From: Mark Gaffney <markgaffney@mac.com>

Date: October 22, 2008 5:32:20 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Mac Mini is gone


Hi Milton, I was looking at another colour camera with my prospective purchase of the Flea 2 so LRGB images won`t affect me at the moment.(that`s right isn`t it?) When I set up my new C9.25 XLT OTA & took my first movies of the moon I found I had the camera orientation wrong Left-Right. That`s OK as far as stills are concerned but reversing the movies is another matter! I hope to be back home at Tullymorgan in a couple of days & will start setting up the scope again. I had a 2 degree error with Iterative Polar Alignment before leaving which is about right I think as Sigma Octans is about 2 degrees from the pole. As far as Firewire I notice the i-Macs have a FW 400 & a FW 800 port.  I have a 10 metre FW cable & a 3 port Unibrain repeater now & with a couple of shorter cables I should be right for a guiding camera too.  This might be the shot for me (if the Mac Mini isn`t replaced) unless I opt for the portability of the polycarbonate 13" Macbook eventually. The higher level Pros have FW 800 at least & if you have plenty of money the top level job has both ports I think!? I understand your worries as to future decisions at Apple though. Mark.

On 23/10/2008, at 8:56 AM, Milton Aupperle wrote:

Hi Mark;


On 22-Oct-08, at 3:24 PM, Mark Gaffney wrote:

Hi there Milton, Considering my G4 Mac mini is still going OK I might  

go with the Flea 2 anyway & see what Apple comes up with...? Mark.


It's a crap shoot as to if they will replace it or not (I'm sure it hurts sales of their Apple TV boxes too). However it's loss means one less Mac that has FireWire.


Steve said he doesn't want to produce "Cheap Macs" in the conference call yesterday and he has also said "all you need is USB" too. Just remember this isn't "Apple Computers" it's "Steve Jobs Computers" and Steve does whatever he wants too.


So the next lowest offering with FireWire is the White MacBook or if you can find one of the remaining FireWire Macbooks/MacBook Pros listed on Amazon and other retail Mac sites. They won't last long from what I hear.


On an Astro IIDC note, I have been reworking the rotation code in the LRGB Image Importing Alignment code (with Darryl Robertson's Help), which really didn't work like I wanted it too. So if you need to rotate LRGB images while assembling them, it doesn't work real well yet. Scaling works fine though.


HTH..


Milton J. Aupperle