Some issues with the otherwise excellent AirParrot

airparrot

I have been using the excellent AirParrot program to stream from my computer to my Apple TV. Mostly because there is no App for Showtime Anywhere on the Roku, iPad or Apple TV that will stream to the Apple TV or Roku. AirParrot allows us with older Macs to activate AirPlay streaming, and does a pretty good job of it, allow you to stream your screen or an individual app or window (the most useful for ShowTime anywhere, if you pop out just the video, so you just see the top bar of the browser window and the video) and it streams sound as well. This is great, and I will likely still keep the program around, just uninstalled (so I can re-install when I need it).

The reason I am keeping it uninstalled is it has been causing some issues with my sound on my MacPro. Specifically I was losing the 3 physical hardware settings in my Sound control panel. And I run my sound out through a Digital Out to an Emotiva DAC, but have lately had no sound options. Sometimes running Diskwarrior seemed to help, but as of today nothing was bringing them back, so I removed Airparrot and it’s installed plug ins (they have a removal tool that I could not find on their web site, though it talks about it, but when I tweeted them they quickly gave me the link http://t.co/bFYfDNoaFN, though I used the awesome Find Any File [and it is $7.99 in the app store] while holding down option to really find anything, and was able to remove the program and it’s installed file ) and after a restart my sound settings were all back. And hopefully they will stay that way!

Beware of NVIDIA web driver 313.01.01! Took my machine down for a day!

NVIDIAWeb

Yesterday I saw that NVIDIA had released a new web driver , 313.01.01, and was hoping it would help my Geforce GTX 670, but instead it caused a cascade of failures and kept me down for a whole day!

Installation went fine. bit on restart the computer would not come up. Eventually I had to put my old Geforce GTX 275 back into my Mac so I could use option and boot into my edrive or the emergency partition (both of which I had to use). First off even with the GTX 275 the computer would not boot at all, not in single user mode or even safe mode (well I honestly stopped Safe Mode after about 2 hours, it was still moving, but going so slow I didn’t think it would boot.

And even emergency mode was trouble, because my external OWC 3TB backup drive, no longer mounted, so I couldn’t do a restore from my Time Machine partition! And I didn’t want to try and re-install the system over the old system, just in case, so I had to go to Best buy and get a new Hard Drive.

DId you know that the new Seagate Barracuda drives in fact don’t say Barracuda anywhere on the box? It just stays Desktop, though the drive still says Barracuda! WTF?!?!?!??!

So I got that drive home and re-installed a fresh install of OS X on it, and then had it take my old user and settings from the old drive, which after about 5 hours worked just fine (though I had to move the drive internally as it wasn’t working from my external USB housing for some reason).

After everything was in place (including my slow finder) i reinstalled my GTX 670 and the machine rebooted just fine, and even stranger now has the NVIDIA control panel installed, but not the new driver.

I could immediately see the menu bar item for the new control panel.

NVIDIAMenu

And when I opened the control panel it informed me that yes that driver is incompatible with my system! YES NO KIDDING! So what systems is it for?
NVIDIACOntrolPanel

I just wished it realized the Web Driver was not compatible before it installed it before, as it took down my whole system! And I had to buy a new hard drive to get it up and running again!

Sonnet releases Enhanced xMac mini Server

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Creative cow has the press release, but you can check out the new xMac at Sonnet’s site. Using thunderbolt to expand a Mac Mini is a brilliant idea now that not only is there not an X-server anymore, but the MacPro has not been upgraded in ages, and though we have Tim Cooke’s promise of a new MacPro, this may be the best Mac Server solution going right now, as you can expand it with many PCI cards, and make a real server, with an inexpensive Mac Mini.

No to a Mac Minitower

Dan Frakes at Macworld has now written 2 articles on how now is the time for a Mac Minitower (one is here, and the second is the editorial in the June 2013 issue of MacWorld), and I have to say I think he could not be more wrong!

Apple has already almost completely killed the current MacPro. It hasn’t truly been updated in many many years, and is no longer even on sale in the EU due to environmental regulations, and seems like Apple killed it, but Tim Cook has said that we should expect “something really great” sometime in 2013.

From what it sounds like while the MacPro does not lose money, it is not a money maker either, not like Apple’s other products, so they don’t need any stupid mini tower to split the market and make a MacPro that much less of a moneymaker.

What Apple needs to do needs to do is at the June 10th WWDC, announce their new MacPro, which should be a serious upgrade to the new MacPro, with the ability to use the latest and greatest video cards and pci cards (and I am talking the NVIDIA TITAN HERE) as well as having Thunderbolt technology and USB3 and yes still Firewire 800, as so many of us still use it (though SATA ports would be great too). And as many hard drives as they can cram in there. I would love an SSD for my system and an addition 6 drives spaces for a hardware raid 5, and yes I still want an optical drive, but can live with that externally if it means more drive space!

Apple please do not listen to Mr. Frakes! Don’t split your pro market, just make a new MacPro so that I don’t have to make my next tower a Windows machine, because once us high end graphics people, editors and designers all move to windows Apple will lose a lot of it’s cool!

Mac Vs. PC from Social Meteor

Social Meteor has an a good look at how the divide between using a Mac or a PC has mostly gone away for designers.

I totally agree, which is why I have been considering a PC for my next Mac. Sure there are things I like better on a Mac, but on a PC I can buy any video card I want, and get a huge powerful tower with many internal hard drives. And since Mac seems to have basically given up on MacPro’s (I know they are supposed to announce a new on this year, but with this long wait I am kind of thinking why bother, when PC’s seem to run faster).

AppleInsider Speculates on MacPro

AppleInsider has a 2 page article speculating on the new MacPro.

Talking about the very small size of the market for the MacPro, and how Apple could do something small and modular.

If it is true, it is time to move to a PC for me. As a video professional I need a big tower with as many drive bays internal as possible and as many PCI expansion slots as I can get, and maybe 2 CUDA video cards with 4-6GB of RAM if I can afford it. And if Mac isn’t going to offer it, then it is time to make the jump to PC.