The automatic bump never happened. I called Verizon approximately 8 times to inquire about it and every person I talked to had a different understanding of it, though truthfully, several FiOS service reps were totally unaware.

I called again today and immediately selected the option to talk to someone in billing. I got a very nice girl on the phone who was willing to listen to my gripe. A first time experience for me dealing with Verizon - she knew exactly what I was talking about. Oh My Frikin Gawd! A FiOS employee in the know! Wow! She checked my account, confirmed that the 20/5 option was indeed available to me and put the change request in. For free, by the way.

Now that was pretty awesome. It got even better when she told me when to expect the upgrade to take place. “Now,” she said. My reply was less eloquent - something like “Haruh?!”

Lo and behold, I popped over to speedtest.net and ran a quick test. I got a near perfect score. Here’s the result:

So if you have FiOS, you may be eligible for a free upgrade. Give them a call. Give the billing dept a call. The support guys are serving up a pretty dismal 10% success rate at solving problems.

P.S. It looks like I can upgrade to 20/20mbps for an extra $10 per month. I might just do that!

Fast forward a year or so, and you’d see me sitting at my computer, cursing the task of converting AVI files to Apple TV friendly format so I could watch important videos on my TV instead of my little MacBook Pro screen. Curses, wasted CPU time and wasted disk space from double files… that was the price I had to pay for the pleasure of watching AVI video content. Sometimes I would spend as much time converting a video as I would spend watching it. Bah.

A few days ago, I stopped by Best Buy (I’m slightly embarrassed admitting that I went to that store) and found a very nice Pioneer DV-410V DVD player with a little USB input on the front of it. The DVD player handles DVDs and DivX videos among other formats. It also has an HDMI port for connecting video and audio to my HDTV in one tiny cable.

I set up the DVD player and popped in a micro USB flash drive loaded with a few of my favorite AVI videos and voila! it played the video cleaner and better than the Apple TV ever did! Imagine my surprise! A weight was lifted off my shoulders - the world seemed bright and warm. No more wasted time converting files. No need to stream video. No need to keep my MacBook Pro turned on while I watch videos. Sure, I lost the ability to rent movies from the iTunes store directly from the Apple TV, but I had only done that a couple times in 18 months, so it’s hardly a sacrifice.

Now I can quickly load a dozen or more AVI files on a stamp-sized USB drive and watch amazing quality videos. Buh-bye Apple TV - hello HDTV sneaker net!

Some people may argue that the DVD USB option is lower tech and doesn’t really constitute an “upgrade”. In my opinion, anything that produces remarkably better video, faster prep time, fewer steps, less hassle, consumes less electricity and allows more free time for enjoying video… well, that is truly an upgrade; the best kind of upgrade.

If you’ve never tried one of those DVD players with an internal USB reader, you absolutely MUST. It’s awesome.

P.S. As for the $90 in my pocket, I promptly sold the Apple TV and had $90 left over after the cost of the new DVD/USB player. Nice.

P.P.S. The aforementioned $90 lasted about 12 minutes as I bought another cool gadget that I absolutely had to have. C’est la vie.

Pre-pre Installation

The Verizon tech had to guess where the termination was and I wound up with a 6"x6" hole in my sheetrock. Wrong spot. Wrong spot means big hole in the wall and no cable drop. After fumbling around for another potential drop point, another 6"x6" hole was cut into the wall. Success on the second attempt.

As for the holes in the wall, I was told that such booboos were commonplace and that Verizon would send someone out to fix the sheetrock the following business day (Monday), free of charge. I waited the whole day and no one showed up. Nice.
 

Pre Installation

Installation

Despite the 3 hours allocated for the entire installation, Pavel got his whole job done in less than 45 minutes - that’s full installation of the Verizon FiOS service box, TV, modem, everything. He was smart, quick and very professional. He even turned down a nice tip.
 

