Finally someone else si also getting my “system_profiler quit unexpectedly” crashes in OS X

For a while now I have been getting “system_profiler quit unexpectedly” crashes in OS X, and I get them a lot, but have not always been able to figure out why. I have a thread at Apple discussions on it, and finally someone else has run into the error.

And the thing we both have in common is that we both have PC NVIDIA cards as our Graphics cards, so it is quite possible that this is the issue. The other user has reported this as a bug to apple, but since we are not using approved video cards it will likely be ignored.

He also has a temporary solution, to disable the system profiler app, but this seems excessive in case you need the system profiler, but if it keeps bothering me I might try it.

sudo chmod -x /usr/sbin/system_profile (To revert this, use “+x” instead)

This is really an annoyance, and sometimes happens a lot in rapid succession, so I really do wish I could figure out a permanent solution to this problem.

OneRIver Media Blog on upgrading a 2009 MacPro to it’s fullest potential

One River Media Blog has an awesome article on fully upgrading a 2009, 4,1 MacPro to it’s fullest potential to make it rival the new trashcan MacPro.

This involves replacing the processors with Dual 6 CPU’s which you can now get for around $650 (or less for a slightly slower model) installing dual SSD’s for a startup drive, an NVIDIA Titan X with 12 GB of Video RAM, 64 GB of 1333MHz RAM, 2 6TB internals and a 4TB internal. This is all doable for around $4000, much cheaper than a new Trashcan Macpro with the added bonus of an NVIDIA graphics card VS the unupgradeable ATI graphics cards in the new MacPro.

Honestly if I had the money this is what I would love to do with my Mac! It would give me years more life with my Mac and really make it fast!

The CalDigit FASTA-6Gu3 USB 3 and ESATA PCI card for Mac does not and will not work with Yosemite

So I have a CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 USB and ESATA PCI Card for my MacPro to add USB 3 to my old MacPro 4,1. And it worked great for a long time, but not since Yosemite came out.

I checked there web site about it, and it says this:

It does not support OS 10.10, so I wrote to CalDigit, and got this response:

Dear Jonah,

We regret to inform you that the mac OSX platform is no longer supporting the chipset used on the FASTA-6GU3 card after 10.9. Therefore, it has become impossible for us to develop a viable driver for the 10.10 platform that will work with the card. Unless you’re able to revert to a previous version of OSX, you will be unable to regain functionality out of the card’s USB 3.0 ports. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

Regards,

CalDigit Support
CalDigit, Inc.

It seems you must now buy the Pro version to have OS X 10.10 support.

Total bullshit! I am staying away from this company!

Macnn Feature Thief article on Final Cut Pro, iMovie and iDVD

William Gallagher and Charles Martin have an interesting article on Apple and it’s changes to it’s video lineup. It goes into iMovie, Final Cut Pro and iDVD, and how Apple upgraded the first 2 with less features, but slowly made better versions.

My biggest complaint with the article would be on who they polled as they say that most of the people who were angry over Apple’s switch from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X have moved back X (with a cursory mention of Premiere Pro as an alternative).

Personally being a professional editor, I did give the initial Final Cut Pro X a try, and hated it. And got a refund and have not gone back. There are some features that I do really like in X (especially it’s handling of Meta Data), but since I edit complicated graphics heavy shows, it is the timeline that is the deal breaker for me, and it is the fundamental feature of X, so no matter how many updates they do, the timeline is too unorganized and broken for it to make sense for a 15 track highly organized video project.

And of all the editors that I know, I have only heard of one that has gone back to X and really likes it now. And while features are starting to make their move to Premiere Pro, there have only been a few instances I have heard of big houses moving to X. Most of the big houses I know that were basically all Final Cut Pro have moved to AVID at the studios insistence (kick backs?!??!), while most commercial houses have moved to Premiere Pro for it’s fidelity with graphics.

I just don’t see Final Cut Pro X as a viable solution, and with Apple’s history of dropping software, I don’t trust Apple to keep it going anyway!

JMR Lighting Tower for new Mac Pro

Just saw an ad for this in Post magazine, and I guess they showed it off at NAB this year. The new JMR Lightning Quad Tower for Mac Pro is a PCIE expansion tower via thunberbolt for the new MacPro, that includes four full sized PCIE expansion slots, a built in RAID controler wth 9.6TG capacity, and brings your USB, Ethernet and Audio ports to the front.

Very cool. I am sure it is not going to be cheap, but what a great idea! Make a real MacPro out of a new one, if only Thunderbolt was a little faster.

Photos for Mac is broken, no way to delete photos that you have imported! FIGURED IT OUT iCLOUD PHOTOS IS BROKEN

I was just importing my photos off of my iPhone into the new Photos for Mac, Photos being the replacement to iPhoto that Apple recently released, and I noticed a major issue.

