Shooting fish

Core Image Fun House is a lot of fun, installed with Xcode from the Leopard CD. The Edit menu's a bit obscure though..

Not on the Radar

Radar is Apple's bug tracking system, but you have to be a paid member of ADC to access it, and I haven't made that plunge.. yet. If I did, I could report this error which is consistently reproducible, updating Camino from a disk image as a non-admin user: first the update fails to request my credentials to authenticate the update (the copy fails) then as a bonus the existing version fails to run until the copy failure sheet is dismissed.

Edit: seems to be fixed in 10.5.1

Time Machine

In order to make Time Machine complete a backup on my G4 before the heat-death of the universe I had to disable Spotlight indexing on both of my drives as well as the drive I am backing up to. Now it's running nicely (albeit still slowly). This will be the first system backup I have ever made in more than 10 years of personal computing, which says something about Time Machine (as well as me).

I need to get it to run at a reasonable speed (ie one that will complete in my lifespan) as I can't just leave the disk connected, as I could only get it to work with no actual enclosure, so currently it's just the naked hard disk and external IDE connector, and I don't want Monsieur Garcon getting hold of either. Serves me right for buying cheap shit enclosures, I am finally learning the lesson that the 3.84 unit is no good and I should always buy the 20.84 unit - when I finally bought a proper USB2.0 card to support my iPod touch it worked out of the box, but the 3 other cheap ones I bought never worked properly.

Incidentally, is there a nerd in your life??

(Edit: it worked eventually, but it took 3 days. Then it took Spotlight another day or so to reindex the volumes..)

Looking for a Wii online?

My Wii was stolen along with my MacBook, dead iBook and iPod in a recent burglary. It's been tricky to replace: my local Blockbusters had them in stock straight after I got my insurance settlement, but I really hate them so I didn't buy one. Then I regretted that particular decision, and couldn't find one anywhere: step up to the plate the realtime 'Wii In Stock webpage', which I kept open in a browser tab yesterday lunchtime. After only an hour or so it popped up with Amazon having stock, and although it seemed to be being drip-fed onto the site - I kept trying to buy one but it was out of stock by the time I reached the checkout - I got one eventually, and I just got the email to say it's been shipped so it's non-virtual and will arrive next week. I paid £1.69 for delivery, which I frankly couldn't care less about: there were websites selling the basic Wii package for £279, a premium of £100 over the usual selling price. I bet they sold them, as well.

Just in time for the release of Super Mario Galaxy! While I can't believe it can be as anything like as good as Super Mario 64 it will be fun finding out, though Becky has persuaded me to wait for my birthday: fair enough, it's only one more month and I've waited a long time.. I need to build up my Wii Sports tennis rating to something respectable first, I think I peaked at 2200 or so on my old one. I thought about buying Tiger Woods golf because I am an old fu- sorry, because I enjoyed the Wii golf game, but I'm not sure - have you tried it? Is it good?

iPhone/iPod Touch SDK

My iPod Touch runs some variant of OSX Leopard, that seems pretty obvious. So why am I not surprised Apple haven't released a SDK for it given that the whole of Leopard is still under a strict non-disclosure agreement which is still being enforced?

Arse-backwards

I was reading this advice about running as a non-Admin user on your Mac, when I realised it's totally backwards.

It advises setting up and using a new account, to which administrative privileges are not granted. It advises

If you want to transfer any data (such as preferences files or e-mail messages) from your current account to the new one, drag the items from their current location in your Home folder to the corresponding location in the new account’s Home folder.

Oh, just like that? All my preferences, bookmarks, settings, documents, music and photos? This is bad advice. Setting up a new user account for a little change like this is quite unnecessary and practically destructive of your data as you can never migrate everything (1). If I'm not mistaken, it's perfectly possible to remove the admin privileges from any user account created in OSX, including those created with Setup Assistant (2). Another reason it's bad advice is that if you can't stand running as non-admin because of some behaviour of other, you can't just Go Back. Which you should always be able to do with changes spouted in an online column.

Far better to set up a new account called Admin, with admin rights, then remove those admin rights from your current account. If you ever do anything in Terminal using sudo then add your current account to the sudoers file using visudo before you do this as it's a pain to do it afterwards (believe me, if you don't understand that or have never heard of sudo you don't need it). (3)

I did it to see what it was like, having experienced nightmarish scenarios in Windows trying to run as a non-admin user (this is much mitigated in Vista, more on which later) and it's just fine - I love OSX's admin escalation paradigm anyway, being able to set/unset with the little padlock is much nicer than Windows Vista's UAC, but the only extra time I've noticed having to authenticate is adding an appliction to the Applications folder, and I don't do this very often. (well, every day if you count getting the nightly trunk build of Camino, but I don't mind that). In fact, I have a Camino image waiting now.. I have to enter the admin user name and password, which is mildly annoying compared to just password, but I can also disable auto-login on my current account knowing Beck can enter the password, and keep the viciously complex password for my admin account. Yes, I know that all of these passwords can be bypassed with OSX install disks, but I am thinking of mitigating that by using Filevault to encrypt my home directory. I just need a backup strategy first!

