Replicate the experience of 19th century phone service

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, one can combine Skype VOIP, a modern laptop, a wireless LAN and a USB full duplex speakerphone to recreate the turn of the (prior) century experience of yelling "HELLLLOOOO, CAN YOU HEAR ME??".

Pretty bloody awful really. Must be the negative energy field I project. In any case, it'll be handy for picking up my voice mail from my parent's home in Montreal.

Greenspun stuff to checkout

Philip Greenspun's Weblog:

Some interesting things that I learned about at the Hacker's Conference that either are or have Web sites:

• http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html and http://www.googleguide.com/help/calculator.html
  [jf: these are really superb!]
  
• http://www.nw.com/nw/projects/cubatron/
• http://www.dataplace.org/
• ...
  
• * http://mappoint.msn.com/directionsfind.aspx (select the "LineDrive" format and watch in awe as Microsoft draws you a schematic map to your destination, with the uninteresting long freeway sections compressed and the complex local neighborhood sections in detail, all black and white for easy printing, proof that not everything interesting is happening at Google)

Flickr now supports printing -- at least in the US!

At last. Flickr now supports print ordering - at least for US custoemrs. It will be interesting to see how well they do it. Aeons ago I tried to get various vendors to understand what they needed to do to make print ordering grandma-friendly. You'd think they'd understand that I was suggesting, free of charge, a way for them to print money. Alas, nobody got it.

I'll see if Flickr gets it.

I've used Shutterfly and Smugmug and a few others. I liked Smugmug's service but not their limited Mac support. Flickr has a good iPhoto uploader -- but don't integrate your Flickr and Yahoo accounts just yet -- that breaks most of the uploaders.

Now that Flickr offers printing, and since Smugmug's Mac support is weak, I think Flickr may be my business.

OX apps for blogging

Cool OSX Apps lists some OS X apps for blogging. I was quite surprised to find I use none of these! They sound very interesting and I'll have to try each one. Highly recommended! I'm particularly interested in the SubEthaEdit and Cyberduck combo for working on my non-blog server based HTML files.

Changing key assignments to empower OS X Tiger's dictionary

I love these Macworld hints. Maybe I should subscribe to the print magazine! I've never thought about the dictionary built into OS X, but clearly I should: Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Make Tiger's Dictionary roar

Black thumbnails in iPhoto: one cause and solution

An iPhoto power user hacks the system color profiles to fix a notorious iPhoto color profile bug. At some point, his thumbnails go black, it takes a lot of work to connect this back to his color profile hack. It appears to have had something to do with permissions on files within iPhoto.

An obscure chain of events, but it does suggest some interventions for others afflicted by the course of the black thumbnails -- perhaps by other causes.

Adobe is a doomed company

Why is Adobe doomed? Any company that can't get automatic software updates working is hopelessly messed up. I almost never get Adobe's reader software to update correctly; I think the installer assumes you never change the default install path. The uodater just makes a mess of things; eventually I have to download a full copy of Adobe and install it.

They've had years to get this right. By now it's evident they can't fix it. Someone needs to aquire them.