Problems with Apple Beats Powerbeats3 Wireless Headphones, sending for service

I seem to be hard to be hard things, because they don't last. I used to use Bose overear headphones for my dog walks every morning, but after a year or so they stopped working with a microphone even with a change of cable.For Christmas last year I was given a pear of Apple Beats Powerbeats3 Wireless headphones. I didn't want the Apple Airpods, because I don't trust that they won't individually fall our or I will immediately lose one. The Beats seem like a much better idea because of the cord in between them and that they wrap around your ears.Overall I have been mostly happy with them. The battery life is very good, the sounds is good, and after trying out all the earpieces I found ones that mostly stay in my ears, though I am constantly pushing them on more.For me the major problem is the connection to my iPhone 6. I take my dogs for walks every morning, Indiana Bones for 45 minutes and JK for 30 minutes. And even with my phone and headphones fully charged, and my phone in a case on my hip I lose connection constantly. Mostly it just stops playing, and I can use the inline remote to start playing again, but about once a day it completely disconnects and I either have to wait for it to reconnect or go into bluetooth and force a reconnect. As I said I can usually start again quickly, but not always and sometimes I have to pull my phone out to get them to play again. And this is a real pain when I am being pulled by Indy and especially when I am also carrying a full dog poop bag as well. I just want them to not stop! Not only that the problem has been getting much worse. At first it was happening maybe twice a walk, but now it can happen up to 10 times a walk!Also the microphone does not seem great. Partially I think it is because it on the cord that wraps back around your neck, so it is behind your mouth so has to be powerful and so it picks up a huge amount of wind noise. My mom is constantly complaining about the sound quality.The range in my house is pretty good, especially if I have my iPhone in the middle of the house, it reaches pretty far, but can't make it outside, or through too many walls for sure.I have tried resetting my PowerBeats3 and have restarted my phone, but the stopping persists, especially when I am out and walking (seems to work better in my house). I contacted support and they are sending me a case and will check them out, and if they find a problem they will send me a like new pair, and if they don't they will charge me for the inspection, even though it is still on warranty.And maybe the issue is my iPhone, but I will find…

Red Shark article on Mac Pro users wanting a simple powerful box

Red Shark has an article on Mac Pro users not caring about design, just wanting a powerful expandable box. I love the idea of a MacPro Classic with modern inards. Heck I would be OK with a PC box with Modern Mac innards, but the MacPro Classic is exactly what I want. Or honestly an even bigger box, with not only the 4 drive slots, but also a 4 drive raid with RAID hardware built in.It isn't going to happen though. Tim Cook does not get the Pro user or care about them at all. There hasn't even been a speedramp on the Trashcan, and the video cards are old tech! Besides most pros want CUDA and NVIDIA.Hell if Apple really cared enough they would let a 3rd party build a new MacPro. I want an Origin PC MacPro! And give me a choice of Xeon or i7 chips!Once I can afford it my tower will become a PC, likely an Origin. I will likely keep my iPad and iPhone. They work great and do certain things better than my Surface 4 i5 can do.

Color Correction Test with DJI OSMO+, Canon 60D and iPhone 6S and Visual Effects of Gun Shots

I shot some test footage with 3 of my cameras, my DJI OSMO+ my Canon 60D and my iPhone 6S. I color corrected the footage using DaVinci Resolve 12.5 and did the Visual Effects in Adobe After Effects.The visual effects include adding the gun shots, light flashes, and color correcting the orange tip of my gun so it is gray.I was trying to show my ability to color match the footage from such different 3 cameras, as well as add the visual effects to make an interesting little sequence.Let me know what you think!

More fun with iCloud Bookmark sync

So after giving up on LastPass because it is not e10 multiprocessor compatible, I have been trying to sync my bookmarks using Firefox Sync, Chrome Sync and iCloud Bookmark Sync for windows. Unfortunately iCloud bookmarks is garbage, because it has no simple way to either clear bookmarks, or force a sync from a single source, and unfortunately it often gets completely corrupted! To clear it you have to disable sync everywhere except your mac, and let it sit, then clear your bookmarks and either import or create a new clean set. Unforunately this process is very unstable. It requires much switching off sync and waiting, and hoping.Keep your fingers crossed, as I am.

LastPass 4 does support e10s in Firefox, but no word on Xmarks

So I was let know that LastPass version 4 does in fact work with e10 multiprocessing in Firefox. The normal update does not work, so you need to install LastPass 4.0 from the web site.There is no word on Xmarks though.So I am now running the iCloud Bookmarks Plug In on my Surface Pro 4 to sync between Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. And using Firefox bookmark Sync to sync from my mac to my Surface Pro.

Looks like Xmarks and Lastpass will never support e10 Multiprocessor in Firefox

So it looks like neither Xmarks or Lastpass will ever support e10 Multiprocessing in Mozilla Firefox. For years Mozilla Firefox has been my browser of choice because of all of it's extensions. There was a short period where I used Chrome, but it is not as customizable. Firefox though is changing and is becoming multiprocessor, and that requires re-writing plugins to work with e10, or they won't work. Right no Firefox will still work without e-10, by keeping Firefox in the old mode without mulit-processor support.I contacted Xmarks/Lastpass support to see about their e-10 support, and I got this response.Hello,Thanks for reaching out to Xmarks Support.Through testing that we were unable to install Xmarks in Electrolysis e10. At this time, we have no plans to launch Xmarks compatibility with e10. I will submit a formal feature request ticket advocating your desire if you'd like.Thanks,JeremySo basically a paid service will never update their software and will very shortly lose all support for Firefox my favorite browser! Time to kill my accounts for xmarks and lastpass!Of course now the question is how to replace these essential programs. I am going to try out Firefox Browser sync, and iCloud sync. Unfortunately iCloud Browser sync only runs on windows, but I have my Surface Pro 4 running Windows 10, so I can try Safari Browser sync to sync between Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac. And it is e10 supported, so that might work. I will keep my backup in Firefox on my mac so I can keep replacing my good backups.

