Greenspun dSLR recommendations

Phil Greenspun's recommendation for an average family photographer:

Canon EOS Digital SLR System

* Canon Digital Rebel XT (Black), $690
* Sigma 30/1.4, $400, for high quality indoor photos without flash and general photography
* Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, $690, for travel
* Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM, $670 for sports (equivalent to 300mm on a full-frame camera), or possibly a telephoto zoom (Canon doesn't make any good telephoto zoom lenses designed specifically for the small-sensor cameras, the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM, $590 is probably the best match)

Personally I'd go for the crummy bundled zoom package, the very inexpensive 50 mm Canon, the very nice Sigma 30 and a decent flash. I'd hardly ever use the zoom, and often switch the 30 and the 50.

MacInTouch: Bonjour for Windows

I've used Bonjour for Windows to locate a few network resources. Worked well, it's a good addition to an XP machine living in an OS X environment.

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

Apple released Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3, noting that the update 'is recommended for all Bonjour users to improve usability and compatibility. This update also improves start up performance of Bonjour on Windows platforms.'

Drag-and-drop disk image creation

Disk images are wonderful. This is elegant ...

Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Drag-and-drop disk image creation

... Just drag your folder onto the Disk Utility application icon—whether that’s in the Dock, the Sidebar, the Toolbar, or just in the Finder itself. Disk Utility will launch, displaying the image creation dialog. Set the type of image you’d like to create, and whether you’d like to encrypt it, and you’re set.

PDF Column selection in OS X

Command-option-select:

Macintouch: Mac OS X 10.4.6

David Barnett

If you need to select a column of text from a PDF you can do this by holding down the and keys while dragging the selection in either Preview or Adobe Reader. This trick also works in TextEdit, Mail and Stickies. This is the same convention that is used in Alpha.

I suspect it is a feature of Cocoa applications using the standard text window and PDF handling.

Yahoo! FareChase: bargains in travel

A NYT report on Yahoo's integration of a travel search into their general search utility was the first I'd heard of: Yahoo! FareChase Tools. They sound pretty interesting. I like the Yahoo Widgets integration; maybe it's time to take a more serious look at all of those Widgets (which started out on OS X).

Pacifist is back

ExtraBITS notes Pacifist has been updated. I thought this essential OS X utility had been retired. Great to here it's back, my old Pacifist couldn't parse some of the newer packages. I won't mind paying if I'm due, but I'm probably convered by my old license.

OS X Safe Boot: easiest way to repair disk (fsck replacement)

It's oddly hard to find a clear explanation of what safe boot does, and how it compares to repairs using disk utility (boot DVD) or fsck:

Care and Feeding of Panther

... Under Jaguar, you could run an FSCK from here to manually fix system problems (see the earlier article 'Care and Feeding of Jaguar' if you are running any of the various iterations of Jaguar 10.2.x). Unfortunately, with the introduction of Panther, Apple included a feature called 'Journaling.' Journaling is a system that keeps track of your file and directory information. If something goes wrong, your system might be able to be reconstructed from the 'journaled' information collected prior to the crash. It's actually a pretty cool feature, and it may keep you from ever even noticing that your system had severe problems and fixed them!

The unfortunate part is that this journaling behavior also makes the old Single User Mode FSCK maneuver unworkable. You can force the FSCK in Single User Mode with a little extra code, but you are quite likely to encounter erroneous error messages such that the system seems to have problems but really doesn't. The FSCK routine may not give you a clear idea of whether or not your system is actually fixed.

Luckily, there's a better way to do this. If you reboot your system into what is called a 'Safe Boot' (by holding down the Shift key after the 'bong' like the old Disable Extensions in OS 9), you will see the words Safe Boot in the loading box. When you boot into Safe Boot, Panther automatically runs a complete FSCK during the load process. It may be a slow boot into Safe Boot, because the FSCK running in the process takes quite a long time. It may even be necessary to reboot and run Safe Boot a couple of times, since FSCK may fix one thing one time and then find yet another thing the second time.

It's particularly important to run this Safe Boot FSCK process if your system has had a total lockout like a ten-minute spinning pizza. If you have had to force re-boot your system without shutting it down properly, it is quite likely that certain temp files have gotten corrupted. This may not show up as a problem today, but a week from now, you could get really nasty behavior and even unexplained crashing. Save yourself a little trouble and quickly run Safe Boot if this happens to you.

Despite running a journaled system I do get minor errors on occasion. I think it's worth doing this after major system updates as a maintenance step.