The iMac in my kitchen has flaked out and evidence suggests that parts of the logic board are fried. Though the board could be replaced, basically it’s time upgrade to something else (it is a PowerPC machine, after all). I’m struggling with what to replace it with, however, and am soliciting advice from readers.

This machine acts as the central hub for the house, so is our main media repository. It also hosts the sorts of information you might normally track using paper, magnets and a refrigerator: shopping lists, calendars, sticky notes, and so on. It’s also the recipe database and cooking timer. I should also mention that I will probably be redoing my kitchen soon, so the exact height between the counter and the bottom of my cabinets might change slightly.

Here are my main contenders for a replacement:

A 20-inch iMac: This is the obvious choice, but for for one glaring problem: it’s about a half-inch taller than the space under my cabinets, so it will not fit as is. There is, however, quite a bit a clearance between the bottom of the machine and the bottom of the stand stand, so it would definitely fit if I took the stand off. I could then mount it to the wall on an articulated arm, which would actually be quite helpful. Unfortunately, the 20-inch iMac doesn’t include standard mounting brackets on the back. Apple does make a bracket for the 24-inch model, but this wouldn’t fit even without the stand. So it looks like I need to use a custom solution, making use of this third party bracket and then, because this leaves the stand in place, cut a good bit of my stand off with a metal saw. (Further, as I understand it, getting the stand off of this model iMac is very involved, and certainly voids the warranty, so I might need to saw the thing while it’s still connected to the machine.) I was hoping that MacWorld 2009 might feature an iMac revision with a VESA mount, but no such luck.

• Pros: powerful, one unit (i.e. not as many cables running amok), sexy.
• Cons: setup that is complex, annoying and risky

A Mac mini and VESA mounted LCD. In this case, I would mount the mini upside down to the bottom of the cabinet, and use an articulated arm to mount the LCD. With choices of vendors, I could certainly find a VESA mountable monitor, so the labor wouldn’t be a problem. The issue here is that while I was hoping for an iMac rev, I was flat out expecting a revision of the mini during MacWorld. The current version was released in August 2007, and was only a very minor improvement to the version released in February 2006. While they are fairly cheap, buying 18-month-old tech is not a great idea, especially a product line that might be canceled soon (or mutated into something very different, like an AppleTV/Mini hybrid). This counters one of the mini’s largest advantages in such a setup: that you could keep the same monitor and just swap in new minis as the tech curve advances. Since Apple doesn’t seem that interested in the mini, that advantage instead changes to the bummer of basing the whole thing on a concept that isn’t sustained. The biggest problem with the mini, though, is that the hard drive in the current models just isn’t large enough to be a media center. While it’s possible to upgrade the drive, it’s a pain.

• Pros: cheap, potentially upgradeable, easy setup, monitor choice allows more flexibility (such as also using it for TV, speakers, etc.)
• Cons: old tech, uncertain future, underpowered, extra cables

A mounted Modbook Pro. These were introduced at MacWorld 2009. Since Apple is never going to make their own tablets, this is the only way to get a tablet right now. (An iPhone with a bigger screen won’t count, and Apple might never make that either.) New to this model is the addition of a touch interface, to go along with the pen input of the previous model (or a bluetooth keyboard). In some ways, the pen input is a natural fit for a kitchen, and the touch is even more so. It would also be nice to pull it from the mount to use as a tablet on occasion. A drawback, in addition to the cost, are that it would be a step down in screen size, though this might not be the end of the world. The other problem is that I can’t tell if it is VESA mountable or not. The old one was not, but Axiotron claimed to be working on a bracket for Q3 2008 that would allow VESA mounting, though they have yet to deliver it. There hasn’t been much coverage of the Modbook Pro so far, so I’m hoping for more mounting information.