Property Damage

I finally landed one support guy in Texas who said that I should just have the sheetrock repaired myself and Verizon would reimburse the costs. At the same time, he said he’d submit a “ticket” that would require a guaranteed call-back from a local supervisor within 48 hours.

I got the two gaping holes repaired for $112.97. I called Verizon to request reimbursement, whether by check or account credit. Another dozen calls ensued, with everyone passing the buck to the local Verizon dispatch/support manager. They eventually gave me his cell phone number. I called, left a voicemail and never heard back from him.

4-5 days later, I called Verizon again - nada. Total lines of crap from everyone I got passed to. The mandatory 48-hour call-back gets extended by 48 hours each time I call.
 

Property Damage, Follow-Up

When she was informed that a) three Verizon techs and four support reps acknowledged that they were responsible, and that b) the “original contractor” was Verizon (duh!), they agreed to a reimbursement. I was told a check would be sent to me right away. Three weeks later, a check arrived. Issue successfully closed.
 

Download Speeds

Here’s a speed test (speedtest.net) done July 1st with my 15/2 FiOS service:

Here’s the last speed test I did while I still had Comcast running (test run June 16th):

According to Verizon FiOS support, FiOS speeds may not be faster all the time, but they’re consistent. Ha ha ha. Ouch. That kind of consistency is nothing to brag about.
 

Download Speeds, Good News Follow-Up

All of a sudden, with no obvious causation, the upload and download speeds normalized at 90% to 101% of the 15/2mbps account speeds. That’s right - I’ve actually seen downloads exceed the 15mbps download cap. I haven’t had a single service outage since the sudden improvement. Go figure.

 

Legal Bittorrent

Video on Demand - Foreign, Porn, Horror

I called Verizon FiOS support to see if I was missing something. I got a support rep who sounded like he was heavily stoned. After verifying every last minute detail about my account, he asked what the problem was. I explained the bogus selection. After a long pause (was he toking? eating? picking his nose?) he repeated my problem back to me like a junior high school counsellor, only he got it wrong. I explained again, telling him my options for free Video on Demand were Horror, shorts and Porn. When he heard ‘porn’, he asked me “for free?!” I said, “Yes, for free, but that’s not the point. Comcast has nearly 100 good movies - comedies, action, suspense, whatever. Where’s the selection on FiOS?”

Stoney suggested that I re-educate myself on the remote control and VoD settings. (Painfully stupid.) Another few repeats of my “actual” problem to dipshit support man left him slightly dumber than before. He concluded that it has to be a billing issue - that the monthly FiOS TV plan I’m on must restrict free Video on Demand movies. Good lord.
 

Channels Go Wacko

My Overall Observation of FiOS

Verizon’s main weakness is a confounding combination of corporate idiocracy, contradictory management policies and untrained/unintelligent support staff. Not all Verizon support techs are detrimental to the cause (honestly, some are very smart and helpful), but too many low-rent reps spoil Verizon’s potentially wonderful image.

It seems that Verizon is simply just too big and clumsy for its own good. It seems as though Verizon can’t manage itself worth a damn, and if it wasn’t for the solid technical delivery of its services, Verizon would probably implode or get eaten up by competitors.
 

Oh, and I just got another Verizon FiOS invitation letter encouraging me to switch from cable to FiOS.

The new MobileMe service doesn’t include Backup 3. Time Machine doesn’t read/open individual files. Google searches resulted in various complex ways to retrieve data from the backup.sparseimage files that Backup 3 produced. I called Apple support to get help figuring this out. After being put on hold a number of times and having to re-explain the situation again and again, my support rep put me on speaker phone with his supervisor. That supervisor suggested the simplest of simple solutions. Double click the backup.sparseimage file that Backup 3 had created.

Derr. Way too simple. Of course, the backup.sparseimage file just opened up like a DMG file would - as a separate volume (like a drive). I could browse all the folders and files that had been backed up in 2006, drag & drop to my desktop and another external drive as needed. Simple solution.

