When I bought my current Mac Pro, it came with nVidia’s GT8800 that I ordered as a factory upgrade from whatever was stock at the time.  The upgrade was inexpensive and got me a better GPU and more memory.  The card also supported Dual Link DVI to two displays and I have to say that I got over two years of excellent service from it.

But as I embark ever more deeply into video editing, I discovered that likely through my own ineptitude and lack of proper training, I was able to strain the capability of the GT8800 so I started researching alternatives.  There was the ATI Radeon HD 4870  on the Apple Store that had a faster GPU but no more video memory, there was the nVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for nearly $2,300 (argh, choke) and the EVGA GeForce GTX 285.  I was not aware of the GTX 285 or of EVGA for that matter so I went over to my local Canada Computers and talked to John and Samuel.  Canada Computers is a retail chain that deals in all manner of kit but this store at least, attracts some seriously hardcore gamers and gamers as we know tend to beat on video cards pretty hard.  Both Samuel and John admitted to no familiarity with the Mac Pro platform but did share that they had enjoyed a lot of customer success with EVGA cards and with the Windows release of the GTX 285.  They did tell me that the GTX 285 had been superseded by the GTX 295 on the Windows platform and also advised that there was a hack out in the internet on making one work in a Mac Pro.  As I depend on the Mac Pro for work every day, i chose not to go that route and had them order me the Mac version of the GTX 285.  With no disrespect to Apple or Apple resellers, I saved at least 10% off the price of the card by getting it from these folks.

Installation was straight forward once I disconnected the web of cables from the Mac Pro and pulled its mass out from under the desk and into the kitchen where I could work on it without crippling myself.  I did learn some tips that might be useful for anyone else.

1. When EVGA says read the instructions first, do it.  If you are not running a current build of Snow Leopard, be absolutely sure you follow the instructions about installing the display drivers BEFORE you take things apart to install the card.  I found that on my machine, running 10.6.3 at time of install, the drivers had already been provided in an Apple update.  If you find this too, well you’ve burned a whole minute, but if you didn’t have the drivers installed and tried to power up the Mac with the new card and no drivers you’d be seeing a black screen and the only fix would be to pull the new card, put in the old card, load the drivers…You get the point.

2.  The PCI-e slots on the Mac Pro have little card locking clips that you engage when removing a card.  Using a flashlight helps you see them and helps you cut down on the cursing when you cannot figure out why the stock card will not come free of the slot.

3. The GT8800 has only one power cable.  The GTX285 has two.  Disconnect the one from the GT8800 before you try to remove the card as you’re going to need it in a minute.  The GTX285 comes with two new power cables, so you could use both new ones of course.  I did.

4.  The motherboard location of the two power ports you will be using is best accessed if you have 14″ long rubber fingers that are impervious to cuts and scrapes.  If you are not Mr. Fantastic, take the time to do the motherboard connections before you install the new video card.  If you don’t, you will just have to pull it out to get the cables connected, and if that happens, remember point #1.

5.  Did I mention that making those connections can be challenging?  I found that a pair of bent nose hemostats worked fine.  Connecting the upper slot first makes things easier as well.

6.  Once the cables are connected and latched onto the motherboard (check that the latching mechanisms on the power connectors have engaged), place the card into the slot.  Slot 1 is best because like most other high end video cards, the GTX 285 is a double-wide.

7.  Replace the card slot locking bar, put all the other pieces back together, connect your cables and fire it up.

At boot time and in normal operations, frankly you won’t see much of a difference.  If you use iStat and watch temps very closely, you might find the system runs a bit cooler.  Or not.  The new card really comes into it’s own when you are doing some intense editing in Final Cut Studio or Premiere Pro or Logic Studio.  Screen draws are faster in Aperture, and Photoshop seems snappier.  I’m not a gamer but I did speak to a guy who uses Steam on the Mac and he says this card is better than what I had for gaming.

In summary, if you need more video horsepower, can handle the expense, and are willing to read the instructions you will like the EVGA GeForce GTX285 Mac Edition.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I really wish I could say more nice things about these headphones than I actually can. But that’s not going to happen.

The Motorola S9-HD A2DP headphones look like a decent product despite being a behind the head unit that is floppy on small heads and too tight on folks with large craniums. The Bluetooth receiver is in the middle of the neckband and based on my own experience and that of others, we all must be emitting interference from within our brainstems.

