O'Grady's PowerPage

Tag: 3.5″

  • Bonham’s begins auction of rare Apple Macintosh “Twiggy” prototype with 5.25-inch disk drive

    Bonham’s begins auction of rare Apple Macintosh “Twiggy” prototype with 5.25-inch disk drive

    If you’re looking to bid on an important Apple prototype and a piece of computing history, you’re going to like this.

    A rare prototype of the original Apple Macintosh, complete with a 5.25-inch disk drive instead of the 3.5-inch disk drive the computer shipped with is headed to auction again as part of Bonhams’ upcoming History of Science and Technology collection.

    The prototype, nicknamed the “Twiggy Macintosh” given that it features the same 5.25-inch double-sided floppy disk drive created for the Apple Lisa, was codenamed “Twiggy” during its development. The internal drives were infamously unreliable at the time, and given that the Macintosh shipped without any internal storage, the disk drive became a critical component that could be relied upon.

    In addition to the rarity of the machine, the underside features the model number “#M0001” and helps boost the appeal to potential collectors.

    This specific Twiggy Macintosh originally came from the developers of the word processor MacWrite and was one of two prototypes restored to working order in 2014. Less than five are known to exist, but what makes this prototype especially collectible is that it features model number #M0001 on the underside, making it one of the earliest.

    The prototype originally sold through a Bonhams auction in 2019 for $150,075, setting a record for Macintosh computers at the time. The Bonhams auction house estimates that the #M0001 Twiggy Macintosh could sell for between $80,000 and $120,000, or possibly even more, this time around. Earlier this year, Christie’s sold an Apple Lisa 1 for $882,000.

    The Bonhams auction has gone live and is set to close on October 23 at 12:00 EDT.

    Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

    Via The Verge and Bonhams

  • Little Snitch 3.5 nightly build 4226 released, offers SSH fixes

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    Little Snitch, the popular network utility by Objective Development Software Gmbh, has been updated to version 3.5, its nightly build number 4226, a 22.2 megabyte download adding the following fixes and changes:
    – Little Snitch menubar item no longer occupies space when disabled.

    – Added support for showing iOS App Extension icons.

    – Improved handling of via connections:
    Connection alerts now show a cancel button if either the parent or the via process is terminated.

    Until Quit rules are now valid until both the parent process and via process have terminated.

    OS X Yosemite changed how incoming ssh connections are handled. Incoming connections are no longer handled by sshd directly but instead by launchd. On OS X Yosemite, this version of Little Snitch automatically converts existing rules to ensure incoming SSH connections work as expected.

    – Minor improvements and bug fixes.

    (more…)

  • Carbon Copy Cloner updated to 3.5

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    On Saturday, Carbon Copy Cloner, the shareware favorite for drive cloning operations by Mike Bombich, reached version 3.5. The new version, an 8.6 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:

    – This version of Carbon Copy Cloner requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, or OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and is fully qualified on each of those OSes. We will continue to provide user support and bug fixes for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users on CCC 3.4.x for a while longer.

    – Recovery HD support has been overhauled to better support the concept of “one Recovery HD partition per volume”, rather than one per disk. If you have multiple backup volumes with different OSes (e.g. Lion and Mountain Lion), CCC can associate a Recovery HD with each one and apply the appropriate OS to each Recovery HD partition.

    – We have leveraged code signing within CCC for nearly five years. For GateKeeper compliance on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, however, CCC is now signed with an Apple Developer Certificate.

    – Most of the binaries in the CCC bundle are now 32/64-bit Intel-only binaries.

    – Fixed an issue that appeared in 10.7.4, specific to Macs running Lion with a 64-bit kernel, in which the /Volumes folder on the destination volume would be locked rather than hidden. This resulted in external volumes being unmountable when booted from the backup volume.

    – Performance of deleting scheduled tasks is much improved.

    – CCC previously encountered some performance problems when simultaneously saving very large numbers of scheduled tasks (e.g. > 29). These problems should now be resolved. This is most applicable when updating CCC, or when CCC has been moved and all tasks must be re-saved at the same time.

    – Updated graphics for High Resolution support on the new MacBook Pro (Retina).

    Carbon Copy Cloner 3.5 retails for a US$39.95 shareware registration fee. The application requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.6 or later.

    If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.

  • Adobe releases Lightroom 3.5 update

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    On Thursday, software giant released version 3.5 of its Lightroom (available on the company’s update page) photo editing utility. The Lightroom 3.5 update added the following fixes and changes:

    – Using the arrow keys to modify image adjustment settings lacked responsiveness.

