December 2011
1 post
Save As vs. Duplicate in Lion
Having used Lion for more than a month now, I do not understand at all all the bluster about the auto-save behaviour and the disappearance of the ‘Save As’ command. Not having to think about saving just feels natural to me. And duplicate also feels like the more natural way of doing things, since we always used ‘Save As’ as a means to duplicate a document. Of course, the...
August 2011
1 post
Installing Lion on a RAID volume
Installing OS X Lion automatically creates a new invisible recovery partition on the volume the target partition resides on. Unfortunately, if the target partition is a software RAID volume created by OS X’s Disk Utility (or probably any kind of RAID), the installer is unable to create this additional partition (or at least without destroying the software RAID) and might fail.
Reportedly,...
June 2011
1 post
My top XX iPhone apps are not your top XX apps
I am amazed when I hear that people only use a handful of apps. Loosely sorted by usage frequency, these are the third-party apps I use regularly:
BBC News (listening to the BBC Wordservice)
RSR (listening to my favorite music radio station)
Reeder (RSS client)
Shazam (identify music)
Skype (VoIP, lowers your phone bill)
Articles (Wikipedia client)
Simplenote (synchronised notes across all...
April 2011
1 post
Apple Discussions - making sense of the nonsense
Apple’s new discussion pages offer a lot of options viewing the content. But as usual, just adding options rarely makes for a useful product, something that Apple is normally keenly aware of. Alas, this time they threw it all out and did not even attempt to provide a useful default view. Here is my overview of the available options, bold text referring to actually useful elements:
A)...
February 2011
1 post
Is Apple's grab for a cut of iOS revenue worth it?
Three questions come up:
(a) Are we fine with Apple driving off all competitors for any market for iOS apps it chooses to compete in (iBooks does not have to pay a 30% tax to Apple, Amazon however has to, leaving very little room for any iBooks competitors, and that is before counting the private APIs and customer information advantage iBooks has)?
(b) Do we think it is both fair and good for...
January 2011
2 posts
Apple's deal with the Appstore
With the original Appstore for the iPhone, Apple offered us a deal: We are only allowed to install applications through Apple’s vetted Appstore but if we would not charge our users, Apple would not charge us for hosting the apps. At least as long as we respected a set of overall reasonable rules. One of the least reasonable rule in many eyes was that apps should not compete with the core...
Apple's attempts to monetize on free apps
The recent private message sent by Apple to several European newspapers that it wants all access to paywalled content channelled through its own upcoming subscription service instead of going through free apps and an access code sold via the newspapers websites might primarily be motivated by giving its planned Appstore subscription service as much scope as possible. But it also serves as a first...
August 2010
4 posts
Eye-Fi: How not to write software
The two main bugs I ran into were:
(A) When connecting to my Eye-Fi card for the first time, the Eye-Fi Center and the Eye-Fi webpage refused to let me create a new account, instead asking me to log into my account using my not-yet-existing credentials. Support told me that this should only happen with an already registered card but the Eye-Fi Center clearly showed my card as unregistered (see...
Eye-Fi and iPad
With the application ShutterSnitch it is possible to transfer images directly from a camera wirelessly using an Eye-Fi card onto an iPad. Using a mobile wireless router (MiFi, Huawei E5830) this also can be done in the field, even with no internet access. But setting things up is not exactly obvious. Once the basic Eye-Fi settings have been defined (see other post), here is how to switch between...
May 2010
1 post
Getting files on and off the iPad
Von meinem jetzigen Wissenstand her, würde ich sagen, die einfachste Methode Sachen auf den iPad zu bekommen ist Dropbox (sehr schnell wenn Computer und iPad im selben Netzwerk sind, vollkommen automatisch, funktioniert wie ein einfacher Ordner auf dem Computer). Auf dem iPad aus der Dropbox App heraus öffnen, und dann auf iWork.com exportieren (dies geht über das Internet, kann daher...
March 2010
1 post
Mercurial's real main advantage: merging based on...
With a decent experience in Subversion (albeit in tiny teams), I read this tutorial on Mercurial with great interest. My general take is that the real advantage of Mercurial is its merging tool, ie, one that actually works and the fact that it works is because it is based on changesets not on final states. Plus the ‘UI’ of doing multi-level repositories and merges looks more...
