DisplayPort vs DVI (HDMI)

Apple announced today that the new Mac Mini has been launched - and wonderful news it is because the idiosyncratic little Mac lives on as the ideal home media server.

But what is really wonderful, and very interesting, is that the brand-new Mini uses the old school mini-DVI port rather than Apple's latest display-port adaptor. This is a huge boon for media centre use as a DVI to HDMI adaptor is a simple (and cheap) accessory - in fact DVI-D (the digital derivative and the only one used for ages) and HDMI are identical standards except the former will not carry audio. But that is taken care of by the optical 3.5mm jack straight to the surround amp. And as we all know there ain't an HD TV sold without an HDMI input - whatever Apple says it is the de facto high def standard at the moment, and will be for quite a while (because consumers are in the middle of a compelling TV upgrade cycle right now, and won't be in 2 years time).

So all good - a triumph of practical necessity and clever thinking. But why all of Steve J's posturing about DisplayPort on the MacBooks: "As you know, HDMI is limited in the resolution it can drive." and going on to state that "Steve Jobs says that Apple will be building the Mini Display Port into every product the company makes" (from this Ars Technica article).

Can it be this decision was reversed because Steve is not at the helm?? NO, absolutely not - this was my hateful little shot at tabloid/internet forum, baseless, tittle tattle. But it's so easy to write, eh?

Potentially a break-through - Coyote Speed Camera GPS Device

I am a man who likes to drive in a spirited (yet safe) fashion and I have taken extended courses to further my knowledge of proceeding as "rapidly and safely as conditions allow" (in the words of John Lyon, the instructor who offers the courses). The thinking being that if you love tennis or golf you probably will get some coaching to improve - so why not do the same if you love driving?

And although track days are all well and good, one spends most of one's time on the public roads and so it is here that improving on-road driving skills matters most. And if this is the environment in which you are operating then you will encounter the dreaded GATSO and its bastard siblings the Truvelo and SPECS cameras.

Ever since the UK became populated with these money-generating nasties (which, if you check the data on road deaths, have mushroomed while there has been no dramatic reduction in fatalities - in fact, in-car safety devices such as airbags and better crumple zones have done far, far more) the business of detecting them and alerting drivers to them has been big business.

Initially the solution lay with radar detectors but this ran into problems with the 1949 Wireless and Telegraphy Act (which was then challenged in the Queens Bench Divisional Court in 1998) as being unlawful. In real-world terms these also became less effective as a result of the decline in use of "hair-dryers" or hand-held police operated mobile radar guns which emit a high power blast of radar that can be detected for miles around. These were replaced by laser units and GATSOs both of which are far more difficult to spot with radar/laser detectors. Not least because laser doesn't spread much (of course!) and so detection by any vehicle other than the target is very difficult and then because GATSOs lay down a small, controlled & constant radar box which is very neat and also hard to detect until you are almost on it. And it faces away from the driver, whereas the old radar guns pointed towards on-coming motorists so helping to warn those further away but approaching.

So the technology of detection and alerting the driver changed to GPS units. Perhaps the most delicious thing about these is that they hoisted the restrictive road safety lobby by the own petard: by using the lobby's defense that cameras were only placed at accident black-spots the makers of GPS devices were able to say that by providing advanced warning of the black-spots they were only furthering a road-safety agenda. The fact that they happened to be warning of a camera site was a by-product, honestly officer.

These reached their great sophistication with units like the TomTom which converge satnav, camera warning and even hands-free telephony in one neat bundle. But of course some cars have on-board nav and so there remains the need for small, neat & discrete units just for cameras.

And there is the rub - because the efficacy of these systems entirely relates to the comprehensiveness & freshness of their camera database. Most companies rely on motorists to press a button when they pass a camera that is not on the system and in doing so the unit stores the GPS co-ordinates, which then get uploaded the next time the unit syncs. However, almost all systems then submit these new locations to be verified by head office before they make it onto the main map. So it can be weeks or months before the users of the database get new cameras onto their 'radar', as it were.