RedShark article on time to take a new look at Final Cut Pro X 10.3

So RedShark has posted an opinion piece on Final Cut Pro X 10.3 and why you should give it a second look now because it is so fast and has become so powerful now. The author gave it a new look after looking at this video.It is interesting and it does look powerful now, and full of most of the features it should have had on release.Still a couple of things give me pause. Number one being this quote from the article on the magnetic time line:The stress of knocking your entire sequence out of sync is gone.I can honestly say that I never had any stress about knocking a timeline out of sync in any NLE. You learn how to use it and never have an issue with knocking stuff of of sync. To me that is not a reason to create an all new paradigm for the timeline, because I have never had a problem with knocking things out of sync!And second I just don't trust Apple anymore. Sure I love OS X and wish I could stay on it forever, but without having a customization "Pro" machine like the old MacPro I can't see them as Pro. And that is why they have to make FCP X work on less powerful machines so well, because they don't have a viable alternative. And no way am I ever getting a trashcan even if they do upgrade it. Not having it upgrade able or internally expandable means it will not last like my MacPro from 2009 has! And I don't trust apple to not just kill FCP X one day. They did it with Shake. They did it with FCP 7. They did it with Color. They did it with DVD Studio Pro. They did it with Aperture. I just don't trust them anymore.

Safari no longer supporting 4K videos on YouTube

AppleInsider has this article on what is going on. It seems that for all videos uploaded as of December 6, 2016 Adobe has moved from the paid to license H265 Codec to the free VP9 codec, and Safari does not support VP9. Previously the 4K videos had been encoded in H264, but both H265 and VP9 require much more power to playback and it will drain battery life, and use some serious processing power.Obviously using a free encoder vs a paid license will help the bottom line for Google, as will videos that take up half the hard drive space, but users take a hit because people who don't have the latest Machines will take a hit and be unable to playback 4K because it is so processor intensive. Seems a little soon, but Google has already made the switch.If you want to encode VP9, Fnord has a free plug in for Adobe Premier Pro and Media Encoder.

It was the video card that failed, it is replaced and everything is working great

So after some posts online at various forums, it seemed to be that my crashing issues were what I feared. My EVGA NVIDIA GTX 680 4GB was causing the crashes.Unfortunately MacVidCards seems to not have had any stock since September 2016, so I wasn't going to get a flashed replacement card.So I started looking for a PC NVIDIA GTX 980 4 GB with 2 6 pin power supply. This was much easier said than done. There are still quite a few new 980's out there, but most of them either have 2 8 pin, or 1 8 pin and 1 6 pin for their power supplies. Looks like with the 10 series out (even though those won't work in a Mac since NVIDIA hasn't bothered writing drivers for them) that the 6 pin 980 have become rather sparse.Finally I was able to find a ZOTAC NVIDIA GTX 980 4GB AMP! Edition which had the requisite 2 6 pin adapters, and a bit of a speed increase over stock along with 3 fans instead of 2. I had never even heard of ZOTAC before, but most reviews seem like it is a pretty good company.I got the card and installed it, no startup screen of course, but it runs great. And speed tests show it is about 100% faster than the 670 I had installed, and it works great, the crashes are gone. And Premiere Pro runs great!

MacPro Crashes are certainly to do with my NVIDIA Video Card

So I have been having some serious crash problems of late on my MacPro 4,1 that has been firmware flashed to a 5,1 with an NVIDIA GTX 670 and 4GB of RAM. I have posted about it here and here.I am running 10.12.2 with 32 GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 4095 MB and I had started getting bad crashes with noise in the image, which I show in a previous post. And it was happening more and more, especially when trying to run Premiere Pro. I had been running the OS X driver instead of the web driver, as it seemed to be more stable, but when I switched to the web driver 367.15.10.25f01 those crashes stopped, though I did get random restarts still, and crashes when I try and run Premiere Pro (which my previous posts show was from the Web Driver).So the fact that the different drivers have the different crashes to me seems to show that it is for sure the video card that is causing the crashes. Unfortunately I don't really have the money right now for a replacement. Eventually I want to replace this whole rig with a PC (as the 2013 Trashcan MacPro is not a powerful enough machine for what I need) but that would be even more.Now I currently have Premiere Pro running, but am doubtful it won't crash again soon. And I have run TechTool Pro 12 and it showed my Graphics RAM as being fine. Are there any other tests to see if my video card is for sure failing? I posted at Apple forums, but have gotten no help.EDIT: Well I was wrong about none of the video noise crashes with the Web Driver. I hadn't had any, but when running Premiere they happen with consistence. I have had 4 of them in less than an hour. Seems like as soon as CUDA cuts in the issue is happened with the web driver. Basically I can't use Adobe (the main use for my machine) or I get the crashes. SHIT!EDIT 2: Also posted on MacRumors and at least one poster says bad video card.