• Pros: touch interface, could be unmounted and used as portable
• Cons: expensive, smaller screen than current iMac, uncertain mounting, not available until the summer

Other possibilities exist, but aren’t as palatable to me. A small form-factor hackintosh, for example, could be done similarly to the setup mentioned for the mini. It’s not clear how long hackintoshes will remain possible, though, and I’m not sure I want to be bothered setting one up. (Also, I’ve been counting on the purchase of a new Mac to provide an upgrade to iLife, which I would otherwise need to buy.)

What would you do? Are there other choices? And what kind of VESA arm should I get?

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My cable provider supplies a digital video recorder (DVR) that records high definition. It’s not a very good one, with possibly the ugliest user interface ever (from an application called SARA), but it’s adequate and gets the job done. Or did, until the DVR started to run out of disk space. It turns out that this particular cable box/DVR (a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD) has an external serial advanced technology attachment (eSATA) port on it. I happened to have some SATA drives left over from upgrading my RAID, so I thought I’d try to plug one of these in. This turned out to be a bit of a challenge.

The first task was to put the drive into something that supported the eSATA interface, which means getting a drive enclosure for the bare drive I had. I wanted this to be as versatile as possible, so I managed to find the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Quad Interface, which supports eSATA, USB2 and both flavors of FireWire. This case is quiet and solid, made largely from large pieces of aluminum. Mounting was easy, and I tested the drive on my Mac with no problem.

I also discovered a bit of a bonus: my MacPro has some spare SATA plugs on the motherboard, and the same company that sells the case sells a cheap doohickey that plugs into these ports, and exposes them as eSATA ports on the back of the machine. Simple, inexpensive and useful.

Anyway, connecting this drive into the cable box didn’t work. It turns out that the DVR is very finicky about both the drive and the enclosure that it talks to. Since its all standard interfaces, this is both stupid and irritating, but it seems to only accept certain combinations. My drives were Maxtor drives and didn’t seem to work. Possibly they are less standard than usual.

By this time, we were really running out of space, and I got a bit obsessed about gaining extra storage for the damn thing. I wound up finding a solution made specifically for the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD, with a money back guarantee if it didn’t work. This meant getting a whole new drive, so wasn’t the most cost effective thing to do. Still, I can use the Mercury Quad for other things, so it’s not a total loss. It was also an excuse to get a larger drive than that one I had.

From opening the box, it took all of five minutes to get this drive working with my cable box. Very simple, really quiet, works great, and roughly quadrupled our DVR recording ability. So, pretty happy with it, though a bit beyond the original budget. I have yet to try to unmount the drive and read it with a computer. From what I read, this doesn’t really work that well.

This summer, we also totally upgraded our main TV area, adding a Playstation 3 and flatscreen TV (which necessitated a new receiver that could handle HDMI, and lots of it). After connecting it all, and resurrecting some old hardware to make the 802.11n connection a bit more reliable, our setup now looks like this:

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The Mac Pro contains four accessible hard-drive bays. Mac OS X comes with easy to use RAID software. Put these together, and you can quickly build a backup system using redundant disks, so that if one drive fails, another takes its place.

Building a RAID (meaning “redundant array of independent disks”) like this may be ideal for backups, but isn’t as useful for other applications of RAID technology (such as striping for great video encoding performance, and so on). This because the RAID is controlled by software, so is on the slower side. It’s possible to put an optional hardware-based RAID controller into the Mac Pro, but it is pricey and complete overkill for backups. The speed doesn’t really matter for backup use, especially when using Time Machine, since it is all done unnoticed in the background anyway.

Preparation

The key thing about making a RAID is that you need to use multiple identical disks. As mentioned, speed doesn’t really matter for backups. In fact, you are usually better off buying the slowest disks you can find because they a) will still be fast enough, b) are cheaper, c) are usually quieter and d) usually draw less power. The Mac Pro uses Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (Serial ATA or SATA) disks. The drives used in this post are a pair of 1.0TB Western Digital Caviar Geen drives, due to their lower power consumption and sound output. These drives use a variable number of rotations per minute, but are rated at between 5400 and 7200 rpm. So, these are not speed demons, but they don’t need to be. At the time of writing, Other World Computing had the best deal on this particular drive.

