reboot (or shutdown -h now if you don't want the machine to turn back on)
Replace
This isn’t exactly the same as a fresh install but it is close enough. It removes all of the users and has the person go through the steps of naming the computer and registering with Apple.
Let me know if you have any other tips for restoring a Apple computer to true factory defaults.