So, if you have an old .Mac Backup 3 archive that you want to grab data from, and if you are using OS X 10.5 Leopard, just open the old Backup 3 folders until you see “backup.sparseimage” and give it a quick double click. C’est tout. That’s it.

Granted, if your backup.sparseimage is corrupt, double clicking won’t help a whole lot. But for those ex-.Mac users who have stable backups, this is a nice revelation.

What the hell is going on with these companies sending out tiny, near-weightless items in these massive boxes? The carbon footprint on stupidity like this is just sickening.

I wish someone at TechDepot (and plenty of other companies… Newegg, *cough* Dell *cough*) would take a little responsibility and stop the madness. Items like this could go out in little bubble-wrap envelopes. Big savings (and more profits) to the retailers, major relief to the shipping companies, less gasoline used for transit, less waste in landfills (or recycling depots) and fewer pissed-off consumers.

Here’s one sample - it’s a flower, though I’m not sure what kind. It looks like a magnolia, but as far as I know, it’s not.

Square Edges:

Rounded Edges:

The rounded edges are pretty cool. It gives a different feel and adds more character. Check out roundpic.com to test out your own image. The only downside I noticed with using roundpic.com is that it can strip Adobe color profiles from images causing colors to be slightly different. Check the two images above and you’ll see the correct color profile in the squared version (if your browser recognizes color profiles; Safari does), and stripped color profile in the rounded version. Oh well. Maybe 2.0 will solve this little side-effect.

Here are some pics showing the process of taking the WD Passport Elite drive apart.

Here’s the prey in its natural habitat:

A credit card or thick fingernail is the best tool for prying the wide edge open. There are quite a few notches - very tough, very resistant to force. Careful, or *snap*, the case will break!

You can see the notches that hold the case together.

Because the case wants to snap back together, it’s necessary to hold it apart from all angles. I used four credit/gift cards to do the trick.

Here’s the center frame extruded from the outer case.

All the parts…

As you can see, the drive inside is a Western Digital 320GB SATA drive with a 5400RPM rotational speed. These drives sell for $130 to $170 online, and for much, much more in retail stores.

Here you can see the SATA drive separated from the tiny little SATA-USB controller. This controller works fine on its own. You can use it with or without the WD enclosure.

BONUS PICS:
I dropped the 320GB drive into my MacBook Pro. It formats to 298.09GB. So far, I’ve got 219GB free. Wow.

Close-up inside the MacBook Pro…

Another close-up inside the MacBook Pro. I like the paper-thin SATA interface.

FINAL WORDS:
What I like about the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB is that it’s a great hard drive for laptop use. It’s much cheaper than a generic OEM drive. The outer case is flat-out awesome - better than most 2.5″ cases you can buy online for $50 or more. An additional perk - the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB case is 100% bus-powered. No need for an external power supply or dual-USB cable setup to power the drive. I’m very happy with this purchase.

Caveat: moving from a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive can result in a slow-down here and there, but I’ve found that this 320GB drive is pretty swift on its feet so far. Boot time is only 3-4 seconds slower, Photoshop runs roughly the same and only video conversion seems significantly affected (by about 20%). All else is good.

This afternoon I opened my mailbox to find an envelope from Parallels. When I opened it, I found another surprise - a $10 iTunes gift card. That’s $20 in customer appreciation on a $79 purchase from 2007.

This seems rather unprecedented, doesn’t it? I like this trend!

Download and enjoy. The full-sized image is 1920×1200 and will easily scale down to 1680×1050.

Formatting the 32GB OCZ Flash Drive for booting into OS X. In this example, I split the drive into an OS X partition and a Windows-friendly data-swap partition.

 

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy a fresh image of OS X to the bootable partition on the 32GB drive.

 

The cloning took hours and hours. Painfully slow. This speed (or lack thereof) is consistent with the speeds I experienced with data transfers on my Windows servers.

