Category: Apple

Capacity planning for digitizing CDs

I keep forgetting to document the set of assumptions I’m using to size the hard disk requirements for my home music server. This might be helpful to someone, so here goes:

On average, Apple’s lossless codec (ALAC) compresses files to about 58% of their uncompressed size. This means that to do capacity planning for moving CDs to digital storage as ALACs, you might think about it this way: a CD holds about 700 MB for 80 minutes of music; most CDs come in closer to an hour; and ALAC files are 58% of the full size representation on the CD. So the formula would be:

number of CDs × (700 × (60÷80) × 0.58) =
number of CDs × 304.5 MB =
number of CDs × 0.297 GB

So my library will weigh in at 929 × 0.297 GB = 275 GB. Which, honestly, isn’t as big as I thought it was—but is a lot bigger than you can fit on the existing Mac Mini. Or, for that matter, most external drives—the biggest I can find on Outpost is 300 GB, but most drives seem to be weighing in at around 250 these days. Maybe it’s time to look at RAID based solutions. You know, for future growth.

BTW: Why lossless? Because I’m a music bigot and like to hear all the frequencies in my music, not just the ones that lossy algorithms preserve. (No, I haven’t been able to figure out how to reconcile this with purchasing 128-bit-encoded AACs from the iTunes store.) Or, maybe, putting a better spin on it, I want to preserve the entirety of my investment in the physical CDs. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Managing iTunes with limited disk space

MacOSXHints: An AppleScript to manage two music folders. The poster was running out of room on his PowerBook hard drive (sound familiar?) and created two music libraries—one on a shared disk on his home network, and a smaller one on his PowerBook. An interesting alternative to the other solutions I’ve identified to this problem, which include having a dedicated machine running iTunes and sharing all its files, or using a VNC-like product to remotely connect to a music server machine.

Mac Mini update: hard drive

Thanks to Mac Mini Hacking, I can pretty much say with confidence that:

  1. It is possible to replace the hard drive on the Mac Mini yourself, provided you have a good thin putty knife, screwdriver, and nerves of steel (see “It takes a very steady hand” for the link to the video).
  2. As the hard drive used in the Mini is a 2.5″ laptop drive, there may not be much point. The biggest replacement drive available (as far as I know) is 100 GB. For reference, my laptop hard drive currently has 35 GB of digital music on it, some ripped and some downloaded from the iTunes store. I have probably over 600 more CDs to rip, but there’s simply no room on my hard drive. And let’s not even talk about video at that size—you could only get 90 minutes of HD content on there.

So it looks like if you’re serious about doing home theater with your Mac Mini, you’ll either have to wait until laptop hard drives come in bigger sizes, or live with a stack of outboard drives attached to your Mini.

SmartDeck: Nice, but does it squeak?

Lockergnome: MWSF – Best of Show – Griffin’s SmartDeck (Hardware). While I don’t know if an iPod cassette adapter is what I’d normally consider as a candidate for “best in show” at MacWorld, this one is making me think twice. By communicating the state of the cassette deck (paused, fast forward, etc.) back to the iPod, you can use the cassette controls instead of the iPod controls. Which is brilliant, because it basically does an end-around all the expensive car head unit integration products to allow you to do the same thing—use the buttons on your steering wheel (or the console) to control your iPod’s playback rather than taking your eyes off the road to fast forward.

The one advantage a head unit integration package has, of course, is that it uses a direct line into the stereo and doesn’t have the mechanical aspects of a cassette adapter, meaning no squeak. The adapter in my car has developed a grinding squeak that drives my passengers crazy. Mine isn’t the only adapter with the problem either.

Mac home theatre PC

When I was working at Microsoft, I had Windows envy for something like the first time in my life when I looked at what my coworkers were doing with Media Center PCs that they built themselves. That was a cool use of hardware. To fill that envious void, a couple veteran Mac bloggers have stepped up to start a Mac Home Theatre PC blog. The impetus behind the blog was the launch of the Mac Mini, which is certainly the most living-room ready Mac to date, but the blog is tackling other issues as well.

One hack that I’m looking forward to trying is the one that uses software included with Apple’s FireWire SDK to record HD programs off a Motorola DCT 6200 HD cable receiver. Of course, my 3 free GB of hard disk space would be exhausted by about 2 and a half minutes of HD programming, so I might have to wait for a while to really try out this hack. Still pretty cool, though.

On the Mac Mini: living room trojan horse

First impressions on the Mac Mini—brilliant. As others (including Glenn Fleishman) have noted, it’s essentially a slimmed down Cube, unapologetically at the bottom of the feature scale for a modern Mac but also at the rock bottom of the price scale.

Of course, the “bottom of the feature scale” for a modern Mac isn’t such a bad place to be. With a 1.25 or 1.42 GHz G4 it can run pretty much anything you can throw at it.

