The main problem with doing this is that there are a lot of different distributions (or ‘distros’) of OSX86, and knowing whch of them will work fine on the AAO is a bit of guesswork. There are, however a few that have been used by quite a few people. The XxX, iPC and iAtkos distros have all been installed successfully, and I believe that all of these are available up to OSX 10.5.6.

Each distro has a very similar set of optional components, though if you use a guide for one for another, then you may have to go hunting through the options to find the things you need, and they’re not always named the same.

A great guide is available at :-

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=153352  

This is for the iAtkos distro, but works fine for the others if you can search out the relevant bits in the install. Its a good step by step guide with a lot of feedback from other forum users afterwards also.

One tip – make sure you install the ‘Shutdown Fix’, as if you don’t then your AAO will crash about 50% of the time when shutting down running on batteries. It’s not a big issue (just hold down the power button to switch off), but always feels better and neater when it doesn’t crash!

Insanelymac in general is a great source of info for anything OSX86-related.

Also, the OSX86 Wiki at http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page is also a godsend.

Cheers!

There are several flavours of SSP – all produce a similar output, but in different ways. The first (and currently most used) version, is SSP for Flash. This consists of flash plugins that enable you to construct a slideshow inside flash and export it to upload to a website. The second, and the version I use, is a plugin for Adobe Lightroom. This causes SSP to be aded as a ‘Slideshow Type’ in the ‘Web’ section of lightroom, so you can construct slideshows from any combination of your images in your Lightroom library.

These cost $29 for the Flash plugin, and $25 for the Lightroom plugin respectively. Both have extremely good docs, great support on the SSP forum, and are well worth the asking price.

Thirdly, there’s Slideshow Pro Director. This is not an alternative to the above plugins, as you still require those to create your initial layout. What SSP Director is, is a way of managing your slideshows, allowing you top upload images, create albums and galleries, and tweak many aspects of the way it all works, dierctly from a browser. It is MySQL and PHP based, so you’ll need a webhost that supports these, and be reasonably up on their basic use to install it. It honestly isn’t difficult, and the SSP people provide a free server compatibility check download for you to make sure it’ll work on your host’s server before you buy the full thing. If you’ve installed WordPress, Joomla, CMS Made simple or anything else that uses MySQL and PHP, you’ll know hat I mean. You just need to make sure that the table prefix doesn’t match anything you have at the moment (unlikely!).

Director costs $29 per domain. They used to charge just for director, and you could use it on as many domains as you wanted to. This changed to a domain lock-in system on the current release. It’s a part of the install process, and it registers the domain you are installing it onto with the company. This license IS transferrable to another domin however. For the price, it’s well worth it in my opinion, as director is the very nice and tast icing on the cake of SSP.

Director allows you to manage your slideshows and galleries once you have them online. What it doesn’t do is enable you to fiddle with the layout and design of your slideshows – this still has to be done in Flash or Lightroom. Director provides an easy link to an XML file for each album and/or gallery of albums you create. This link is then simply pasted into the Lightroom or Flash plugin during the design, which then takes the images from the web gallery for its content, rather than the local files. This means you can do all the layout with local files as examples, then sikply paste in the XML link to make SSP use the web gallery instead. Easy once you get your head around it!

You then export the gallery to a folder, which brings together all the SWF and site files (only abot 5 or six if I remember) for you to upload. You can either use the default index.html it provides, or take the code from that and add it into your own pages.

Once uploaded, the original SWF file does not ever have to be changed if you don’t want to. You can simply edit the galleries that you want to, and the SWFs that use them will use whatever images are provided. Another very good aspect of Director is it’s ‘on demand’ publishing system. Simply put, SSP Director automatically resizes (and caches on your webspace) images that are required for your SWF galleries. So… say you had a two galleries, both using the same images, but different sizes. You can point two differnt sized slideshows at the same XML file, and director will resize the files on the fly to fit the correct SWF. It will then cache the resized images so that the next visitor will not need to wait for them to be resized again. As the first visitor is almost always yourself when you’re testing the gallery, subsequent visitors get the gallery displayed with little or no delay.