 

Booting to an external drive is easy - just hold down the “option” key when starting your Intel-based Mac. When the available drives appear (internal, USB or FireWire), select the one you want to boot from and hit Enter.

 

It took over 5 minutes to boot OS X from the OCZ flash drive. Ouch! For sake of comparison, it takes about 25-30 seconds to boot from the internal SATA drive, and roughly 45 seconds to boot from a 5400 RPM SATA drive in an external USB enclosure like the Thermaltake BlacX. 5 minutes is rather crappy, but the cool thing is that it actually works.

 

As you can see in this image, the MacBook Pro is running OS X via the OCZ 32GB flash drive.

 

The 32GB drive certainly “works” as a bootable drive, but its performance leaves so very much to be desired. Five minutes for boot time is really unacceptable (6-7 times slower than external SATA drives), although I’ll admit that USB flash drives still have a lot of room for improvement.

Despite the aggravating 5 minute boot, it was fun to see OS X successfully boot. On a faster USB flash drive, I’m sure the boot time could easily be reduced by 50% or more.

When I used the drive for the first time, I was expecting some pretty impressive transfer speeds. OCZ, the drive manufacturer, indicates that the 32GB drive uses dual-channel tech to speed things up. In theory, it sounds great. In practice… not so much.

The first major chunk of data transferred was a 4GB folder with about 800 files. From the point of drag-and-drop to the moment the data transfer completed, the 32GB drive took just under 490 seconds, or roughly 8 mins and 8-10 seconds.

I thought this was a bit odd, so I made the same backup with a 500GB SATA drive using a Thermaltake BlacX USB 2.0 drive bay. The same transfer took about 128 seconds, or 2 mins 8 seconds.

I then repeated the backup with an old beater 8GB flash drive from Corsair. The same 4GB folder transferred in about 230 seconds, or 3 mins 50 seconds.

In this nerdy chart, shorter bars are better. Stats are in seconds.

I got slightly better results moving larger individual files, like 500MB and 1GB video files. No major change when formatted and used on my MacBook Pro.

As for data storage, the OCZ 32GB drive is hard to beat. 29.86GB formatted, this thing will fit TONS of data. I could back up critical files from all my servers with this little drive. I could easily move my entire iTunes library off my MacBook Pro’s hard drive and free up many, many gigs of space. I can have my Win 2000, XP and Ubuntu OSes boot via Parallels from this drive. But because the throughput of the OCZ 32GB flash drive is nowhere near as fast as I was expecting, I’ll have to shelf my dreams of speedy keychain backups of my servers.

Due to CompUSA’s closure, I was shopping at Fry’s recently (the fact that I loathe and despise Fry’s is another issue) and found a great item - the “Thermaltake BlacX” external USB 2.0 drive dock. It accepts both 3.5″ SATA and 2.5″ SATA drives, has its SATA connections firmly built into the body of the device itself (thereby preventing the all-too-common weakening of connectors) and the drives, once inserted, sit vertically into the air, allowing for excellent heat dissipation. It works with Mac and PC. The Thermaltake BlacX even has a little “eject” button for popping drives off the SATA connectors. The price was $39.95.

So far, this peripheral/accessory/tool has been incredibly useful. I’ve been able to use my 2.5″ SATA drives on a daily basis, and it’s less than a 5 second task for me to pull a drive from another computer (PC or Mac), pop it into the BlacX bay and pull/write necessary data and then eject.

All things considered, this is probably the handiest $40 tech item I’ve purchased in years. That said, I can think of a few improvements that Thermaltake could make.

• USB hub on the front and/or sides
• a better product name. Honestly… BlacX?   WTF?   (Morans on the marketing team!)
• a FireWire 400 or 800 version of this drive bay. I’d pay extra for that!

Here’s the drive dock with a 2.5″ SATA drive:

The next morning, the CD was delivered to my door. It was sent overnight. From a service point of view, this was fantastic. I was expecting a week or so, but never 18 hours.

