Chris Hamady

A Breath of Fresh "Air."

by Chris Hamady

A Review of the 11 inch MacBook Air  CLICK FOR IMAGES

After a two year wait, my dreams of an ultra-portable Macintosh notebook have finally been answered. Enter the 11 inch MacBook Air! At just 2.3 pounds, this computer manufactured from a solid piece of aluminum really lives up to its name.

I bought this computer from the Ann Arbor Briarwood Apple store to replace a 15 inch MacBook Pro that I take to and from work, as well as a 13 inch MacBook that I travel with to do presentations. Both of these computers are fantastic in their own right, but the weight of them tends to wear one down after walking for tens of minutes through airports or across long parking lots. 

My day to day needs are fairly complex but shouldn't be hampered even by the specs of the entry level MacBook Air:

Mac OS X 10.6.4

iLife '11

1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processor

2 GB SDRAM

64 GB Flash Storage

NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics with 256MB shared SDRAM

11.6 inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen

Two USB 2.0 ports

One Mini DisplayPort

Headphone jack with support for iPhone-type headphones/mic 

Integrated omnidirectional microphone

I use my laptop day to day to:

Use productivity tools (word processing, presentations, spreadsheets)

Browse the web

Check email

Use Apple Remote Desktop to remotely administer computers and servers

iChat (video conference and IM) with colleagues, friends and family

Do light video editing and simple graphic design

Do podcasting

Watch gobs of streaming video in both H.264 and Flash formats

The first thing I did when arriving at the Apple store was ask the salesperson if he would mind installing Adobe's Flash Player on the display model. He was very courteous and agreed to do so after checking with one of his superiors. Once installed, I loaded up the Blender open source movie, Sintel, in 1080p via YouTube and was blown away by: 1. how quickly the movie began to play 2. how smoothly and flawlessly the MacBook Air delivered this incredible video experience in full screen to the viewer.

I wanted to see if this was just an anomaly of the Apple store having a fast internet connection. I clicked on the icon for iMovie and was flabbergasted to see iMovie instantly open up with a number of video projects loaded into it. My only explanation for the incredible performance of this computer is that the solid state drive feeds the processor in a much more efficient manner than a mechanical hard drive can. I'm really only just now starting to realize the performance bottleneck that we have all been hampered with when using hard drives based upon spinning platters of data and moving read/write heads.

I have yet to do anything on this computer where the experience has felt slower or less productive than when using my 2.66 GHz MacBook Pro but I'm sure that applications and tasks requiring a lot of processing horsepower would be severely limited on a machine based on such a modest processor speed.

So far I've tested and confirmed excellent performance with:

All of the iLife '11 apps

Firefox

Safari

Mail

Netflix/Silverlight

YouTube/Adobe Flash player

Open Office

iChat

FaceTime for Mac

Apple Remote Desktop

Adobe Photoshop

The 11.6 inch screen of this new MacBook is just the right size. When sitting with the computer on my lap in my living room chair, the MacBook Air's screen has a larger viewable perspective than the 52 inch television 6 feet in front of me. Clearly this is "large enough" to work comfortably on. Now that I'm officially "middle-aged," and my vision is beginning to change, I did however, have to bump all of the default font sizes up one or two points in both the OS and my apps. Not a big deal as far as I am concerned. 

The keyboard feels identical to the size and response that one would get from using the Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard. I typed this review on it with ease and did not encounter any difficulties. 

Lastly, since the Air does not have an optical drive, it does not ship with a restore DVD. It includes a tiny USB stick that contains all of the software that ships on the computer should you need to reinstall it. Simply insert the USB stick into one of the two USB ports on the computer, reboot holding down the "C" key on the computer keyboard, and you will soon see the familiar Mac OS X installer. By switching away from the old "remote DVD or CD sharing" manner of reinstallation, Apple might attract more "first time" computer buyers who do not currently have a computer in their home.

If you are in the market for a new ultra portable laptop, do yourself a favor and check out the new 11 inch MacBook Air at an Apple store near you. Try it out and then lift it up off of the counter. You will see for yourself why Apple calls it "Air."

