Picture Arena: OS X photo management software imprts iPhoto images

Producttour > Import // Picture Arena - next generation digital picture management for MacOS X // IOSPIRIT GmbH - for creative minds ..

Dynamic iPhoto™ album import

On startup, Picture Arena is dynamically importing your existing iPhoto™ albums, including comments and thumbnail data. As this import is dynamic and happens at each startup of Picture Arena, they are always up-to-date and you don't have to delete and reimport them each time you have made a change to them or added new albums. If you want, you can permanently convert your iPhoto™ albums into Picture Arena albums, though, and benefit from all of Picture Arena's features for these images, too. The extensive support for iPhoto™ albums in Picture Arena gives you the best out of two worlds and the flexibility to use Picture Arena as either an extension, a replacement or in combination.

Brave words -- interoperating with iPhoto seems brisky. They have a free download. I doubt the import routine will import original images (vs. current) or keywords. BTW, this is a German company, so the sometimes awkward English is no reflection on the quality of the product.

Problems with my hard drive backup -- Vantec cartridge incompatible with Seagate Barracuda 200GB drives.

I outgrew my 80GB backup drives in my Vantec EZ-SWAP cartridge (see Backing up a mixed OS X and Windows 2000 Home Network) and confidently ordered two 200 GB Barracude ATA drives. I was sure it would be a half hours work (max) to swap out the 80 from the Vantec and put in the 200. Wrong. The 200 GB Barracudas don't work in the Vantec cartridge, though they work fine as regular drives.

The BIOS recognizes the Seagate perfectly during initial startup. The hang occurs after the POST is complete, when Windows starts up. The yellow and green lights on the front of the drive light up and the system waits about 20 seconds. Then the system continues and the Windows splash screen appears with its progress bar. The progress bar continues to move, but the system never gets past this point.

I hear a 'zuttt' sound every 20-30 seconds when these drivers are powered up in the Vantec.

I've tried many tricks, including configuring the Seagate as a 32GB drive using the jumpers. I've tested with two identical Seagate drives, two different IDE cables, two different controllers (Paradise and MB IDE). I've tried Master and cable-select configurations. I've confirmed that the Vantec EZ-Swap continues to work very well with my 80GB drives. I've confirmed that the drives work fine outside of the EZ-Swap cartridge.

In short, the 200GB Seagate Barracuda ATA ST3200822A appears to be completely incompatible with the Vantec EZ-Swap.

The Vantec support people actually answered an email, but they've had no ideas. My guess is that the Seagate can't tolerate the minor signal degradation created by the IDE cable splices to the cartridge.

Backing up Blogspot sites with Teleport Pro

Teleport Pro -- Offline Browsing Webspider

Blogger has an official way to backup one's blog. Problem is, it's slightly ridiculous and it produces a huge document.

I tried using an OS X personal spider (SiteSucker) to suck down my blogspot site, but it started failing with a download error after page 300 or so. So I located my ancient copy of Teleport Pro (windows, alas) and fired it up. It worked perfectly, creating several thousand pages and localizing all the URLs pointing to internal blogspot pages.

I'm impressed. Incredibly, you can still buy Teleport Pro at this site. It's not the most intuitive application, but it works great.

Update 11/25/08: I ran into a 65K limit for URLs when using Teleport Pro with the 2008 version of Gordon's Notes. There's a more advanced spider sold by the same vendor, with a $30 updgrade discount it's $165. I'm going to look around for alternatives. Also in 2008 Blogger did introduce the ability to export blogs in a Google defined XML format.

Hard Drive Cooling for 10 Cents

Cheapbooks.com - Hard Drive Cooling for 10 Cents

He mounts an 80mm fan over his drives using a cheap hardware bracket. Note these larger fans are much quieter than the small fans sometimes sold for hard drives. My Vantec case let me install an 80mm to blow external air over the drives ...

OS X and all its bizarre keyboard shortcuts

macosxhints - An OS X keyboard shortcut reference

Well, probably not all of them. A complete collection is probably impossible, since they vary between machines and OS versions. One imagines an immense grid in several dimensions ...

The comments reference other collections, including Apple's. I've printed them into one big pile in my desk -- useful for when the Mac isn't working.

A psychoanalyst could make much of the Mac keyboard fetish -- especially since the Mac was born of a the mouse world. Single button mouse, one trillion keyboard shortcuts ... hmmm. Compensation perhaps?

Uber-Geek usage of Safari

All About Safari :: Apple-X.net :: Alternative Mac Tech News, Analysis, Reviews, and Opinion.

There are tips here even I'd not heard of.

Backing up a Blogger blog

Blogger Help : How do I create a backup of my entire blog?

There's now a way to backup a Blogger blog -- even if it is tortuous.

Skype gets interesting: inbound number and voice mail

SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail Beta

Skype is a popular (too popular?) Voice over IP (VOIP) solution. It's primary use is cheap long distance calls, technical conferencing, and low cost conferencing. There are several similar alternatives.

Now, however, Skype is getting .... interesting.