After the surprise and delight wore off, I got to thinking about the situation. The box was huge. A laptop would have easily fit in it. It also weighed a lot - much more than cardboard and a CD.

I opened the box and found a huge amount of wadding taking up 80% or more of the empty space inside. Below the wadding was a thick, heavy user manual for the laser printer, and shrink wrapped with the thick tome was my slim little CD.

Barring the fact that the CD should be downloadable in its entirety from the Dell website (costing Dell nothing), I thought the following:

I didn’t need or want a massive user manual. (Who would?!) The CD could have been sent to me in a smaller envelope, like a standard FedEx envelope or even a bubble-style envelope. It could have been sent 2-3 day air, or even by USPS media mail for about $0.60.

The expense involved in this sort of frivolous and wasteful shipping practice is staggering when you consider the number of similar occurrences that likely happen on a day to day basis. Even if there were only 20,000 such “lost or damaged CD” requests per year (roughly 50 per day worldwide), the overnight shipping, the cost of the superfluous user manual (printing and raw materials, not to mention deforestation), the oversized and wasteful cardboard box, and all the paper/foam padding.

At 20,000 estimated occurrences per year (arguably a low estimate), the cost could reach $400,000 or more. Nearly half a million dollars to send out replacement CDs.

Had Dell put a policy in place to not ship user manuals with each CD (ask the customer if he/she wants it - 99% would not) and use thinner, more efficient packaging and shipping methods, costs could be cut by 70% to 80% - easily.

Or, add the stinking CD to the support site for download - or make it a download-by-request email link. Cost = $0.

Another thought - the carbon footprint for sending out unwanted user manuals and other materials overnight is h-u-g-e. That big, fat, poisonous and lumbering carbon footprint could easily be reduced to near zero by Dell if they’d just pay a little attention to where they’ve got wasteful practices.

The second photo is of an unrecognized breed of raptor (a.k.a. a bird of prey). It’s like a falcon, only smaller - even when fully grown. It was found in the Columbia Gorge area between the Oregon and Washington state lines. It’s a gorgeous bird, that’s all I know.

Enjoy the desktop images! (Personal use only, please!)

I cloned my 160GB drive to the 200GB drive. Unfortunately, it took nearly 4 hours thanks to the 80GB of data running over a USB 2.0 connection. USB 2.0 sucks. Really.

Once the cloning was done, I got my handy-dandy Torx screwdriver set out and began disassembling the MacBook Pro. I used the awesome (but somewhat outdated) instructions from iFixit.com.

MacBook Pro, ready to go. Note the awesome Dr. Bodelin’s Laptop Bumpers that keep the MBP raised up a little for heat dissipation.

Beginning surgery:

Removing screws from the body of the MacBook Pro is simple.

I found that placing the screws along side the iFixit instructions made things easier on me. So many screws, but so little to worry about.

Lifting the to off the MacBook Pro is easy… kind of. The rear, left and right pry loose with almost no effort, but the front was a real pain in the butt. There are some little plastic tabs that are hooked just under the lip of the front bezel. They just don’t want to let go. After a leap (or tug) of faith, I wrestled the entire top of the laptop off.

Pretty stuff under the hood:

Old drive with heat sensor:

The iFixit.com instructions indicate that there’s a bluetooth card here by the drive. Not in the case of the 2.4GHz MacBook Pro. It’s just a little brace.

Old drive and new:

200GB drive snugly in place in the MacBook Pro:

Putting the MacBook Pro back together was dirt simple. It took no more than 4 minutes and everything looks as good as it did before the whole upgrade process.

- - - - - -

The Good
After replacing the hard drive, I’ve got nearly 120GB free space. Wow. I noticed that moving data to and from my FireWire 800 backup drive is much, much faster. A 10GB transfer used to take 6-8 minutes, and now it rips through in less than 4 minutes. Parallels seems to open and run faster, too.

I’ve noticed almost no increase in heat with this new drive, and it’s actually quieter than the 160GB drive that came with the MacBook Pro. Hooray!

