Impressive G5 iMac comparative review with description of a poor fan design

ScienceMan.com - iMac G5 Noise Page

iPhoto 4: the bizarre 4.21 GB 'not enough room' bug

This is one of the most annoying bugs I run into. I'll try to export photos from iPhoto 4, and I get an error messages saying there's not enough space left -- when there's plenty of space left.

This error message arises from many bugs, but the most annoying is the 4.21 GB boundary bug. When that's the amount of drive space left, iPhoto croaks on export. Some sort of 'divide-by-zero' bug.

If I duplicate a large folder to get my free space below 4GB the error goes away and I can export.

Unfortunately iPhoto 5 is unuseable on a G3 machine and has a reputation for very nasty bugs.

When Apple support fails: the customer relations number

iMac G5 (Part 11) notes:

So thanks very much to the folks at the Apple Customer Relations department and to the guys at the Apple Store in Houston. I can't forget the folks at MacInTouch for providing this forum for discussing the problem and possible solutions. And the big thanks go to Stephen Hart for forcing me to call the Customer Relations phone line (800-767-2775). And final thanks go to the companies which make external FireWire hard drives so that people like me can make data backups.

If you're having problems with Apple's service, this is a place to go.

Granite Digital for firewire enclosures

MacInTouch Home Page:

I like the sound of this advice:

Louie Berry:

My suggestion to him would be take a hard look at Granite Digital's large product list of FireWire enclosures, bridge boards, cables, and complete single units and RAID arrays. Throughout the last several years of reported FW problems, I've never had one instance of trouble from Granite stuff. They write their own firmware for the chipsets and I don't believe an update has been required since the release of 10.2. I use Granite enclosures on all manner of Macs from legacy machines to the latest G5s and move them from machine to machine; OS 9 to Tiger.

For years Granite was the leader in top quality SCSI cables, terminators, RAID, etc. and switched their main thrust to FireWire about five years ago. I have no connection with them except as a satisfied customer for about 10 years.

Fix for OS/X problem: Keychain Access asks for keychain "login" after changing login password

Mac OS X 10.4: Keychain Access asks for keychain "login" after changing login password

Don't change your password on Tiger installations. If you do, here's the fix. (It's a bug.)

iBook and PowerBook battery innards

The Cult of Mac Blog

It's complete surprise to me that the iBook's battery pack is filled with ordinary-looking rechargeable batteries. Apparently this is also the case with the PowerBook....

Update: AppleFritter has a forum thread with some handy hints for do-it-yourself repairs of iBook and PowerBook batteries.

AppleFritter is down right now, but I'll f/u with more detail. I've an old battery I can experiment on.

Image Sharpness Problems under iPhoto 5.x

iPhoto (Part 13, Macintouch)

Tom H. Koornwinder

Dave Middleton wrote on June 1 about iPhoto under Tiger: "When editing only the sharpen bar to sharpen a photo, while changing nothing else, the photo sharpens fine. Then while saving, the photo reverts to the previous more fuzzy state, and the sharpened edit cannot be saved at all."

I observed the same phenomenon (under system 10.3), but then I found an Apple help file "iPhoto: Sharpness adjustment may not be apparent when viewing at less than 100 percent", where this is explained. In reality the sharpness changes were saved, but since the image has been re-aliased to fit your screen, the image's true sharpness may not be apparent. To evaluate whether an image is sharp or needs sharpening, always view the photo at 100 percent/full size.