Kodak is releasing a new Super 8 Camera!

One of the surprise announcements of CES this year was Kodak’s very cool new Super 8 Camera! It will be $400 and $50 for a cartridge of film that you send and will be processed and that includes a digital scan as well! And it records sound to SD card.

Not only is this cool because most thought this format was mostly dead, except for Pro 8 Film (which crazily will do up to 5K scans).

I hope this gets some use at Film Schools, though I bet most have moved to digital.

iTunes update

So I have been spending all the time I can re-rating my iTunes Library, and so far I am only in D! This is going to literally take forever! Such a pain. And it seems to have been slowing down the more things I rate or make playlists, but that seems to have changed.

iTunes updated to version 12.3.2.35 recently, which allows for 100,000 songs in iTunes Match, and iTunes seems to have sped up again, no more beachballs all the time. Nice! Lets hope it stays this way! This is such an improvement. My almost 50,000 library seems zippy again!

Message now works on my Mac and all it took was resetting my PRAM! Some NVIDIA weirdness though.

I can’t believe I had not tried that, but Apple support got me and now Messages works in El Capitan

There was some strangeness though, and it is to do with my NVIDIA Geforce GTX 670 I mentioned in my previous post. After resetting the PRAM the computer came back up, but all the blue was orange again, and this time I took screenshots, but they looks correct once the problem is fixed! And to fix the issue I had to re-install the latest NVIDIA web drivers, though they were showing as already installed. Next time I will take a physical picture.

10.11.2 El Capitan update did not require NVIDIA web driver to boot (though it looks crazy)

I run a NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4 GB of RAM in my MacPro, and it is not flashed. So when I update the system I have to use VNC to sign into my Mac and update the NVIDIA Web drivers and restart before my Mac shows anything on the monitors (or I have to swap my old GTX 270 and do the Update).

This seems to have changed with 10.11.2. In fact it showed the updating screen before the Desktop, and then came to the desktop. Of course it was not normal, in fact all Blue Colors were Orange! I wish I had though to take screen shots, as after the update I upgraded the NVIDIA web driver and restarted and everything was back to normal.

This is awesome news if this continues in the future, as it makes it much easier to upgrade to the latest NVIDIA web driver. I hope it just wasn’t a fluke.

Still unable to log into Messages with iCloud in El Capitan 10.11.2

So 10.11.2 came out, and I am still unable to log into Messages with iCloud on my Mac, though it works fine on my iPhone and iPad.

So I am on the phone with Apple Tech support. They for sure can see that my MacPro is not authorized. We went through signing out my iPad and iPhone of Messages, Facetime and iCloud and then signing back in, but that didn’t help.

I was then moved to a level 2 tech, who sent me and apple application called Capture Data, and had me try to log into Messages with it collecting packets, and I sent the info to Apple and they will be contacting engineers.

They were very nice and I am supposed to hear back Monday. Fingers crossed that they can figure this out. Seems like it has to be on their end, as it worked fine before El Capitan and the weirdest part to them as well is that it still happens on my clean install of the OS.

Update on iTunes and El Captian

So I have still not got iMessages to work in El Capitan and I have to Log into iCloud every time I restart or it doesn’t work, but this is about iTunes.

After getting my iTunes back working, but losing all of my playlists and Metadata, I have been working on re-rating my tracks, and remaking my playlists.

What is interesting, and scary to me is as I rate more tracks, iTunes slows down more and more, and I am getting more and more beachballs. Basically I listen to a track and give it rating then skip to the next track, and often it starts playing the new track, but doesn’t show it in the interface for a while and I get the beachball for a bit before I can rate the next track. And as I rate more tracks and remake more playlists it gets worse.

I just hope once I am done (as I am only in B so far) that it doesn’t slow down to the speed of my old messed up Library. I thought the new clean library would just stay faster, but it seems to be getting slower the more work I do on it!

This is really scary as it shows that the slowdowns are indemic in iTunes code with large libraries and a large metadata collection.

It means Apple really needs to start over on iTunes and rewrite the code from the base up, but that is a scary prospect as it will likely break much of the functionality that exists (and they have already been losing more and more functionality over time), and create new issues for a while.

Honestly I just hate to have to put all the time into fixing my iTunes only to see it be slow and hard to use again.

Managed to fix my ailing TIVO with my Mac

My TIVO Premiere XL had started having issues, it was pixelating and randomly pausing, which are signs that the hard drive is failing. My TIVO is way out of warranty, and last time I called TIVO for this issue with my previous Series 3 TIVO, they told me to buy a new one. Well right now we can’t afford a new TIVO, and especially not a TIVO and moving over my lifetime service (which they don’t offer on their site, but I was certainly going to call them and get it), plus since I have the XL if I got a new TIVO I would really like a PRO model, and there is no Pro Model of the TIVO Bolt, only of the previous generation ROMIO.

So I decided to try and repair my TIVO by replacing the drive, and doing it with a bigger capacity. I did this with the help of two sites, Ross Walker’s excellent guide to Upgrading or Rescuing a TIVO, and the Tivo Community forum thread on the awesome JMFS Live CD that Walker tells you to use.

Now it was not without issues, firstly because I have a Mac, and it would not boot off the JMFS Live CD, and to get around this I used Parallels to run the JMFS Live CD in emultation, though this meant I had to connect the drives externally so I could get them to mount in Parallels (i have a Sonnet SATA card, but the drives show up as internals so I couldn’t get them to mount). At first I tried to use 2 external drive housings, that the drives just plug into, but one was USB 3 (and my USB 3 card no longer works with OS X EL Captian) so it was really slow and kept failing after 24 hours.

After this I tried using the Ubuntu method to just do the copy, but couldn’t get that to work as the drives would not show up in it in parallels, so I gave up and went back to the JMFS live CD in Parallels.

So I put one drive in an OWC housing and tried that, but still I got failures. So I put both drives in OWC housings, with a lot of space around them and pointed a Vornado at them to cool them down. On my fifth try it succeeded.

This is after it succeeded and trying to fix failed blocks, which it changed from 469K to only 29K, nice job JMFS!

This it almost completed showing the higher errors.

And with JMFS, after the copy I was able to expand, and supersize the drive. The commands to activate the Accoustic and Sound management (got errors) but it is a brand new drive, and a 3TB WD Green Drive, so I am not worried.

I put the new drive in and started my TIVO and it did 2 restarts with noise, and then did it’s full startup and all my shows and record settings made it over, and it works great!

Amazing how painful it was having no TV for a week, but at least it is up and working now, and now I have higher capacity! WOOHOO!

Thanks for the help people on the boards.

Problems with Mail in El Capitan eating all application memory

I have been getting problems in El Capitan running out of application memory (and I have 24 GB of RAM and am not running many programs). I checked Activity Monitor and it seems that Apple Mail is the culprit and is eating all of my memory and run time.

I did a google search and came up with this Apple Discussion on the issue. It seems that Mail is loading all of it’s log files into RAM and compressing them into ZIP files. You can at least temporarily fix the problem by deleting your log files at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail/ with Mail closed.

And the problems continue with El Capitan!