In addition to the drives, you will need a Mac Pro, one functional hand, and a standard phillips screwdriver. You might also want a grounding strap to prevent electrical damage to the components, particularly in dry climates or if you tend to get shocked by light switches a lot where you live.

To start the installation, shutdown your Mac Pro.

Hardware installation

Pull out the tab on the back of the Mac Pro, pull the top of the side panel out, then remove the side panel (click on any of the images in this post to see a larger version):

About a third of the way down, find the four numbered drive caddies. If this is a new machine, chances are that drive bay #1 holds the primary disk and the other three caddies are empty. These instructions assume that this is the case, and that you’ll put your RAID drives into bays #2 and #3. Adjust this to match your machine accordingly. It doesn’t matter which of the bays the RAID drives are in. Give a tug to caddy #2 (or whatever) and slide it out. It should come out without much effort; it is not secured with screws or anything:

Before unwrapping your drive from its anti-static bag, hold the bag and touch a metal part on the frame of the Pro. This should lessen the chance of a spark that could damage the drive. Unwrap the first drive and find the four silver holes at the edge of the side with the visible circuit board. Note that these are in the same orientation as the screws on the caddy. Line the caddy up with these holes and connect with a phillips screwdriver. Note that the “open” end of the caddy should point towards the back of the drive (where the copper pins are).

Put the caddy with the mounted drive back into the machine by locating the tab-like rails into which the caddy slides. These should fit very naturally. Once in place, slowly but firmly push the caddy all the way back in. It should be flush with the rest of the caddies.

Repeat the process with the second drive, using bay #3. Once done, replace the side panel by lining up the bottom of it with the space in the machine, then tilting the top back in place. Once flush, close the tab on the back of the machine to lock the side in place. Boot the Mac Pro.

Software setup

If all goes well, once you boot up, you will see messages asking you if you want to format the new drives. Say no to (or cancel) these messages. You’ll need to reformat these drives as a RAID, so no point in formatting them just now. Instead, launch the “Disk Utility” application (usually found in Applications/Utilities).

When it comes up, you should see the new drives listed on the left, along with your primary drive and your DVD drive. From the tab selections at the top of the right-hand section of the window, click “RAID”. Enter a name for your new RAID, such as “Backup”. Make sure “Raid Type:” is set to “Mirrored RAID set”.

Now select one of the new drives from the list at the left. Holding down the shift key, click on the other new drive, to add it to the selection as well. Drag the two selected drives into the large white space on the right-side section of the window. This will add two entries to this list, saying something like “New member: ‘disk 0′”. Below this list, click “Options”. Make sure “Automatically rebuild RAID mirror sets” is checked, and click “OK”. (This setting will correct problems in the RAID if one of the drives has an error.)

Click “Create”. A confirmation screen will come up, warning you that creating this RAID will completely erase the drives. This is a good time to make doubly sure that you have selected your new drives into the RAID, and not any other drives. When satisfied this is so, click “Create”. A progress bar will appear as the RAID is being created. When finished, you should see the new RAID show up in both the left side list, and in the right side section. While the Disk Utility will still show you the individual disks, everything else will see the RAID as if it is a single drive.

Note that the capacity of the RAID as a whole matches that of one of the drives, not their sum. This should be as you would expect. The whole point of the RAID is to act as a “virtual disk” and when a byte is written to that disk, the RAID software writes that byte to the same spot on both of the drives, making sure they each have a copy of the same data. Thus, either one can fail, and you still have a working copy of the data.

A short digression

Before setting up this RAID for use with Time Machine, a quick digression. For troubleshooting purposes, it is sometimes useful to get more information about the drives you are using. Six months down the road, for example, you might have forgotten which drive you put into which bay. The System Profiler application can provide a bunch of information about your system, including the drives. You can launch this app either directly from Applications/Utilities or by selecting “About This Mac” from the Apple menu, then clicking “More Info…”.