I’ve not covered all the options available here. For example, you can actually make video slideshows too, as well as adding music etc to your SWFs. The full list of features can be found on the SSP site (www.slideshowpro.net). I love this piece of software, and all of my images will, from now on, be published using it. Take a look at the full gallery by clicking the link under the slideshow in the sidebar, clicking the slideshow itself, or by going here – http://www.axemansplace.co.uk/gallery/maingallery/.

Cheers!

Unfortunately, the N73 isnt compatible with Three’s new ‘Turbo’ (or 3.5G) connection, which gives mobile broadband speeds of up to 2.8Mb/s in enabled areas (mostly currently Major Cities and around, but apparently gradually spreading out – much like the original 3G signal). To be honest, at the moment, it really doesnt bother me, as the speed I’m getting is by far enough. Also, with only 1Gb a month to play with, it’s probably better that the speed isn’t too high, as I’d be tempted to download a lot more, and quickly use up my data allowance! I can report that Skype works well over this connection too, which is a bonus.

I’d heartily recommend it for PC users, though I’m not too sure about Mac users. I gave it a go on the iMac yesterday, and it connected ok, though the speed was low. this is more likely to be becasue i dont live ina 3G enabled area though, ratehr than any problem with the connection itself.

All-in-all, very good, and I’ll definitely be using it more when I’m away.

Here I go again. Praising the abilities of this technological wonder I now own…

See that image above? Click on it for bigness. It’s an image of Windows XP running inside OS X, and acting as a TVersity transcoding media server to my Xbox 360 sitting downstairs. I set this up on the offchance that it would work, fully expecting it to fail. I suppose I should know better by now – there’s nothing this Mac has failed on yet! Basically, TVersity is a uPnP media server that transcodes content to the format required by the 360 on the fly. I’m yet to look for a suitable mac alternative, and until then, I’m sticking with this. After all, I can just fire it up and away it goes. The only caveat in the whole shebang is the fact i have to dedicate both CPU cores on the Mac to this, slowing the OS X side down a fair bit. Thing is, I dont really mind this, as I’m very unlikely to be watching something downstairs whilst still trying to use my Mac upstairs (unless I go about some twisted VNC shenanegans).

This thing continuously amazes me!

Stay tuned for my rundown (now its more or less finished) of how I got all my home studio stuff talking happily.

Google Search for Cubase with Bootcamp

Good news! Looks, from general Consensus, that SX3 on Bootcamp is a very viable option. Looks like I may be swapping both my PC and current G5 iMac for a single solitary (and silent!) Intel iMac at some point in the not-too-distant-future. I’m obviously going to do some more research, but it’s looking good!

The only real issue flagged up has been with using the Mac’s internal sound card for recoding. However, any external firewire etc. interfaces seem to work fine.

I’ll report back when I know more…!

Something just occured to me. Basically – I want one of these….

It’s one of the new iMacs that I was wittering on about in my last post. I tried one today in the Apple premium reseller in Cardiff, and I’m smitten. Sad I know, but there we go. What I’m trying to work out is whether this machine (a Core 2 Duo-based monster) with XP and 2Gb of RAM, would be enough to successfully run my current recording software well.

I’d love more than anything to get rid of my big-box PC and replace it with a single one of these with a dual-boot of Windows XP and OS X. I’d use OS X for everything apart from the recording. The only reason I stick with Windows for the recording is that all the software I have for recording is Windows based, and having to rebuy everything on Mac would be prohibitively expensive, as well as being a total pain in the ass.

The main problem is that I’m not sure how good the architecture of the Mac is when it has Windows running on it. I’d need at least 2Gb RAM, which isn’t a problem, but I still dont know how well everything would run.

Obviously, I’d be using Windows drivers, but I dont know what potential problems there are for compatibility etc. Thing is, after a quick google, I’m none the wiser. Nobody seems to have tried this yet – or at least nobody seems to have documanted their attempts…

If anyone has tried this, please get in contact – I’d love to know how it went. Until then, I’ll keep looking.

