The New NVIDIA TITAN X is the King of the Hill!

Yes there is a new king of the hill in the consumer video card arena, and that is the new NVIDIA TITAN X. I had expected this to take a while to come out after them releasing the new 10 series, 1080, 1070 and 1060, but it was quickly announced and is coming out August 2nd! Wow! And the specs are amazing!

GPU Engine Specs                                               TITAN X                 GTX 1080

NVIDIA CUDA® Cores                                          3584                         2560

Base Clock (MHz)                                                   1417                         1607

Boost Clock (MHz)                                                  1531                        1733

Memory Specs:

GbpsMemory Speed                                                10                              10

GDDR5XStandard Memory Config                        12 GB                       8 GB

Memory Interface Width                                         384-bit                      256 bit

Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)                                 480                           320

Thermal and Power

Maximum GPU Temperature (in C)                       94                             94

Graphics Card Power (W)                                       250 W                     180 W

Supplementary Power Connectors                          8 pin and 6 pin       8 pin

That is an extra 1024 CUDA Cores for Adobe Creative Suite to play with, and an extra 4GB of faster RAM for not that much more power draw!

If you have been reading my posts, I have come to the realization that my next computer won’t be a Mac, and have been looking at custom build PC’s like Origin PC or Puget Systems. For a bit I was thinking that maybe 2 SLI GTX 1080’s would be the answer for my CUDA needs, but that would basically eat all of my PCI slots. And I likely need some sort of Black Magic Design card to kick out video at least to an HD Monitor for editing, if not an Intensity Pro 4k. And while I can get a USB 3,1 external Raid for hard drives (as I likely won’t get a ThunderBolt 3 Motherboard, unless I decide to build for myself), so I could live without a raid controller I would like need a Firefire PCI board to deal with my all my old hard drives until I can afford new enclosures.

So it looks like the new NVIDIA TITAN X would be my $1200 card of choice.

Trying to figure out what programs I will use if I move from Mac to PC

I have been talking about it for ages, and have used Apple Computers since I was 7 and got an Apple IIC. I love my Mac, but it getting old, and the next macOS Sierra has end of lifed my 4,1 MacPro. Luckily I can hack it to become a 5,1 with a simple firmware hack, so I can install Sierra, but it is likely the last Mac OS my computer will run. And big Adobe updates usually require the latest Mac OS. And the new “MacPro”, the trashcan is a joke that has not been upgraded since it’s release in 2013. It isn’t upgradeable, nor can it have more than one harddrive internally, so it isn’t pro. And it’s use of a Xeon processor is not a boon. Xeon’s are usually a few generations behind on technology, the big difference is that Xeon’s don’t have an integrated graphics processor (which doesn’t affect you if you us a high end graphics card) and they 2 processors! But the trashcan can only use one! And yes it can have 12 cores (for an insane price), but i7’s have now reached 8 or 10 cores and are newer tech, so why not use those if you are only using one processor. I really don’t get it!

And yes I could build a Hackintosh, but I have been using a Quo at work,mand while it is great, upgrades are never too fun, and you must disable security features to even install El Capitan.
So it is looking like my next computer is a PC, cause I can put an NVIDIA Geforce 1080, but I need to figure out moving away from many of my current programs.
I know I can move iTunes to PC, though I hear it doesn’t work as well on the PC, but my library and ratings will make it over.
I can export and move my mailboxes, browsers and the like pretty easily. There is nothing to easily move my Photos library to Windows, but I can import my Library into Adobe Lightroom and it will take my Keywords, then move to PC so it will work there. Pages and the whole iWorks suite is a pain as I need to open each file and save it out to word (hopefully I can automate it).
Making my web sites is more of a pain. I have used many programs over time, starting with Net Objects Fusion before it went Windows only, and I have even used Dreamweaver, though my HTML skills have gone to hell, and I don’t want to code anymore. So currently I use Rapidweaver, which makes it easy and I have 2 different web sites for me and my mom’s web site, which can link to much web site content. Now I am starting to look at Adobe Muse as an alternative, but I am not sure it will easily plug into all the content I currently use, from YouTube, Vimeo, 500px, or Flickr, so sites you can easily upload things and have them automatically show up on your web site. And it looks like there is no way to embed my blogger blog into muse, as I have done with Rapidweaver. Might be able to do my self hosted wordpress, but not my blogger blogs. Damn!
Then I will of course have to figure out a bunch of other programs, and especially system tweaking, and a new backup system, as I can’t use time machine anymore.
It is surprising to me how little info there is online for moving from Mac to PC. Any info or even programs to help seem to be made to go the other way.
Oh well, when it happens I will likely be running both machines for a while, until I am sure everything is moved over.
And I am sure I will miss my Mac in many ways as I have Windows 10 in parallels and bootcamp on my mac, but it works, and honestly is a more pro system nowdays.