Once the System Profiler launches, clicking the “Serial-ATA” section will show a list of the drives in the machine. If you click on one of your new drives, the bottom right section will display all sorts of information about the drive. Two more useful bits of information are the “Bay Name” setting, which tells you in which drive bay the drive is physically installed, and the “BSD Name” field, usually set to something like “disk1s3″. This code is needed for a number of command line disk manipulation tools, so is good to know when troubleshooting problems.

Time Machine

Setting up Time Machine to use this RAID is the same as using any other drive. Just “Open Time Machine Preferences” from the Time Machine menu icon (by the clock in the menu bar), or by selecting “System Preferences…” from the Apple menu, then going to the Time Machine section. Once there, turn Time Machine on and select the RAID.

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Upgrading the primary hard drive in my Mac Pro exposed an annoying hurdle that might not be very obvious: if you have upgraded your video card to an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, you might not be able to boot from your Leopard Install DVD any more.

I ran across this because, after installing my new drive, I decided to try a “full restore” from Time Machine. In theory, this would result in a clone of my old primary drive, just on a new, larger disk. It appears, however, the only way to use this feature is to boot from the Leopard Install DVD, and then select “Restore System from Backup” from the “Utilities” menu. The problem I had was that when booting from the DVD, I kept getting the dreaded grey screen telling me that “You must reboot your Mac” in several languages.

The DVD booted other machines just fine. The Pro booted from other sources just fine, at which point a dialog telling me that my machine crashed and would I like to submit a report to Apple? It didn’t even occur to me that the video card might be the culprit until I read the crash log attached to this report and noticed the stack contained a bunch of video initialization calls. From there it occurred to me that the GeForce 8800 GT to which I upgraded several months ago didn’t even exist when the install DVD I was using was created, so the DVD probably lacked the correct drivers.

Fortunately, I still had my old video card, so I swapped it in and the rest went as planned.

Looking on the net, I discovered that some others had my problem, but that there is a newer version of the install DVD (10.5.2) which does not have this problem. Most people reported that attempts to get the Apple store to exchange a 15.0 DVD for a 10.5.2 DVD failed, but since this seemed so stupid, I decided to try it anyway. I didn’t have much trouble (though I may have been helped by a) having once been a paying Apple developer and/or b) the long list of hardware I’ve purchased from the Apple store, including the Pro and the video card) and supposedly I will be getting mailed this newer DVD soon.

Sadly, even with all this, this was still probably my easiest primary drive upgrade ever.

Update: My (sparsely labelled) 10.5.2 DVD arrived.

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Apple has rejected a number of iPhone applications from their store recently, because they “duplicate functionality” of Apple applications (or, evidently, of apps Apple might write). Apple is now adding a new wrinkle: they now warn that notification of these rejections is included in non-disclosure agreements.

So, forget for a second that this whole process is stupid, bad business, insipid, and almost certainly illegal. Instead, imagine that you are a developer who gets an app rejected like this. In addition to being angry and disillusioned, you also have a problem: you now can’t tell your fans why the app they are waiting for will never come without violating the NDA. About all you can say is “we have stopped work on this application”. If anyone demands an explanation, all you can say is “we can’t tell you”.

I suggest an alternative solution. Rather than say “we can’t tell you”, explain it with a phrase that has no actual meaning whatsoever, but one that will come to be known to mean “Apple screwed us over with their idiocy but we can’t tell you that”. I offer up the following phrase (which, I must stress, has absolutely nothing to do with the iPhone, Apple or the app store, but is merely a way of stating the inexplicable): “an overabundance of doughnut gravy”. So you might say something like: “We regret to inform you that we have canceled all work on application X. We found we could not continue after suffering from an overabundance of doughnut gravy.”

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Having recently completed Awake in the Dark, I was glad to see Roger Ebert’s article on how to read a movie. I immediately started thinking along the lines that some of the commentators did: could this be reasonably done in an on-line way?