Ordinary User stuartd

(1) Creating a new user profile is a good way of losing cruft but it has to be deliberate and consensual.

(2) As a software consumer I think "Assistant" sounds a lot more promising than "Wizard", but is that just because I have read Terry Pratchett / JK Rowling? Shop Assistant, Library Assistant, Teaching Assistant, Rincewind, Harry Potter. Which one do you want helping you?

(3) I missed the old sudo warning when I got my new MacBook.

New speed cameras on the A27

I went to Eastbourne today, and noticed there are two speed cameras between Falmer (Sussex/Brighton University) and Lewes where I work, one just after the University bridge and another a mile or so further on. They're both currently pointing East, ie Brighton -> Lewes. It was hard not to notice, as the cars in front slowed down to 30 mph (which is not in fact the national speed limit, no matter how much people who drive on Sundays wish it was)

Not really a problem for me in my old car. They look a bit temporary, I wonder if they're the harbinger of catastrophic roadworks?

Edit: the cameras have been covered up ever since, and the sign saying roadworks are scheduled has been taken down.

Touch notes

A couple of things I have noticed about my iPod Touch:

1) If you do a big swaparound of music, several GB or so, the portrait-mode cover art and the thumbnails are wrong but the right picture is displayed in coverflow (landscape mode.) A full restore fixes this.

2) Before restoring the device, iTunes has to download a 150 MB disk image. Not surprising after the fact, but it increases the already long time it takes to restore over USB. I don't suppose it's feasible to have a connector which could connect to either USB or Firewire, which is a pity as USB is noticeably slower than Firewire.

3) Turning off wireless increases battery life hugely.

4) It optimizes photos - I added a thousand or so, expecting to fill up the Touch. iTunes spent all night optimizing them, as there's no point storing 2460x1280 on a little screen like that: it's a pity this can't be done offline, as this means I have to leave the Touch plugged into the computer all night and thus within reach of the children in the morning. But, when they're on the device, they look great and in slideshow mode you can fast-forward at 20 images per second at high quality. And they only took up a gig or so. [Edit: it doesn't take that long, even for lots of photos]

5) It's tough putting a decent sized music collection on 16GB: my old 40GB 4G used to have everything on it that I would ever want to listen to, but you need a different strategy for 16GB . I won't bore you with mine but it uses half a dozen playlists and smart playlists, fortunately you can drop them all in a folder to keep them out the way (of accidental deletion, mostly!)

6) The back scratches whatever you do. My case hasn't come yet because of the postal strike. I'll be having words with Danny (who works for the PO) when I see him about it!

7) It is a beautiful, wonderful device. And it sounds brilliant, I think even better than my old iPod.

Straighten up and fly right

I've moved my dock to the right hand side of my screen on my macbook - when the display resolution is 1280x800 then vertical space is far more premium than horizontal, especially as a decent sized dock could be 100 pixels high, thus being 12% of the vertical viewing space even without the menu bar vs being 100 px wide and 8% of the horizontal aspect. It bugs me hugely, obviously, that the dock is away on the right but I'll get used to that and I do already really appreciate viewing documents and code without it breaking up my reading eyeline. I've left it at the bottom upstairs, it seems OK on 1280x1024 and I don't do much reading on that Mac, more pictures. Gruber made me try it out and I like it.

Incidentlly, I noticed that a car number plate in Heroes tonight was NCC-1701..

Maggie And Boris

Scary future:

Better than us

Check out these Japanese manhole covers. I love the way the page's margins move when you scroll down, and the idea of having public art just to be walked on.

iLife 08: iMoan but iLike it really

I'm a bit disappointed that iPhoto 8's implementation of albums is still still so inferior to iTunes playlists. In an application designed to manage large photo collections with simple rules it's unfortunate that the implementation doesn't allow chaining rules together to query your data with and/or/either.

In order to do this, you need to be able to reference one "smart album" (a photo album based on a rule or rules) when defining another, and you can't: the operation of creating a smart album is not closed.

iTunes allows this. Say you want all music that's been added to the library in the last six months and is either disco or funk. Easy: create a smart playlist that has genre=disco or genre=funk by using "Match any condition", and another smart playlist where the playlist is the one you just created and the date added is in the last six months.

Not a very real query, but the best I could think of. In iPhoto, I specifically wanted to create a query where the (keyword=Daisy or the keyword=James) and it's been added in the last year. This is to create a playlist that I can then send to iDVD to make a slideshow from with some nice music on to send to my mum. But, it can't be done: I can create the first two options easily enough in a smart album using "Any" with the two keywords, but I can't chain that to another album to restrict by the date.