You can find the headphones at BestBuy, FutureShop, the Apple Store and other retailers.

The Good

The sound coming from these headphones is incredible. When they work. Two different sizes of earpieces are provided. The headphones support A2DP and advanced bluetooth controls. If your devices support the advanced functions you can skip and rewind. If not, you cannot. Even with my Apple kit which only does A2DP, I could pause/play, answer a call, hangup a call and change the volume. Pairing the device is as for any other Bluetooth device but may take a bit longer than you expect. Battery life before recharging is decent at about six hours. Pricing at around $120 is comparable with other bluetooth headphone options. Charging is accomplished using a wall wart. There is one soft button and a multi-coloured LED on the receiver that you cannot see while wearing the unit because it’s at the back of your head. The best part about these phones is the audio quality when listening to music.

The Bad

The electronics are an embarrassment to the brand reputation of Motorola. Wearing them while walking around requires that they have line of sight to your bluetooth transmitter, which is tough since the receiver is on the back of your head. The reputed 30 foot range is a complete crock of poop.

The connection to your transmitter drops in and out with increasing frequency the longer you use them and only deleting the pairing and then repairing fixes the issue and then only for a short time. With my iPad they played fine for an hour, then cut out completely. When I reconnected they dropped out every couple of seconds and then would alternately speed up and slow down the music. Gord Downie’s voice warbles as it is and this pitch shifting was not helping.

Unlike my other bluetooth headsets, the S9-HD can only pair with one transmitter at a time, which is annoying if you want to use them with more than one device.

Wearing these headphones while working out (which would seem like an ideal scenario) is an exercise alright, but one of frustration since your gym like mine is probably filled with wifi enabled phones, wireless devices, other radiation emitters and members with bluetooth phone earpieces stuck to their heads. This electromagnetic free for all makes the S9-HD spend most all of its time dropping the signal. I have read reviews of people who dared to perspire while working out and had the units short out. Think I’ll pass on that.

I selected these headphones to pair with my iPhone so I could listen to music wirelessly and still take and make calls. i can hear the incoming caller no problem but every caller said that hearing me was a challenge and that I should get out of the wind tunnel I was obviously standing in. I tested this by calling my own voicemail and leaving a message from the quiet of my studio. The message playback sounded like I was on a carrier deck while spitting into an echo chamber. So not a good choice for a bluetooth connection to the mobile.

I began to wonder if the problems were related to using only Apple bluetooth transmitters, so I paired the headphones with the corp issue Blackberry 9000 I carry for work. Short answer, the issue is the headset not the iPhone or iPad.

The Results

My first mobile was a Motorola brick. Then the slimmer brick. Then a series of StarTacs. My first bluetooth headset came from Motorola. Things went downhill from there with idiotic proprietary chargers, firmware issues on the last Motorola flipphone, earclips whose silicone rotted in a couple of months, just a seemingly endless stream of quality issues. I was really hoping that the S9-HDs would reverse the trend. They don’t. Perhaps Motorola could put more money into building quality products and less into dorkozoid websites for urban trendies more concerned with how they look to others than whether the kit they are carrying actually works.

NOT RECOMMENDED – DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY – RUN AWAY – On a scale from 1 to 10, minus 5. Only the great sound when it works keeps these from being a complete disaster in design, concept and execution.

Day one with the new printer is done and overall I’m very pleased. While I bought the printer from my local Apple reseller, TRG in Aurora, it was delivered direct from Xerox by Purolator. The driver got the box to the front hall and I took it from there. The printer weighs about 60 pounds so once it was on the stand it was simply connecting power and Ethernet. Then I loaded the wax ink blocks into the proper trays (impossible to mess this up) and fired it up. I then put the install CD in the Mac Pro and launched the installer. It discovered the printer on the network without issue and installed the drivers and configured the connection. The test print failed from the installer software but one launched from the print queue directly worked perfectly. I then ran Apple’s Software Update and it fed me new drivers automatically.

The printer is nearly silent unless printing and consumes little power at idle. It generates a bit of heat because it keeps the wax liquid, but no worse than a colour laser. Print quality is incredible, better than any colour laser I’ve seen using toner and nearly as tight as a photographic inkjet printer. Paper handling so far has been trouble free.

