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October 31, 2007
October 29, 2007
links for 2007-10-30
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cool dusky lighting effect in photoshop
Leopard initial impressions
By this time, I have 3 of four machines upgraded to Leopard, the latest iteration of the Mac OS X.
Here are some cursory observations, in bullet form.
- Comic Life only ships with new macs, if you do a clean install of Leopard you’ll lose it. You can always download the 30-day trial or buy it.
- Same goes for iLife. If you do a clean install of Leopard, you’ll lose it.
(the advice here is to “upgrade” leopard instead of a fresh install. If you want a “fresh” install then you could always do a fresh install of Tiger from your original disks and then upgrade to Leopard. Comic Life and iLife should be intact)
- I could not upgrade one machine that had a pre-release of Leopard. I had to clean the machine off. In another case, Leopard was able to suck up my previous pre-release Leopard Time Machine backups and completely restore my machine. The latter was for my main desktop so I’m thankful since I have tons of apps I use installed and some have limited activations (Adobe CS3, for instance).
- I had the clever idea to use my 60GB iPod as a Time Machine backup device but could not get this to work. I tried formatting the device to what I thought was the required file system (Mac OS Extended Journaled) but still no worky. Perhaps using iPods as Time Machine backup devices is in poor taste since the little bastards get kicked around so much. So, I merely used it as a dumb drive to copy off my user folder before I installed Leopard clean.
- When Time Machine is backing up 300+GB of data, it’s amazingly low-impact on your system.
- I experienced very few faults in apps. PhotoShop gave me one relatively benign error about not being able to convert my color profile. BitRocket crashes every now and then. iChat crashed a few times.
The improved networking (screen sharing, file sharing, overall presence) is a welcome addition with Leopard. Search folders are pretty awesome and I find that I actually use Stacks and Spaces.
One note about screen sharing is that I believe it uses vnc or a vnc-like engine, which is a dumb remote image transfer. While I think the implementation is superb, it’s just not in the same league as Remote Desktop on Windows.
If your client OS is Vista and your remote system is also Vista, Remote Desktop actually hardware accelerates some things… including desktop transparencies, animations, fades, etc. I hope Apple gets up to speed in this area since remote desktop (on a Mac or a PC is a huge part of my workflow).
It’s been a few days now and things are still running very smoothly. I’d say I’m waiting for the inevitable patches but…. not really.
October 27, 2007
A single stroke
This is the work of genius:
October 25, 2007
Crescent Saturn
This is a beautiful picture of Saturn, showing a crescent phase. Note that you can never see Saturn as a crescent from Earth. Read the APOD entry for more details on the picture.
October 18, 2007
Dude, just turn the doorknob...
But what a cool ride…
links for 2007-10-19
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Some fascinating pictures of snow at bvery high magnification
October 17, 2007
Fantastic mirror prank
This is a great prank… all you need is a glass wall and twins.
links for 2007-10-18
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Freaky
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Good passive WiFi stumbler for Mac
October 16, 2007
links for 2007-10-17
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Cool tutorials on creating photoshop effects
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What if humans disappeared? When would the Earth recover from the damage that we've done? A simple interesting timeline. SciAm also did a full article on this, which predicted more rapid deterioration of urban infrastructure.
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All the textures you could ever want, in one place.
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More tutorials on painting and digital art
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You should definitely read this top ten list. Very, very funny and some sound advice.
October 15, 2007
links for 2007-10-16
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Tips on airbrushing people to perfection. Not that I'll be airbrushing models, but these are some great techniques to remove the occassional blemish from an important photo...
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Some great computer graphics and matt paintings by David Edwards.
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Battleship: Sexism Edition, MB 50’s game - check out the link for the images of Mom and daughter washing the dishes while the men have fun at the table.
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Tutorial on drawing hair... very neat
October 13, 2007
links for 2007-10-14
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Wow! Decent resolution scans of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings.
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Mac Screen Recording
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Lots of menbar items
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Cool physics flash animations
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Cool drawing lessons. Hundreds of them, it seems.
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Just like windirstat! A must-have utility for every mac user
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Um... neat...
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Advanced glow effects in Photoshop
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Cool realistic 3D sky for Windows, Mac, or Linux
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Cool periodic table of the elements
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No matter what the problem is, it's always a people problem.
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Whoa, possibly the best wallpaper site I've ever seen... may even rival DeviantArt...
An explosion of water
Truly amazing.
October 12, 2007
Let me smell that...
I don’t have much to say other than, “What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu%$!@”
A Ringworld
Cool ringworld-like image.
(Original link from CG Society)
In the original book, Ringworld by Larry Niven, the world was much, much bigger than this. It also completely surrounded a star. In the book, there was no roof to the ring. It was completely open to space. Gravity and the high walls kept the air in. This “ringworld” is more like a big space station in comparison.
October 11, 2007
links for 2007-10-12
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This is an awesome interactiove flash demonstration of how you can create complex structures with simple movements of the mouse.
