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Rob Griffiths

My new favorite (for now) laptop Mac

A while back, I tweeted that my new MacBook Pro was my fave-ever portable Mac—this despite having only used the machine for under two weeks at that point. A few people asked me "why your fave-ever?," so I thought I'd use those queries as an excuse to post here on my near-silent blog.

The specific machine in question is a 2010 15" MacBook Pro with the 2.66GHz Core i7 processor, 4GB of RAM, and (when new) a 5400rpm 500GB hard drive...and, oh yes, the single most important spec: the anti-glare 1680x1050 high resolution screen.

This machine replaced a 2008 MacBook Pro (last of the non-unibody laptops) with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and a 7200rpm 200GB hard drive (and the only screen at the time, the standard 1440x900).

Comparing the two, the only area where I gave up anything at all was in the hard drive's speed. I took care of that problem by installing a new Seagate Momentus hybrid hard drive, the 500GB version, to be exact. (A hybrid drive is one that combines a small solid state drive—4GB in this case—with a traditional drive, and then uses its firmware to optimize performance on the fly. For more on the Seagate hybrid drive, see this excellent article at Anandtech.)
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Macworld: 2009 writings

Macworld logoAll (or as many as could be found online) of my 2009 writings for Macworld.

January
Jan 2Spotlight enhancer HoudahSpot gets enhancements of its own
Jan 6The amazing vanishing Mac desktop machine
Jan 7First Look: Numbers ’09
Jan 7The history of the Mac, told by those who were there
Jan 8Expo Notes: Memeo puts you in a sharing mood
Jan 9Expo’s Ask the Editors session
Jan 9Expo Notes: Jing, a year later
Jan 10Expo Notes: The search for TechTool Pro 5
Jan 10Expo Notes: Araxis Merge adds to its file-comparison bag of tricks
Jan 10Expo Notes: Digitize your paper trail with NeatReceipts
Jan 12Expo Notes: Restoring the matte screen
Jan 19The video industry just doesn’t get it
Jan 22Pirated iWork '09 installer may contain trojan horse
Jan 22Review: iDive 300 iPod/iPhone underwater case
Jan 23Review: Third-party browsers for the iPhone
Jan 27Review: Numbers ’09
February
Feb 3Hands-on: TechRestore’s matte-screen MacBook Pro service
Feb 4Look before leaping... and formatting hard drives
Feb 6Review: Power Support MacBook Pro Anti-Glare Film
Feb 9Six years with an Apple Cinema Display
Feb 11No more getting started with iLife ’09
Feb 12Review: Days of Thunder for iPhone
Feb 12Review: Spreadsheet editing apps for the iPhone
Feb 16Growl 1.1.4
Feb 18Review: Keynote controllers for the iPhone
Feb 23Review: MobileFiles Pro for iPhone
Feb 24Review: Air traffic control games for the iPhone
Feb 24First Look: Safari 4 Beta
March
Mar 3FireWire 400 reaches the end of the line
Mar 13VirtualBox 2.1.4
Mar 16Mariner Calc for iPhone
Mar 1615 iPhone 3.0 features we'd like to see
Mar 24Eight years and counting
Mar 30What you need to know about the Conficker worm
April
Apr 15VMware Fusion bug breaches the guest-host OS wall
May
May 5Why Firefox is my preferred browser
May 11TechTool Pro 5
May 14FireWire saves an iMac from a failed 10.5.7 upgrade
May 15Pointer Remote for iPhone
May 15First Look: Chromium browser for OS X
May 19Application Wizard makes program switching easy
May 20Close the Java security hole in many browsers
May 21Add an OS 9-like app menu to OS X with ASM or multiXFinder
May 21Hands on with the WolframAlpha computational knowledge engine
May 22Click Archive: An easier way to work with disk images
May 25DeskCover makes icons easier to see
May 26Digital Sentry watches your computer's activities
May 27iCab Mobile for iPhone
June
Jun 1Quickoffice Files for iPhone
Jun 2BdContacts: An alternative to Address Book
Jun 3Hands on with the Opera 10 Web browser beta
Jun 4Port Map: Simple port mapping for your router
Jun 5WWDC Preview: What we know, what we expect with Snow Leopard
Jun 8Snow Leopard more feature-laden than expected
Jun 9DailyFinance and eTrade Mobile Pro for iPhone
Jun 12Mariner Calc 1.2 for iPhone
Jun 17How I use iPhone 3.0's Spotlight search
July
Jul 1First Look: Firefox 3.5
Jul 6SpamSieve 2.7
Jul 7Personal Antispam X5
Jul 9Chrome OS's impact? It's too early to tell
Jul 13The no-worry backup plan
Jul 16Purify 2.1
Jul 20SpamX 4.0
Jul 22Living on the EDGE
Jul 23The Intel-only future draws closer
Jul 28The case of the cracked iPhone
Jul 31New NetNewsWire sync option isn't for everyone
August
Aug 4SpamSweep 1.6.1
Aug 5The end of the road for a favored text editor
Aug 6Frankenbook! Another look at hacked Mac netbooks
Aug 27Services step out in Snow Leopard
Aug 28Snow Leopard's old and new annoyances
Aug 29Snow Leopard: What's gone where
September
Sep 3How to create a Service in Snow Leopard
Sep 15Camtasia for Mac
Sep 23Snow Leopard changes the rules about opening files
Sep 24The real genius of the Genius Bar
October
Oct 13Inside Snow Leopard's Guest account data loss bug
Oct 15Apple allows in-app purchasing for free App Store apps
Oct 26First Look: VMware Fusion 3
Oct 26ScreenFlow 2.0 adds powerful new editing features
Oct 27ScreenFlow 2
November
Nov 4Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac arrives
Nov 20Mad Skills Motocross
Nov 21Why go Pro when iMac goes faster?
December
Dec 4PDFpen 4.5
Dec 8First Look: Chrome for Mac
Dec 21Run Stats for iPhone
Dec 20Batch conversion saves slow QuickTime clips
Dec 29Add an ExpressCard solid state drive to some MacBook Pros