What is amazing is how fast this thing is. I have been using an older Minolta QMS Magicolor 2210 for a few years and while it’s been a good unit it’s starting to go through parts. I was becoming frustrated with it because graphics rich PDFs or Keynote presentations were taking a long time to print. I ran a 20 page analyst report, double sided, through the Xerox and had beautiful rich output in under a minute. The colours are bright and snappy, the tables are sharp and the charts just pop.

The unit uses wax blocks with excellent longevity in four colours, black, cyan, magenta and yellow. You buy block kits like toner. The colour kits include 3 blocks and the black kit comes with six blocks. Each kit is about $140 from Xerox (cheaper from Amazon) and delivers several thousand pages. Xerox posts all in prices per page of from 2.9 cents for a business letter to 25 cents for a full blown graphics page. Their models include all the consumables not just the ink, so a fairly accurate overall costing in my opinion. Prints last well but could fade in sunlight according to my research.

The only issue I ran into with the unit had to do with the Windows 7 driver install. I tried the install both from the CD and from Xerox’s Web site. It took a really long time to discover the printer and when it installed the management console something caused the printer to freeze. Since this happened more than once and only when I tried to get the Windows 7 drivers working, I think that the problem is related to the driver. I’ll try again without installing the console since it seems of little use anyway. It’s not a big deal for me because we’re finally all Mac here at the castle, except for the test machines needed for Windows and Linux.

This is only the first day so stay tuned for further updates, but so far I’m very pleased.

I admit that as a wannabe netcaster, I look to leverage my alleged muscianship to help me do better recordings. I was very pleased to find that Apple put the camera in the bezel of the MacBook Pro. It’s pretty good, but I am less enamoured of the built-in mic. It’s decent enough but picks up desk noise and doesn’t have great dynamic range. not a major indictment. I am a fan of the Logitech camera/mic combos and they do work well with the Mac. But to keep weight down, I’ve gone back to the built-in camera. My latest mic pick is from Samson, called the Go Mic. I bought it online sight unseen because it was relatively inexpensive, about $80 CDN all in.

Wow! I’m very impressed. I have a good condenser mic in my home studio that I use for most of the netcast work I do for my full time job. This little Samson is going with me everywhere. It folds flat, has great sound and clips perfectly to the lid of my MacBook Pro just as in the picture. It runs off USB and provides good quality sound for voice recordings and netcasts. I have seen positive reviews for music recording and vocals. I don’t sing (you are all welcome) and use the Stealth plug to jack my guitar directly to the Mac.

So while my own use is focused on creating netcasts and spoken word recordings, I really like this little mic. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Belkin is well known and respected for a lot of network and computer kit. For years you’ve been able to trust anything with the Belkin name on it. Except here. Because I liked Belkin products when I have needed USB2 hubs, I have up until now purchased Belkin products. Except for a couple of devices from Radio Shack / The Source / The Shack, I recently bought 4 of the Belkin 7 port hubs F5U307. This was because they were on sale and I wanted to give the company another shot, because the layout and functionality appealed to me. The first two I bought three years ago, died after a year. Back then I didn’t filter every AC outlet and thought they got spiked. This time all the power was protected and I have gone through 4 units in about nine weeks. First they get flaky. Then they get hot. Then they stop working. Then it smells like a plastic fire. I’ve concluded that these things are not indicative of Belkin’s past performance. They’re junk. Don’t buy them. You shouldn’t have to pay a fortune for a quality USB2 hub, but you shouldn’t burn your cash (or your desk) with crap.

About a year ago I bought a Sony PRS 700 ebook reader. It was expensive and the software for it only ran on Windows. The touchscreen prevents there from being the ability to alter contrast. Books were also expensive and the selection was incomplete. Now the software runs on the Mac as well but nothing else has changed. It’s hard to read, has poor contrast and even the backlight is ineffective. So it sits unused. I bought a Kindle II last week because they are now available in Canada. The screen is incredible, wireless purchasing is super easy and Amazon has made it much easier to load content on the device with a recent firmware upgrade. It just works. I signed up for a test of live newspaper delivery and it is so simple that I didn’t miss my daily newspaper when it failed to arrive on a recent snow day. I know it’s ideal because my wife keeps stealing it and she causes technology breakdowns with the power of her personal magnetic field. I saw a number of negative reviews of the Kindle II when it became available in Canada. I don’t agree. This is an excellent tool and I recommend it highly. I have tried other readers and love the Kindle. It does what it says and does it well.