CLICK FOR IMAGES

CH

Good news. My blood pressure is coming down from an all time high. For nearly three years now the administrators of the school that I work for, Toledo Central Catholic High School, have had to deal with little to no cellular signals in our building. Why? Because some tech junkie (me) that loves revolutionary technology (iPhone) talked them into getting the iPhone which necessitated that they switch from Verizon to AT&T. In our building, owners of Verizon handsets consistently have more bars and better coverage than those of us on AT&T. Let's not fixate on the fact that the most revolutionary cellphone/mobile device in the world is hampered with what others have described as "…a marriage of convenience and necessity." See: http://technologizer.com/2009/06/09/atts-network-problems-arent-just-in-big-cities-anymore/

We've all heard that AT&T is working on improving and "fixing" this situation by enhancing their infrastructure, but realistically we can't ignore the reality that since the original iPhone was released in 2007, those of us at CCHS either couldn't make a call, couldn't receive calls, or dropped calls consistently from our AT&T-based iPhones.

While it would have been better for everyone if AT&T had come into Toledo, done an assessment and put up more towers, this would have cost AT&T large sums of money. Like many corporations affected by the recession today, AT&T had to come up with a fix that limited the impact to their bottom line. In an effort to quickly fix situations like this, AT&T has released the MicroCell. See: http://www.att.com/3gmicrocell

The MicroCell is an ingenious device manufactured by Cisco for AT&T. Essentially, a MicroCell is a miniature cell phone tower around 10 inches tall that you can put into your home, workplace, or business. You connect MicroCell to your pre-existing broadband internet service such as a cable modem or DSL router. Once configured and activated under your AT&T phone's account, the owner of the MicroCell can assign up to 9 more AT&T phone numbers as authorized users of the device. It functions nearly identically as any other cell tower though the device is limited to 4 simultaneous calls or 3G data connections. A friend's or another authorized phone's usage of your MicroCell counts against their calling plan, not against the calling plan of the owner of the MicroCell.

Our MicroCell was purchased from a local AT&T store for $149.99. There are no monthly charges or activation fees. Let's talk about setup.

Before physically setting up the MicroCell, AT&T requires that you to log into your current wireless account, and "activate" your MicroCell by providing things like:

*MicroCell serial number
*Location address for e911 service
*Authorized user phone numbers

Unfortunately, I couldn't log into AT&T's website as they were still dealing with the recent iPad 3G hacked account issues. See: http://www.slashgear.com/ipad-3g-email-list-exposed-by-att-hack-1089218/

The next day I was finally able to begin activation (after calling AT&T because the website was STILL down). Once that process is complete, setup should be as easy as connecting your MicroCell to your broadband connection and plug in the included power cable. I say "should be" because we will have more on this issue later.

The first thing you will see is the power icon light up solid. The internet connection light will blink as the MicroCell tries to negotiate its DHCP assigned internet address from your cable modem or router. Once the internet connection is established, the GPS light and 3G light will begin to blink. GPS?

Unless the MicroCell can lock onto a Global Positioning Satellite signal or one of AT&T's cell towers, it will not function. Let's go back to that issue I mentioned above. I'm curious as to what makes AT&T think that GPS signals will penetrate a building when cellular signals will not? If I can't get cellular service into my building, how can the MicroCell lock onto one of AT&T's towers? This was the most maddening thing I have dealt with in some time. The GPS light just blinked on and off, over and over again. The user manual says that one should wait 90 minutes before contacting tech support. So I waited and waited. Then I called AT&T (again) and asked for help:

So here is what AT&T says to do to fix this situation- put the MicroCell by a window. I know what you are thinking. If my MicroCell is by a window, and it covers a diameter of 5000 square feet, nearly half of my coverage will be outdoors!

I literally spent hours on the phone with multiple AT&T technicians trying to get them to hard code the GPS coordinates into their database to remove this restriction. The last technician on this day that I spoke with said that I should leave the MicroCell connected for 24 hours and that he would call me back the next day. He did not call me back the next day.

Two days later I moved the MicroCell into an office with a window, called AT&T back (yet again) as it still wasn't working, filed a case number with another technician and hung up the phone. Thirty seconds later the MicroCell was working! We are now covering a large portion of the front lawn of our school but more importantly, we are now covering most of our administrative offices with a high degree of success.

