Tim Sodhi’s Weblog

This holiday season, my not-so trusty Sony Handycam SR300 succumbed to the black LCD syndrome. Really tired of spending upwards of $150 each time, getting it repaired, I decided in favor of moving to a new and better camcorder. The governing factors in the choice of a new video device were:-

1. Price (200-300 USD)
2. Recording format (easily editable on the Mac)
3. Optical Image Stabilization
4. HD Capabilities
5. Form Factor

I trawled through Camcorderinfo.com with these specifications in mind, and searched high and low for an appropriate camcorder fulfilling my criteria. Unfortunately, none of the camcorders listed could match all of the criteria. They were either too expensive, or featured really poor HD quality. Furthermore, they either recorded in AVCHD or in MPEG-2 (both of which though capable formats, aren’t natively supported in OSX).

I took my queries to the CCInfo forum, where an enthusiastic post by a forum regular got me interested in the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 Digital Camera. Yes, you read right – a digital camera. I was highly skeptical at the onset, but I read on, and researched a lot, and it seemed that the ZS3 was indeed a camera that could indeed break through the Camcorder/Camera barrier and combine the features in one highly functional device. A few specifications of this PAS.

• Optical Sensor Resolution: 10 MP
• Optical zoom: 12 x
• Motion Recording: AVCHD Lite (720p) & Motion JPEG (720p)
• Audio Recording: Stereo 2.1
• Lens: 25mm ultra-wide-angle lens
• Maximum Aperture Range: F/3.3-4.9
• Minimum focal length: 4.1 millimeters
• Maximum focal length: 49.2 millimeters
• Optical Sensor Size: 1/2.33″
• Display Size: 3 inches
• Width: 4.1 inches
• Depth: 1.3 inches
• Height: 2.4 inches
• Weight: 7.2 Ounces

As I mentioned, I was very skeptical of the poster’s claims that he had supplanted his regular HD Camcorder (Sony) with this Point and Shoot camera. To help me better understand and decide, I searched online for some unedited HD clips from this camera, as the ones I found on Youtube and Vimeo stuttered on my MacBook Pro. However, I did find a few which looked gorgeous on my MBP, and the decision was made, with the assistance of Digvijoy, my brother, who spoke highly of the camera as well, and goaded me into finding a deal, and biting on it.

The Camera was delivered this Monday thanks to expedited Amazon Prime Free shipping, and till now, my reaction has been cautious but optimistic (I will blog about the various facets I have noticed, another time). The low light photography that everyone complained about, is definitely a problem. The pictures are underexposed even with the flash enabled. I have however, found a workaround that works beautifully. Video, is rather impressive, and the colors quite vibrant, but more on that later too. One thing I haven’t yet been able to fathom is how to improve the microphone sensitivity on this camera. The audio captured by this device needs to be post-processed to get to an acceptable level. Luckily, since I am editing video on the Mac, I am easily able to tweak the audio with my tools of choice – FCP or iMovie.

And here’s to a lot of New Year cheer and the prospects of greater expansion of our OSX expertise and know-how!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to relegate my main machine (Gigabyte 965P – DS4) to a file server. I decided to go the no-hassles route and installed Windows 7. After painstakingly converting all my drives back to NTFS, I found to my chagrin, the great amount of lag when opening a network share via Samba (SMB) on my Macs. The Finder would scan the remote directory for what seemed like minutes before it showed me the contents of the folders.

That in addition to the messed up permissions on the server machine made it nearly impossible to sync files to and from the iMac/Mac Mini/MacBook Pro. Each time I’d initiate a transfer/sync session, the permissions on the Windows server would cause the sync client to erroneously recognize the entire data set as new, and cause a full copy between machines. Not too serious, but it does get old when the entire network is choked up due to 100GB of data crossing over each night.

And this is when I decided to head back to Mac for my server needs. It is an old adage that if you don’t flex your muscles enough, you lose them. Apparently, the same goes for Hackintosh skills! For the life of me, I couldn’t remember which set of KEXTs I used in my /E/E folder, so I decided to go back to the easier Leopard route. I installed iPC, only to notice the slower network speeds of 32MBps (Gigabit Ethernet). I could get up to 60-70MBps on Snow Leopard – so indeed, I decided to reconvert all my drives to HFS and then start the process of installing Snow Leopard.