A non-review of Avatar

It's not very often that I see a movie that moves me enough to write something about it. Sure, a couple years back, I put together a list of some of my favorite comedies, but those were capsule summaries written about movies that were, in general, quite a few years old.

Yesterday, however, I saw Avatar, and was, for the first time since the 1977 release of Star Wars (I refuse to call it 'Episode IV'), absolutely amazed by a film. As such, I felt moved to write a little bit about Avatar.

This is not a review, and it (hopefully) doesn't contain any spoilers. Instead, I've focused on my reactions to Avatar, some comparisons to that original Star Wars movie, and what I think it means for movie making going forward.

First off, after sleeping on it, I definitely stand by the three-word (five, counting the parenthetical) review that I tweeted yesterday:

Go see it (in 3D)

Go see it because it's entertaining. Go see it because it represents the state-of-the-art in movie visual effects. Go see it if you're a fan of cinema in general, and want to see where filmmaking may be headed in the future. But really, just go see it—Avatar is well worth the cost of admission, regardless of the reasons.

Does that mean it's a perfect movie? No, in fact far from it—the story, in particular, is too predictable and has been seen many times before. Then again, Star Wars wasn't necessarily a completely original story, either. Another recent favorite of mine, Star Trek, was itself very similar to Star Wars (this funny video demonstrates just how similar). In short, I don't necessarily mind a predictable story if it's presented well and the rest of the movie works with the story.
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Now for something completely different…

Veering off the usual technology/toys focus of my blog, I have a nutrition question. My wife and I are having a friendly debate over the relative healthiness of a couple of different breads. One of these breads is a traditional "whole wheat" loaf, and the other is one of the newer "whole grain white" loafs. I'm hoping some nutrition wizard out there can help settle the debate as to which is better for us to be eating. After the jump, you'll find the nutrition labels from each loaf. I'm curious as to whether or not one is clearly better than the other...
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One way to password protect a WordPress site

I was helping a friend set up a site for their family, and they wanted it to be password protected. I protect our family site using Apache's basic access protection (httpauth), and it works well enough, so that's how I set up his site as well.

However, we then had nothing but trouble with the Flash-based image uploader in WordPress, which is a tool I don't personally use. After some digging, I discovered that the Flash-based image uploader simply won't work with httpauth.

Because the objective was to keep out unwanted visitors, I found a workaround -- it's not perfect security, but it seems to do the job well, and allows the Flash-based image uploader to work. I disabled the httpauth access restriction, then installed two plug-ins:

  • Restricted Site Access: This plug-in prevents anyone from seeing the site without first logging in. We then created one generic username/password for my friend to give out to all his relatives (which is what we would have done using httpauth, too).
  • Peter's Login Redirect: This sends users to the home page of the site after login, instead of to their control panel. I'm not sure why, but after logging in, our generic user was going to their control panel. This plug-in solved that problem.

The end result is a site that's protected from casual visitors, as well as robots (though we've also got a robots.txt file set up, just in case). It'd be nicer if WordPress would just fix the httpauth issues, but it seems they're not interested in doing that.



