Cmd-Opt-Eject to lock screen

OS X now uses hibernation instead of old-fashioned sleep -- at least on MacTel machines. Risky, it's easy to shut a laptop, sling it into a bag, and walk off with the hard drive still spinning. (The way too small sleep indicator on the MacBook contributes to the problem.)

Worse, hibernation mode means someone can browse the disk image and extract the content of memory -- including usernames and passwords.

So this OS X Hint tells users how to: Disable Safe Sleep for faster sleep on lid close.

Personally I'll skip this one, but from comments I learned how to lock a screen quickly from the kb: Hold Command-Option and then tap the Eject button. The machine doesn't go to sleep any more quickly than tapping Power-S, but the lock is instantaneous (if you have the machine set to request a pw on wake from sleep). Handy when you're trying to get the laptop away from the kids. It doesn't work on every laptop apparently, but it's fine on my MacBook Core-2 Duo.

Export a book as a QuickTime movie in iPhoto 6

Another undocumented iPhoto feature:

macosxhints.com - Export a book as a QuickTime movie in iPhoto 6

...Create a book in iPhoto. With the book selected, Option-click on the Play button. The slideshow settings panel appears as it normally would. The difference, however, is that when you click the Play button in the panel, you're prompted to save the slideshow as a movie. Pick a save location, name the movie, click Export, then wait. No need to invoke iDVD...

Amazon S3 and a Firefox based file manager

Coding Horror: Using Amazon S3 as an Image Hosting Service is another excellent CH article and comment collection. S3 is said to be a favorite startup storage facility. CH describes a Firefox based S3 file browser.

Windows NTFS almost has basic file system indirection

Shell-Shocked :: Windows Symbolic and Hard Links. It's in there, it just doesn't work very well. Reminds me of NTFS forks, which include MacOS-like resources and other alternative file streams.

I think WinFS was supposed to replace all of this semi-hacked technology. If Vista had really come with WinFS, I'd have been seriously interested in it.

A tutorial on website bandwidth, RSS outsourcing, and image outsourcing

Coding Horror: Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage is an excellent, brief, tutorial on the state of the web art. Among other things, I learned about image outsourcing with Imageshack, why people use FeedBurner (outsource the RSS burden), the huge cost of badly written RSS readers, HTTP compression (ok, I knew about that, but it's rarely mentioned), JavaScript and CSS optimization. An excellent reference to keep at hand.

I do need to learn more about FeedBurner. There's evidently a reason it's so popular.

Update: check out the comments too. S3 is mentioned a content host a few times.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: Impressive

I'm impressed. I tried Adobe - Photoshop Lightroom (OS X) when it was in beta and I wasn't that keen on it, but it's come a long way. Editing tasks are quite fast on my G5 iMac, certainly faster than Aperture, but even quicker than iPhoto. You can actually edit a date in Lightroom, which you can't do in Aperture (still). (Ok, so there are bugs in dates prior to 1600 or so ...)

The relatively small number of keyboard shortcuts are just right to make quick work of editing. I quickly got the hang of ~, R, G, Cmd-U, etc. The auto-correction and several tools for saving and applying sets of editing operations worked quickly and well.

I don't see the powerful querying and image management tools I used during my Aperture trial however. They may be there, I haven't finished looking at the app yet.

If Adobe had decided to support migrating from iPhoto I'd be strongly tempted to buy it. Of course they didn't. Lightroom is not a good option for anyone with a great deal of metada in iPhoto, but it may be the best bet for just about everyone else. This 1.0 release of Lightroom seems better put together than Aperture 1.52.

Did I mention the user interface is clear and readable -- unlike Aperture's bizarre non-Apple GUI?

Apple needs to get in gear. They're already losing a race that's barely started.

Update 3/8/07: I've found my first nasty bug. On occasion Lightroom reports it cannot import an image. It may even say it can't be read. On a retry Lightroom reads it. Image Capture, iPhoto, etc have no problem with the same image.

Jon Udell tackles the multiple calendar problem

Jon Udell wrote some fabulous columns for BYTE magazine in its heyday [1]. He always looked harder and farther than anyone else. So I'm delighted to see he feels the multi-calendar pain, and he's writing about it ...

Calendar cross-publishing concepts � Jon Udell

... The private URL [Google Calendar] is what we’re looking for. And in particular, the iCal flavor of the private URL. That’s what other calendar programs, including Outlook, can latch onto to subscribe to this calendar. The URL that Google produces starts with http:// and, when you plug it into Outlook 2007, bingo, there’s the family calendar nicely merged in with the work calendar...

Huh!? Outlook 2007 will integrate an iCal source with the work calendar? Maybe Office 2007 isn't all bad after all.

This does mean that family events go into the work world, which I dislike. I'd much rather have the work events to to a secured family calendar, but of course my employer doesn't care for that. Jon says Outlook 2007 will publish to a WebDav server:

... When you publish your Outlook calendar to WebDAV and then try to subscribe from Google Calendar, you’ll fail if the calendar is secured with HTTP basic authentication. (However, Apple iCal will succeed in this case.) If you instead allow anonymous access to the WebDAV-hosted calendar it’ll work in Google Calendar, but only if you alter the sharing URL produced by Outlook, changing webcal:// to http://...

Hmm. If I sign up for .Mac I get a WebDAV server and a family Calendar sync. If I can also integrate my work calendar ...

The multi-calendar problem is driving me bonkers. I remember the blessed days when I could sort-of-get Outlook to selectively sync certain categories with my Palm. Back then, I had a full calendar view on my Palm and at home, and a work only view at Work. Alas, an immense number of bugs and design flaws made me give up on that solution; I've had two cursed calendars ever since. The problem is all the more painful given that there was once a pretty decent solution ...

[1] There's nothing like BYTE in the world today. I'm convinced its demise set back progress in personal computing by several years. I'd always felt Microsoft's relative enmity (PC Magazine wrote whatever they wanted, so they got the goodies) was partly responsible for BYTE's demise, so it's a bit ironic that Jon now works for the Empire.