Still fixing my iTunes Library after disasterous update to El Capitan

After my disasterous update to El Capitan which tanked my iTunes Library, I am still working on cleaning it up!

I have fixed the music, and re-rated all my tracks, and only lost about 20 tracks out of my 40,000 plus itunes library, but now I am working on video and that is such a mess. So many tracks have been randomly renamed! I have to go through and watch some of them and figure out what they are and rename them!

All I can say is never move your iTunes library to an external Synology as it just ruined my iTunes library completely!

More fun with Frontier Communications, who took over my Verizon Fios service

Already been pretty unhappy with Frontier Communications, who took over FIOS from Verizon in Southern California. They had many features not working, like being able to add your family to video users so they can also watch streaming video (which they seem to have added now, though in a much more difficult way than Verizon did, but it isn’t working right for my mom and she can’t watch Showtime), and the internet just seems less responsive and slower, and their tech support is not nearly as good as Verizon’s. Plus there is the fact that I never got any notification of the change and one day could not longer log into Verizon to see my account.

Well today we have been having weirdness with our home phone, where the people would call and there would be nothing, and if we called the phone never made any sound and never connects. So their phone service seems completely down.

So I decided to contact customer support, but low and behind, while Frontier’s sales site is completely up their account site is completely down.

All I get is Internal Service Error.

So I tried tweeting them on Twitter, but have not heard anything back and see tons of people from all over the country seemingly having problems. And even better they are saying you need to submit to them to try to even get money back for their downtime (which should just be automatic).

So far the service from Frontier has been very substandard. I used to love my FIOS, but now I am so unimpressed with their service!.

More fun with Xmarks and Safari

So I am still having major xmarks issues. On my Mac on El Capitan 10.11.5 I am running Firefox 47.01 and Xmarks 4.3.19, and I am running Safari 9.1.1 and Safari Technology Preview 9.1.2 (which was recently updated, and maybe the issue) and Xmarks for Safari 2.0.19.

After creating my clean bookmarks in Firefox and making a clean backup of them I kept uploading them and overwriting the xmarks servers, but when I uses Xmark for Safari it has been seemingly just wiping out all my Xmarks in both Safari’s, but leaving my completly messed up bookmarks on both my iPhone and iPad. So this time I turned off iCloud Sync for Safari on both iPad and iPhone and deleted the bookmarks then overwrote the Safari bookmarks on my mac with the clean bookmarks from Xmarks, and it left Safari empty of bookmarks once again. Weird. So I let it sit overnight with no bookmarks in Safari on my Mac, iPhone or iPad, but when I woke up that was no longer the case. Once again Safari had messed up bookmarks on my Mac (though nothing on iPhone and iPad sync iCloud is off completely) and the server copy on Xmarks is messed up again too!

Great! So now I have also turned off iCloud on my Mac and have re-installed my good backup bookmarks into Firefox and re-uploaded them to Xmarks, and redownloaded them with Xmarks for Safari (which I have also uninstalled and re-installed) and once again I have no bookmarks in Safari. Maybe having iCloud though on all my devices it will eventually clear the bookmarsk in iCloud which are obviously totally messed up, though eventually I do want it to sync to my iPhone and iPad.

I have contacted Xmarks support to see if they will do anything.

I am thinking after this I may just need to kill Xmarks for Safari and just work from an exported bookmarks from Firefox and put them into Safari, as for sure something is not working with Xmarks!

The Palette Gear Controller

I can’t believe I never heard of the Palette when it was in it’s Kickstarter campaign, but this is a fully customizable controller with analogue controls. It has 4 levels of kit from $199-$899mfor a wooden controller,mand you can also get additional buttons, controllers and sliders which are all controllee by the core untit, amd they have programable lcd lights, so you can remember which button is set for what.

This sounds very cool, and I would love to try one out, though the lack of SpeedGrade control makes it certainly not as impressive, though it does work with basically the rest of the suite.

Jonny Elwyn has an awesome review, which goes heavily into the details.