There’s a bit of duffer in all of us

Thank you, Michael Letzig, for demonstrating just how difficult golf can be. Yesterday, during the Buick Open PGA tour event, Michael hit a shot that I've replicated many times (too many times!) myself--a good old-fashioned full-on hook shank. This shaky YouTube video shows just how bad the shot was.

That clip, however, is quite dark and it's hard to spot the ball. So I snipped a bit of it out, and processed it with ScreenFlow and QuickTime Pro. The end result is this version, which makes it much easier to track the ball and see exactly where it wound up. Urgh.

The bad news for Michael is that, despite that shot (he saved par on the hole), he played well enough to...get paired with Tiger Woods in the final pairing for today's final round. Urgh.



Trip report: Destin, Florida

Last week, we took the kids to a family reunion in Destin, Florida. For those who've never been (as I hadn't prior to last week), here are some observations from my experiences.

  • Highway 98, the main arterial road that runs up and down the peninsula, is seemingly always crowded. This is especially true on Saturday and Sunday. We sent some folks on a grocery run to a Sam's Club when we arrived on Saturday. It was 16 miles away, and it took them nearly an hour to get there. The rental office was five miles from the bridge where we crossed to the peninsula, and it took nearly 20 minutes to cover that distance.
  • The sand (at least on Crystal Beach, which is where we stayed) is simply astonishing. Pure white and very soft, with nary a hard shell to poke you in the foot.
  • The water temp near the surface was 80F+, and very pleasant. Waves are generally small, but large enough for the kids to enjoy some boogie boarding. We went scuba diving one day (though Destin isn't the greatest of dive destinations), doing two relatively short dives (as they were somewhat deep). One decent picture at right.
    The water temp was about 73F to 77F at 60 to 85 feet; we wore 3mm wet suits, which kept us warm enough for the two dives.

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In search of iPhone golf GPS and/or scoring apps

Macworld logoI'm in the midst of a huge round-up of iPhone golf-specific GPS (range finder) and/or scorecard apps for Macworld. As of now, I've identified 32 of them, but I'm wondering if I've missed any. If you have a second, please check out this list and let me know (via a comment here or via Twitter) if you're aware of any other apps.

Read on for the list (note that some of these may be mis-categorized as I haven't tested all of them yet)...
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What are the chances?

This is a story about chance, and how, well, chancy it can be.

Today I flew across the country to visit my dad for a few days. The first leg of the flight left at 6:00am, which meant a very early start to my day (even by my standards). Out the door at just after 4:00am, after parking and shuttling to the terminal, it was a bit after 5:00am. Check-in went fine, so then it was off to the security lines. At the Portland airport, they run two security lines--one for first class and one for those of us in the cattle car.

Both lines were quite long this morning, but moving at a good pace. As I neared the front of the commoner line, I looked to my right and noticed a familiar face standing almost right next to me, in the first class line. It was Bill (names have been changed, as I didn't get permission to share this story), whom I worked with at my last job (prior to joining Macworld full time).

I hadn't seen Bill in person for probably three years (I left the company in 2005). However, Bill and I had been trading voicemails for a few weeks, trying to get together for lunch and to set up a round of golf at some point. But we kept missing each for one reason or another.

So it was very odd to stumble into Bill at the airport, especially at 5:15am on a Tuesday morning. He was traveling with his family, heading off for a week-long vacation. What was even more chancy about this encounter is that, for at least a couple days, Bill and I will both be in the same city on the east coast! How very odd.
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Five easy steps to a heart attack

Here's how it's done...

  1. Have your cat awaken you at 4:30am, pawing your face to let you know he's hungry.
  2. Head downstairs in a stupor, leaving the annoyingly-bright lights off.
  3. Open cat food and start scooping it into the cat's bowl, letting the cat know just how you feel about the 4:30am wake-up pawing.
  4. See the light from, and hear the click of, the downstairs bathroom light coming on.
  5. Have heart attack.

OK, so clearly I didn't actually have a full-on heart attack. Instead, my pulse merely doubled and I had an amazing adrenaline surge.

As soon as I started breathing again (quietly), I reasoned that any intruder with even a quarter of a brain wouldn't actually bother to turn on the bathroom light, nor would they have ignored my easily-audible talking to the cat.

So what was the cause of the spurious pulse-quickening light? It turns out that our six-year-old daughter apparently heard me, and had gotten up to use the bathroom. Why she chose to come downstairs--very quietly, I might add--I have no idea, as there's a bathroom just down the hall from her room.

Needless to say, after bundling our daughter off to bed again, I found it basically impossible to go back to sleep, given the adrenaline coursing through my veins.