Category Archives: Apple

Exporting Photos from Aperture to iPhoto

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I’ve been using Aperture for a while but now that iPhoto ’09 has all these new features like Face Recognition, Flickr and Facebook integration I figured I wanted to be able to use iPhoto.
Problem is that I’ve been exporting all the photos from my camera to Aperture and not iPhoto.
To get your Aperture photos to iPhoto you need to export the masters from Aperture into a folder and then drag that folder into iPhoto and it will import the photos in.
I choose All Photos in Aperture, and selected all the photos. (I selected the first photo, scrolled to the last photo, held down shift and clicked on the last photo to select all photos)
After selected all the photos I clicked File -> Export -> Masters, and choose to export the masters into folders based on the project name.
After all the masters were copied to the specified folder I dragged that folder into iPhoto and everything was copied over.
Now I just gotta wait for the new iPhoto ’09 to be released and try out all the new features.

Apple releases iPhone 2.2 Firmware

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Apple just released the new iPhone 2.2 Firmware.
Some of the new features include:

  • Enhancements to Maps
    • Google Street View*
    • Public transit and walking directions
    • Display address of dropped pins
    • Share location via email
  • Decrease in call setup failures and dropped calls
  • Enhancements to Mail
    • Resolved isolated issues with scheduled fetching of email
    • Improved formatting of wide HTML email
  • Podcasts are now available for download in iTunes application (over Wi-Fi and cellular network)
  • Improved stability and performance of Safari
  • Improved sound quality of Visual Voicemail messages
  • Pressing Home button from any Home screen displays the first Home screen
  • Preference to turn on/off auto-correction in Keyboard Settings

To enable street view, you go to a area on the map where street view is available and drop a pin if you don’t have one currently up and click the small person in the red circle.
You can find out more about the update here – http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/

AT&T offers free WiFi access to iPhones at hotspots and Starbucks

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I got a SMS text and a email today telling me that AT&T is now offering free WiFi for iPhone customers.
If somehow my computer could use the WiFi I think that would be more valuable to me.  My iPhone has a 3G connection most of the places I go and that is pretty quick enough for me.  I’m not doing any internet intensive tasks on my iPhone that would really make a difference being on a WiFi network.
So what main benefits do we iPhone 3G customers get from this?  If you area has only Edge, then it might be cool, but I really could care less about a WiFi connection for my iPhone at a hotspot.

What do you think of the new MacBook’s and MacBook Pro’s?

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So now that the new MacBook’s and MacBook Pro’s have been out for a while.  What do you think of them?
I myself have setup a MacBook for a client and the design is really nice in my opinion.  The lack of firewire on the MacBook’s doesn’t seem to bother me since I don’t use a firewire camcorder.  I know for some people that might be a issue, but they can always upgrade to another video camera if they really want.
I do think that the prices could be slightly more competitive but Macs have always been slightly more expensive than there PC counterparts when you look at the tech specs.
What’s nice about the new books is that they use a faster front side bus and ram speed.  1066mhz DDR3 is faster than my Quad Core gaming PC.
Also some people complained about the glass screens being non matte, but I think they will offer matte screen protector add-ons shortly if they haven’t already.
So what do you think about the new MacBook’s and MacBook Pro’s?

iTunes 8, New Nanos, iPod Touches, and iPhone Software Update 2.1

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Apple had a Let’s Rock event this week and announced some new products and iTunes 8.
iTunes 8 mainly added a Genius feature which is a revamp of the mini store.  Whats interesting is it can create playlists on the fly by selecting a song and choosing Genius playlist.  It will pull songs from your library that go with that one particular song.  It’s a pretty cool feature for making mixes.

These are the new nanos and the colors they come in.  Very bright colors that can stop traffic in case you are listening to your iPod too loud and stumble into oncoming traffic.
They include a accelerometer like the iPhone and iPod Touch and have games based off it also.
It has a new shake to shuffle feature which is sure to make a few Nanos fly across the living room.

The new iPod Touch with 2.1.1 software.  I have held and tested one of these and it is really thin now.  It has a built in speaker and volume control buttons now.  Something that the first one really should of included.  The speaker isn’t as loud and clear as the iPhone 3G’s but still good enough to hear what’s going on in a general enviroment.
What is also interesting is they include a built in Nike+ sensor that works with a Nike+ shoe insert that can track your running workout.

The new iPhone 2.1 Software Update.  Update includes:

  • Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
  • Significantly better battery life for most users
  • Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
  • Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
  • Faster installation of 3rd party applications
  • Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
  • Improved performance in text messaging
  • Faster loading and searching of contacts
  • Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
  • Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
  • Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
  • Genius playlist creation

I’m still backing up my phone now and waiting for it to install.  After it is done, I’ll post a update to see if it fixed these issues.

