Maculous > Hardware

I recently bought the HDHomeRun network HDTV tuner made by Silicon Dust. This product has two HDTV tuners onboard, each is capable of receiving QAM unencrypted cable TV high definition channels or ATSC broadcast high definition channels. I have one tuner connected to our local CATV and the other to an indoor HDTV antenna. [...]

Last year we expanded our web operations and invested in a 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro. The machine has performed flawlessly and met all of my expectations up until it was upgraded to Leopard. Apparently Leopard places higher demands on the video card, and as a result the fan on the original ATI X1900 [...]

Macs Are Great! has tested the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card, a truly unique concept that brings 2012 technology to the 2007 holiday shopping season. This ordinary sized SD memory card contains a wi-fi chipset. After using your Mac or PC to configure it with the details of your open, WEP, or WPA protected wireless [...]

Recently I received one of the new aluminum Apple keyboards. It is the full size version with the cluster and it connects via USB. I’ve never used a keyboard in my entire life that I liked more than I like this one. It is fantastic.
I find that I’m able to type faster [...]

For years we have been using SuperDuper to create bootable clone backups of all of our Macs. Each Mac has its own external hard drive reserved for backups, and in the event of a massive failure we can be back up and running quickly. The author of SuperDuper is hard at work on a Leopard [...]

Having felt recently that my Dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac was getting a bit outmoded, I decided to invest in a machine that would be so fast it might outlast any other I could buy, so my attention turned naturally to the 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro, possibly the fastest desktop computer made today. Looking [...]

Sling Media produces a line of Slingbox products that accept video input to a proprietary codec with a UDP video server you can access across your home LAN, or with reduced quality from anywhere, using their Slingplayer client program. Of course you need to open a port in your firewall to access Slingbox remotely. [...]

My lovely new MacBook Pro arrived today, and I took some photos as I unpacked it and used Target Disk Mode to transfer files from my MacBook.
Later I installed Parallels and used Parallels Transporter to import my old Sony VAIO VGN-S170 Windows XP notebook. In the course of just a few hours I have a [...]

This morning I had an email from Apple informing me they had shipped my new MacBook Pro. Among the many new features in this notebook are

LED backlight display for lower power consumption and longer life
Santa Rosa chipset for fast 800MHz frontside bus
A 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
4MB of L2 cache memory shared between [...]

Yesterday Apple announced new versions of their MacBook Pro with a number of improvements. Least important was a slight bump in CPU speeds, but much more significant is the introduction of LED backlights instead of flourescent and a massive speed increase in the front side bus. These new notebooks are going to be much faster, [...]

Apple has apparently listened to some of the criticism of their Apple TV product, and has introduced an upgraded model that includes a 160gb hard drive. This seems very much appropriate since a 40gb hard drive is a bad joke on a device meant to store an entire collection of digital music and TV and [...]

A very good friend of mine who lives in the next state over called me last night wondering why he could not connect to any of my web sites. Right now they are spread across 2 dedicated servers as we wait for a client to finish migrating from our old server to this kick [...]

Recently we wrote about a cordless Skype phone, but here is an even better solution that we setup on an Intel CoreDuo iMac under OS X version 10.4.8. A company named Von-Phone offers a great selection of Skype compatible hardware, and they have a special page that lists Mac Skype stuff. Among the items they [...]

Everybody knows that Skype is a cool way to talk free online, from computer to computer or with Skype Out from your computer to any phone worldwide. Recently I decided to get rid of our second phone line and move towards some sort of a VoIP solution. During regular business hours the main house phone [...]