December 2009
1 post
Nikon Tele Lens Prices →
(Click title for graph)
Very crude guide at what Nikon tele lenses cost, based solely on the theoretical area of the front element needed for the noted aperture at maximum focal length. Line is a third-order polynomial fit (parameters in box), prices based on early December 2009 B&H website. Red numbers are deviation of actual price from theoretical one. As it can be seen, zooms with...
October 2009
1 post
Creator codes
John Gruber makes all the right points (http://daringfireball.net/2009/10/congrtlns-osx) but fails to mention one crucial one: There never was an (official) interface to set creator codes. He correctly concludes that:
“The creator code long ago stopped meaning “the app that created the file”, and instead meant “the app this file should open with by default”.
If people had used the...
July 2009
1 post
Boost, Bjam, Xcode for Dummies
Boost (boost.org) is an extensive set of open-source, peer-reviewed C++ libraries. Associated with it is a compilation/make tool called bjam. Here are some quick and dirty instructions to get it running:
Installing bjam: - Install bjam executable in your path (eg, /usr/local/bin), get it from: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/more/getting_started/unix-variants.html#get-bjam - Install...
February 2009
1 post
Realplayer and Time Capsule
A lot of people are getting socket errors on all Real streams when connected via a Time Capsule. As always when certain internet connections systematically do not work while most others do, suspect a port issue in your internet connection pipeline. At one point, I thought only Realplayer 11 was affected but other users report problems with version 10 as well. What helped for me was expanding the...
August 2008
2 posts
IMAP, Mail and the iPhone
I finally switched to IMAP for my main Gmail account on the occasion of getting an iPhone. I was diligent and did all the ‘recommended’ extra configuration:
In Mail.app’s account preferences, checked: ‘Store sent messages on the server’
Selected the ‘Sent messages’ folder in the GMAIL folder in the Mail sidebar and via Mailbox->Use this Mailbox...
Capture NX - Why bother?
This quote from the Aperture User’s Network very much sums it up:
Personally I don’t care if a photographer uses Aperture or Lightroom or PhotoMechanic or even Bridge to do selects and ratings, but it pains me on a nearly physical level to see photographers opening up countless files in CS3 (or CS2 or CS, or 7, I’ve seen it all today) just to zoom in and see if they’re...
June 2008
1 post
Why Spaces will never work
In priniciple, Spaces is already superfluous. The real problem with Spaces is that hiding applications + minimizing windows does basically the same thing. Hiding applications allow for the creation of any combination of virtual spaces by unhiding a set of applications (and de-minimizing windows). That is what most users, particularly power users, do constantly. Unfortunately, minimizing does not...
April 2008
1 post
Projects and albums in Aperture
The primary organisation of images in Aperture is via projects (and blue folders containing projects). Every image belongs to one and only one project. Albums provide a secondary organisational structure which is independent of projects but can be freely combined with them. The main difference is that the same image can appear in several albums. That means that dragging an image from one album to...
March 2008
6 posts
Spaces - I don't get it
In Leopard, Apple introduced Spaces, a multiple desktop tool. So far, I have not been able to figure out what it is really good for. Most often when my monitor(s) become(s) cluttered, it is because I have too many Finder windows open, some needed for one task and one application, some for another. I can distribute these windows over several spaces but as soon I close all windows in one space and...
After the dust has settled
After a week with Leopard surprisingly the machine seems to settle down (and I as well, I presume). The hiding issues are becoming less frequent. Mounted servers no longer ask for a password but still sometimes take very long (20 seconds) to mount. The spinning beachball has become less frequent also. Still, fixing and researching all these small issues and exploring all the new functinality takes...
Don't, really don't
Do not upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5, at least not now, unless you have really nothing else to do. Wait maybe another six months and make sure to take a week off then, you will need it. Not that 10.5 is in any way a particular problematic update but you will probably find about half a dozen minor issues and each will take about a day to fix. That is why you need that week, and a box of tranquilizers....
Not realizing your strong points
Macs had a really great Finder. Or at least they had one feature which made working in the Finder very neat when one had to deal with folders containing large numbers of files. Something I regulary run into whenever I start ‘coding’ projects. This includes larger Latex documents and all kind of programming languages where you keep amassing files, source code, supporting files (eg,...