Update:
After using the new iTunes 8.0 for about a week here is what I noticed.
The iPhone syncing and backup is all fixed, no more waiting for the iPhone to backup.
The new visualizer is pretty cool if you have a large screen to enjoy it on.
And last but not least, the new iTunes Genius feature is a great way to make mixes and seems to make the mixes pretty well.
Also BTW, the new iTunes 8.0 has the equalizer on by default.  Mine was set to rock on my MacBook Pro.  You can further adjust the equalizer by clicking Window on the and equalizer on the menu.

Triple Booting my MacBook Pro with Leopard, XP, and Ubuntu

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I tried to triple boot my mac a while back, but I realized later it wasn’t as easy as seemed since the mac uses a EFI loader instead of a BIOS and XP doesn’t really support multiple OS’s.
After trying different things and searching the net, I finally found a method that enabled me to triple boot my mac successfully.
Something to note when you reboot, you can always hold down alt/option and it will let you choose to boot to a CD or eject it if you need to switch.  Also if you install rEFIt, you will also be givin the choice to boot to the CD, but you won’t be able to eject and swap CDs once rEFIt loads.

Installing.

  • First I installed rEFIt a boot loader which enables the mac to boot to more volumes than just holding down alt/option.  It has a cool graphical menu selection screen where you can choose the OS you want to start.  It is free and can be downloaded.
  • Next I partitioned the Macs hard drive to add two more partitions.  I ran terminal commands to complete this:
    diskutil list
    diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 123.6G “Journaled HFS+” “Linux” 10G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Windows” 15G
    The list command will show the partition and total size of partition 2.  You want to split it up so they add up to this size.
  • Reboot and hold down alt/option when the boot sound comes and choose to boot to the Windows install CD.
  • After agreeing to the user agreement choose to install Windows on the 4th partition you created that is labeled FAT32.  When it asks you to format it, choose NTFS or FAT32 and quick if you don’t want to wait a long time to check the disk for errors.  (FAT32 does not support file sizes greater than 4GB)
  • After it copies files and asks you to restart, choose the Windows partition to boot in rEFIt and finish installing XP and do the same again after it saves all the final setttings so you can boot into XP and install the Bootcamp Mac drivers.
  • Reboot and hold down alt/option and press eject if you need to change CDs and ut the Ubuntu disk in and choose to boot to the Ubuntu install CD. (It will say Windows CD)
  • Choose English, Mac keyboard, and install and follow the usual install up until the partitioning selection.
  • At the partition choice, press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F2 to backup the MBR to a temp location.  At the terminal run: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/sda.mbr bs=512 count=1 . Then press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F7″ to exit back to the installation.
  • Choose Manual and the SDA3 choose EXT3 filesystem and format checkbox and mount point / then click ok then foward.  It will warn you about SWAP space, but ignore that click continue because with 2GB or more ram, you shouldn’t need a swap file for ram.
  • Enter your name and password and I just skipped the migrate doc and settings part.
  • At the READY TO INSTALL part, click ADVANCED and choose SDA3 to place the boot loader.  You can review the settings where at the bottom it should say the following partitions are going to be formatted and it should list sda partition #3 as ext3. Click install.
  • When it says the install is complete you need to restore the Windows MBR.  Press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F2.  At the terminal enter: sudo dd if=/tmp/sda.mbr of=/dev/sda .  Then press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F7″ to exit back to the installation and reboot.

Hopefully you should have a triple boot going now and a bootloader to choose which OS you want at boot time.

Windows information.
After installing bootcamp drivers and everything, I still had a device in device manager with a exclamation on it.  I went to intel.com and downloaded the inf chipset file for the 960 chipsets and it reinstalled the chipset drivers and it seemed to take care of that.

Ubuntu options. Some of these I got from – https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro
To show the temps in the top panel:

sudo apt-get install hddtemp

add this to /etc/rc.local :
modprobe coretemp
sensors -s

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensors-applet

Now you can right click the panel and add the sensor options.

Function Keys on Keyboard.

Pommed is a daemon to support extra keys on apple computers. These include the brightness, eject, volume and others. Releases of Pommed 1.8 or up fully support the MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards. It can be installed with this command:

sudo apt-get install pommed

You can check your pommed version number with this command:

pommed -v

The default behavior on Apple keyboards is to have the top row keys primarily function as media keys (brightness, volume, etc), and have the expected function keys (F1, F2, etc) accessible with using the fn keys.

To reverse this behavior, edit the pommed configuration file with this command:

sudo gedit /etc/pommed.confChange the value of fnmode to “2″, and save. At any time, you can change this value back to “1″ to return to the default behavior.

Touchpad Fixes.

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace :

Sections “InputDevice“

  • Identifiers “Synaptics Touchpad”
  • ..
  • ..