In iPhoto when you imported your photos you had the option to delete them on import. Well in Photos that option is completely gone. There is only the option to import your photos. Well I just imported 2 gigs of photos, and want to clear up the space off my iPhone. Now I have to what, delete them off my iPhone myself? Well the only way to do that is individually, and this is 300+ photos and videos!

And I thought maybe I missed something and imported the photos again, and it happily imported the same photos and put them into my Photo library right next to the previously imported photos! What is going on here?

I get that the new iCloud features are to keep all your photos forever and safe, but the idea is to keep your full sized photos in the cloud, so you can access them from anywhere, not to never be able to delete your photos from your iPhone. If that is the case people are going to run out of space really fast!

And besides who can afford the iCloud feature? Apple is charging way too much for online space, especially when Amazon lets you store your photos for free!

And the removal of a trash can isn’t a good idea either? What if you accidentally delete a file? (I was wrong about this, there is a way to view Recently deleted photos, just now a menu item instead of a section on the sidebar)

Why has Apple changed to a company that doesn’t give you a choice on how you use your Apple devices, you have to use them how they tell you to and there is no other way (exactly why I don’t like Final Cut Pro X)?

••••

Well I think I figured this out, I had to turn off iCloud Photos on my iPhone, now when I import I get the option to Delete items after Import. So if I was to keep iCloud Photos on, my phone would fill with all my Photos.

So now I had to re-import all my photos again (making duplicates in Photos) with the checkbox checked and now I can have it remove the photos from my iPhone, though this doesn’t seem to work well as it only did about half the photos the first time, and I am having to do the process multiple times to get the photos off my phone, creating duplicates in Photos every time. And now it seems frozen about half way through!

Is this seriously a feature? Being unable to remove photos from my phone? Seriously? This is a joke, if I want to store all my photos in iCloud I don’t want to keep copies on my iPhone or it will completely fill up really fast! This is completely broken! FIX THIS APPLE!

Not only that, but Apple help doesn’t work for me with Photos. So how am I supposed to figure out how this works?

Used Premiere Pro’s Capture for the first time yesterday

I was handed a DVCAM tape yesterday and work was going to rent a DVCAM deck to capture. I said I would do it myself since I have a Sony DS-20 in my office. I used to use it all the time, but it mostly gathers dust now, so it was good to give it a run, and I decided to try it out with Premiere Pro.

Now I knew that Premiere had a very simple capture engine that would work with HDV or DV, so I decided to give it a try. It has very few settings, just which capture setting, then you can set in’s and outs, change clip and tape names and capture a clip or a tape. The problem is that the tape was old, and it kept failing on the capture, and it doesn’t seem to have a setting to automatically break up clips when there is a break in timecode. After many many attempts that failed, I gave up and switched to Final Cut Pro 7.

Final Cut Pro 7 still has a much more powerful capture engine, and will in fact break up a capture if you set it to, so you get clips around the breaks, but surprisingly it managed to capture the whole 1 hour and 50 minutes in one go, not making any breaks.

So honestly I am glad Final Cut Pro 7 still runs on Yosemite, as it does still have some uses. Looks like I will need to keep a backup of this system state before the next OS which will likely break Final Cut Pro 7 completely so I can still capture DV easily if need be.

Bare Feats compared the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 with 10 other GPU’s in a 2010 Mac Pro

Not only does this card us standard six pin connectors so it will work fine in the MacPro, but in many tests it doubles the performance of a GTX 680 Mac edition! WOW!
If I had the money I would totally go for one of these, since it is literally twice as fast as the GTX 680 Mac Edition, and I currently run a GTX 670, though it does have 4 GB of RAM.
I WANT ONE SO BAD!!! Ha! Not happening anytime soon.
Your best bet for one is this one from MacVidCards which is $835 plus shipping, the cards has been flashed for Mac so you get the full startup with it (which I annoyingly don’t have with my GTX 670).

Rumors of a MacBook Air with only 2 Ports, and ditching Thunderbolt, let’s hope not

9 to 5 Mac has rumors and it’s own artist renders of what it claims to be the soon to be announced revamp of the MacBook Air.

The terrifying part, is that it has only 2 ports on it. A headphone jack and a USB Type C port. The USB 3 Port is more advanced than USB 3 with a reversible connector, that can drive a monitor and also power a computer.

I can’t even articulate what an awful idea this is. One connector means you need a hub to attach anything else to the laptop. My mom for example has her fitbit sync in the usb port, which would have to be left in the hub. And even worse is the removal of Thunderbolt.