Apple sent an alert out to AppleTV users on the 7th advising those who downloaded AppleTV 3.0 to go get 3.01 right away. If you don’t use aTV Flash do it. If you use aTV Flash, wait a few for the update advisory from aTV Flash as the 3.01 update will likely break your aTV Flash install

I just picked up an EyeTV 250 Plus TV box to replace my aged EyeTV 200 unit. The 250 Plus is smaller and has a faster processor so the picture is better. Unfortunately, I and several others are having issues with the stereo audio inputs on the box, but that’s not the point.

One of the frustrations of the excellent EyeTV 3 software is that if you connected it to your cable or satellite set top box, you had to manually change the channels on the set top box because the Mac could not do it for you via the Eye TV software. This inhaled rapidly because of course you couldn’t queue up a bunch of recordings without remembering to come back and change channels. Hence the box tended to be a one trick pony. When I did get a recording done, the software made a great image and pushed it right to my AppleTV. But I wanted to be able to queue up recordings.

Of course I could have rented or bought a PVR from my cable company. Ste instore staff are not really tech savvy but they have some great support people. Unfortunately getting material off the PVR is next to impossible without cracking it to activate the USB or FireWire ports.

I then discovered the ZephIR IR Blaster from studioZee at http://www.thezephir.com/ZephIR/Home.html It leverages a database of infrared receivers to program its own infrared sender with the proper codes to control the device. I plugged the IR Blaster into a USB powered hub and put it in front of my cable box, a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3200. I picked the 3250 from the database and the ZephIR software popped up a test panel and I was quickly able to verify that I could control the cable box.

Then I went into EyeTV and set up the same name for the set top box and chose Tuner as input, because audio isn’t working on the stereo inputs for S Video or Composite on the EyeTV 250 Plus. EyeTV connected properly and everything looked fine. But now if I use the EyeTV remote or the onscreen guide or the onscreen remote to change a channel, the ZephIR sends the right codes to the cable box and it changes channels automatically. Now I can cue up a bunch of recordings while on the road like on a PVR but I can also edit them in the EyeTV or other software to rip out the commercials and other crap and then load them to my AppleTV.

The ZephIR package with Blaster and software was $49.95 US. I put the order in last Wednesday night at 8pm. I received the Fedex package identifier that evening and the unit at my door on Friday. Excellent followup and delivery. Yes I had to pay some duty but in the end I’m pretty happy. So if you are looking to control a set top box from your Mac, the ZephIR might just be the answer for you.

Well you’ve probably heard all the hype about the Magic Mouse. Mine arrived today and I’ve just set it up. This review is not sponsored and I receive no compensation for doing it.

Upsides:

Smaller than I expected and also lower
Case design is elegant
Good weight
Once paired, software update is smart enough to go get the right software when you check for updates
It’s the full Steve Jobs thing, no visible buttons
Has on off switch
Scrolling works well
No side buttons

Downsides:

Feels really awkward Will take getting used to, especially since I switched from the Mighty mouse to Logitech MX series mice a while ago
Scrolling with momentum far from the elegance of the Logitech model
No side buttons
Two finger swipes can move the entire mouse

So overall it’s beautiful, kind of cool, and has a learning curve. I’ve decided to pair it with the MacBook Air and try it instead of the Kensington Slimblade I use with that machine and see how it goes.

Hey friends,

If like me you are getting a lot more out of your AppleTV by using the excellent aTVFlash offering, take a minute to read this before applying the AppleTV 3.0 upgrade.

First things first. As of this writing the aTVFlash folks do not have a release that is 3.0 ready, so hold off upgrading until you are notified that there is an aTVFlash version that’s ready and then be sure to read and follow the instructions.

The other, potentially bigger issue, is that to do an AppleTV upgrade you need to have the primary storage set as the AppleTV hard drive, not an external drive. One of the best things aTVFlash does in my opinion is allow you to attach decent storage volume to the AppleTV. The pipsqueak internal drive could not handle the 600GB of stuff on my external drive.

I have reached out to the aTVFlash folks to obtain the how-to for this scenario, and will post their response as soon as I hear back from them. In the meantime, hold fast where you are.