The Bad
With a 7,200RPM drive, I was expecting a serious decrease in boot time. I saw a significant increase - like 15-20 seconds slower. Converting AVI files to MP4 (for AppleTV) went from 5 mins 20 seconds to 6 mins 40 seconds. Time to open big RAW images in Photoshop remained the same. A bit of a disappointment.

The Ugly
During the cloning process, something must have gone awry, because the Leopard video drivers got seriously messed up. The colors on the MBP screen looked washed out and my 24″ LCD screen, which was previously gorgeous at 1920×1200, was now rendered dull brown-ish green in color and wouldn’t display anything above 1440×900. I re-installed the video card firmware update that Apple released in late February, but that didn’t fix it.

I ran a full battery of cleanups with Leopard’s Disk Utility and OnyX. Neither made any notable improvement.

After several fruitless calls to Apple Genius bars, I decided to wipe the drive clean and see how things would go. The fresh install of Leopard fixed the video problem, but it didn’t seem to make any difference with the speed I was hoping to see in the 7,200RPM drive.

Even with 4GB RAM and a fresh OS X installation, the apps I use most often seem to move at the same (or slower) pace with this new drive. Bogus.

Final Verdict
While I’m happy with the extra hard drive space, I am pretty disappointed with the fact that I’m not seeing any real-world, “holy crap!” increase in speed. Aside from the kick-ass transfer rates with my external backup drives, the 200GB 7,200RPM upgrade seems to have been a bit ho-hum.

Update on New Upgrade:

After using the 200GB 7,200RPM drive for a couple months, I swapped it out for a 320GB 5,400RPM drive made by Western Digital. Check out the installation process for photos, notes, etc. - Jason

This creates a problem for me because I like to keep images sorted by date. And unfortunately, my file naming practices have changed over the years. I used to name files by event, like “Dallas BBQ - IMG 0001.JPG”. Useless for sorting by date. At one point, I added the date into the file name, but at the end. Also useless. Then I stopped renaming and left the file as named by the camera, like “IMG_7538.JPG”. That’s great, but when I upgrade cameras, the file names often start over at IMG_0001, and I certainly don’t want my new images to replace my existing files! Imagine 35,000 photos with inconsistent file names, then imagine them with incorrect file data. When the file info is screwy, the sorting and organizing becomes a hellish nightmare. Not even iPhoto can organize things properly.

Allow me to introduce the little application that saved my sanity - ExifRenamer. It’s a simple app - terribly simple - but it solved all my image renaming problems in a matter of seconds. ExifRenamer looks at the Exif data stored in your digital photos (date shot, for example) and renames the files based on that Exif data. In my case, I wanted ExifRenamer to add the exact shoot date as a file name prefix, then use the existing file name as a suffix. So “IMG_8399.JPG” instantly becomes “20071108 14-21-06 - IMG_8399.JPG” with down-to-the-second accuracy.

Check out this little video clip wherein I run some of my images through ExifRenamer. You’ll see how fast it works, but pay particular attention to the “Date Modified” column. Finder says these images were Created On and Modified On December 4, 2007. Bull-honkey. Check the proper output from ExifRenamer. 2003, 2004 and 200-frikin-5!

The best part about ExifRenamer… it’s free. Check versiontracker.com for the most up-to-date download.

In stark contrast, it’s a pleasure to see a company stand by its customers. It’s even more impressive and heartwarming when they voluntarily do something to show they appreciate your business. That’s what recently happened with Parallels.

I bought Parallels Desktop for Mac last year and have been using it daily. I long forgot about the $79 I paid for the program, partly due to the amount of time that had gone by, but mostly due to the program’s near flawless operation and the fact that it’s so incredibly useful. Why should I worry about a $79 purchase when it has probably saved me hundreds or thousands of dollars?

