As my MacPro was a bit poorly, I installed a new graphics card last night. It’s an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.

Installation was easy (everything is easy inside a MacPro). The card itself is about half the size of the outgoing ATI Radeon X1900, but most importantly is mostly silent.

Now running something vaguely graphics intensive like iTunes visualisation or  Time Machine is a quiet relaxing affair, and not like descending into the bowels of a cruise ship’s engine room.

More importantly, it’s stopped crashing.

Hurrah!

My MacPro has been getting very noisy and a little unstable recently.

It’s an early (2006) model with a mere 4 Xenon cores of just 2.66ghz but still jolly splendid.

I’ve tracked the problem down to the graphics card, and with a bit of research there seems to be a common problem with ATI Radeon X1900 overheating and causing visual problems and even lock ups.

Right on cue, the fan is now ramping up – clearly typing this sentence is highly graphically intensive !

So I think a new graphics card is in order.

The easy option is the Nvidia Geforce 8800GT from Apple – pricy compared to the Windows PC version and not quite state of the art, but has a good power/performance/price profile and considerably better than the ATI.

The alternative is to force the case fans to go faster permanently to help in cooling and probably wear my noise cancelling headphones all the time too.

My Mac Mini had drive trouble some time ago and I ‘fixed’ it by booting off an external drive.

This has been most acceptable for the last 15 months or so, but recently, with a rejig of media stuff in the living room, I thought it would be nice to have the mini working properly off its own disk.

I found some money languishing in my PayPal account, did some interweb research on best drives and upgrade instructions and this morning set at it.

It’s an Hitachi 250GB drive (old was one 100GB) and the instructions were found here. Thanks Sole!

I was particularly impressed with the ease in which a disk can be cloned from one to another and then just boot from it. No hassle at all and all handled with Disk Utility.

I was also impressed with my Stanley putty knife and am proud to be the owner of such an essential Macintosh DIY tool

I watched The Incredible Hulk at the weekend (the one with Edward Norton).

For some reason I thought that most people believed that the previous film was rubbish and this was much better, even good, but I didn’t think so.

Or maybe I imagined that.

Anyway, how Norton got an Oscar nomination for it is beyond me. Hurt and Roth were especially poor. Cameo by Lee was painful.

Still, it was nice to see Lou Ferrigno as the security guard (again) and Hulk’s voice. I wonder if he has some contract where he has to be in every TV show or film about the hulk?

Anyways, as a side-line, I bought the film from iTunes and watched it on my Mac Mini attached to the big plasma in the living room. Not quite as plug-n-play as an AppleTV, but worked well and quality was good. Much better than the typical annoying DVD interface where you’re forced to watch endless ads and trailers.

The other day I was thinking about being a long-time Apple customer and that around the very late 90s, early 00s, when Windows PCs were a bit of a joke, it was very easy to feel superior and evangelise a bit about Macs and OS 9 and generally lord over the great unfortunate.

So a lot of people felt the pressure and switched to Mac, or bought an iPod, or whatever and whenever there is a problem it’s somehow my fault - the gloating goes the other way.

Anyways, coincidentally this morning I see a much better piece written by Cult of Mac.

To keep myself sane (ish) and avoid becoming an Apple apologist, I’ve taken to using the ‘other side’ from time to time:

• I use an ordinary mobile phone and suddenly the iPhone’s problems seem insignificant.
• I use Outlook’s search facility and somehow Mail’s inability to sync accounts between Macs seems like a minor inconvenience.

See? Nothing to apologise for

After the demise of my iBook, we needed a replacement for wireless interwebbing at home.

Lo! a shiny new MacBook has been ordered and shall be delivered in a week or two, but why does ‘3 days’ on Apple’s website always translate to two weeks once they’ve taken your payment?

iBook seems to have relapsed after a spirited recovery.

It was taking a long time to boot, Spotlight felt it was necessary to reindex the drive, then would crash and repeat. After a single-user disk repair session it wouldn’t boot at all, in fact it didn’t seem to be getting power.

Battery and mains adaptor are fine, so it looks like iBook’s last hope is an Apple service centre

Update: When the battery is connected, the num-lock, caps-lock and power lights all flicker alarmingly.

Looks like iBook seems to be recovering after an OS reinstall. After syncing back its personality from .Mac he seems as good as new.

Fingers crossed he stays that way.

My iBook kernel panicked. And is doing it again on reboot.

For those less enlightened, a kernel panic is akin to the Windows Blue Screen Of Death.

I’ve yet to do any real analysis, but I fear the worst.

Snowy the iBook has been a good and faithful servant since September 8, 2005.

He is my second iBook, the first, Toilet, serving me well in 1999/2000, and my fourth Mac overall, the others being iMacs.

Since then, my PowerMac G5, Mini and Mac Pro have also served me well, the latter two still going string, despite the Mini having trouble a while back.

Hopefully, Snowy the iBook is just going through a bad patch and will pull through.

I’ve had the iPhone for two months now, time for the hype to die down, and for normal usage patterns to emerge.

