Aperture Lift and stamp tool - winner of the unusability award?

I've been trying to use the "lift and stamp" tool in Aperture 1.5.3. It will only "stamp" one image, no matter how many I select before application. When I search on this tool, I mostly find comments on how hard it is to use it.

Aperture is such a frustrating product ....

Encyclopaedia Britannica - Google integration

We subscribe to the encyclopedia britannica - mostly for sentimental reasons. It's not terribly useful; Wikipedia has better coverage for the topics I need to know about. Still, it's handy when the kids have questions, though even then it can be flaky. Tonight most of the links were dysfunctional when I used Camino, a switch to Safari fixed that problem. (I suspect I was hitting a bad server and switching browsers randomly assigned me to a working server.)

Really the EB seems to have been on its last legs for ages. The web site has been remarkably uninventive; for example, they've never really tried to build a community of users. I figure they've been waiting for Google to bail them out.

Maybe that's starting. Just by chance I came across this Google co-op integration feature:
Co-op Encyclopaedia Britannica integration. I've used Google co-op to create my own custom searches, but I'd not heard of this option.

I clicked the button, and now, as long as I'm logged in to my Gmail account, my Google searches include results from EB at the top. I'll give it a try for a while. Maybe I'll even use my EB account more than once every six months - if they can get their site working! (Wikipedia, by contrast, never fails me.)

The Co-op site, btw, provides other search integration options, but I didn't see any others I wanted.

The mystery of Safari, and how to file a bug report

The "surprise" of Steve Jobs unremarkable Apple developer keynote address was a Windows version of Safari. It's not been an auspicious launch. Even by the unexacting standards of Apple's product releases it's probably a month away from being ready, but Jobs dumped it out anyway.

There's a new version for Windows out already, but I'm more interested in how we're supposed to file bug reports (not that I'm going to bother with it!):

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Safari Beta 3.0.1 for Windows

• For security issues: email product-security@apple.com.
• For engine-level issues, like site compatibility or crashes on specific pages: file a bug report in WebKit bugzilla.
• For any bugs, including the above categories, you can file a Radar bug.

In other words, don't bother with the little bug icon on the toolbar. That offical Apple stuff goes nowhere.

In related news, Cringely tries to figure out why the heck Apple bothered. He figures the premature timing was driven by a lack of anything to announce at the WWDC, but the primary motivation is to provide a platform for AT&T web services. Seems unlikely, but, like all things Cringely, it's interesting.

The explanation I like best (so far) for "why Safari/Windows" came from Daring Fireball. DF thinks it's all about referral revenue from using the Google search box in Safari/Windows. Apple wants a Windows platform for iPhone web development, and this way they get that and a few million in cash flow.

Ultimately though, I'm still puzzled.

By the way, I wrote a while back that the push of OS X from April to September, and the reasons given for that delay, suggested that OS X may not be ready until 2008. The lack of WWDC news has reinforced my suspicions.

It's rare for a project as big as 10.5 now appears to be to slip by only a few months. If they do ship in September, I'll bet it will be about as cooked as Safari/Windows.

Why doesn't Apple do basic security testing?

 Glenn Fleishman, writing for Tidbits, asks a simple question ...

TidBITS: Apple Updates Windows Safari Beta with Security Fixes

... It's disturbing that Apple isn't stress testing its public beta software with the same kind of readily available tools for fuzzing that both researchers and the nefarious have. Many of the Month of Apple Bugs flaws (see "MoAB Is My Washpot," 2007-02-19), as well as many recent AirPort and AirPort Extreme problems, were discovered through fuzzing.

We all know Apple treats early adopters as alpha testers, but Fleishman is making a more important point. Apple is releasing products that evidently haven't passed even basic attacks using off-the-shelf hacking tools -- including OS X 10.4.

In a reasonable world, that would be product negligence, and there would be rabid lawyers ringing Cupertino. It's the 21st century Apple. You need to do much, much better.

Pogue's headphone alternatives to Bose

I rather like my Bose QC-2 headphones, but now, Pogue says, there are very good alternatives: 

Headphones to Shut Out the World - New York Times

PANASONIC RP-HC500 The pleasantly smushy-edged earcups on this new model do an excellent job of isolating your ears. That may be one reason the noise cancellation works so well; all but the highest frequencies are subtracted. Better still, the music reproduction is stellar, especially in the crisp, clean higher registers.

I waited to look up the prices for these products until after I’d tested them. So I was astonished to discover that you can find these online for $100. You get quality that’s nearly indistinguishable from the Boses — for a third the price.

AUDIO-TECHNICA ATH-ANC7 Here is another winner, with another surprising price: $132 for these comfy, solidly built, absolutely great-sounding headphones. The circuitry cuts out a huge swath of engine, road or train noise, and the music is crystal clear, sweet and finely textured.

David doesn't say which are truly around the ear vs. on the ear. This is an important distinction for eyeglass wearing Luddites. On the ear phones painfully compress my the ears against eyeglass frames, I can really only wear over the ear phones. If I were shopping today I'd consider the above two -- assuming they're "over the ear".

Credit to Pogue as well for pointing out that the Bose QC-3 phones require one to carry a LiOn charger! Grrrr. They should, at the very least, have included a mini-B charging port. That would rule them out for me.

In defense of Bose's high price, the quality of everything in the QC-2 kit is impressive, and Bose customer services is peerless. When a manufacturing defect caused cracks to appear in the arms of my 3 yo phones the discussion with customer service took about a minute. The replacements were a completely new set, not a refurb. I wouldn't mind seeing Bose's price drop to, say, $275 however.

Dan's Data: Laptops for all, and for all a laptop

Dan's Data, one of the world's best geek blogs, reviews the state of the ultra-cheap Linux laptop. No, the Foleo does not quality. DD covers a lot of territory, including the PalmOS running Dana (huh!?) and the famed Newton eMate, but what he really wants is the untouchable $175 OLPC device (one laptop per child). In the meantime, though, the $199 Eee PC is supposed to be coming our way in August.

$200 is indeed interesting.

Fifteen years ago I almost sold our rural school district (Delta County, MI) on a program of distributing eMates to elementary school kids (a lease-to-buy program with an insurance component). Mercifully saner heads (not mine) prevailed. The Eee PC, if it truly appears, is going to resurrect schemes like that ...

Update 1/2/09: The eMate was formally introduced in 1997. My school district presentation would have been @1994. So there's either something fishy with my memory, or there was a long prelude to the eMate's formal launch. I think in those days, when Jobs was gone, Apple used to leak product ideas -- so I'm tending to favor the latter. I'll have to see if I can dredge up the presentation from my archives.

Screen fonts in OS X vs. XP/Vista: Round to Microsoft

Alas, even those who prefer OS X must admit that sometimes Microsoft wins one. Safari/Windows has allowed side-by-side comparison of Apple and Microsoft's approach to font rendering. Both are defensible, but today Microsoft's is better. I suspect Apple's approach is a descendant of NextStep's Postscript display technology, which became OS X's PDF based display technology. Ideal for a very high resolution output, like 300 dpi printing. Not so good for 100 dpi screens.