A few days ago, I was opening my mail and spotted an envelope from Parallels. I figured it might be a promotion for some new utility or maybe a notice of a future upgrade. It almost went in the trash. When I opened it, I was very surprised to see a $10 gift card; not just a “$10 discount on a future purchase”, but a $10 Visa card that I can use anywhere, for anything.

Wow! Now that’s how to show some customer appreciation!

Here’s a quick clip of the setup:

At long last, I found a short mention of using white foamboard from Office Depot (Staples, whatever). Desperate, I went with that suggestion and was very pleasantly surprised with the results. I bought several 2′ x 3′ sheets of white foamboard - five in total. The foamboard’s ultra-white surface has the wonderful ability to gently disperse light. The foamboard is also very rigid and makes it easy to construct a 5 sided box that doesn’t get wobbly or weak.

I used a full-sized sheet of foamboard for the bottom surface. I cut 2′ x 2.5′ squares from two foamboard sheets and used them for the left and right sides. A 2′ x 2′ square was used for the back of the box and a 2′ x 2.5′ sheet for the top. Standard masking tape was used to affix the boards together and create the standing box. I would have preferred to use white duct tape or white masking tape, but neither Home Depot nor Office Depot had any in stock.

The slightly-longer bottom extends out from the box for a little more white runway in angled photos. I then used a razor knife to carefully cut several flaps in the top of the box for properly angled lights. These flaps can be opened or closed, depending on what angle I want light to shine. Cutting holes (and not flaps) is discouraged, because it causes a permanent light drain, inhibits internal reflection and, if you’re shooting anything highly-reflective (like glass, bottles, etc.), the dark hole will show up as an annoying artifact on your object.

To reduce the inevitable horizon line from the bottom joint of foamboard sheets, I used a couple sheets of ultra-white paper taped to the backboard of the box, with a sloping angle, then taped to the bottom foamboard sheet.

As for lighting, I used three cheap articulating lamps from IKEA. They cost $8 each. They’re awesome because the insides of the lamps are coated in bright white paint. The key element in this setup is the actual light bulbs. Standard incandescent bulbs cast a terrible orange glow that can ruin shots. I opted for bulbs that had near-perfect light. They’re “daylight” CFL (compact florescent) bulbs that have a color temperature of about 5000 or 5500. (Incandescent bulbs have color temps around 8000-9000 - way, way too orange for any decent photos.)

With the white box built and the bright white bulbs installed, I set up a tripod for some test shots. Here are a few test results:

Not too shabby. Certainly better than white sheets, white felt, white linoleum or goofy cloth-style pop-up photo tents.

P.S. I found that placing a thin sheet of clear plexiglas on the bottom of the white box helps create a neat reflection under certain objects, similar to the drop reflection common to Apple’s product photos.

So I set out to increase the RAM to 2GB and pop in a new 500GB hard drive. My first task, opening the iMac case. Apple makes this harder than opening other, earlier cases. They use Torx screws instead of phillips screws. Home Depot has sets of Torx screws for $10 and eBay has similar sets for $8 to $15.

Here’s the iMac opened up on the operating table. I didn’t disconnect the LCD 100% from the iMac. I left the video connector attached and used the foot of the iMac as a nice stable holding spot during the surgery.

In this pic, the insides of the iMac are exposed. A late note about warranties. This completely voids the warranty on the iMac. I don’t care, but if you try any of this, you should consider preserving your warranty. Unlike repairs on most Macs, opening Intel iMacs results in obvious cosmetic scarring inside. It’ll be 100% clear to any Apple tech that your iMac has been opened and messed around with.

Here’s the 160GB SATA hard drive. It’s tucked tightly inside the case.

Luckily, it’s very easy to remove. Two screws and a little slight of hand, and the drive pops right out.

See?

Unplug the SATA power and data cables.

Carefully remove the HDD heat sensor. There’s a glue-like substance underneath. Try not to tear it.

The new 500GB drive is back in place. I secured the heat sensor on with some electrical tape. It may give a slightly inaccurate read due to the thin insulation, but it’s fine. Again, be gentle with the adhesive.