During the week, it’s my alarm clock – I put it on silent mode, so calls/texts don’t wake me up, and I disable vibrate.

I carry it to work in my pocket. If I’m lazy and take the 7 min bus journey, I use it to catch up on the news. At work, it sits on my desk, off silent mode but with volume at minimum and vibrate on. When I’m wondering around, it goes in my pocket. There are no scratches on the screen from this activity. It doesn’t feel cumbersome or heavy.

When I’m on a train or other long journey, it turns in to an iPod and does the business.

At home, in a permanent WiFi zone, I use it for many things I’d normally use my 12″ iBook for… surfing, email checking, etc. Basically, interweb stuff, where I can’t be arsed to go to my home office and use the MacPro.

I tend to dock/charge each evening, and even with heavy use, never see the charge dip below about two-thirds.

So, on to the features I use most:

Phone

It’s still the best phone I’ve ever had, in terms of sound quality, signal strength, and general usage. It’s especially good hands free, and considerably better than the Cisco headset I use at work.

The visual voicemail thing has become surprisingly useful to me; I rarely get to take calls when at work, so collecting calls and playing and re-playing them later is common. It’s only when you have to use sequential voicemail (“press 1 to play again, 2 to save, 3 to delete, 4 to go back 10 seconds” etc) that you realise how good visual voice mail is.

iPod

As iPods go, I think I prefer the old click-wheel interface. The iPhone iPod interface is a bit heavy on animation and a bit light on usability. Coverflow in particular is flawed because it doesn’t track the playlist/genre/etc you are looking at (at least it doesn’t seem to).

There’s also no way, as far as I can tell, to scrub through a song without holding down the back/forward buttons. On a normal iPod, you can use the wheel to scrub backward and forward.

At least all this can change with firmware updates, so we’ll see how things get on.

I particularly like the iTunes Store integration when in a WiFi hotspot. I’ve used this way more than I would have imagined. In fact, I’ve probably purchased more stuff using the iPhone than iTunes. The syncing back to the Mac is really good too – no dramas there, and it handily distinguishes between stuff bought via iTunes and stuff bought via the iPhone.

PDA

I’ve had a number of PDAs over the years, Psions 3 and 5, Palm Pilots, mono and colour, a WinCE machine (omg, what an utter pile of shite), and more recently, some pseudo smart phones, like the SE W850.

My needs have changed though. With the Psion series 3, I needed something to keep a travel diary on, so it had to have a keyboard, and be reasonably rugged, operate at high altitude, in very cold and very hot/humid conditions. It did a great job and also looked after my expenses coz it had a spreadsheet.

My needs now are simpler; I need it to completely sync my calendars, address book and email with my Macs and .Mac. The iPhone does this very well. No other PDA has. In particular, most PDAs and phones are very poor at handling all the information in an address book entry. Most are problematic with calendar syncing, although I expect modern Windows Mobile devices are probably quite good at syncing with Outlook.

I don’t need to keep a diary any more, at least not on my PDA, but If I did, I suspect the iPhone would not be good. The keyboard is OK, but there’s nothing to take notes in…

It needs a good note taker app, that allows text, photos from camera and voice notes to be kept together, either chronologically or by name. A way of linking text messages or voice mail or email to the notes would be useful too.

email

The email client is good. It works well with IMAP, lets you have multiple accounts, and have some disabled when you don’t need them (like an address for support pages from work).

There are a few things that I’m not too happy with though:

• Can’t set different sounds for different email accounts.
• Yahoo push sometimes stops working and if push is enabled, it doesn’t pull either, so you can go for hours or days without knowing you received any mail. Maybe this is O2’s fault, but regardless, it makes it useless, so I stick to IMAP pull
• You can’t turn email sideways to read it better
• You can’t tell it to not download linked content from HTML emails, so there’s a privacy issue
• No spam filtering for .Mac account (that’s normally done on the mail client)
• At one point, iPhone Mail reverted to a set of mail accounts and preferences that I’d set up a week or so ago. It just lost everything. I don’t know if it was a weird syncing error, but I had to reset it from the Mac. Was easy to recover and no data was lost, but just a bit weird.

Safari

Great except that when you read pages designed for low-bandwidth devices, eg BBC News, the text is very small and hard to read, and as it’s all just one column, you can’t easily double-tap to zoom in. So it’s actually easier to read full graphics pages, but then you have the bandwidth issue, if you’re out of WiFi range.

I possibly solution might be a toggle to tell the Safari to stop pretending it’s a full desktop browser and just be at 360×480 display (or whatever).

3G would help a bit, but not too much.

Camera

Occasionally, but it’s really not a great camera. Most pics have a strong blueish cast and need post processing before showing them, so taking a pic and posting it directly to a blog is not really on the cards. A shame that, especially as the iWeb/Web Gallery integration is actually very good.

- / -

So in summary, it’s still a great device. People still come up to me asking “oooh, is that an iPhone, can I have a look?”. It doesn’t disappoint as a phone nor a smart phone.

Upcoming firmware changes and the 3rd-party dev kit being opened from February can only make it better.