Author Archives: Robert Ryans

Flaming Thunderbolts!

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Stay on this channel…

A Zeroid

A Zeroid. Image via Flickr – click for link.

Sadly this is not a post about the classic TV show Terrahawks, but instead about Thunderbolt docks and expansion devices.

Thunderbolt (TB) is an Intel/Apple standard for connecting high-speed peripherals to computers. With modern Macs having limited numbers of expansion options TB is quite important. While there are all sorts of things one can plug in via Thunderbolt, I’ll talk about the most commonly used option around QUB, which is the laptop docking station.

MacBook Airs are wonderful machines but when at your desk you’ll generally want to use a larger LCD, wired network connection, and external backup drives. Without a docking station you’re probably going to have to use your TB/Mini-DisplayPort socket to plug into an external monitor, and then run hard drives and even ethernet over USB. Rapidly you run out of USB ports, so you need a USB hub, and it all gets very tedious. Apple’s USB ethernet adapter only works at 100MBit, and while that’s better than many WiFi connections it’s still well down on the standard 1GBit connections we have on campus.

It’s technically possible to connect gigabit ethernet adapters and even DisplayLink video devices over USB3, on the Mac at least I emphatically discourage it. I have yet to find a USB3 ethernet adapter which worked well on the Mac, and Displaylink leaves a lot to be desired; under Mavericks it doesn’t really work at all. So, if you want significant expansion on your MacBook, TB is the only game in town.

There are now four ‘docking’ products on the market:

  1. Apple Thunderbolt Display
  2. Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock
  3. Matrox DS-1 Thunderbolt Docking Station
  4. Caldigit Thunderbolt Station

Here’s my opinions on each of them, based on having used each at various times. Note that all of them will require you to purchase a TB cable (around £25 for a 0.5m one) to connect to the dock, apart from the Apple TB Display which has one built-in.

1. Apple Thunderbolt Display

This was the first TB docking option, and comprises a 27″ 2560×1440 display, MagSafe charger, speakers, FaceTime HD camera, FireWire 800, 3xUSB2 ports, gigabit ethernet, and a downstream TB port for adding additional devices. It costs about £750 for education customers.

Coming from Apple it’s a well built bit of kit, and if you need an external display and don’t mind glossy glass fronts then it’s a good choice. It has a few downsides though: obviously if you’re not in the market for a new LCD, or don’t like glossy glass, you’re not going to be happy; it only has USB2 ports; and adding an extra display is problematic – the Apple solution is to add another TB display, and plugging one of the standard MiniDP-DVI adapters into the downstream TB port won’t work (though from personal experience I know that adding a DS-1 to the downstream port will allow you to add another LCD).

In summary, elegant and well built, but may be a little limiting in some cases. Not the worst option though as the cost of a third party dock plus similar LCD will not be that different.

2. Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock

The first third party dock on the market, the Belkin offers a downstream TB port, gigabit ethernet; FireWire 800; 3.5mm headphone and microphone sockets; and 3xUSB3 ports though these are only capable of 2.5Gbps transfers instead of the full 5Gbps USB3 is capable of. List price is £249.

This works well, though the lack of an onboard display connector means you will end up using the downstream TB port with a mini-DP to DVI adapter, making daisy-chaining additional TB devices difficult. No drivers are required (at least with OS X 10.8 onwards). Still, it’s expensive compared to more recent options and you’ll still need to obtain a display adapter. Reviews suggest you can use the Apple Dual-link DVI adapter kit to add high-resolution 27″ displays though.

3. Matrox DS-1 Thunderbolt Docking Station

This was the second third party dock, and comes in two variants – one with a DVI port and the other with an HDMI port. Both variants feature 1xUSB3 port; 2xUSB2; gigabit ethernet; plus 3.5mm headphone and microphone sockets. It costs around £200.

This is slightly cheaper than the Belkin, but lacks any downstream TB port, and only has one USB3 port – reviews suggest the throughput on this is not that of a full 5Gbps port though it’s still better than USB2. The maximum supported resolution from either the HDMI or DVI ports is 1920×1200, which means high-res 27″ displays are out.

So this is a compromised product – I’ve used one to add another LCD to an Apple TB Display, and as that was a 24″ unit the resolution limits were not a problem. But if you need a larger display and more USB3 you’re going to look elsewhere.

4. Caldigit Thunderbolt Station

The newest entrant to the market, retailing at £149, offers 3xUSB3 ports (full-speed with UASP mode for faster disk access, and capable of charging/powering USB devices); gigabit ethernet; downstream TB; 3.5mm microphone and headphone sockets; and HDMI capable of supporting resolutions up to 2560 x 1600. A network driver is necessary for OS X 10.8, but support is built in with Mavericks. The downstream TB port also supports video adapters and you can connect various combinations of displays depending on what your Mac supports.

I’m very impressed with this product so far – the price is good, the unit has excellent capabilities, and seems to work as described. I’ve ordered several for various people already. At this price you’re not so far away from the cost of a good powered USB3 hub, ethernet and display adapters.

And the winner is…

At the moment I’d go with either the Apple TB Display or the Caldigit TB Station. If you don’t need/like the Apple LCD then the Caldigit is an excellent solution, and I expect to be ordering them as my default docking solution for most MacBook Air users in the future.

Just to be clear, this is my personal opinion based on experience with each unit. It’s not an official QUB recommendation!

