Tips and Tricks

If you are in the market for a desktop or NAS/Server hard drive, you’ve no doubt been checking out some of the 2TB drives pictured above.  HotHardware just reviewed most of the majors in the market from Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung.  

There are 10 pages of hard drive testing glory, but like a lot of people, we’re most interested in the results:

Ultimately, our picks for each class of drive are as follows. For general-purpose drives, you’d think it would be a no-brainer and we’d pick the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB($139) for its relative high performance and great value. The problem is, it has a much lower load/unload rating of 50,000 cycles, versus 300,000 cycles for the other general-purpose drives–the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB uses the older Contact Start-Stop (CSS) technology to park its heads, while the other drives use the more updated and more reliable Ramp Loading technology. Once we took the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB out of the running, it was a very close call between the Samsung EcoGreen F3 2TB($179) and WD Caviar Green 2TB ($139.99), but we ultimately chose the Samsung EcoGreen F3 2TB because of its speedier overall performance. For the performance drives it was a much tougher call; but with almost identical overall performance, the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB ($275) edged out the WD Caviar Black 2TB ($279), due to the Barracuda XT’s lower price tag and lower power consumption (see the specs tables on page three of this roundup). For the enterprise-class drives, it’s a runaway, with the WD RE4 2TB ($285) as the undisputed performance leader that also has high reliability ratings.

They also give the Western Digital AV-GP($173) high marks in media centers for being quiet and able to withstand high temperatures.

FWIW, I bought two WD Caviar Green w/64MB cache ($139) for my home NAS and they’ve been perfect so far.  via Engadget

iFixit’s mid 2010 MacBook Pro teardown reveals a few interesting tidbits:

• Apple has stopped using five-point Torx screws found on other MBP 15″ Unibodies in favor of Tri-Wing screws
• The battery is now rated at 77.5 Wh. That’s just a tad bit more than the 73 Wh battery found in last year’s 15″ model, but not enough to explain the 1-2 hour battery life improvement Apple is claiming for this machine.
• Sound improvement: Apple changed the design of the speaker assembly slightly, moving from a single plastic enclosure to separate plastic enclosures for the speaker & subwoofer that are connected by the speaker leads.
• The Wi-Fi/Bluetooth board location has changed to more closely resemble the MacBooks’.  Because of the metal enclosure of the MBP, Apple added an antenna on the opening of the Superdrive!
• New Intel BD82HM55 S LGZS Platform Controller Hub. – assumed chip is switch between the Intel and NVIDIA graphics.

Create Digital Music (via MacRumors) points out that the iPad camera connection kit might be able to allow USB-audio out, which would support some professional audio equipment.  Nice, if true.

More importantly to us, however, is whether the USB camera kit can power a Mifi over USB.  Mifis normally have about 4-6 hours of battery life and the iPad has 10 (and often more).  We’d love to be able to power our Mifis via the iPad for a few extra hours.  

(Update: it looks like the iPad will do 100mA out Which could operate the Mifi but not charge it.)

Figure if the iPad can add another four hours to the Mifi while only sapping 2 hours of iPad juice, we’re mobile for 8 hours total.  A full work day.  What say you, Camera connection kit? Can we have USB power?

Apple today continues with the updates.  Everyone (Leopard+Snow Leopard) got Security Update 2010-003 while Mac Server administrators get numerous improvements to their Admin Tools.  

Meanwhile, 27-inch iMac owners got a Firmware update that resolves CPU Audio handling and power-on backlight issues.  Hit Software Update for the details.

I got a good question today via Twitter that I have some expertise in: 

What would you consider the “best” monitor for Macs…for a [good] price?

I’ve been buying monitors for small to mid-size companies for awhile and have one each of a Sharp, Dell, Samsung, Apple and HP monitor in my house so I feel like I have a bit of experience in the area.

Disclaimer: If you are a pro/artist, you are going to want something else.  This recommendation isn’t for you

The Apple Youth movement is in full effect according to a new post by the Loop.  Apple has set up three new programs for kids: For Families (workshops show kids how to improve their skills using all of the iLife and iWork applications); For Teachers and Schools (Field Trips from school to work on projects) and For Kids (

If you are designing apps for the iPad or just want to find out what goes into the design of iPad apps, check out Matt Legend Gemmell’s fascinating guide/tutorial.  

Apple likes to schedule its events in secret.  The last few WWDCs were marked in Mosone’s corporate calendars as generic “Corporate Events”.  The same with Apple’s events at the adjacent Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  Luckily, not too many huge conventions are scheduled in secret, so it makes finding Apple’s events a little easier.

We, like many other sites, saw the saw the late June, early July corporate event as being a likely time place for WWDC.  But, with a recent change to the calendar (and the removal of Sun’s JavaOne conference – wow!) it looks like WWDC might have changed dates…or even *gasp* changed venues.

Old Moscone Schedule circa January

The new calendar shows a shorter Corporate Event scheduled for June 23-24 but it is only labelled a “Meeting” as opposed to a “Convention”.  That is during the time the Sun JavaOne conference was originally scheduled.  The time period originally thought to be the Apple Corporate event (WWDC) now no longer exists in the calendar.

No other generic corporate events are scheduled for the forseeable future so we have a few guesses to throw out in the order of probability (in our opinion obviously):

• Apple got Moscone to hide the corporate event even further by not even listing it
• WWDC dates are in flux and haven’t been listed at Moscone yet. 
• WWDC won’t be held at Moscone this year.  Apple is having WWDC at another venue
• WWDC?  Apple doesn’t need a WWDC when it has Apple Stores!.

Thanks Moscone Tipster!

Rob Griffiths, the founder of our favorite Mac tips website, MacOShints.com is leaving  to join a company called Many Tricks.  Before he leaves, he drops his top ten favorite tips of all time, which we’ve pasted below.  Good luck to Rob and here’s to hoping Macworld can find a worthy successor. 

1. Run a screensaver as your desktop background: This one is still my all-time-favorite hint for showing off the power of OS X. It lets you run a screensaver as your desktop
   

Tonight, we’ve been piecing together what appears to be an iPad video recording and still camera application.  For a device that has no camera?

We have found video recording indicators, ‘take video’ buttons, take still photo buttons, video editing toggles, video playback icons, etc.  The list goes on and on.  Also, in these files are little new tidbits such as a rotate image button and an icon for importing images.

Additionally if this camera is real it was auto-focus according to other images within the iPad SDK. Another feature that will cause some excitement is the addition of cropping photos. There are two images indicating photo cropping.

We have compiled a bunch of new iPad tidbits with screenshots for your viewing pleasure below:

Lots of settings pop up if you know where to look:

YouTube Videos can play in HTML5 (this looks really good btw, not sure if a dedicated Youtube App is necessary):

Optional Battery Percentage Indicator: 

File Sharing (will this find its way to iPhone OS 4?):

Lock screen media controls:

Photo frame access from lock screen:

Playing Quicktime audio in Safari: 

Built-in Google Suggestions:

Handwriting for Chinese character input:

Square Home Screen Web Clip icons:

Did we miss anything?

Thank You @sonny788 for your help. 

Those lovely people at Panic software have put together a utility to batch shrink vector-based PDF files, such as those produced by Illustrator, on the fly.  They use Apple’s own Preview.app engine to pull all of the extra “crud” out of files that Adobe builds into PDFs made with their software:

What was all this extra crud? Will started digging into the files and brother, you won