Apple - Safari
My primary Mac is an iBook (12" PB is starting to tempt me!). The 1024x768 display is pretty small. I'd use the Full Screen view of Firefox or IE if Safari supported it, but it doesn't. Alas, even Firefox on the Mac is lacking -- the F11 key is used by the MacOS and thus there's no keyboard shortcut for Firefox Full Screen mode.
The next best thing is to hide the address bar. There is a shortcut key for that: Cmd-|. It's conveniently located above the enter key, but to get it you need to type the shift key (the default is \).
The oddity occurs if you have Safari debugging turned on. Then Cmd-\ (same key but without the shift) brings up an interesting page debug menu. I don't actually use the Debug menu much, so I may disable it and see what Cmd-| does then.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Friday, February 04, 2005
Cheap DVDs don't have macrovision?
Dan's Data letters #140
Macrovision is why you can't tape from a DVD to a videotape. Try it and you get signal distortion generated by the receiving system. Dan's Data claims cheap DVDs, by which I assume he means the $40 models often sold in hardware stores, may not have Macrovision support:
PS. Amazon sells some devices that claim to filter out the signal that recording systems rely on to trigger their video distortion mechanism.
Macrovision is why you can't tape from a DVD to a videotape. Try it and you get signal distortion generated by the receiving system. Dan's Data claims cheap DVDs, by which I assume he means the $40 models often sold in hardware stores, may not have Macrovision support:
Macrovision is turned on by most commercial DVDs, but you can disable it on many cheap DVD players these days, one way or another. The better cheapo players come with Macrovision (and region coding) turned off.Dan's in Australia, I don't know if this is true in the US. It's illegal in the US to describe how to defeat Macrovision, so Dan can't give details. Heck, maybe it's illegal even to mention that some devices don't have it enabled. Free speech is so 20th century.
PS. Amazon sells some devices that claim to filter out the signal that recording systems rely on to trigger their video distortion mechanism.
Service Manager for Mac OS X (via Macintouch)
Service Manager
From Macintouch: "[Nigel Warren] Mac OS X does not provide a built-in method for [removing items from the Service menu], unfortunately, but there is a great little piece of free software that does, Service Manager. I've used it for a year or so without a problem and find it very useful. It lets you turn services off and on, as well as letting you reassign their keyboard shortcuts and arrange them in any submenu of the services menu that you like."
From Macintouch: "[Nigel Warren] Mac OS X does not provide a built-in method for [removing items from the Service menu], unfortunately, but there is a great little piece of free software that does, Service Manager. I've used it for a year or so without a problem and find it very useful. It lets you turn services off and on, as well as letting you reassign their keyboard shortcuts and arrange them in any submenu of the services menu that you like."
Thursday, February 03, 2005
iPhoto aliases are not -- they're relative symlinks
macosxhints - Use symbolic links instead of aliases on the desktop
When you browse an iPhoto Library file tree, you see that albums are instantiated as folders. Each folder contains what appears to be an alias.
Only they're not.
If you copy an iPhoto album, the aliases reference images in the tree of the copied album, they don't reference the original files.
A true OS X alias would reference the original File ID, not the ID of the copied file. (This worked better in OS 9, changing a file extension in OS X will break an alias even if the File ID doesn't change, this Mac OS X hints page has a good discussion.)
What appear to be iPhoto aliases are in fact relative symlinks. I copied one to the desktop and noticed it lost its icon. Then when running ls -l from the terminal one finds:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 jgf staff 29 3 Feb 18:23 IMG_2523.JPG -> ../../2003/07/13/IMG_2523.JPG
I'm not a unix guy, but I think lrwxr is the signature of a typical symlink. That's why one can copy an iPhoto Library and not have the whole thing fall apart.
When you browse an iPhoto Library file tree, you see that albums are instantiated as folders. Each folder contains what appears to be an alias.
Only they're not.
If you copy an iPhoto album, the aliases reference images in the tree of the copied album, they don't reference the original files.
A true OS X alias would reference the original File ID, not the ID of the copied file. (This worked better in OS 9, changing a file extension in OS X will break an alias even if the File ID doesn't change, this Mac OS X hints page has a good discussion.)
What appear to be iPhoto aliases are in fact relative symlinks. I copied one to the desktop and noticed it lost its icon. Then when running ls -l from the terminal one finds:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 jgf staff 29 3 Feb 18:23 IMG_2523.JPG -> ../../2003/07/13/IMG_2523.JPG
I'm not a unix guy, but I think lrwxr is the signature of a typical symlink. That's why one can copy an iPhoto Library and not have the whole thing fall apart.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Bug in Google's identity management: Gmail and Groups
Google Groups
Google has a bug in their identity management.
1. Log into Gmail.
2. Switch to Google groups.
3. Create a post.
4. OOPS. Don't want to put my Gmail address on Usenet! Good catch Google. Ok, click on the option to use other account.
5. Uh-Oh. Screen allows one only to CREATE another account, not to use one that already exists.
6. Go back -- lose all post content.
It's a bug! Of course there's no way to report this to Google.
Here's another one.
Reply to a post in Google Groups. Get a dialog to login. Login. Lose the contents of what one posted. (Firefox 1.0)
Google has a bug in their identity management.
1. Log into Gmail.
2. Switch to Google groups.
3. Create a post.
4. OOPS. Don't want to put my Gmail address on Usenet! Good catch Google. Ok, click on the option to use other account.
5. Uh-Oh. Screen allows one only to CREATE another account, not to use one that already exists.
6. Go back -- lose all post content.
It's a bug! Of course there's no way to report this to Google.
Here's another one.
Reply to a post in Google Groups. Get a dialog to login. Login. Lose the contents of what one posted. (Firefox 1.0)
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