It's easy to hack around this manually by creating static albums, filtering photos by keyword and dragging them to the album, until you get to a state where you can use a smart album to get the final set you want, but this is annoying because it doesn't update as new photos are added and needs to be redone every time.

Oh, there's another thing you can do in iTunes that would be very handy in iPhoto - you can context-click a track in a playlist and choose to open the track in any other playlists it is a member of, or in the default music collection. I was using an "Untagged" smart album and it would have been very handy to be able to jump to the photo within it's event or in the main photo list even.

Still, I like iPhoto's implementation of Events a lot. I got the new version in the middle of tagging 8,000 photos - I was accused of taking more photos of our eldest child than the younger, and there was only one way to find out. So as well as having 4,000 photos to tag I had 8,000 photos to put in events as well.. It took me a little while to adjust my workflow to the new keyword interface, and I usually have the keyword window over the album list which isn't the perfect usability. I have my events as months, so I don't have too many but they don't have too many in, but I like being able to have special events - holidays, birthdays - in their own events. It would be nice to be able to autosplit events monthly: I tend to take a few pictures a few times a week rather than a lot in one day. One thing I found annoying was that I would open an event I wanted to split into separate months, split it, then return to All Events. Usually then I would want to merge the split events into existing months, but iPhoto has automatically selected all the albums you have created already, and if you're not careful to deselect those before clicking on the one you want to merge, you can end out re-merging all the photos you've just split with some others!

Incidentally, when you delete the current photo in a smart album, if you then try and use the arrow key to navigate, at least under some circumstances you get summarily dumped to the top of the list. Annoying, but at least you can delete from within a smart album now. I deleted 1,200 out of focus photos as part of the tagging project, so it happened to me a fair few times.

Pigment map courtesy of MacBook Photo Booth

Every bit of non-vitiligoed skin shows up, even bits I can't see. I will have to find out which effect this is. (Edit: it's 'Glow' of course)

It doesn't get any better than this

First day of the football season in an odd year (*) watching MOTD with no idea of the football results and the newly promoted Black Cats (Sunderland **) beat "Top Four" Tottenham with a goal in the final minute. Joy! Or rather schadenfreude, which all football fans know is just as good.

* Odd years - ie 2007, 2009, 2011 - have neither a World Cup nor European Championships to fill the tedious close season.

** My family on my mother's side, the Oswalds, are (or at least were) Sunderland fans. My Uncle Dick packed in a grocer's stall my Granddad had bought for him so he could go down the pit because he'd get Saturdays off to go to the games. He'd been bought the stall (it might even have been a shop, I will ask my Mum, also about the date which I estimate 1933) to keep him out of the pit of course.. in the '50s, incidentally, Sunderland were called the Bank Of England club because they spent so much money chasing success: in the end they won nothing, and the sums spent seem tiny compared to the modern game.

Hmm

I crutched to Sainsbury's today (in my car - you can't carry shit with a crutch) and a woman said to me (presumably about some geezer) "He's a cheeky bugger - they're all the same, after it every minute. I don't know why they come after me, I haven't had it for twenty-seven years, I can tell you".. then I dived down the butter aisle.

Mac Blindness

I spend so much time staring at my MacBook I worry that spending too much time on a short fixed focal length will damage my eyesight, and I have a bet with Beck that she'll need glasses before me. It's a bit of a worry..

To the rescue!

Breaking a bone in the outside of my foot has caused my walking pattern to change, putting a lot more weight on my heels, and causing the hard skin on them to crack open. Ouch. I've been suffering for a few days, Becky got me some cream to soften them. The instructions said to beware putting the cream in the open cracks, bit of a problem on my left foot with old Grand Canyon Crack. So I had a brainwave - superglue the cracks together before applying the cream! Worked a treat, they are a lot less sore. Wish I'd done it last week.

If you think I'm crazy (Beck did) then google for "superglue cut": there are vague concerns that cyanoacrylates (the chemical in superglues) are toxic, but a) it's on the outside and b) it isn't much and c) I got more on my fingers anyway and d) life is toxic, man.

Come to think of it, there must be a statistical split with superglue users, something like:
30% - perform gluing operation perfectly with no residue or spillage
30% - perform gluing operation satisfactorily, but get glue on your fingers resulting in some sticky moments while trying not to touch anything for more than 3 seconds so as not to get stuck to it - while still getting the gluing done.
30% - perform gluing operation, but get glue on fingers and get stuck to the thing being glued.
10% - perform gluing operation, get glue on fingers, then inadvertently squeeze the rest of the tube. With hilarious results..

Stupid Technorati crap

It's that or give them my account details (over unsecured HTTP, why not, eh?)

Technorati Profile

New thing

I find myself watching a program on channel a hundred or so called [adult swim] which is apparently an animated comedy sketch show. Cruel, ruthless and funny: of course, that could be just the episode I'm watching. Let's try another.. seems some are just one scenario, some are many quickfire jokes.

How cool is that?

Lisa and Steve's Lego Wedding cake

See also the bride and groom