Apple

I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.

Applescript: iPhoto or Aperture?

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I’m experimenting with the Aperture free trial right now for photoshoots with my D70s, but I still wanted to use iPhoto for my Casio point and shoot. Apple allows you to set either iPhoto or Aperture to automatically launch when the Finder mounts a memory card, but by choosing either one, I’d have to quit and manually launch the other application depending on which camera I was importing shots from.

However, Aperture also gives you the ability to set any application to launch when a memory card is inserted. I set up this simple little Applescript (saved as a launchable app) to be the app launched on memory card insertion:

tell application "Finder"
    if exists disk "CASIO-DSC" then
        launch application "iPhoto"
    else if exists disk "NIKON D70S" then
        launch application "Aperture"
    end if
end tell

Now, whenever a memory card is inserted, the Applescript launches, checks the volume name of the memory card (which is set by the camera when you format the card), launches the appropriate photo application, and then quits.

Pretty simple for a lot of experienced Applescripters, I’m sure, but I’m pretty happy that I got it figured out.

Another Valentine’s Day Present

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Valentine’s Day morning, as I was puttering about the house and getting ready for the day while Prairie slept in, there was a knock at the door. When I answered, I was handed a package from Amazon by one of our landlords. This was a little confusing, as I didn’t remember ordering anything, but it was definitely addressed to me. Okay, whatever…

The Cult of MacWhen I opened it, I was quite pleasantly surprised to find The Cult of Mac, which I’d put on my Amazon Wishlist not too long ago. On the shipping invoice was a nice little note from ‘Liz in Pittsburgh,’ who reads this site and decided to send me a Valentine’s Day present — cool!

So, many thanks to Liz! I got about halfway through yesterday as I was bussing around town, and have been enjoying all the stories of the Mac über-fans (and, unsurprisingly, seeing elements of myself in more than a few of the stories). I hope your Valentine’s Day was a good one as well!

Photo Drop

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Photo Drop

Photo Drop is a slick little Dashboard widget — actually, one of the first that was slick and potentially useful enough for me to download and toss in to my Dashboard, which isn’t exactly the most-used OS X feature on my system. It’s a nice, simple one-trick pony: drag a photo to Photo Drop, set a few quick options for the final look (size, effects, etc.), and you’re done. Plus, it’s free. Not bad!

Throwing down the gauntlet…

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Bill Gates, in an interview with Steven Levy for Newsweek:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

There’s a few other doozy quotes in there as well, but that’s the one that really got my attention.

More under the jump…

Read more

4,000 Lattes…to go?

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From this morning’s introduction of the iPhone, as Steve Jobs was demonstrating various features of the gadget (as reported by MacRumors):

10:27 am finds moscone west
10:27 am finds a nearby starbucks
10:27 am presses a button and calls starbucks
crowd laughs
10:27 am orders 4000 latte’s to go
10:27 am oh sorry – wrong number
10:28 am hangs up

Prank calling Starbucks live on stage at MacWorld? Nicely done, Steve! ;)

(via blog.ariffic)

Aperture

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Consider this firmly on my wishlist come Christmastime: not only has Apple just upgraded Aperture to version 1.5, but Frasier Spiers has announced the first beta of an Aperture version of his excellent FlickrExport plugin (I consider the iPhoto version of FlickrExport an unconditional must-have for iPhoto/Flickr integration, along with Ken Ferry’s Keyword Assistant).

Even better, the educational pricing for Aperture is just $150 — half off the standard retail of $299.

It’s not a critical need, but it’s definitely a wishlist item. So pretty…

iTunes “Nebulus” by Fluke from the album Puppy (2004, 5:57).

Hot Tunes

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Goofy idea that I don’t have the programming chops to create:

A plugin for iTunes (originally I was thinking of a separate program, but I think that this could probably all be done through Applescript) that, when activated, polls the weather services on the ‘net for the current temperature and then randomly selects a song from the year that matches the current temperature. A sunny summer day of 85° would produce synthpop from 1985, a cool fall afternoon of 63° would play the rock and roll of 1963.