Limitations? Memory and disk space. The former may not be such a bad thing; the latter…

For PC switchers or someone looking to use this machine as a primary PC, I would definitely recommend upgrading the RAM to 512 MB. But for a lot of us, including me, the 256 that the base machine comes with would be just fine—to run iTunes and iPhoto as a headless appliance hooked into my network and my audiovisual system. And with that 6.5″ square footprint, it’s small enough to truly live in the living room.

What limits that scenario is hard disk space. If the disk maxes out at 80GB—and can’t be replaced—it’s too small to hold my music. And it looks like it does—check out the images on the Design page and the TidBITS note on the Mini. But, as Glenn points out, you can always plug in outboard storage.

Conclusion: Apple may have a winner here—not by addressing the spec heads but by paying attention to the Wife Acceptance Factor in the design of the product.

New Apple enterprise products

Apple released a bunch of new enterprise-class products today, including single 2.0 GHz and dual 2.3GHz XServes, and Xsan, a new 64-bit storage area network file system which gives up to 64 clients simultaneous read-write access to a Fibre Channel storage network (with volumes up to 16 TB in size) operating at speeds up to 400 Mbps. (All at a low low cost of $999 per node.) Apple also slashed prices on Cinema Displays; the 20-inch display, which used to weigh in at $1299, is now $999. (A bargain!)

Thanks to MacOSXRumors, whose staff must refresh the Apple Store page every Monday morning to catch these early warning signs, for the heads up.

Mac OS X Encrypted Mail: howto, pitfalls

A year or more ago, I quietly started digitally signing most of my outgoing email messages. This trick, made possible by the S/MIME support in Mac OS X’s email client, is about providing authentication—proof that the message came from me and not from someone spoofing my return address, like an email virus or spammer. For the most part the digital signature is handled painlessly by receiving email clients; some will display a “digitally signed” graphic, but that’s about it.

If you want to get your own digital signature enabled in Mac OS X, this tutorial at O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter is the best I’ve found for going through the process, including signing up for your own free digital certificate at Thawte.

I should mention a few issues, however:

  1. Recent versions of Outlook enforce some stringent rules about attachments and digital signatures; specifically, if IE doesn’t know about the agency that issued my certificate, Outlook won’t allow you to open attachments in signed mails from me. Which to me seems silly, as it will allow you to open attachments in unsigned mails from me. But oh well.
  2. Other users with unspecified email clients have had problems with their clients treating the digital signature (which is attached to the email like a file) as a graphic file of some sort.
  3. Thawte certificates are only good for one year, and Mac OS X doesn’t warn about expiring certificates. I stopped sending signed emails and didn’t notice for about a week, then had to figure out how to get an updated certificate. It was a pain. Long story short—remember the password for your login on Thawte’s site.

We assimilate another one

Shades of Gray: Back to Mac. My fellow Sloanblogger is seeing the light. Straz, here are my quick thoughts about life with a Mac:

  • Make sure you check out VersionTracker for software downloads—including Keyword Assistant and other invaluable iPhoto plugins; Mac OS X Hints for tips and tricks for getting more out of your machine; and the MacFixit Forums for troubleshooting.
  • MarsEdit is my blog posting tool of choice—it copes neatly with my Manila blog as well as the Movable Type-based BlogCritics.
  • The biggest problems I have with my machine tend to be managing hard disk space—probably because I have over half my 60 GB disk filled with digital music.

Have fun, Straz, and welcome to the other side!

More Mac OS X command line goodness

MacOSXHints: Set system and network prefs from the Terminal. There have always been command line tools for setting prefs in Mac OS X Server; this article shows you how to get access to the same tools by installing the free Apple Remote Desktop client, and walks you through a few sample uses.

This always drove me nuts on Windows XP. If you’re going to have a command line in a system at all, it would be nice if you could do some useful things with it—especially on remote machines.

Adventures in design

While I was once an avid amateur typographer (I would never dare call myself a graphic artist), these days I touch my design program about once a year. Yes, it’s holiday card time again…

This card started with a photo—my snow photo—and built outward from there. That wasn’t the problem; it was the type. Specifically, Mac OS X’s built in Font Book. Which would be an industrial strength font management tool, were it not for its propensity to drop my 1GHz PowerBook G4 to its knees when adding (or enabling, or disabling) more than one font at a time. You know this Apple training web page where it says, “or drag an entire folder full of fonts into Font Book to add them”? It is to laugh. Har-de-har-har. Only if you want to see the spinning beachball of death for up to five minutes at a time.

On the plus side, once I had my fonts in Font Book, it was a snap to preview them until I found the right script font for the cover, drop caps, and tag line of my card. on the minus side, I spent most of my four-hour waiting room sojourn at the Volkswagen dealership getting my font collection straightened out.

Then I found a printer. Since I didn’t want to repeat last year’s card printing disaster (Kinkos color copies—cost more than my universal remote), I started calling printing companies. And amazingly found one that was not only reasonably priced, but allowed me to print the file directly to them over the Internet. Very cool, and it turned out great.