1/50 sec at F4, ISO 400 at 100mm

I’ve been toying with the idea of upgrading my iMac ever since I started to use Aperture. The spec of the original machine was always going to struggle: I maxed out the memory at 4Gb earlier in the year [it was a 2008 vintage], but it went off a cliff performance-wise. Aperture crashed a few times on the original import of my image library, and although I’m pretty sure that I got all of the wrinkles out, it was an indication of some frustrating performance issues ahead.

I gave the iMac I7 a long hard look, but didn’t really fancy having a 27″ monitor sitting on the dining table. I’d some concerns [subsequently allayed by a friend who uses one for work] about them running hot, but the upgradeability was also a potential issue. I decided [after some extended domestic discussions, it has to be said!] to move on a Mac Pro. To have comparable memory speed to the iMac, you are in pretty heady CPU territory – the six core Westmere.

In order to have at least some control over runaway costs, I decided to go for the base level of storage [I’ll look at an SSD some time next year, when the dust – of the scorched credit card – has settled], and 6 Gb of RAM. But I thought I might as well go for the 5870 GPU, as the upgrading the 5750 after the fact would be pretty expensive.

The other hard choice to be made was with the monitor. Again I didn’t fancy Apple’s 27″ beast [or the cost of it], so started looking at 3rd party kit. After a fair amount of research I took the plunge for a Dell SP2309W as I saw some pretty decent reviews for it. It’s a little bit industrial in terms of design and – rather quaintly – has that squidgy LCD that you tend not to experience anywhere outside of work these days.

The integrated camera works well enough, but I’ve hit a brick wall with trying to get the microphone to work. No great loss: I’m a very occasional Skype user, and a USB mike would be no more than a few quid if I were sufficiently motivated. Bottom line, the screen is great, and that was what it was all about for me.

So am I pleased, overall? Absolutely. Aperture is now as fast as I’d hoped for. It’s not without the odd little stutter – like trying to scroll the Faces’ list as soon as the screen loads – but you have to seek out problems, rather than be faced with them everywhere. Backing up a DVD for Apple TV was an interesting experience: 20 minutes, rather than the guts of two hours, and that was with some Aperture messing in the background as well.

1/125th sec at F9, 100mm at ISO 100

My new iPad arrived on Friday. I went for the baseline spec, partly on price, but principally because I intend using it at home [no 3G], and reckon that I’ll rotate content off it regularly enough, especially video, not to feel constrained by the capacity.

I wonder how many people up and down the UK sparked up the Times application this morning and, like me, were annoyed to find that it doesn’t include the The Sunday Times. Having had a couple of days to play with the thing, my general impression of the software is that it’s overpriced. The Times app is quite nice, but makes up for any deficiencies by virtue of having fantastic content. Its pricing policy is another matter altogether. I’m hoping that there will be some sort of in-app purchase to pick up the Sunday Times. I’m not particularly interested in reading a paper every day – which is what the £9.99 will transform into, a monthly subscription.

I’ve written before about the novelty tax that I felt consumers are being asked to pay for eBooks, and the fact that it irks me to be expected to pay more than the commonly available price [i.e., Amazon or supermarkets] just to have the dubious honour of reading an electronic copy of a book.

The iPad takes this one step further: we have a direct price comparison to draw on with an existing market, for iPhone apps. So we have a screen resolution penalty to pay on top of everything else?

Hopefully the prices will calm down in a couple of months….

This is a case of a little knowledge getting me into trouble and then back out. If you have stumbled on this article it might possibly save you some time, or at least provide answers to questions that I struggled to find. Also, I don’t claim what I’ve done here to be elegant or even finished [I’m certainly not an Apple developer, in fact I haven’t written any code beyond the odd script for about 10 years and the world is undoubtedly a safer place :)]. But it does work. On with the story…

First the photography context for my buying the NAS unit: I recently purchased a Buffalo 2 Tb Linkstation Pro LS-WTGL/R1 because my manual, multi-hop back-up process was getting swamped. I was keeping two copies across the camera card, my mac, an external hard drive, and then finally DVD. If you bake editing and trimming of duff pictures into this, it rapidly turns into a mess. This is part of my motivation for getting into Lightroom for streamlining my workflow.