Options that should be included:

  • Some form of fahrenheit/celsius recognition.
    • Switch between the two systems (85°F/1985 is 29°C/1929).
    • Converting between the two (85°F plays 1929, 29°C plays 1985).
  • Choosing songs from the decade, rather than the year (85° plays songs from 1980-1989, 72° plays from ’70-’79).
  • Applying some alteration (plus or minus X, other transformations) to affect the temperature to year conversion (otherwise, most places would get a lot of songs from the 70’s through the summertime, and many people don’t have a huge collection of 20’s and 30’s tunes to listen to during the winter months).

It’s the kind of silly little one-trick pony that could only be released as freeware, and likely wouldn’t get a ton of usage. It amused me when the idea crossed my mind, however.

(Incidentally, the song I’m listening to at the moment — which will be noted at the bottom of this post — was released in 1979, because according to my ‘puter, it’s 79°F outside. At 11:20pm. Ick. Yes, I’m whining. Yes, Colorado, Arizona, and many other places are hotter than it is here in Seattle. I’m still whining. Candles shouldn’t melt when they’re not lit.)

iTunes “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along” by Kermit the Frog/Rolf the Dog from the album Muppet Movie, The (1979, 3:58).

State of the Computer

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Well, the computer lives — though we’re definitely dealing with a near-total case of amnesia.

On the bright side, a new hard drive has been purchased and installed (and I love how easy it is to install a hard drive into a PowerMac G5 [.pdf link]), the OS is installed, and I’m going through the (slow, laborious) process of downloading and reinstalling all the various programs I use on a day-to-day-basis. Also, as I’ve been using Gmail as my primary e-mail address for some time now, most of my recent e-mail still exists (on Google’s servers), which is allowing me to rebuild my address book and contact lists.

So, there’s progress.

The downside, of course, is that so far I’ve been unable to coax the dead drive into doing much of anything. I haven’t given up completely, though. Using some instructions from Apple I used fsck on the problem drive and got the following:

Quicksilver:/ djwudi$ sudo fsck_hfs -l /dev/disk1s9
Password:
** /dev/rdisk1s9 (NO WRITE)
** Checking HFS Plus volume.
   Invalid B-tree node size
(4, 0)
** The volume   needs to be repaired.

A quick Google for ‘mac os x invalid b-tree node size‘ led me to this Macworld Forums discussion which indicates that either DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro should be able to at least recover my data, if not actually repair and resurrect the drive. So I think that acquiring one of those will be my next step, though that will have to wait for a week or three until I’ve got a paycheck not already claimed for little things like rent, bills, and food. With luck, though, those will allow me to pull the old data off once I get to that point.

And if that doesn’t work, then I can always try the freezing trick that’s been mentioned by Nitallica and Josh. Seems a little bizarre, but hey, if it might help….

In the meantime, rebuilding goes slowly, but I’m making progress. I also picked up an external enclosure for an old 80Gb drive I had been meaning to liberate from my old Blue and White G3, slapped the pieces together, and now have an external drive that I’ll be using as a backup repository using SuperDuper!, which I found though a rundown of OS X backup software pointed out to me by Marcus. Once that’s up and running, than even if this happens again somewhere down the line, I won’t have lost the data.

I know: backup, backup, backup! You always think it won’t happen to you…and then it does. Ah, well. So it goes.

Thanks to everyone for the support and suggestions!

FBiPod?

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Who knew the government was this in tune with today’s marketplace?

The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.

— Pres. George W. Bush, during a speech at Tuskegee University

(via The Cult of Mac and Engadget)

Googling a Dead Horse

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There’s a certain irony in Google‘s new Google Calendar supporting the iCal standard for calendar sharing and distribution (named, unsurprisingly, for Apple’s iCal calendar application) when — as usual — they don’t yet support the standard Mac web browser.

Google Calendar in Safari

Sigh.

I don’t know why I even bother checking, really — this has been the pattern every time Google’s unveiled something new and shiny.

iTunes “James Brown Is Dead (Take Outs)” by L.A. Style from the album James Brown Is Dead (1991, 0:55).