iMac 27 Screen Problems

Screen Busted

There has been a lot of concern online about screen problems with the late 2009 27 inch model of iMacs. Gizmodo has covered this extensively. I recently saw an Arlington, Virginia customer’s 27″ iMac that had developed screen problems. I used PiXel Check to change the screen to one color to see the problem more clearly. I took the photograph below which shows the streaks and smudges that have formed in the top right corner of the monitor. (Note: The fading at the bottom of the screen is only a camera effect of photographing the screen.)

imac_27_screen_smudgeResolution, We Think

Happily, Apple dealt with this well. An Apple representative needs to see the screen problem in person, so a phone call to Apple Care doesn’t help. The customer made a reservation with an Apple Genius at the Clarendon, Virginia store. After looking at the screen, the Apple Genius immediately said that the LCD screen would be replaced free-of-charge.

Unfortunately, the Apple store needed to order the part so the iMac will not be fixed for a few days. The customer opted to bring the iMac back when the part arrived so that he could still use it.

The Apple Genius said that they had seen this problem many times before. So check your screen, especially if you have a 27″ iMac.

Some online reports suggest that Apple has fixed the problem. We hope that’s true and that the replacement will work long term.

Learn Guitar or Piano with GarageBand

Music, Easily Learned with a Computer

A recent Washington D.C. client wanted to learn how to play guitar and asked what the best software was for the job. The clear winner here is GarageBand on Mac OSX. It is part of iLife ’09 and included with all new Apple computers. GarageBand has a series of free lessons for guitar and keyboard/piano that go through all the basics (e.g., chords, strumming, etc.). After completing each lesson, you can play along with a song related to what you learned. You can easily repeat sections or slow down the music if you are having trouble playing at the pace of the teacher. If you’re like me an not particularly good, you can save yourself the embarrassment of practicing a chord change twenty times in front of a real teacher.

GarageBand

Learn from the Artist

There are also Artist Lessons, costing $4.99 each to learn a song directly from the artist who wrote it. There are only 20 Artist Lessons currently available, but these include songs from Sting, Rush, Ben Folds, John Legend and many other popular names.

GarageBand Artist Lessons

Create Panoramas with Hugin

Hugin is free open source software for creating panoramas from a series of photos. It is not terribly difficult to use, but you should follow one of the tutorials such as the Lifehacker Hugin tutorial. This explains how to set control points between photos in order for Hugin to know where things line up.

There are downloads for Windows, Mac, and various flavors of Linux. For simplicity, download from the pre-compiled versions.

NY Panorama from Hugin