Blogging from a Genius Bar
I’m sitting at the Genius Bar waiting for Time Machine to restore the Mac Pro from a Drobo. I’m not sure it’s going to happen before the Apple Store closes. My backup is on a first generation USB Drobo which doesn’t exactly do snappy data transfers.
My Genius has been fun. He’s done some work with Leo Laporte during South by Southwest and makes appearances on the NSFW Show.
Over the last week, Apple ran a battery of tests on the Mac Pro and can’t find a problem with the hardware. They wiped the boot drive and the new goal is to start from scratch. I fear this isn’t going to fix the problems I’ve experienced with this Mac since the very beginning. It has (4) 15,000 rpm SAS drives I’ve never been able to write to. I always end up working around the drives that should be AWESOME by writing to Drobo Pro.
Since getting this Mac, which we paid over $10,000 for, it’s been a constant source of frustration. I made Genius Bar appointments, took it in and I’ve been told to change some configuration or another. I believe they replaced the RAID card twice. I get the very heavy and hard to carry Mac Pro back and try to produce a video on it. It fails and I go back to the Drobo Pro work around. Then I’m focused on a project and live with the work around until the frustration becomes too much. I make another Genius Bar appointment and the circle of frustration continues. I even tried emailing Steve Jobs about it, but it was after he was so sick.
My gut says this Mac has a bus problem. Data doesn’t make its way through the machine like it should, but the tests don’t reveal a problem so I’m discouraged. It’s kind of like those stories you hear about a person going to doctors over and over again because they have a problem. They know something is wrong with them, but it isn’t something doctors are able to diagnose.
My goal was to restore the software and attempt to edit video here to try and replicate the problem after they’ve attempted to fix it, but I doubt the restore from Time Machine will finish today. I’ve been here three hours and it’s still Preparing to copy.
This Mac Pro should sing when processing video, but instead it makes me cry. I think it’s a lemon, but I’m not pushy enough to convince the Genius Bar to replace it.
Read MoreCapturing Heat Created by Computing to Heat Homes
The year before GeekBrief.TV ended, Luria and I bought a killer Mac Pro. It has (2) 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 14GB 667 MHz DDR2 RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB Graphics card, (4) 15,000 RPM SAS HDDs with storage capacity of 1.5TB (not counting external Drobo storage). There are two classic Apple Cinema Displays attached. One is 23-inches and the other is 30-inches with a resolution of 2560×1600.
I feel very lucky to work on a computer this powerful, HOWEVER(!!!), every yin has a yang and every blessing seems to have a curse. The curse of all this computational power is that it generates a tremendous amount of heat. In my office as I write this, the window is open, there is no heater, I have a ceiling fan on and a fan blowing air out the window. It’s 43 degrees outside and a toasty 75 degrees in here. Heat generation depends on how hard it’s working, so if I’m processing video, it’s a lot warmer than if I’m just uploading video.
If my system creates this much heat, imagine how much is generated by cloud storage server farms! Researchers at the University of Virginia and Microsoft Research collaborated on a paper suggesting the placement of servers in private homes to generate heat. Data furnaces would consist of one, two or three cabinets filled with servers that connect with the existing circulation fan and ductwork. 110 servers would generate all the heat required to warm a home in the coldest climates. In warmer weather, the heat would be vented outside.
If you’re intrigued by the concept, there’s more information about how it could work to reduce costs and energy usage here. I doubt this will become a reality because of security concernes, but I love the idea. I’d love to find a better way to pump the heat out of this office to a place where someone is cold!
Read MoreHow We’re Doing GeekBrief.TV from Two Locations
I’ve said all I’m going to say about the personal part of what’s happening, but I thought it would be kind of cool to share how we’ve been producing the show from two locations.
Writing the show hasn’t changed much except that Luria writes much more than she did when she was here. It’s been interesting to see the different types of stories she chooses than me. I tend to write about gadgets. She tends to write about tech news and Web services like Google Docs. The Brief we will release today is about stuff we both wanted to cover. I wrote some of today’s show yesterday, some this morning and she wrote some to. Because of Google Docs, it’s always been easy to collaborate on a script.
After the script is done, Luria shoots it herself. She has our lights and the camera and the teleprompter. She shoots in front of a green screen in one take with one fixed shot and then she transfers one HUGE file to me, via FTP. The uncompressed footage is typically 4-8GB per episode. Sometimes it takes five hours, and really, that’s the biggest downside of the setup.
I have all the editing gear. As I download the file, I do preproduction graphics that will be used in the episode. When I have the file, I drag it into Final Cut Pro. It usually takes less than an hour to edit. Occasionally, when there are unusual graphics or video features in a particular episode, it takes longer.
I compress the show into three formats using Sorenson Squeeze. It does an excellent job, but it’s slow (and expensive). Then I upload the four formats to Mevio and post to the GeekBrief.TV Web site.
Except for news that needs to be more timely the workflow has worked well. It’s always fun to trouble shoot our way through new challenges.
Read MoreWhat’s Wrong with the Mac Pro?
I have a lazy Web Question. I’ve been working on this most of the day and I can’t find a solution.
My system disk is almost full according to a warning I received earlier today. It’s a 300GB drive and I don’t store many files on it. It’s primarily applications and system files. iTunes has a handful of songs. iPhoto is empty. All the apps that store files are empty. My Final Cut scratch disk is on a Drobo. There is no reason this drive should be even half full, but if I Get Info on the system disk it says I’m using 297.87GB of 300GB.
I ran OmniDiskSweeper and it only found that I was using 146.71GB of disk space. I ran Filelight and it showed me using 140GBs.
What am I missing? Thanks in advance!
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