Approximately 30 minutes later I received the first of three separate phone calls from various technicians at AT&T letting me know that the MicroCell should now be working and that I can call them back if I have any more trouble. Here is a picture of your iPhone once it connects to MicroCell:

I found a number of resources that some of you might find useful if you want to deal with this GPS issue in other ways:

http://forums.wireless.att.com/t5/AT-T-3G-MicroCell/Is-GPS-lock-required-for-MC-to-work/m-p/1943122

http://www.gilsson.com/garmin_gps/antennas/mcx.htm

I want to make one more point that I think needs to be made about my experience with AT&T. Every customer service representative and systems engineer that I spoke with at AT&T was extremely nice, polite, and easy to deal with, but ultimately they were all mired and restricted by an incredibly non-customer-friendly set of horrific rules, regulations, and procedures that create what I feel is the worst customer relations nightmare that I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with in my entire life. In my opinion, AT&T has the potential to be the premiere wireless carrier in the United States, but only if they hire usability experts and design experts to tear apart and rebuild their entire customer experience.

In conclusion, the end result is that the MicroCell is successfully installed, our administrators should be able to consistently use their iPhones inside of our school for the first time in nearly 3 years, and my blood pressure is slowly returning to normal.

CH

The schedule of presentation sessions for the Creativity and Technology Integration in Innovative Education conference is now available at http://catiie.centralcatholic.org.

Please contact me if you would like more information.

CH

This year our school began to stream school events live over the internet. We chose to use http://www.bitgravity.com as their streaming platform is incredibly easy to implement and use, provides exceptional video quality, and it scales extremely well to large numbers of viewers.

The only problem that we were facing was due to the fact that BitGravity is an Adobe Flash-based encoding/delivery platform, we can't stream live to Apple mobile devices like the iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone. This is what we did to solve that issue. First up, the press release:

PRESS RELEASE

"Central Catholic High School is excited to announce that on Wednesday, May 19th at 7:00 PM, this year's commencement event will be streamed live over the internet in two exciting formats. In addition to using our BitGravity content distribution network that provides unbelievable video quality and clarity to our computer audience, we will also be streaming via the Stickam network to Apple iPhones, iPod Touches, and even the new Apple iPad!

If you are interested in watching CCHS's commencement via the internet, computer owners can access the stream right from our homepage at:

www.centralcatholic.org.

Apple iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users can download the free Stickam application from:

http://tinyurl.com/cchs2010

Once you install the Stickam application on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, simply search for centralcatholic on the Stickam viewer app and you will be able to stream our video feed live to any of those mobile devices.

We are very excited to be able to provide multiple commencement streams ensuring that we continue to be, One Connected Community.

Thank you and we hope that you enjoy this important event."

END RELEASE

So now that we had a solution, let's look at what we had to do technically to make that happen. Stickam's platform is free and only requires that you create an account with them in order to stream live. Both BitGravity and Stickam require that a FireWire DV stream be sent to a computer that encodes the stream and uploads it to their content distribution platform. Our problem was that our DataVideo SE-800 video switcher only has one FireWire (DV) output port that we already connect to a MacBook that encodes for BitGravity. The SE-800 also has analog A/V outputs (RCA composite ports).

We purchased a Canopus ADVC-55 Analog to Digital Media Converter. This device takes S-video or composite video in and outputs DV over a FireWire interface. Our plan is to send the SE-800s DV out to the BitGravity encoder MacBook and send the SE-800s analog A/V outputs to the ADVC-55 which will then send DV to a second MacBook encoding and delivering the video stream to http://stickam.com/centralcatholic

So far our tests have been very positive. I'll be uploading some screenshots here comparing each stream as soon as possible. A production workflow is available in PDF format HERE. (For those of you interested, this workflow was created using free mind-mapping software called MindNode for Macintosh.)

Lastly, I even tested the Stickam app for iPhone this past weekend and used it to broadcast live video of my daughter running in her championship track meet. Her grandparents watched the stream live and were amazed that I was only using a cell phone to send them the feed.

So check out the Stickam app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. If your school is currently using a Flash-based video encoder for your commencement, this app may give you the capabilities that you need to reach even more of your alumni.

CH