 

 

Bootable Mavericks disks

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After downloading the Mavericks installer from the AppStore you may wish to make a backup copy of the ‘Install OS X Mavericks’ app since it will normally be deleted after a successful install. If you’re going to install to multiple machines then you can simply copy the Installer app to the other computers, saving yourself a few GB download per Mac.

For future use you may wish to make a bootable USB drive – here’s how:

Sadly Carbon Copy Cloner no longer has a simple button to do this, but DiskMaker X does.

Note that as Apple updates Mavericks the installer App will be updated too; you can re-download it by visiting the ‘Purchases’ tab in the App Store, then re-make the USB drive.

Posted in Mac

Happy Halloween

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Here’s a little Halloween computer story which is quite possibly real and most definitely concerning.

Add in another story involving Adobe incompetence.

I have a pretty poor opinion of Adobe software. Flash and Reader are two of the worst security problems on any computer, and my honest advice is not to install either.

These days there are few things one really needs Reader for. Macs, Windows 8, and Linux systems all come with perfectly competent PDF reader applications; under Windows 7 there is the well regarded Foxit reader which is free and has a better track record. The only times I have ever needed Adobe Reader are

  • reading encrypted PDFs used for inter-library loans
  • printing some Royal Mail prepaid mail envelopes

so I tend to think that most people are fine without it. If you must install Reader, make sure it’s not the default PDF reader and stop it from installing its web browser plugin. On the Mac this is a tedious manual process – you have to manually remove it from /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ after each update. Another reason to avoid it!

Flash is known as a security disaster, and hopefully its failure on mobile devices will lead to its eventual demise. However for the moment it’s still out there and at times necessary. My preferred solution for some time was to use Safari as my default browser, with no Flash plugin installed, and have Google Chrome as the backup browser. Chrome has its own internal Flash install which is sandboxed and auto-updates. Even then I would use a plugin blocking extension so that Flash objects would only work when clicked on.

Newer versions of Safari on the Mac now have more granular control on which websites can use plugins, so combined with the ClickToPlugin Safari extension a Safari-only option is more tolerable. Under OS X Mavericks Safari also sandboxes Flash, which will help, but is not a universal panacea as sandboxes can be broken too.

In case you’re wondering why I’m so paranoid, a common infection vector for malware is the insertion of exploit code in either Flash objects, or even tiny PDFs, embedded in web pages. These can affect perfectly legitimate sites too – either the site is hacked, or a third party advert or content service the site uses is compromised; either way you could end up with these malicious objects running when you visit a web page. Hence it’s best to minimise the attack ‘surface area’ as much as possible!

In a future post I’ll talk about some more security matters, including passwords. Meanwhile, as they used to say on Hill Street, Let’s be careful out there.

Newer is not always better

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My most recent excitement has come from the most recent Apple software updates:

  • Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks
  • iOS 7
  • iWork – specifically Keynote 6

I’ve not had much time with Mavericks as yet. I’ve installed it on a test laptop and it seems about par for the course for a .0 release of OS X – interesting but with some rough edges. I give it a week or so until 10.9.1 pops out. I’ve not seen anything mindblowingly awesome so far, but have found a few glitches. I’m keeping track of these on my wiki page.

For those interested, Ars Technica has a thorough analysis of Mavericks.

I installed iOS 7 on my work iPad Mini last week. It seems mostly OK though I’m not enamoured with the new look icons. The recent update to 7.03 means that one can remove not only the parallax effect, but also remove the folder closing animations. Thankfully they didn’t make me feel ill, but I did think they were a waste of time. I have not yet been inclined to install on my iPhone or home iPad but I’ll probably come around in time.

A big part of the Mavericks launch was the announcement that iWork will be free with all new Macs and iOS devices. I’m a big fan of Keynote, the presentations app in iWork, and use it instead of Powerpoint as it does things that make Powerpoint fall over in a sobbing heap. Sadly the update removes quite a few features in the name of parity between the Mac and iOS releases. One I use quite a bit is the option to embed a web page in a presentation which can be dynamically updated when the slide shows. Apple removed this from the main user interface a while ago, but existing embeds worked just fine and could be edited & copied to new presentations. Sadly Keynote 6 opens the presentation, converts the website with a static image, and then autosaves the file to the new Keynote 6 format overwriting your old file unless you cancel the import. All in all quite vexing.

This has set me thinking about how to replace that functionality. PowerPoint doesn’t do it either – you can link to a site, but that’s no use on a display board. So I’m looking at various HTML5 display frameworks which let you write a presentation with HTML and CSS. Several look impressive, so over the next few weeks I’ll be trying out a few, such as

After all, if most of the content you’re displaying is text, images, and web pages, what’s better than HTML to wrap it all up?

Why am I doing this?

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I’ll start my blog off with a short explanation of what I’m hoping to achieve with this. Fame, fortune, and a cushy writing job would be nice, but seem unlikely.

I’m one of the computer support officers in the School of Mathematics and Physics. My primary responsibilities involve the Astrophysics Research Centre and School/Physics clerical staff, though I get to work with colleagues from all over Physics. I’m also involved with computer-related purchasing, do some research at times (Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in), and even outreach talks about the science of Science Fiction. Day to day I use Macs and Linux systems and I hope that through this blog I can spread various bits of useful information to colleagues in the School and beyond.

This is an experiment. It may work, it may not. Hopefully I learn something along the way.

To those interested, the background image is a snap of the front of my first Mac, a Classic (later upgraded to a Classic II), taken with my iPhone. How we’ve moved on…