Graham Hancock

This weekend I stripped out all of the hard drives from my old Early 2006 Mac Pro and replaced the boot drive with an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD boot drive and a 3TB Raid 0 to use as a scratch disk for video. The resulting speed boost was excellent!

Performance (Read/Write) of the SSD Boot Drive:

Performance (Read/Write) of the 3TB Raid0:

As a matter of fact, after these improvements the Mac Pro now scores almost as high as my brand new 27″ Core i5 iMac on XBench tests!

Red: 2010 iMac, Blue: 2006 Mac Pro with SSD boot drive

Just received my DodoCase iPad case this morning. I ordered it over a month ago. It’s a hand made iPad case made by an old book binding company here in San Francisco. Definitely the best iPad case you can get.

Check out the video review that Kevin Rose & I shot a few months ago:

I’ll admit, I was pretty impressed when I heard the EVO 4G could record 720p HD video. It was one of the most touted features of the 4G. However, after seeing these comparison videos I’m surprised that HTC can even get away with advertising that the EVO 4G records HD video. Watch these two comparison videos recorded simultaneously on an EVO 4G and an iPhone 4 by Chris Pirillo:

Watch a few seconds of the iPhone 4 Video:

Now, watch the same video as recorded by an HTC EVO 4G:

There is just NO comparison here. The quality of video and audio being captured by EVO 4G is awful, and could be bested by even the oldest Flip camera out there. The bitrate/compression is very low, and it seems like the frame rate is capped at below 25 fps, possibly even 15 fps. That is NOT HD video. The “resolution” may be 1280×720, but that is absolutely not high-definition quality video.

Of course, by comparison iPhone 4′s “HD” capability looks fine, but i’m noticing quite a bit of CMOS “jelly” motion when there’s some side-to-side movement going on in the frame. Not perfect, but it seems to minimize it more than most Flip devices. Another observation is that the iPhone 4 camera seems to handle very well in low-light, which is encouraging.

Over the past few months I’ve grown very tired of my TivoHD running out of space, not recording scheduled programs, deleting things too early, etc. So I decided it was time to upgrade. The drive that came with my Tivo HD box was 160GB and would only hold a pathetic 20 hours of HD content. So I’ve decided to bump the drive to 1TB, which should get me around 160 HD hours! Here’s what the inside of a Tivo HD box looks like (with the new drive installed).

Pretty simple to figure out. I was able to clone the old 160GB drive and keep all of my recordings and settings on the new drive. Worked like a charm:

The resources I used to do this upgrade can be found at the TiVo Community.

The drive I’m using is a cheap 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black. Currently $99 at Best Buy.

Since I’ve removed myself from the world of Windows I’ve gained a new perspective. While I may not enjoy Microsoft’s flagship operating system, there are a few things that Microsoft does extremely well and that’s gaming consoles and optical mice. The focus of this review is Microsoft’s new Arc Mouse for users on the go. A full size optical mouse that folds in half to 60% of its size for portability. Short review: I am pleased. Make the jump for the long review.

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