    – A Publish Collection targeting a hard drive on Windows would not behave properly if the designated folder was deleted from hard drive.

    – After editing the capture time in Lightroom, “Date Time Digitized” was incorrectly changed (Only “Date Time Original” should be modified).

    – On Windows computers, Lightroom would interpret the wrong time zone.

    – Changing Lightroom’s date created field to a date prior to 1933 resulted in unexpected values.

    – Lightroom 3.2 introduced preview cache inefficiencies.

    – GPS Altitude metadata was incorrectly excluded from files converted to DNG or exported as DNG files from Lightroom 3.4.1.

    – For non-English language operating systems, folder names in the import dialog may not
    have been translating properly.

    – When exporting images with the “Write Keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy” enabled,
    keywords with “Include on Export” deselected would still have been included on export • Saving metadata to a JPEG file in Lightroom 3.4 could have caused Lightroom to quit
    unexpectedly.

    – A Publish Collection in Lightroom 3.4 set to publish original files would fail to include XMP files for proprietary raw formats.

    – RECONYX images did not open properly in Lightroom 3.4.

    – When applying automatic lens profile correction, Lightroom 3.4 did not automatically
    recognize the following lens: “Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 24mm f/1.4G ED”.

    – Using the plus or minus key to increment Develop Module parameters did not work
    properly on the Mac.

    – The Limit File Size export option was incorrectly including EXIF metadata on export when the Minimize Embedded Metadata option was selected.

    – On Mac OS X 10.7, the Lightroom import dialog did not properly display network volumes.

    – On Windows computers, using Shift + Scroll wheel to adjust the Adjustment Brush feather size, the expected result of the scroll wheel movement was reversed.

    – Lightroom would not provide the correct error message when attempting to delete photos published to Facebook.

    – Lightroom would experience tether capture failures on computers utilizing OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.

    – Develop load time performance was inconsistent.

    Adobe Lightroom 3.5 retails for US$299 and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later to install and run.

  • Seagate announces one terabyte 2.5″ notebook hard drive

    Hard drive manufacturer Seagate on Monday announced the industry’s first 2.5″ enterprise-class drive with one terabyte of capacity, or about 60% more could be stored previously.

    Per Macworld, the next generation Constellation hard drive allows a standard 2U (3.5-in high) storage array to store up to 24TB, and a full server rack to store up to 500TB.

    Seagate’s new drive spins at 7200 rpm, contains four 250GB platters, and has 6Gbit/sec throughput. Like the first generation of the Constellation, the second generation comes with serial SCSI (SAS) connectivity. The updated offering also offers serial ATA (SATA).

    “We’re comparing this model to a 10,000-rpm drive in the enterprise, which today has a maximum capacity of 600GB,” said Barbara Craig, Seagate’s senior product marketing manager. “Its performance is about three times that of notebook drive and it’s twice as reliable.”

    The SAS model of the Constellation.2 is dual ported for resiliency and sports sequential and random read speeds of up to 115MB/sec; the SATA model has 115MB/sec sequential read speeds but boasts 180MB/sec for random reads. Not only did Seagate double the maximum capacity of the Constellation, but it also increased the entry-level drive capacity from 160GB to 250GB.

    The Constellation lags behind Seagate’s 1TB, 3.5″ enterprise-class drive in sequential performance, but blows by it in random reads. The random performance is better on 2.5″ drives because of their smaller disks and denser data.

    Sequential Performance (MB/S) is better on 3.5″ drives because of the larger disk capacity and the higher areal density of the drive, Seagate said.

    Regardless of the performance in comparison to its 3.5″ drive, Seagate pointed out that its new 2.5″ drive offers far greater space and power savings over its larger cousin. For example, the Constellation.2 offers 72 percent power savings while idle over the 3.5-in drive, or 3.85 watts versus 8 watts while idle, the company added.

    Like its predecessor, the Constellation.2 is a self-encrypting drive. The latest model offers an encryption algorithm from AES 128-bit to AES 256-bit.

    Sometime next quarter, Seagate is set to announce a Constellation.2 drive that has passed the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and is sealed with a tamper-resistant label.

    The estimated mean time between failures (MTBF) was also increased with this drive from 1.2 million hours with the previous generation to 1.4 million hours, according to Craig. The Constellation.2 has twice the lifespan of Seagate’s 2.5-in laptop drive, the Momentus.

    Final pricing and availability have yet to be announced for the Constellation.