I’m trying to do this because, for whatever reason, the USB3 cards that are available for the Mac are easily eight times more expensive than the commodity cards that are targeted at PCs. Of course, this cheap Rocketfish card doesn’t come with Mac drivers, so it takes a little finagling to get it working, so try this at your own risk.

First I tried installing the USB3 driver from the MultiBeast “Hackintosh” toolkit, and installed the card. Rebooted my machine, and… grey screen and creepy repeating garbled startup chimes. Uhhh… that’s not good.

Pulled the card out, and it still just hung on the grey screen. Fortunately, I knew which system extensions (a.k.a. “kexts”) it had added, and I was able to Hold down ⌘-S to start in Single-User mode and manually go in and delete them before rebooting again. Back to normal. Whew.

I reinstalled the PCIe card just to make sure it wasn’t the hardware itself, and the Mac Pro booted fine again, so it was off to try a different driver.

What worked: I installed this set of kexts from osx86.net including the DP3 files for Mountain Lion. After a reboot, drives connected to the USB3 card showed up, and seem to be working well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that I’m getting quite as high a transfer speed from the drives as I do when they’re connected to my retina MacBook Pro (with native USB3 ports) — maybe 3/4 the ideal speed — but I’m happy to have a couple of extra USB ports, and a still-impressive speed boost when using USB3 drives.

Of course, since this is using a hacked third-party driver to enable the card, this may very well break with future updates of Mac OS X. Just know what you’re getting into, if you try this.

Update: I may have spoken too soon. It seems the card will only mount an external drive when you start or reboot the machine with the drive already plugged in; I haven’t found a solution that enables hot plugging yet. Still, it does work when you do it at startup, but not exactly convenient.

You can download the entire set of 14 posters as PDFs, suitable for printing up poster-sized.

Thankfully, Squarespace 6 has made it impressively easy to export your site to WordPress, and so here we are. The export/import process certainly isn’t perfect (somewhat due to Squarespace’s oddly malformed XML), so you may see weird formatting or missing images here and there while I clean things up, but for the most part, the migration just worked, and I give my thanks to both the Squarespace and WordPress teams for that little miracle.

Any saved bookmarks or other links from the old site should also still work, thanks to WordPress’ permalink settings and a little bit of mod_rewrite magic.

Does this mean I’ll be posting here more often? I refuse to speculate on such a matter of national security, but as ever, if you want to hear my unfiltered ramblings, I suggest you follow me on Twitter or ADN.

Update:

Had a little hiccup with the RSS feed, but should be fixed now. Let me know if anything else seems broken. Thanks!

In addition to my Netflix disc queue (and my instant one), I would like to beef up on my film history, so I’m looking at going back to the AFI’s 100 Years movie list (and its update) — there have got to be some more available on DVD that weren’t the first time I took a run through it. There’s also the National Film Registry, and Roger Ebert’s Great Movies books.

I suppose there’s also the Criterion Collection to peruse.

What other lists of great movies are out there?

Update: a friend on Twitter suggested “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die”, and I remembered that I also wanted to go through the entire backlog of Cinefex, and go over the movies they’ve covered. Another Twitter follower recommended this intense post about creating your own “best movies” list.

Day 1:

In the morning, we talked to a number of folks from Apple about their new products and the Xsan, our concerns and our plans for the future. The SAN is a very good thing, and I think at this point we’re just deciding the scale of our buy-in. Final Cut Pro’s previous bugs, though, I’m not yet convinced have been totally addressed— as one engineer said, new features sell more boxes than bug fixes.

We also saw Sony’s new HDV camera, the Z1, which I’ll have to say is a pretty impressive piece of kit with a really beautiful image. Unfortunately, I think using it in our postproduction flow would be a nightmare, since it’s a different tape format entirely, and doesn’t match our video size or frame rate either. It would require a ton of processing just to get it to a useable point to work with our DVCproHD main camera.

We had lunch at Quark’s Bar at the Las Vegas Hilton (I had the “Cardassian” fish & chips), and headed back to see some more technical vendors in the South halls, like Leitch’s Videotek division for their tech monitoring solutions (waveform, vectorscopes, etc.). We also saw a nice router from Sierra and an interesting one from Blackmagic Design (infinitely cheaper, but perhaps not up to the task we have in mind). Also talked to AJA, who makes the impressive Kona2 card that will let us do High Definition SDI and monitor it properly in each room.

Star Trek closed for the evening, back to quarks for after-convention, then drinks at Nine Fine Irishmen
No Gambling
Drinks: Romulan Ale, Liquid Latinum at Quarks, (2) Dry Blackthorn ciders, a Guinness and Two shots of ______ whiskey at 9FI.
Running Total: Up $15.75

Day 2:

Breakfast at the buffet, went to North hall, saw a bunch of stuff, Panasonic (plastic camera!), JVC, maps, etc. Finally broke for “lunch” at 5pm, went to the Klingon Experience, then back to the hotel, was going to go for steak, but instead went to japanese place _____, amazing chef’s sampler. Boss & I played craps while our younger colleague lost at blackjack. As I left the craps table with $507 (from $200), wandered around, and had to play “just a little more (which is usually my downfall). I stuck a hundred in a $5 slot machine, and came out another $120 richer.

Drinks: Sake at the japanese place, a sip of a bloody mary at the craps table

Running total: Up 442.50

*the japanese place in question was Shibuya, in the basement of the MGM Grand.

That’s it. Just wanted to note that. If you want to be added or removed (or have suggestions for same), get in touch.

In the meantime, I’ve found that the old Scanalizer (model number SCSA4601EU) is actually a re-branded PlusTek OpticSlim M12, which does have drivers that work fine on Mountain Lion.

I had tried installing that driver on top of the Neat software, and it still didn’t work, but I uninstalled everything, installed tthe PlusTek driver first, then re-installed the Neat 4 software on top of that, and it seems to be working again. Whew!

So, I think I’m using it that way, for now. However, I’m transitioning to MoneyWell for my personal finances, so that means that I can now also just scan ‘em with the PlusTek software, and then use MoneyWell to keep my receipt images. Only trouble is, Moneywell doesn’t offer one-step scanning, or OCR of the receipts, so… I might be stuck with both.

If you’re not familiar with 3D-printers, you could look up the dry Wikipedia article that looks kind of boring and technical, or your could check out this sweet time lapse of a Yoda bust being printed in green plastic. Basically, it lays down very thin (less than 1/3 of a millimeter) layers of melted plastic until they build up to something.

I built the printer from a kit that I got about a year ago, with all of the metal rods and motors and a ridiculous number of nuts and bolts. After two weeks of building the printer, several months calibrating it, forgetting about it, getting too busy with work, fiddling with it some more, printing out cute (and functional!) tiny alligator clips, jamming the print head, and fiddling with it just a bit more, I’m finally getting it close to useful.

As you can tell, 3D printing is probably not yet ready for the average home user. But if you like to fiddle with mechanics, robotics and electronics, it can be a lot of fun. The finish on my prints isn’t quite perfect yet (still needs more fiddling), but it’s getting pretty close.

So, this holiday season, I went to Thingiverse, which houses tons of free models that other people have created and uploaded for you to print with your printer, downloaded a snowflake ornament, and modified it a little bit. And then the printer went to work.

(Warning, this video, though a time lapse representing over two hours of printing, is still 7 minutes long and kinda boring, but if you want to see how your snowflake was made, this is it! I recommend watching a little bit at the beginning, and then skipping to about the 6-minute mark.)

And then I stuck it in an envelope with a link, and maybe you typed that link into your browser, and here we are. Enjoy!