December 2007
1 post
svnX and file conflicts
svnX is an open source subversion client (svn) for Mac OS X. It requires the installation of the svn command line back end (Leopard includes it already). When it is presented with file conflicts of binary files, it might not be obvious how to resolve them. In short, pressing ‘Resolved’ retains the local version, pressing ‘Revert’ retains the remote version.
November 2007
2 posts
'Replace all' droplet using Platypus
Using Platypus (http://sveinbjorn.org/platypus), a development tool for Mac OS X, all sorts of shell or other scripts can be converted into proper applications. The Perl script to do a ‘Replace all’ presented in a previous post has to be modified somewhat to handle the handover of arguments and file paths. The code below has to be saved as a .pl file. In Platypus the path of the...
Batch 'Replace all' Perl script
Copy the text below into a text file and save with the extension .pl. It expects the replacement text to start with ‘' (ie, a backslash). #! /usr/bin/perl # Does a ‘Replace All’ on file1, using the list of changes supplied in file2 # Usage: replacetext.pl file1 file2 # If no arguments are supplied the two hard-coded files (file-to-be-modified.txt and list-of-changes.txt)...
August 2007
1 post
A Disappearing Desktop
Today, I was suddenly faced with a Desktop that had disappeared. Instead of being a representation of the Desktop folder, it was just a background picture. No icons on it, nothing could be dragged onto it. A second user was not affected. I happened after a couple of Fast User Switches (FUS), after one switch, the Desktop simply remained blank. I tried almost everything. Eventually I discovered...
July 2007
2 posts
Rendering intents, soft proofing and Aperture
Choosing different rendering intents allows to influence how images (and other elements) will be converted to different output spaces. Soft proofing is meant allow one to judge how the material will look on other output devices than our own screen. Soft proofing, however, is no panacea, most often it cannot really fully represent other output media. Understanding what it can show us and what not...
June 2007
2 posts
Latex & Elsevier - a few pitfalls
Submitting latex code to Elsevier online? Here are two issues I ran into: The pdf the website generates is letter-sized. Nothing in the documentation, or even in the documentclass elsart.cls itself, makes that clear. Long tables or figures might be cut off by the change from A4 to letter. The eps files should be saved as ASCII (not ASCII85 or binary). At least it rejected the eps files saved...
Subversion and Samba
In short, never ever add an empty file to a subversion repository if you have working copies on a Samba share and you are running the subversion client on Mac OS X (10.4.x). Here is a more detailed post to the comp.subversion.user group with links referencing other people’s postings on this issue.
May 2007
3 posts
What they forgot to tell you about CM
Every advice about color management starts with the declaration that without a calibrated screen things will never quite work out. Well, hard to argue with that. And if screens were able to show all colors that the human eye is able perceive, or at least the subset that can be captured by digital cameras and scanners, starting out with a calibrated monitor should indeed make it possible to predict...
Things to find out about CM
About Aperture: - What is the internal color space of Aperture? Presumably something big (ie, maybe similar to Adobe RGB). - What is the rendering intent used [by Aperture] when exporting images and can it be changed? Apparently, Aperture uses the ‘preferred rendering intent’ of the printer profile when printing (as reported on the Aperture discussions forums at apple.com). - Now,...
Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog » Digital-Image Color... →
The essentials of color management explained by the logical mind of an engineer ::)
April 2007
3 posts
Official FAQ about the Huey →
Answers most questions one might have about the Huey and has some well explained background information about monitor calibration.
Monitor brightness and the Huey
The way I understand things are that more expensive calibration software [than the Huey] allows one to set a brightness level, e.g. 120 cd/m^2. Depending on the amount of ambient light, slightly different settings, e.g. between 100 - 140 cd/m^2 might be good settings. Moreover, depending on the final output of the photografic material, one might choose different settings. Since printed...
Aperture - Levels, Exposure and Curves
The exposure slider in Aperture does pretty much the same as moving the right bottom sliders in Levels. One difference is that one naturally can move the right slider in levels only to the left. The exposure slider can be moved in both directions. The brightness slider does the exactly the same, except that it acts on the left bottom control in Levels. The contrast slider acts on both the right...