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These are an awesome assortment of Max OS X keyboard shortcuts. Surely I will print this and put it on my wall behind my monitor ;-)
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Another great command-line reference for the Mac OS X. Great for programming tcsh command shell found in Darwin.
October 10, 2007
links for 2007-10-11
October 9, 2007
Beijing 2008
iPhoto Library Screwed
I basically screwed up my iPhoto library and spent the past two nights rebuilding it.
The main reason for the catastrophic failure was the inconsistent way I was managing the photos. I could not make up my mind between allowing iPhoto to copy photos into it’s photo package or whether it should simply “refer” to photos found in my library. So, I had photos in both places.
For a while, this worked fine. However, I began to worry about duplicates so I went on a duplicate file witch hunt and found that I had loads of duplicate files haunting my cramped 500GB drive.
Yes, I’m suffering.
However, most duplicate file finders are essentially brain dead. In my head, finding and effectively removing hundreds or thousands of duplicates in tens of thousands of files is impossible with any of the tools I’ve found. The reason for this is because tools are only good enough to list the duplicates side by side, but unable to give you automation commands such as allowing you to eliminate all duplicates found in a particular directory.
For instance, you might get a duplicate report like so:
iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05678.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05678.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05679.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05679.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05680.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05680.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday:DSC05681.jpg iPhoto Library:Originals:2007:Marco’s 4th Birthday 2:DSC05681.jpg
In this situation, “Marco’s 4th Birthday 2” is the folder that has the duplicate files. Imagine I had 90 files in this directory and I found duplicates in 300 similar folders.
Happy hunting.
First, the tools I’ve found generally only allow you to delete 1 duplicate record at a time. I could delete the duplicate directory but it might just have some files that are unique. Plus, I generally can’t delete the directory right form the GUI, I have to go back to Finder, navigate there, delete it, and re-do my duplicate file search to trim down the list.
Repeat until done.
Second, if I could select one duplicate and simply tell the tool “Delete all duplicates in the parent directory” we’d be done. Extra credit for nixing the directory if all files wind up being nuked.
Oh, but I digress.
I stupidly tried to consolidate and settle on storing all photos within iPhoto. Hoping that iPhoto would detect the dupes. It seemed to have this functionality, but it simply did not work.
(Sample duplicate photo dialog)
I somehow wound up in a situation where half of my files were symbolic links and none of them pointed to a valid location. So… I essentially failed at this task.
I then tried to hold down Ctrl+Command or perhaps Option+Command when iPhoto started in an effort to correct this. Holding down these keys upon startup invokes an undocumented feature that screwed up my library even more.
Yay Apple!
In the end, I decided to start over. I cracked open the iPhoto Library file (by Option+Click on he iPhoto Library file) and selected “Show Package Contents”.
I then copied the “Originals” directory to my desktop and deleted the iPhoto library. Yes, I lost any “modifications” that I made to the photos (such as brightness/contrast adjustments or cropping) but I could not give a rat’s ass at this point.
So, I fired up iPhoto again. It shook it’s head in surprise and wondered where the library file went. I instructed it to create a new empty library and off I went into a 2-hour import. 20 minutes of event auto-splitting later and I was back in business.
Breathtaking Möbius structure revealed in 4 dimensions
Simply breathtaking…
October 8, 2007
And he fell all the way down the mountain...
Painful… and I hope no one died.
October 6, 2007
Gmail Rocks
So, tonight I set my dad up with gmail. He has been moving around a bit and moving ISP’s nearly as often. The changes to his e-mail clients were constantly causing him to reconfigure them and each time it seemed like such a struggle. Of course, I’m the tech guy who has to assist.
I approached him about using gmail about two years ago, but my brother was set against it claiming that gmail would not yield the experience he was used to.
This time around I just did it, and did it in a big way. I didn’t just set him up with just any o ld gmail account, I decided to change the entire domain name to direct e-mails to gmail. This is what Google calls “Google Apps for XYZ Domain”. The configuration is pretty intense and not something the average user can set up. However, once it’s set up you essentially have the following.
Google gets all mail directed to your domain. You get to keep your domain and you get to keep your existing e-mail address.
You get a control panel where you can create a homepage, manage google chat, create web pages, manage e-mail accounts, create online calendars, and have access to Google Docs (docs, spreadsheets and now presentations).
My Dad mentioned on numerous occasions that he loves some of the glitzy features of his “Incredimail” e-mail client and I knew that although gmail was the ultimate in reliability and usability, he might not even see that if he could not send his emoticons.
So, I did three things to make him feel more comfortable.
First, I enabled POP access so he can have his cake and eat it to. Doing this assumed that using gmail’s POP and SMTP server would be “easier” to configure than the trouble I had with my domain hoster. Time will tell.
Second, I populated his contact list with all of his family members and added pictures so he’d see as much visual jazz as I could possibly muster.
Third, I created this friendly ad of his grandson saying, “Gmail Rocks!”