With the hard drive secured and the LCD replaced, I screwed the internal Torx screws back in.

A little more electrical tape to affix the thick tinfoil-like metal sheeting back to the inside frame of the iMac case.

Aligning the top of the front bezel onto the case is important. It can be a little tricky, so take your time. It may take a few tries. The best way to tell if you have it right is to see and/or hear the metal clips snap into place. The back side of the iMac will also be snug against the bezel. If the setting isn’t right, the bezel and frame will be slightly misaligned and will feel sloppy. A tight, clean fit is desired.

Tighten the Torx screws on the bottom of the case to complete the surgical process.

Boot the iMac into FireWire Target Disk mode and clone the old drive to the new, blank 500GB drive. I used Carbon Copy Cloner. Because I had to clone a drive with around 150GB+ of stuff on it, the whole clone process took about 4 hours. Egads.

With cloning done, the new 500GB iMac boots up just fine. I had about 320GB free at that point. After moving the rest of my iTunes, photos and cooking vids, I had about 220GB free. We’ll see how long that lasts. A nice 1TB drive may be in order sooner than I expected.

Post op, I hooked the iMac up to some speakers by way of an Airport Express unit. It’s a very nice setup. It’s not a brand new silver & black iMac, but this is fine for me. Besides, it’s likely to get some ragu on it now and then, so I’d rather have an oldie in la cucina mia.

Please use this as a desktop image only. If you would like permission to use this image in print, please email me using the link at the bottom of this page. Thanks!

I’ll have links to the actual photos asap. Till then, here’s the cover:

AirPort Extreme video 802.11n - silky smooth




Again, it looks like video streaming takes anywhere from 3 to 35 times as much bandwidth as streaming audio depending on the size of the video file, the file type (h.264 vs. avi vs. mov, etc.). I’ve taken a couple stills to show the bit rates of tested movies. They are:


Movie Purchased via iTunes




Legal Backup of Owned DVD




While discussing this issue with one of my uber-geek friends, he suggested that the bit rate of the backed-up DVD may be higher than that of iTunes movies and that iTunes movies would probably play better via 802.11b/g. The images above show that the iTunes movie has a higher bit rate.


The 802.11b/g protocol on the AirPort Extreme just can’t seem to handle video smoothly without supplemental buffering or caching. 802.11n, however, plays video flawlessly. It’s really just as good as if it was being played directly from an internal hard drive or from a DVD.


Of course, I’m not part of Apple’s R&D team so I can’t confirm if this video playback issue has anything to do with why the AppleTV was delayed. If anything, it’s something that Apple should be aware of. Knowing Apple, they probably are aware of it and I’d bet good money that they’ve got a fix for it - maybe a nice big fat buffer built into the AppleTV - enough to prevent Irritable Buffer Syndrome. What a pain in the butt that could be.


Some folks out there may say I’m way off the mark. I don’t know. They could be right. The current speculation is that Apple has delayed the AppleTV as a marketing ploy. Which seems more logical? While I could be wrong, it seems better to delay the launch while figuring out how to improve streaming & caching issues than to release a product that could potentially become an embarrassment.


Either that, or it really is just a tricky marketing ploy.

NB: The screen captures used above were used with a legally backed-up copy of one of my favorite home-library DVDs, The Professional, starring Jean Reno, Gary Oldman, Natalie Portman and Danny Aiello.

Probably one of the more important things to note is the amount of wireless bandwidth iTunes songs take up while playing. I used Activity Monitor and Menu Meters to track these stats. Both apps gave the same result - the average bandwidth required is about 33KB/s.

Obviously, using 33KB/s for iTunes will have almost no effect whatsoever on the rest of your AirPort Extreme use.The only thing I would highly suggest prior to moving an iTunes library to the AirPort Disk, is doing a FULL backup of your entire iTunes library to another hard drive or even to DVDs. Better safe than sorry.

Good luck!