I think it could. It wouldn’t be exactly the same as Ebert describes, of course, for some obvious reasons: the crowd would be much larger, the pace would be necessarily slower, the shots to be examined would have to be selected in some way other than yelling “stop”, typing is not the same as speaking, and so on. Even so, it still might be useful. And fun.

I’m tempted to do this myself. Maybe I will if no one else picks up the gauntlet. One way it could work would be like this:

• Get a domain like cinema-interruptus.org.
• Install the latest version of phpBB.
• Create one forum per film.
• Use one thread per shot.
• For each film, one registered user acts as the “host”.
• Lock down permissions in a forum so that only the “host” can create new threads (i.e. shots) in that forum.
• The host initiates a shot by creating a new thread containing the shot to be examined, with a number in the subject. The initial post would contain things like the time index and so on.
• Anyone can then post to the thread.
• Once some criterion has been reached, a new shot is posted. This could be done in a few ways:
  • Some sort of time limit, say, an hour or two. This forces the experience to work in a “live” way, however, which isn’t what the internet is best at.
  • Some sort of “post count” limit is hit. For example, after 50 or 100 (or whatever) posts to the thread, the next shot starts. This has the advantage that the pace of the process is dictated by interest, moving through shots quickly when a lot of people are posting (i.e. at “peak hours”) and more slowly when fewer are paying attention. Disadvantage is that the cutoff is arbitrary. There will surely be cases where it either cuts off to soon or stalls.
  • Allow the host to move on when he feels the time is right. Would probably be the best choice, but would entirely depend on a good host.
  • Some other method.
• It might be useful, when moving to a new shot, to lock the previous shot/thread. I can see where this would be helpful. I can also see how it would be a hindrance. Probably a choice left up to the host.
• It might be interesting if the choice of frames was deterministic (e.g. take one frame exactly every 30 seconds), rather than having the host (or, perhaps, requests from earlier shots) pick out “interesting” frames. On the one hand, this downplays the human element and forces focus onto a place it might not go naturally. On the other hand, this downplays the human element and forces focus onto a place it might not go naturally.
• Using one film per forum, run several different movies at once.
• Close down the site after being sued by the MPAA for copyright violations.

It would take quite a while to get through a film. It would also be a project with many built-in “intermissions” from the point of view of the reader. That is, they’d see a few shots, then go on with their day, then see a few more, and so on. This would be a much different concept than sitting in a dark room for several hours at a stretch. I’m guessing it might make the analysis better, but perhaps not.

Who’s up for it? Would you participate in such a thing?

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Spam filters are now good enough that they suck away the evil crap without me noticing. It’s been a long time since I cared enough to look to see what it was filtering out. On a whim, I did so today and noticed that subject lines have graduated from spelling out the names of erection medicine in fifty million different ways to using provocative “headlines”, which look like over the top news/gossip events. The idea being, I suppose, that if the headline is compelling enough, you take the time to read (or, at least, render) the spam.

I still haven’t read any of the actual mails, but some of these headlines are hilarious. I’m guessing they have some sort of random context-free grammar thing generating them. Sort of like they fight crime, but more obsessed with media whores. Some examples of what I got today:

• Britney Spears Ditches Music Career, Enters Car Racing
• Britney Spears Admits “My Vagina Made Me Shave My Head Bald”
• Angelina Jolie’s Lips Explode
• Britney Spears’ New Hair Extensions Are Lindsay Lohan’s Pubes (that one’s for you, Rob)
• Britney Spears Shoots Down American Spy Satellite With Her Vagina
• Britney Spears Not Bipolar – New World Order Conspiracy Afoot
• Britney Spears: “Yes, I tried to suck the shine off a bumper”
• Paris Hilton denies screwing Ron Paul
• Britney heartbroken as Diana’s Butler beds Winehouse
• Paris Hilton To Poses For Playboy, followed immediately by another mail claiming Paris Hilton Becomes Nun. Your call on which would be more shocking.
• Paris Hilton’s Vagina Bites Penguin

The Weekly World News wishes they could make these headlines. I can almost see the “photo” they would use for that last one.

Popularity: 5% [?]