EndSection

With :

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
        Option          "LeftEdge"              "10"
        Option          "RightEdge"             "1200"
        Option          "TopEdge"               "10"
        Option          "BottomEdge"            "370"
        Option          "FingerLow"             "10"
        Option          "FingerHigh"            "20"
        Option          "MaxTapTime"            "180"
        Option          "MaxTapMove"            "220"
        Option          "SingleTapTimeout"      "100"
        Option          "MaxDoubleTapTime"      "180"
        Option          "LockedDrags"           "off"
        Option          "MinSpeed"              "1.10"
        Option          "MaxSpeed"              "1.30"
        Option          "AccelFactor"           "0.08"
        Option          "TapButton1"            "1"
        Option          "TapButton2"            "3"
        Option          "TapButton3"            "2"
        Option          "RTCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "RBCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "LTCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "LBCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "VertScrollDelta"       "20"
        Option          "HorizScrollDelta"      "50"
        Option          "HorizEdgeScroll"       "0"
        Option          "VertEdgeScroll"        "0"
        Option          "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
        Option          "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "on"
EndSection

Edit the Font to match OSX more.

By default, Ubuntu uses a style of font rendering different than that used on Mac OS X. You may prefer fonts similar to those on Mac OS X, and you can have these on Ubuntu by doing the following:

1. Open the Appearance preference panel (System-Preferences-Appearance)

2. Click Fonts, and click on Details…, on Hinting select the “Slight” option.

Wireless Network Card:

Installed WICD to control network.

Bluetooth Mouse or Keyboard:

If having issues with connecting using the icon in panel.
Open terminal and type:
sudo hidd –search
It should scan for the mouse of keyboard then you can see the mac address of the device.  Next type:
sudo hidd –connect aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
Where aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff is the mac address of the mouse or keyboard.
The mouse or keyboard should now be connected.  On the next reboot it will probably ask if you want to pair and connect on future reboots.

Printing to a Airport or Brother wireless printer.

Printing to a Apple Airport device is simple.
You just click add printer and choose AppSocket and put the IP of the Airport which is default 10.0.0.1 and port 9100 is default.  Choose the printer driver and it should work.

For my Brother Wireless MFC-665cw I went into Synaptics package manager and searched for MFC-665cw and it found two packages with drivers.  Installed those and then added the printer via socket like the Apple Airport.  Choose the correct driver and it should work also.

As I find more stuff I add, I will post it here as reference.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below.

iPhone 3G

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So I waited on line on the release day from 8am till 2pm and picked up a white 16GB 3G iPhone.
It was quite interesting, I got handed a T-Shirt from a guy who eventually almost fought mall security cause he was soliciting supposedly.  They also handed out free SmartWater bottles of water and as we got closer to the store in the mall, a starbuks person was handing out little small cups of lemon ice slushy drinks.

I got to the store, and was interviewed by a local paper. Newsday.com but handed it off to a friend I met on line instead who made a much better interview.  I was lol the whole time.  He called the iPhone sexy when the reporter asked him why he liked it so much. haha
I was about the 190th person to get into the store for the new iPhone at my local Apple store.
When I finally got in the store and swapped my old iPhone number to the new one and paid, I had to then either go home to try to activate it with iTunes, or try it in the store.  I figured try it in the store and after trying 5 times and going to a lucky MacBook Pro, I was able to activate it and was out of the store.
So far I really like how the 3G does not interfere with some speakers and how the GPS is now using satellites.
When they iron out the 2.0 bugs, hopefully it will be more stable.  I have had a lot of apps crash and have had to remove one or two and re-sync to get some to work.
Overall I’m happy even though it’s about $10 dollars more a month now.  Well worth it for the faster 3G service in my area.

Apple iPhone 3G

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At WWDC 08 Steve Jobs annouced the new iPhone 3G.
What sells me on it, is the GPS functionality.
Much like CarPC apps, you can make location based internet apps that will be really cool.
The iPhone 3G will go on sale in 70 countries by 2009.
It will be released in the U.S. and a few other countries on July 11th 2008 and will go for $199 for a 8GB version and $299 for a 16GB version.
No word on a 32GB version, but I assume that will be released later on with a price drop possibly.
iPhone 3G Twice as fast. Half the price

Griffin SmartShare Headphone Splitter + Headphone Adapter for iPhone

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I just picked up this Griffin device for using the iPhone with regular headphones since the headphone jack on the iPhone is recessed slightly.  It also comes with a dual output splitter with independant volume controls so you can share the audio with a friend.
Both adapters can fit into the iPhone fine, so you get two devices for the price of one basically.
I tested it with my Sennheiser HD-280 headphones and the iPhone sounds amazing.
I picked mine up from the Griffin online store for $14.99 with free shipping.  They also carry these in the Apple store I think.