Apple is really pushing Thunderbolt as it’s next generation connectivity, even giving up the much faster (and far superior) PCI Slots in it’s MacPro in favor of of Thunderbolt. And having Thunderbolt in the Air made it expandable to an amazing degree that would never have been possible with a machine like this, and you could use the same devices across the mac lineup. Even with it being USB 3.1, which can do 10 Gbps, or the same as Thunderbolt 1 (not 2 though, which can 20 Gbps), they should have the same ports across the whole range, so accessories are interchangeable. Unless Apple is getting rid of Thunderbolt all together in favor of USB 3.1, which to me should mean they need to go back to PCI Card expansion in later MacPro’s (and who the hell wanted the trashcan MacPro anyway), which I highly doubt, they should not do this.

I know Apple does not read this blog, nor care what I have to say, but PLEASE APPLE DON’T DO THIS!!!!

Diskwarrior 5 Issues in non standard configurations: UPDATED

Well I for one was very excited about Alsoft Diskwarrior 5, and it’s new USB Stick to run off and repair Macs, but unfortunately it has not worked out so well for me.

Now admittedly I am likely a strange case on this one. I have been trying to use it on 2 slightly out of the norm cases, and haven’t been able to to boot to the USB stick in either case. And though I have gotten it to run, it was via other means, and was not too impressed by the new 64 Bit Speeds.

The first case is my own computer, which is a MacPro 4,1, but the exception here is that I run a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4 GB of RAM, so I am unable to hold down option and select a startup disc on boot, nor able to get into the recovery partition because I don’t get a screen booted until the desktop starts up. And these are the two methods to run diskwarrior from the USB Stick. The USB Stick does show up as a startup disc and I have tried starting up off of it, but the computer never boots this way for some reason.

To get it to work on my MacPro I used a competitor product in fact. Micromat’s Tech Tool Pro 7 has a way to create a recovery partition. And I was able to create it on one of my additional hard drives so as not to mess with the OS X recovery partition, and it allows you to install software there, so I installed Diskwarrior 5 and ran it.

Once running the new Diskwarrior worked fine, just like the old one, and in fact did not seem any faster. I do have a very full 3 TB main hard drive though, so it has a lot of files to check, but still it did not seem exceptionally faster than version 4.

A second place I run diskwarrior is at one of the offices that I work at (being freelance it isn’t always the same place, but I work here allot). And I got them to purchase a DVD of Diskwarrior 4.

Now I wanted to test Diskwarrior 5 here, to see if we could use it. Now while they do have one MacPro with a NVIDIA GTX 680 Mac Edition which I will be testing on later, they also have a QUO computing Hackintosh that I have been using mostly. Already to run Diskwarrior on it, I can’t boot from the DVD, but have to run from a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of the system SSD that has Diskwarrior 4 installed. Still I thought I would try the USB Stick.

And once again no, with the QUO it seems that I can’t hold down option to see the bootable hard drives, so I can’t boot from the USB stick to repair this system. I could install Diskwarrior on my backup, but would not do that with my serial number. I will test it later on the regular MacPro, just because I want to see if I can get Diskwarrior 5 to boot from the USB stick in any situation!

Now the one thing I have not tried is is the new Diskwarrior 5 Diskwarrior Recovery Maker, which updates the USB Flash to the latest OS that your system is, since new Macs have new boot requirements, but I know my MacPro can boot from 10.6.4, and I believe that is the starting system for any Hackintosh, so I though that would work for for the QUO.

I will updater his after I see if it works on the other more standard MacPro, but so far I have not been too impressed with Diskwarrior 5

UPDATE

Well I tested the Diskwarrior USB in the MacPro 4,1 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition, and it froze on the startup screen. I started it by holding down option and selecting the Diskwarrior Recovery partition, and starting up. I left it there for an hour, and the Machine was just stopped.

Here is the Startup screen. It spun for a while then froze.

And the red light was solid on the USB Key so not accessing the disc
And when I tried it on my Quo holding down option, this is exactly what happened, it showed the startup screen and spun and then froze. And the same happened when I selected the USB on my home Mac as a startup disc.
Looks like it is time to contact Alsoft and see what is going on.
SECOND UPDATE
I was writing an e-mail to Alsoft Technical support, and think I figured out the issue, and will test it soon. The GTX 680 Mac Edition requires 10.8.x Operating system to run, and all 3 machines I have tried it on have either that card or a PC GTX 670, so it is likely that the system needs to have at least that system to run. So it looks like it is time to try out Diskwarrior Recover Maker and update my USB.
My only problem is that my home system is Yosemite already. Maybe I can find a system with 10.8.5 and run it, so it doesn’t get too new of a system on it.