But Coyote has a new approach - by building a GSM unit into each module it updates constantly, every 10 minutes, with other Coyote users via GPRS mobile data. And when you store a new location it is immediately sent out to every Coyote unit in the country. So not only do new cameras get logged instantly but it even starts logging the sites of mobile vans and other "temporary" cameras which totally fall through the net of other databases' verification systems.

The system began in France (where it has more than 6,000 users) and is just coming over here - my unit has arrived yesterday and I am very much looking forward to testing the claims of comprehensive camera coverage (phew) but in theory at least this seems to be a breakthrough.

Oh, and the unit is deliciously neat, slickly designed and has a rechargeable battery so it doesn't clutter up your dash with ugly wires.

Updates to come...

Gmail - it's very good, but still

Much celebration after Gmail announces offline access via Gears. But this is so well put.

Tell it like it is

I have just received an email including an "amazing offer" on subwoofers which ended as follows:

"Take advantage of a great offer to increase your profits in this the season of St. Commerce!"

Rightee ho then...

A clever man wrong-footed

The chaps at the firm I used to work at had a lot of respect for this man. His tale of woe is a sobering one and goes to show just how tough it is to be a value investor with a reputation for contrarian genius.

Deliciously Geeky

Some interesting facts about the speeds of componentry within your computer - or "Why do I still have to wait while my computer does stuff..."

Apple's Rev A issues apparent again

My much-loved and well used 17" MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz from 2007 died inexplicably and completely a few weeks ago. Powering on produced an audible hard-disk spin-up but nothing else: no ability to reset PRAM, certainly no single-user mode, no firewire target disk mode, nothing.

My first reaction was panic - and I legged it down to the Apple Store to grab a replacement machine and dropped my old one back with Apple. It turned out to be the NVIDIA logic board issues that plagued a run of 2.4Ghz 17" Pros and they repaired it for free... which was great as I noticed from their receipt that the part would have set me back £675 or so!

But, and apologies for the long-winded intro, my issues really started with the new 15.4" MacBook Pro I bought to tide me over... It was the new model that had been out for a week and so I was most definitely back in 'Rev A' territory.

First, there was the intermittent trackpad click issue which they resolved with a firmware update. (It manifested itself for me in not responding to clicks or taps on occasion.)

Then there was the lack of RAM (I couldn't buy the 2.56Ghz model with 4GB of RAM because the Apple Store didn't have any) so I purchased 2 x 2GB from Crucial via MacWarehouse. This I fitted and immediately started getting full computer freezes. The entire UI would freeze and I would be unable to do anything but hold down the power and force a reboot (not ideal when in the middle of an AutoCAD plan in VMWare). I knew this must be a RAM related issue so I suspected dodgy sticks and ran the comprehensive (and mammothly slow) MemTest. All came out fine and indeed the RAM is not giving problems in any other way. But the freezes continue.

Now for the really weird bit - I have never had one of these when the machine is in my office. Yet the moment I start work at home, on the kitchen table, I will get one within minutes... Is it in some way prompted by something on my home network?

There is plenty of talk on this Apple Discussion thread about heat but I really feel that this is not the right line of investigation as I have used it on stands, for hours at work under heavy loads and in all manner of configs hot and cold with no freezes occurring.

And in the 2 weeks that I used the machine without the new RAM I never had a freeze so I am pretty sure the RAM is the root cause but such erratic symptoms are odd.

So Rev A issue 3: I use a 24" Apple display at work connected to my MacBook Pro as a secondary monitor (an ancient one using the DVI to ADC converter) via the new Display Port and if the Mac displays go to sleep when you wake them the external display will be covered with shimmering, coloured lines and it has to be disconnected and reconnected to restore it. This is quite frustrating to say the least because windows have to squeeze back onto the single monitor and then fan out onto 2 again and they don't always get back to the same places so you have to do the dance of the toolbars and palettes.

So those are 3 fairly key issues that I believe Apple should really not have allowed to ship. There are many people new to Apple buying these units and they will be very disappointed - and in many cases they will wonder why Apple has such a reputation for stability in contrast to Windows.