Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Saft: full screen browsing with Safari
MacInTouch Home Page: "Saft 7.5.1 is a Safari plug-in that adds features such as full-screen browsing, searchable bookmarks and history, one-page PDF export, placement of source URLs in Finder comments of downloaded files, and more. This release adds detection of the recently discovered IDN spoofing exploit. Saft is $12 for Mac OS X"
Monday, February 07, 2005
Fixing iPhoto lockups
From Macintouch. This matches my experience w/ OS X debugging. Deleting prefs and caches is much more useful than the usual recommendation to "repair permissions".
Of course iPhoto should manage problems with cache or prefs far more gracefully that it does. That's another story.iPhoto (Part 12)iPhoto 4 Freeze
Markus Hänchen
My copy of iPhoto 4 got completely stuck yesterday, just out of the blue. I had last used it a few days (and quit) without any problems. Now, the spinning disk came up a few seconds after start-up and I had to force-quit the app. This was absolutely reproducible. Trashing the preferences caused iPhoto to open with the default settings (window size, size of left bar) but again the spinning disk appeared after a few seconds.
What fixed it was cleaning the font caches (AKA user caches) with Cocktail.
Of course iPhoto should manage problems with cache or prefs far more gracefully that it does. That's another story.iPhoto (Part 12)iPhoto 4 Freeze
Markus Hänchen
My copy of iPhoto 4 got completely stuck yesterday, just out of the blue. I had last used it a few days (and quit) without any problems. Now, the spinning disk came up a few seconds after start-up and I had to force-quit the app. This was absolutely reproducible. Trashing the preferences caused iPhoto to open with the default settings (window size, size of left bar) but again the spinning disk appeared after a few seconds.
What fixed it was cleaning the font caches (AKA user caches) with Cocktail.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
New York Times Perma Link Generator
New York Times Link Generator
This web service accepts a NY Times article link as input and outputs an alternative link that bypasses the NYT registration service. The alternative link can be embedded in blogs that refer to NYT articles.
They also provide a handy bookmarklet.
This web service accepts a NY Times article link as input and outputs an alternative link that bypasses the NYT registration service. The alternative link can be embedded in blogs that refer to NYT articles.
They also provide a handy bookmarklet.
Blogger tip: finding open blockquotes
Blogger: Dashboard
My blogs are authored in Blogger and hosted by Blogspot. The service works better than it used and the editing tools are improving (on Firefox anyway, Safari is not well supported), but there's one longstanding defect. The BlogThis! bookmarklet tool, which is fundamental to Blogger workflow, doesn't support the blockquote tag.
Since much of Blogging consists of quotes and response, this is a curious omission. Holy missing semantic markup Batman! (sorry, our kids just watched the 1970s movie). So I have to type the blockquote myself.
Of course I occasionally miss a letter or a tag or a closing quote. This effects the summary page that contains the quote. Depending on the underlying template, the page may render correctly in IE or Firefox, but it always renders oddly in Safari. The right column drops to the bottom of the page.
There's nothing in the post display, however, to tell one which post is "bad". Trying to find the missing tag in the Blogger editor is fruitless. (Worst of all with Firefox compose, it fixes the missing tag so there's nothing to see -- but it doesn't save the fix)
I finally figured out a reasonable approach. Open the flawed display in Safari and choose "view source". Then I just search on blockquote. It takes only a few minutes to spot the missing tag and identify what post needs fixing in the Blogger editor. Opening the page in an HTML editor (even old FrontPage) might do the trick too, but the editor might also fix the defect automatically -- which wouldn't help.
My blogs are authored in Blogger and hosted by Blogspot. The service works better than it used and the editing tools are improving (on Firefox anyway, Safari is not well supported), but there's one longstanding defect. The BlogThis! bookmarklet tool, which is fundamental to Blogger workflow, doesn't support the blockquote tag.
Since much of Blogging consists of quotes and response, this is a curious omission. Holy missing semantic markup Batman! (sorry, our kids just watched the 1970s movie). So I have to type the blockquote myself.
Of course I occasionally miss a letter or a tag or a closing quote. This effects the summary page that contains the quote. Depending on the underlying template, the page may render correctly in IE or Firefox, but it always renders oddly in Safari. The right column drops to the bottom of the page.
There's nothing in the post display, however, to tell one which post is "bad". Trying to find the missing tag in the Blogger editor is fruitless. (Worst of all with Firefox compose, it fixes the missing tag so there's nothing to see -- but it doesn't save the fix)
I finally figured out a reasonable approach. Open the flawed display in Safari and choose "view source". Then I just search on blockquote. It takes only a few minutes to spot the missing tag and identify what post needs fixing in the Blogger editor. Opening the page in an HTML editor (even old FrontPage) might do the trick too, but the editor might also fix the defect automatically -- which wouldn't help.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
A source for high quality CD and DVD
Diversified Systems Group, Inc. - Media & Services - CD-R/DVD-R - Bulk CD-R/DVD-R
Referred via Slashdot. This duplication service company sells CD-R media with a reputation for longevity, particularly Taiyo Yuden and MAM-A.
Referred via Slashdot. This duplication service company sells CD-R media with a reputation for longevity, particularly Taiyo Yuden and MAM-A.
A bigger Safari display: Cmd-| and Cmd-\
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.
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.
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.
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