It’s a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. In a nutshell, it’s a WiFi and Bluetooth Enabled internet and Email client, running a version of, get this nerds, Debian Linux. These things have been around for a little while now (probably a year and a half or so), and started out at £249, which was way too expensive. However, with the recent release of the Nokia 800 (the follow-up), thie 770 has plummeted in price, and I’ve just picked one up brand new for £73!!!!

Before I go any further, to get your own, go here :-

http://www.expansys.com/p.aspx?i=141019

I’m actually quite excited by this. It has a fully featured web browser, that’s flash compatible. It’s actually Opera, so all is good in that case (I’m typing this on Opera as we speak…!) It also has a full POP3/IMAP email client, and can play video and audio no problem. The screen is about 4.5″ish in size (diagonal), and is a generous 800×480 resolution-wise. Considering the PSP, with it’s very sharp screen is only 480×272, then this should be a joy to behold! It only has 64Mb of internal memory, but uses RS-MMC (or Micro-MMC), like some other Nokia phone devices to expand, so space shouldnt be an issue.

As I just mentioned the ‘P’ word, it should be noted that a phone is exactly what this is NOT. It has no space for a SIM card, and its only means of network connection are Wireless (802.11b/g) and Bluetooth (via a compatible mobile with a data conection). I want this to provide an easy means of getting on the net anywhere in the house. I want to be able to lounge on the sofa whilst updating this blog (so I hope it’s compatible!), and be able to check my email without going upstairs to the computer room.

As for other reasonos for having it, as I surf the net, I find more and more compelling reasons to own one of these little wonders. As it’s a Linux-based OS, the support for it from the community has been good. Soon after it was released there were a good selection of apps available for it. These include :-

These, and many other apps that have been ported, or are in development, make this a great little project, and something that I think will be genuinely useful around the house, and a good replacement for my laptop when I’m out and about.

For the official Nokia take on things go here :-

http://europe.nokia.com/770

Once I get hold of it, I’ll be having a good old play before posting the findings on here, so watch this space!

As I said in the main review – part of Fotospeed’s service is to provide you with custom colour profiles if you buy their paper – a great service that would actually cost you more than the paper if done separately. The aim of this process is to provide you with a file which, when used in the print section of Photoshop, will match up the on-screen colours of a correctly calibrated monitor to the colours that come out on the final print. These profiles are specific to an ink/paper combination, as different combos result in different colour characteristics. I got my nice shiny (figuratively speaking) new colour profile from Ray of Fotospeed by email in the middle of last week. Unfortunately, I was away in Italy during that time, so didn’t get a chance to try it until Saturday. When I got home, I installed it. This is a simple process that just involves copying the file to the relevant folder on the Mac (or PC) to make it available as a profile option in Photoshop.

Anyway – I printed a few shots, and I must admit, the results were very nice. The colours seemed to match those on-screen closer than anything I’ve ever done before.

But… there was a problem…!

I was getting some very strange effects in the midtone areas. This was much more evident on mono shots. I got a strange sort of ‘bloom’ in midtone areas, which had the effect of causing these ares to take on a heavy blue tinge, and appear much lighter than they should have done. I contacted Ray of Fotospeed, who said he’d not seen anything like it before. Typical! I’m the first! Ah well. Ray suggested reprofiling – just send him another print and he’d sort out a new profile for me. Great – I’ll just send him a new print, and hopefully it’ll sort the issue.

So – I left it for a few days, and then went back to print the calibration chart again to send back to Ray. I still had the test print on the printer, and it had been a few days since I’d looked at it. I looked again and it seemed like the problem had gone away, or at least reduced a lot. Just to check, I printed out a new version, using the same settings, on the same sheet of paper, next to the old one.

I got these results (click to enlarge, and again to enlarge more for clarity)…

I’ve come to the conclusion that these inks and papers must just take ages to settle once the print has been made. When I say ages, I mean 3 days or so, as when I looked at the print 24 hours after I made it, the blooming was definitely still there.