So the process was buckling under the load: for instance, I still haven’t sorted out my photos from Cuba. Of a more immediate concern is the fact that my external drive, a 1/4 Gig Maxtor OneTouch, has started to make a strange noise. It must be about 5 years old so it doesn’t owe me anything.

So last week I took the plunge and went through the Domestic Investment Governance process, and got blessing for the LinkStation, which I chose on the basis of a positive review in the Register [not the same model but near enough].

Out of the box I configured it as RAID 1 as the first step, and copied 50 gig of pictures over successfully on the first evening, which all worked fine with the default share configuration.

However, the night before last, I started getting some really odd errors errors when I was trying to do a similar sized copy: specifically, the finder was reporting an error code -36, which equates to the rather uninformative, and apparently quite common, catchall ‘I/O error’.

At this point I made the mother of all assumptions. When you configure your Mac for Windows file sharing as a server, you are sending incantations to Apple’s Samba implementation. Samba is something that I have used a lot, and administered briefly, at work. Anyway, because the Mac works out of the box as a server, I assumed that it would be fine being a client. It isn’t, at least with the Samba implementation under the hood of the LinkStation box.

The simple answer is, of course, to press the ‘Apple’ button when you configure your share, which is turning on Apple’s own file sharing protocol, AFP. You then need to change the reference in the server connection configuration [in the Finder] from SMB:// to AFP://.

Simple of course, but undocumented. I get the feeling that the documentation is very much aimed at Windows users, where you don’t need to tinker as much.

On a related theme, the Mac software appears to be… dissapointing, in the non-functional sense of the word. The back-up scheduling software [Memeo] hung when I tried to configure it. I tried installing it twice, and have given up on it. No disrepect intended to whoever develops the software, I’m sure I was doing something wrong. To be honest I didn’t really persevere, as I intend to use the RAID 1 storage as a ‘top copy’, with occasional manual backup to DVD.

What was more irksome was the Mac specific power management capability, when you set the power switch to ‘auto’. The manual says that you ‘…must have the Nas Navigator software installed on your PC for this feature to work”.

And sure enough, the Mac version doesn’t wake up the unit.

Because this is sending a ‘wake on LAN’ instruction I did a bit of googling to see if there were any little utilities that you could point at a given network device to tickle it into wakefulness. I didn’t find any.

What I did find was a piece of open source code which works perfectly. Usual caveats apply: if you are not comfortable putting this code on your machine, don’t. Anyway, it compiles an absolute treat. Just download the full install [not the diff] and then:

• open the tar file in the finder to expand;
• open a terminal window and change into the directory; [all of the following are commands, comments in brackets]
• ./configure
• make
• sudo make install [you will be asked for the admin password]

This will then put the resulting executable ‘wol’ into /usr/local/bin. Next you need to grab the MAC address of your LinkStation. Again in your terminal window, type

• arp -a

which will give you a list of results, including a line indicating the name of the NAS box which is set during the initial configuration, and the MAC address, which is the list of colon separated Hex characters.

The Linkstation is listening on port 9 [one of the standard UDP ports apparently], so firing a command like:

• /usr/local/bin/wol -p 9 0:1d:63:19:b7:32

will wake up the  box. One instance should do it, but I’ve turned this into a little AppleScript which calls the command 3 times:

repeat 3 times

do shell script “/usr/local/bin/wol -p 9 0:1d:63:19:b7:32”

delay 1

end repeat

which I have saved on my desktop. After executing the command, it takes about a minute or so for the LinkStation to pull itself back onto the network. The next part I haven’t had a chance to play with fully, as I only got this working pretty late last night.

Articles I’ve found online suggest that the disk will go back to sleep after 5 minutes of non-use. It would be simple to move the entire loop in the script above to a shell script, add a 4 minute delay, and then run it in the background by using:

do shell script "command &> file_path &"

which is explained fully here. However, if it’s not easy to stop the process you might as well not use the ‘auto’ power-save, so this is a pretty inelegant mechanism.

It’s a shame that it doesn’t seem to be possible to configure the idle time on the LinkStation.

I’ll come back to this when I have a bit more time…