Alessia writes:

How can i check the speed of the hard disk drive in my mac­book pro. Im not sure if its 5400 rpm or 7200rpm. I couldn’t find it on the sec­tion “about this mac”

You’re not alone in try­ing to find this. It would be very nice if Apple could some­how pub­lish the speed of your drive in the ‘About This Mac’ specs on your com­puter. Here’s one way to fig­ure it out though:

In the ‘About This Mac’ sec­tion, which it sounds like you’ve found but for those fol­low­ing at home you can find it by click­ing on the Apple logo in the top left cor­ner of your screen:

… and then click­ing on ‘More Info’

Look under the Serial-ATA sec­tion of the ‘Hard­ware’ area. You should see a brand and model of your hard drive listed. In my case, it’s a Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00:

Take that model num­ber — again, mine is HTS541612J9SA00 but yours could be dif­fer­ent brand/model num­ber — and throw it into Google:

Enter your search terms Sub­mit search form

In my case I ended up at Hitachi’s web site (http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k160/5k160.htm) and could see that my drive was listed in a series that has a 5400rpm spin speed.

Once you see all the rest of the specs there, you could prob­a­bly fig­ure out from your orig­i­nal part num­ber what the seem­ingly ran­dom numbers/letters mean.

HTS541612J9SA00

For my Mac­Book Pro’s drive, the “54” is prob­a­bly refer­ring to the speed (5400rpm), the 12 is short for 120GB and “SA” stands for Ser­ial ATA.

Your mileage may vary as it all depends on which man­u­fac­turer and model of hard drive Apple decided to use in your lap­top and whether or not that par­tic­u­lar man­u­fac­turer main­tains an online list of their hard drives.

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The camp I work at just sub­scribed to broad­band inter­net (bring­ing us out of the dial-up ages) and we decided it’d be a nice ges­ture to hook up our site manager’s house with inter­net too.

Prob­lem: the camp manager’s office in his house and our new inter­net access point are ~100 metres, 5 walls, and a few groves of trees apart.

Solu­tion: cre­ate mesh net­work using 2 Linksys WRT-300n routers ($100 each) and Sveasoft’s “Tal­is­man” firmware ($25/year sub­scrip­tion)

It took a lit­tle wan­gling (had to return one of the routers because it didn’t work prop­erly), but I got it work­ing. Plus, if I ever want to boost the sig­nal… say… to my cabin, all I have to do is buy another router, install the firmware, place it between the access point and my cabin and I’ll have inter­net access.

I love it when things just work! If any­one out there needs help mak­ing their own extended net­work using Tal­is­man, I am happy to help. Let me know in the comments!

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Cor­win says:

I’m work­ing in Final Cut Pro, but the video in the viewer looks very dis­torted… there’s lines all through it, and it looks inter­laced. I just switched com­put­ers from an eMac to the new iMac. I don’t get it, I even have the can­vas size at 100%, so it should be run­ning at full qual­ity. Will it look like this in the fin­ished prod­uct? How do I fix this?

Short answer: your fin­ished prod­uct will be just fine.

Long answer: Most video you tape nowa­days is inter­laced. The LCD dis­play on your iMac is not inter­laced. That’s why your video looks like junk: it’s flash­ing a bunch of lines on the screen, but that’s not how your dis­play works. AH!

So how do you fix this? To work around this prob­lem, you could use a dein­ter­lace fil­ter on your whole video, but then it’d look like junk on inter­laced dis­plays (old tube TV’s and com­puter mon­i­tors). Instead, you have to trick Final Cut Pro into dein­ter­lac­ing your video only when it’s in your can­vas: just resize the win­dow slightly and select “Fit to Win­dow” in your can­vas’ view options. As long as you’re not view­ing the video at 100%, it’ll look just great. Yeah, I know. Silly prob­lem!

Oh, and if you use this trick, your fin­ished prod­uct will still be inter­laced when you export it. And in most sit­u­a­tions, that’s a good thing.

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Alexa writes:

I down­loaded some videos from youtube and they are cur­rently in flv for­mat. I’d like to put them into a pow­er­point, and I think I need to con­vert them to mpeg, or some­thing. But I don’t know how to do that or what pro­gram to use.
Thanks!

I get asked this ques­tion all the time. YouTube is an amaz­ing resource until you need to use one if its videos offline or in a presentation.

And that’s where vixy.net saves the day.

Vixy con­verts flash videos to a few dif­fer­ent for­mats, includ­ing .avi and .mov. It’s super straight for­ward to use:

1. Copy the URL (web address) of the page where the orig­i­nal video is
2. Paste the URL into the appro­pri­ate field, pick a for­mat, then hit start.
When Vixy is fin­ished con­vert­ing the file, it will allow you to down­load the video!
A few quick tips:
–I rec­om­mend using .avi if you’re a Win­dows user and .mov if you’re a Mac user.
–Don’t expect per­fec­tion; YouTube’s videos aren’t that high of qual­ity to start with, and you will lose more qual­ity when you con­vert the video to a down­load­able form.
–This works with any flash site that uses stream­ing flash videos, like Daily Motion, Meta­Cafe, etc.
–Depend­ing on the length of your video and how busy Vixy is, con­ver­sion and down­loads may take a while.
–This won’t work if you copy the address of a page where the video is embed­ded. You have to go straight from the source!
–Vixy can get a lit­tle glitchy; if at first you don’t suc­ceed, try, try again.

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