So – the verdict? Seems good! After the initial disappointment, the final print quality seems about as good as I’ll get out of my printer. Of course, there’s still a lot more testing to do, and I’ll keep the blog updated with any developments. Would I recommend it? Heartily. The money saving alone makes it worth it. Coupled with the convenience, and the addition of a free profiling if you use Fotospeed’s papers, it’s a bargain!

As a final test, I’ve printed one of my mono shots with a splash of colour and lots of graduation and midtones to give it a real test (click to enlarge)…

We’ll soon see!

Well… thats where continuous ink sysems come into play. You can hook one of these up, and it replaces your standard cartridges with a set of cartridges that are constantly replenished from a set of ink bottles that sit external to the printer. The upshot of all this is that you can basically print and print and print until your heart’s content. There is about 15 times more ink in the set of bottles you get with the system than in a standard set of 1290 cartridges.

How does it work? Well, there’s a pipe assembly that runs from the bottles to the cartridges, as you can see in the photos linked below…

(sorry about the lack of thumbnail – I seem to be having image upload problems on the site tonight!!)

This whole system needs to be ‘charged’ first, using a syringe (supplied). The whole thing is a bit fiddly, but is very easy to do, and worked fine for me. Once I’d installed the carts, I just carried on as if I was installing a new set of standard carts. I printed a fair few nozzle tests, and cleaned the heads a few times before I was happy. I had a few strange black streaks in my printouts, but that gradually seems to have gone as I print more. The system was very easy to install, and fotospeed have good help on hand if you get stuck (or just need a little advice) during the process. Once installed, the lid of the printer wont quite shut, but to be honest, it doesn’t affect printing, and is a small price to pay for the savings you get.

As part of the process of getting my prints up to scratch, I also ordered a pack of fotospeed’s own Pigment Friendly Lustre paper. Yes, I know I dont use pigment inks (though you can get a pigment ink set for the 1290), but It works fine with Dye inks too. As part of their service, fotospeed will do you a colour profile for free if you buy their papers. FREE! This would normally cost about £50 or require you to buy a set of equipment for about £1000 to do it yourself. All you do is print out a paerticular image they send you (with all your colour management in photoshop switched off), and send it to them. They then scan it in with their fancy scanner thingy and hey presto, a custom icc profile appears in your email inbox the next day. I’m yet to actually do this, as I only got it today, but below is the pic of the test chart. Hopefully, when I get the profile back, colour mismatches will be more-or-less a thing of the past. I know you can never get it perfect, but I want to know I’m getting the best from my printer that I can.

All of this is useless, mind you, if you dont calibrate your screen. This can be done using software such as the calibration software that comes with photoshop, but this only gives a rough estimate. For a true calibration, you need something like this little beauty. Thats an Eye-One display from Gretagmacbeth (a mouthful!). It does the job properly, and you end up with a much more natural looking display. Luckily, my good mate Rich (http://www.rdsaunders.co.uk) has got one, and was good enough to let me borrow it.

Back to the subject in hand….

What do I think of it? Well.. to be honest, it’s a bit early to tell. Once I have the profile back I’ll be able to tell better whats good or not. After I installed it, it seemed to take ages to clear the nozzles, but at the moment, I’m not sure if that was the ink, the system, or just bad luck. All I know is that at the moment, it now seems ok.

All-in-all, I’m happy with it so far, but time will tell. I’ll post more once I’ve used it a bit.

Wonderful.

An OS X got there first. Flip3D is Microsoft’s answer to it, but to me, it just doesnt cut the mustard in the same way. Vista Expose looks like this :-

Now dont get me wrong – it’s a step in the right direction. But it still doesnt duplicate Exposé on the Mac. There are a few things wrong…

But its a bit better. To be honest, I think I’m gonna look for a hot-corners utility that just activates Flip3D, rather than replacing it with a poor imitation of something much better…

If you want to give it a try, you can get it here :-

http://blogs.labo-dotnet.com/simon/archive/2006/11/08/11485.aspx