I had to refer back to my blog and to the relevant websites to pick up pointers. Luckily I had my DSDT handy and after a couple of trial and errors, I finally had Snow Kitty back up on my Hack. I used Chameleon RC4, and with no need for manual UUID injection, things just worked the way they should. I added a number of flags to my com.apple.boot.plist – mainly to cause a timeout at the boot selection screen, as well as to hide some extra drives that showed up. I also have a new set of KEXTs I am using. These are:-

fakesmc.kext (new one)
LegacyAppleYukon2.kext
LegacyHDA.kext
NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
OpenHaltRestart.kext

It has been a few weeks since then. I am running a 32Bit Kernel and Extensions, and I couldn’t be happier. Chronosync keeps all my Macs up-to-date and runs scheduled backups of all my home movies and iPhoto data.

Indeed, it has been forever since my last update. How better to cap this year, than with a post about what I have been up to, the latter quarter of 2009. Things have been going rather smoothly over the past three months. I finally have fully converted to the Mac side. Our home is now rigged with Macs doling out, and playing back media and resources.

The biggest change so far? The Hackintosh that I worked so diligently upon, is now relegated to a Media/File server. Running 10.6.2, I have rigged my Hackintosh with around 8TB of storage, and run it in a cooled closet 24/7. It is forever on the up, doling out Series/Movies to my other machines.

Speaking of which, I am a proud owner of a brand new spanking iMac. 21.5″ 3.33GHz machine with discrete graphics, 4GB RAM as well as a 1TB HDD, this is one beautiful machine. It has become my main rig, my go-to machine for the day to day surfing. As pleased and satisfied as I am with this week 41 monster, it almost didn’t come to be. But that story is for another day.

In addition to the aforementioned machine, I now also own a Mac Mini which serves as our Media Center. The specs are – 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD of pure win. I installed Plex (an offshoot of XBMC) on this machine, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how seamlessly I can combine all my media to be accessible through one interface. And what a beautiful interface. Till date, I was a traditionalist, preferring to keep my series/movies in proper folders and clicking to view the same using Quicktime or MPlayer OSX Extended. But through Plex, I have it all under control using just the Apple Aluminium Remote. And the interface! Wow, it scrobbles all my series information and downloads Episode Information from various sites, as well as Fanart, Music etc.

I debated long and hard before making the switch to official Apple hardware. Hacks and community support, notwithstanding, it is more of a headache to keep a Hackintosh in perfect working condition. I just couldn’t take second guessing an update, or having my entire installation messed up, because I decided to take the claim of “Vanilla Installation” too seriously. I can’t count the number of hours I have wasted on my Hackintosh, and with an iMac and Mac Mini, as well as a MacBook Pro under my belt, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief and get back to working.

The battle was hard-fought and indeed, I tried to stick by Panic.com’s Unison for as long as I could, but eventually I had to give in, and I proclaim the prominence and sing the virtues of a new Newsgroup Binary Client for every platform – SABnzbd.

If you download Binaries from the NNTP, be it newest Linux distros or what have you, on a regular basis, there is rather a limited field of OSX clients worthy of mention. I rigidly stood by Unison for the longest time. However, it seems that the developers at Panic have lost all interest in updating this App. It has a number of issues on Snow Leopard, and the fact that it doesn’t do any PAR correction or UnRAR operations, makes it a half-client. On Windows, one is set – Newzleecher will do that and more. For the longest time, I searched high and low for a replacement for Newzleecher on OSX. I thought Unison was it, that is, till I came upon SABnzbd.

It does it all, and then some more. I couldn’t begin to enumerate the features of this App, which runs as a server. This means, I can connect to it from my iPhone, or in essence, from anywhere in the world (via Dynamic DNS). I can configure an RSS feed from a multitude of sites, and tell the App to monitor it for anything that shows up, and conforms to a list of keywords I have configured. It will then, automatically download, unpar, unrar AND delete the RAR and PAR files. Oh sweet! I have just started to scratch the surface of what this App is capable of. More to come! Check this App out – best of all, it is Open Source and therefore – FREE!