Spotless: Beat the Spotlight beast for a mere $8 US

Spotless is a $8 OS X utility that lets one delete spotlight (oh wretched implementation) indices and disable spotlight indexing.

In theory Spotlight has a mechanism for excluding drives from indexing. In practice it doesn't work. OS X is perpetually trying to index an external backup drive -- no matter how often I tell it not to. Spotless claims to have disabled that indexing and to have deleted the files.

Unless 10.4.4 finally fixes that blasted bug, and assuming my problems with that drive resolves, I'll happily register spotless.

Oh wretched Apple that three bug-fix releases of the 10.4 have not fixed this problem.

Better ways to record audio: use a patch cable to connect audio out and audio in.

macosxhints - An alternative method for recording computer audio

Emergency fixes for bad photos: Putting Photoshop to good use

This MacWorld article relies on Photoshop for most of its fixes. I liked it because it puts some moderately advanced image editing features in a problem solving context: Macworld: Feature: Emergency fixes for bad photos. Once I buy Aperture, it will be interesting to see how many of these fixes can be implemened in Aperture. The thing I most need to learn is how to rescue underexposed regions without blowing out highlights. I hate to think I have to buy Photoshop Elements, it's a notoriously ill-behaved OS X application (won't install/run except as Administrator, an egregious flaw).

Aperture: Perhaps the best review so far

Aperture Review < Main < Frostbytes.com is evolving as the author, a professional photographer, uses it in his work. He leads with an issues list that feels reasonably comprehensive, then concludes he's pleased with his purchase. The good outweights the bad, the bad looks fixable, and the alternatives aren't so great.

I'm thinking I may move to Aperture in the springtime.

Import Microsoft Access tables into Filemaker Pro

(For related comments on FMPro 8, see my review.)

This is pretty obscure. The official documentation, Querying an ODBC data source from FileMaker Pro, isn't all that helpful.

If you're ever stuck with this problem, here are some tips.

First create an OBDC data source pointing to the Microsof Access file you're importing from.

1. In XP's control panel you'll find something called 'Data Sources (ODBC)'.
2. Open it and create a new data source, choose Microsoft Access driver.
3. In the driver dialog name the source then use the Database select dialog to select it.

Now, in FileMaker choose File Open:ODBC source then ...

1. Select the data source you create above.
2. Enter username and password for Windows account.
3. Write SQL (for an entire table just do "select * from table_name"). Yes, that's not very user friendly. FileMaker is not the program it once was.
4. FMPro imports the Access data. In my experiment everything came in as text, except a boolean that was translated to a number. Dates in Access were imported as text. The latter didn't impress me.

Wouldn't it be nice if FMPro could just import from the file directly?

Hacking Aperture

How to make Aperture run on unsupported platforms. You may regret it.

macosxhints - Run Aperture on a 12" PowerBook

or

1. Use a package opener to bypass installer.
2. Open the .app package once you have it installed, and get to the Info.plist and open it. Apple stores the minimum requirements there. Like RAM for example, change 1000 to 1 or whatever you want less than what you have.

or

http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/12/1542247

or

http://dsiska.wz.cz/blog/?postid=37

Reasons to install Google Desktop and thus Google Desktop search ...

Yahoo Desktop Search, when it doesn't crash and burn, is still the best full text indexing and search tool for XP (I so wish Microsoft hadn't bought and killed "Lookout for Outlook". Google Desktop, and thus Googe Desktop Search, however, is getting very, very interesting. The Plug-In modules are getting clever enough that they significantly increase the value of the product. Consider this one ...

Google Desktop Plug-in: HDDlife plug-in for Google Desktop

Worried about a hard drive failure? Get HDDlife - a real-time hard drive monitoring utility with malfunction protection and data loss prevention features. This hard drive inspector is an advanced proactive hard drive failure detection system that manages all of your hard drive risks. HDDlife runs in the background constantly monitoring your disks. It alerts you about possible hard disk problems before they happen and displays a disk health indicator in the Google Desktop Sidebar.