iPod and OS X firewire problems

Macintouch iPod (Part 27)

Slow Transfer Speeds

William Price
Edward Walters wrote "Has anyone experienced slow transfer speeds with a 40 GB 3G iPod while using an external Firewire drive?"

Definitely. This is almost certainly the same bug as this: "Syncing iPod over Firewire with iSight can cause your Mac to "freeze"".

It's still not fixed yet in 10.3.5. Unfortunately, this KB article leaves one with the impression that the problem is specific to the iSight when in fact the problem appears entirely generic. Having anything at all hooked up to Firewire at the same time as an iPod often results in extremely slow transfer speeds to the iPod. I've experienced this with scanners, external drives, and especially the iSight. I've only seen kernel panics and system freezes with the iSight, but the basic problem occurs with almost anything.

Also, the problem occurs with all incarnations of the iPod, and is not related to iSight firmware updates. I can only assume it's a generic Firewire driver bug.

Greg Weston
When I bought my G5 earlier this year, I ended up using a pair of drives to shuffle content around between that, my iBook and the Sawtooth that was being sold off. I noticed that if I had the drives chained to each other, transfers between them were blazingly fast, but if I had them both plugged directly into the G5 it was so slow that it was actually faster to copy from one of them to the internal SATA drive and then copy again to the other external.

Rob Worman
Until recently I had an extremely similar problem. Here was my setup:

-Stock G4/500 Cube
-bargain Firewire hub (powered...)
-160 GB drive in a bargain Firewire enclosure (also powered...)
-15GB 3G iPod

If I connected the iPod (or an iPod Mini) to this setup and tried to transfer data between it and the Firewire harddrive, the transfer would go along fast enough for about 30 MB, and then slow to a glacial pace that was almost too slow to measure. Searching online forums pointed to a lack of sufficient power on the Firewire bus, so the first component I tried replacing was the hub. No difference.

So I returned the hub and exchanged it for a new (Macally-branded) Firewire enclosure for that 160GB drive, and that made all the difference in the world! The problem is definitely gone.

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Sigh. Yet another OS X firewire problem. Sounds like hubs don't work, but chains might. I do get the feeling Firewire may be on teh way out.

DVD Backup for OS X

DVD Capture

Some of our kid's DVDs are getting pretty beat up. I need to make new ones. Yeah, that's still legal -- despite the best efforts of our corrupt legislators.

What I should have bought for my firewire drive

LaCie - FireWire Hard Drives - Design by F.A. Porsche

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For what I paid in CompUSA for a cheap hard drive, plus the enclosure cost on OWC, I could have bought this drive from LaCie. Sigh.

Update: I've confrimed that the 160GB LaCie Porsche works beautifully with my iBook running 10.3.5. Sleep, awake, mount, dismount, no problem. I'm buying one.

MacDevCenter.com: The Missing Digital Photography Hacks - Interpreting camera histograms

MacDevCenter.com: The Missing Digital Photography Hacks

A good exposure will typically display information across the entire width of the graph. Shadow information is on the left side, highlights are on the right, and midtones are, well, in the middle. The particular shape of the graph depends on how the light is distributed throughout the picture.

What you want to be leery of is when the graph information bunches up on one side or another. A graph heavy to the left usually indicates underexposure with the image appearing dark (move exposure compensation to 1). If everything is scooted over to the right, that often indicates overexposure with blown highlights and washed out shadows and midtones (move exposure compensation to -1).

As you become experienced working with the histogram, you'll begin to correlate spikes in the graph with various intense tones in the actual picture. And when you open your shots in your favorite image editor, such as Photoshop Elements, you can adjust the photo's tones using the histogram display in the Levels dialog box (Enhance > Adjust Brightness/Contrast > Levels). Think of it as another way to look at your pictures.

Life in the dark ages -- of 1900 America

Marginal Revolution: Which countries face a medical cost crunch?

... the level in China would be comparable to that of the U.S. in about 1900. At that time the average American male suffered from six chronic medical conditions, and it was very likely that at least one of those six was debilitating, meaning the person could not work.

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Wealthy enough not to die, but lacking the technology to avoid exterme suffering. The average american back then was relatively young as well ...

An amazing quote. I wonder if it's true.

Microsoft Outlook Categories: Tips and References

Microsoft Outlook Categories

Rarely has a potentially useful feature been so incompetently implemented for so many years. Outlook categories belong in the Microsoft Hall of Shame -- dwarfed, of course, by Word Style Sheets.

Password generator: site specific passwords

Password generator

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This is bloody brilliant. Talk about a modest guy -- Nic doesn't put much on this plain page -- except a JavaScript tool that

will concatenate two fields and MD5 them. The idea is that you choose one master password to secure all your others, and then generate passwords for each site, server, router, &c. by putting a completely obvious name for that resource in the "Site name" field.

It doesn't work with IE, but IE's unsafe on the public net anyways. I love his comment on IE "... too long for Internet Explorer which I believe to have been written by trained otters" A harsh slur on otters though.