They're offering users a 'unversal number' that can be reached by external phones (hmm. What does it do with fax calls?). Calls can go to voice mail or get routed to the Skype client (if it's connected). Cost is about $60/year for one number and voice mail, but I'd expect a variety of hidden fees also exist.

If they also provided programmable routing (route to my mobile phone, route to my home phone, etc) I'd have signed up already, but given their infrastructure it doesn't seem far fetched to expect routing in a future release.

SkypeIn provides an affordable, flexible alternative to costly mobile phone roaming charges with SkypeIn personal numbers. SkypeIn customers can receive inbound calls to their Skype client from ordinary fixed telephones or mobile phones while they travel worldwide, providing seamless interconnectivity without having to pay costly roaming charges. Skype Voicemail enables users to manage incoming voicemail messages, making their Skype usage more ubiquitous...

... SkypeIn customers choose a country and area code and are assigned a regular telephone number... Users may purchase up to three numbers from their home country in Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States during the beta period.

Skype Voicemail customers can receive a voicemail message up to 10 minutes long from any user or traditional phone. Skype Voicemail customers may record their own personalized voicemail greeting, playback their messages, even while offline, and send incoming calls to voicemail if they away, offline or simply busy on another call.

SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail complement Skype’s first premium service, SkypeOut, which allows global calling to public telephone numbers for local rates....

All Skype services are pre-paid, apparently they lead the industry in credit card fraud.

10.3.9 has a significant java bug

Best places to read about it: OS X hints: macosxhints - A fix for broken Java after 10.3.9 upgrade and Apple.

Overall 10.3.9 sounds promising but imperfect. I'll wait another week.

Update: Sounds like it's caused by having java running somewhere (other user space) preventing the update. In theory this is allowed, but in practice here's the superstition I follow for major OS X updates (XP updates, in my experience, have not required this sort of superstition):

1. log in on my very plain admin account (no odd configuration, no startup items, etc). Run PCC (or similar) to flush caches.
2. shut down, restart and login again to admin
3. run the update
4. shut down and restart

I sometimes "repair privileges after #4, but I think that's less important.

AutoIt: Scripting language for Windows apps

AutoIt

In DOS days I did far too much using Microsoft's Batch programming "language" (still a surprisingly useful skill). In OS/2 days I was fond of ReXX (spelling?). At various times since then Microsoft has had a variety of batch or scripting tools; they've never been very well accepted. Even AppleScript, often forgotten, has gotten more traction. (Recently AppleScript has become very useful, and it will be even more central and critical in Tiger.)

Disappointing.

AutoIt is one partial solution; open source and free. No 'build by recording' mode unfortunately (that peaked w/ AppleScript classic). Correction (thanks to a comment by the author of the scripting utility! see below) -- AutoIt has a recording tool - ScriptWriter. It is included in the SciTE distribution of AutoIt. I'll try it out and comment here. AutoIt is starting to feel like serious tool.

I've also used Hot Keyboard Pro, which is only a partial solution.

Does 10.3.9 resurrect the iBook CPU fan?

Mac OS X 10.3.9

This was a very, very good upgrade for me thus far. The .7 and .8 upgrades for me went from bad to worse. Notably in networking, sharing printers, Finder weirdness, among other things. All of that is now fixed! and what's more important is a noise that I heard that I hadn't heard since .6 update ... the CPU cooling fan...IT'S ALIVE!!!!!!

I thought for a few months that my iBook was turned into a convection-cooled device (as the infamous Cube) since the CPU fan never went off. Ever since I upgraded to .9 it's all (the CPU fan included) running again.

Ok, if this is true then I'll upgrade. I too have noticed how quiet my iBook fanhas been for a while. Quiet is good, but hot is not so great.

OS X 10.3.9 includes Safari 1.3

Surfin' Safari

wow. This didn't get much discussion in the release notes! 10.3.9 includes a major Safari update. I wonder what else is in there. I'm waiting a few days before installing.

BlogAssist: make Safari a better Blogger client

BlogAssist is a clever OS X menubar application that applies simple operations on text in the clipboard to speed entering HTML. It's particularly relevant to blogging, especially when working with Safari and Blogger (Safari is not well supported in Blogger, so one has to type HTML directly).

For example, you could copy a URL from a web page, choose the Web Link option, paste the result into a blog comment, and then replace the placeholder display string. In other words:

1. Select text and copy into clipboard (btw, it's easy to forget to copy!)
2. Apply BlogAssist operation (operations can be user modified or defined via menubar.
3. Paste into text area.

via TUAW.

Bloglines may be out of commission

Bloglines

As of this morning my public blogs are gone and I cannot login. I hope they have good backups!

Update: They're back.

Cringely likes Simple DNS Server

PBS | I, Cringely . April 14, 2005 - A Cup of Bandwidth

Cringely likes JH Software's Simple DNS Server. Actually, the entire article today is full of advanced network tips and hints.

"... This easiest of all DNS servers to implement requires almost no customization at all and runs beautifully behind my firewall, providing DNS service to every machine on my network. It worked just the same over the bootleg wireless links."