Adobe Creative Cloud blog on the Essential Sound Panel in Audition CC

Durin Gleaves at the Adobe Creative Cloud blog has an awesome article on the new Essential Sound Panel in Adobe Audition for mixing DIalogue, Music, Sound Effects, Ambient or Environmental Audio in easy, but powerful ways. It can even retime or recompose a music clip to match a certain time!

Well worth a read, I am looking forward to trying this out, though wish it was integrated into Premiere so I don’t have to do a separate mix, but could instead have it happen with the timeline (which I already put on different tracks for different mix types).

More fun with Xmarks on Mac, huzzah for Xmarks for Safari (if only it worked)

So I finally got X-marks to sync, but it was a total pain in the arse. In fact I had to wipe my whole Firefox profile, and use Firefox Sync to get all my plug ins back and then re-log into everything, and then import my clean bookmarks backup and use that to Upload over the Xmarks server. I then did the same at work where I have a portable Firefox setup, though after checking my x-marks bookmarks online they were still old, so I synced again this morning and the server ones finally seem to match.

Now is where the real fun begins! So I went to Xmarks for Safari and told it to Download my bookmarks, as it’s bookmarks were by far the most messed up. The first attempt seemed to merge my server bookmarks and Safari ones so they were an even bigger mess, so I tried downloading again, and now I have no safari bookmarks at all! YIPPEE!!!!

So in Xmarks for Safari I did a Reset Xmarks and relogged in and told it to keep data on server, and discard data on this computer (of which there is none). And Nothing. ABSOLUTELY NO BOOKMARKS IN SAFARI, nor in Safari Tech Preview. Good job Xmarks!

So finally my bookmarks are clean on the server, but I have absolutely no bookmarks in Safari, and my iPad and iPhone each still have the really messed up bookmarks from the strange merging of my clean bookmarks and my clean bookmarks, and they all have iCloud sync turned on.

And it looks like the solution I have used in the past is no longer viable. I used to boot into Bootcamp and let Apple’s iCloud Sync Extension work to sync my Safari boomarks, but posts online I am looking at seem to imply that the extension no longer functions with the latest Firefox and the plug in has been pulled. Thanks a lot Apple. Really appreciate the help!

Can’t Apple make a damn syncing plug in for Bookmarks for those of us that don’t use Safari on the mac, since we are forced to use Safari on our iOS devices?

Anyone else have major problems with XMARKS on Mac?

So I am a Mac user, but I do not use Safari as my browser of choice, but I still want my bookmarks to sync between browsers and get to my ipad and iphone. And my browser of choice is still Firefox (I used Chrome for a while but missed all the plug ins with Firefox) as I like it expansion abilities (and yes I know in the near future it will lose them and start using Chrome extensions, and I will likely re-evaluate then).

So to keep my Bookmarks synced for a long time I have been a user of Xmarks. It works with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and nominally Safari. On PC Apple has released a bookmark sync plug in for iCloud that works very well, but they have never released it for mac. So I use XMARKS.

The problem is I think with Xmarks Safari, which is finicky at best, and often if I am not paying attention to my bookmarks, they all get mixed up and unorganized. Things get pulled out of folders and moved all over, and yes in XMARKS you can go see old sets of bookmarks, but it isn’t exactly a quick or easy process, and often to find a clean set of bookmarks I need to go back far enough that I lose any recent bookmarks that I have added, so I end up just re-organizing my bookmarks once again.

I just spent the last 2 days doing that gain, and am doing a force overwrite of my server bookmarks, so hopefully all my browsers end up with my nice clean freshly organized bookmarks, but I don’t expect it to work, as old things always pop up and things get completely disorganized.

Plus it makes me nervous that my upload has been doing this for the last half an hour!

Which even though I am doing a forced overwrite of the server, I can bet things will get messed up (and yes I have exported my bookmarks and made a backup from Firefox, as this organization took a long damn time).

And somehow my bookmarks never seem to make it to Safari or my iPad an iPhone correctly no matter what I do. And I often end up manually importing the bookmarks into Safari, but then the sync gets all messed up.

Let’s hope for once this actually works.

(EDIT)

 Yup, well now that I have my clean set of bookmarks, it seems I can’t get them to Force Overwrite on the server! Xmarks just seems stuck at synchronizing. And Firefox keeps locking up so I have to force quite. Yipee. I guess I can manually delete Safari’s bookmarks and import the firefox ones and see how that goes, but I have never had a good experience with that! SHIT!

(EDIT AGAIN)

 Walked both dogs and when I came back the sync was done, but when I checked the bookmarks online, they were the old ones, so it didn’t seem to work. SHIT! This is really annoying!