Credit to the data freedom team at Google - the new OS X web uploader can also download albums and even ALL albums - including video.
Does any other free image service allow such easy download of "all albums"? (I pay for extended storage, but most don't)
Joel Barriere's Onyx troubleshooting utility for OS X is free. It comes well recommended, so when my main machine was misbehaving I tried it again.
This time the Onyx startup test told me I had a drive directory structure problem. I was a bit surprised; It's been years since I ran into something like that. Onyx recommended I run disk utility from my 10.6.2 installer disk.
I was lazy, so I tried safe boot instead. Safe boot won't work with a wireless kb, so I plugged in a wired kb and held the shift key down on restart. Surprised again -- it didn't work! I thought safe boot would run fdisk if it found an error, but I guess not.
So I gave in, found my OS X installer disk, and ran Disk Utility from there. It found a missing directory item and fixed it. The behavior has changed over the years, now if Disk utiliy fixes an error it runs a second time to look for uncovered problems. It was fine, but I ran it a third time because I'm that kind of geek.
I don't know if this had any relationship to my problems. My iMac's screensaver uses images hosted on a Time Capsule external share; for some reason it's been dropping the wireless share and failing to reconnect. This is a pain to debug, because there could be multiple causes and because, even at the best of times, OS X doesn't recover from dropped shares very well.
Still, I'm glad to have found something fixable. I made a donation to Titanium Software. I meant to give $10, but I didn't pay attention to the denomination so I gave 10 Euro (about $13 or so).
I wonder if Onyx will be sold in the OS X App store come January. Since it's always been donation-ware (free) that would probably cause some complaints, but this is a venerable and well regarded utility. Barriere surely deserves some revenue.
One of the problems with migrating from iPhoto to Aperture has been that all of the descriptions associated with iPhoto events and albums are lost.
In Aperture 3, however, projects now have descriptions ...
Working With the Project Info Window | Aperture Users Network
The Enter description field is a place to add descriptive text to add to your Project. This is a great concept, which we’ll talk about more in other tutorials, but essentially it’s designed to hold text to describe a whole Project as opposed to individual images in the Project. You can include any information you’d like here, and it’s searchable. For example, let’s say that you were doing a shoot for a client, but you didn’t want to add the client’s name to the metadata of your photos. You could add that to the Project description field and search for that later on.
Aperture 3 projects now behave like iPhoto events, they can be created automatically (fixed 1 day interval, less flexible than iPhoto). There's a good description of the project description field in this support thread. Along the way rwboyer mentions using a one page book template with a large text area for notes associated with project.
This is encouraging. So has Apple finally addressed a major issue with migrating from iPhoto to Aperture? Will event descriptions be saved in project descriptions?
I couldn't find any documentation on this, but it was easy to experiment. I created an iPhoto 8.1.2 Library with an annotated Event and imported that Library into Aperture. The iPhoto Library became an Aperture folder, and the iPhoto Event became an Aperture Project.
After I did this, the Aperture Project description field was ...
...
empty.
I would love to see Apple sued for false advertising when they claim Aperture 3 is a natural migration path for iPhoto users.
This was written in 2004 ...
Dropping Network Connection In Sleep Mode - Mac-Forums.com
... I am running OSX 10.3.4 and really want to know if there is any way to put my computer to sleep without dropping the network connection"...
Actually, I remember that 10.3 wasn't too bad at holding onto network connections. 10.6.5, on the other hand, couldn't hold onto a network share if its life depended on it.
It's been such a longstanding problem few geeks have the energy to complain about it any more.
Maybe the OS X network team should study how Windows 95 did things ....
I've been evaluating the MarsEdit OS X blog writing tool since November 2004. In 2007 I gave it a good try, but it fell short. Finally, in May 2010 I bought it, but by July 2010 I threw it out. It didn't measure up to my lost love - Windows Live Writer [1].
Six years is a long time to evaluate a product, but not as long as I've been fighting with Google's incompetence. Evidently billions of dollars aren't enough to create a rich text editor that knows the difference between <div></br> and <p></p>. This past October Blogger broke me. While I researched alternative hosting solutions, I decided to give MarsEdit another try. By this time it was at version 3.1.2.
MarsEdit is now good enough. Try it, buy it ($40).
No, it's still not the equal of Microsoft's free Windows Live Writer, but WLW was one of the finest pieces of consumer software created in the past five years on any platform. WLW is one hell of a high standard. MarsEdit is now about 60% as good as WLW, and that's more than good enough.
The key to succeeding with MarsEdit is not to mix MarsEdit posts with any Blogger product. Don't use Google's BlogThis! to create a draft post, use the "Post with MarsEdit"/Blog This bookmarklet that comes with MarsEdit. Don't touch your posts with Bloggers pustulent editor, open them with MarsEdit [2]. When you paste text, always use "Paste and Match Style" (sure wish that didn't strip out URLs though).
You can alternate editing a post with MarsEdit and WLW by the way. The post formatting will not be injured.
There are several bugs with the rich text editor portion of WLW. I don't see them very often because I've learned workarounds. Sometimes you just have to switch to the HTML editor to remove <div> tags that seem to confuse MarsEdit -- though if you stick with WLW (Windows) and MarsEdit (OS X) you won't run into this problem. There are bugs with <blockquote>, it helps to include an extra line before the paragraph.
The good news is that you can learn to work around the bugs, and there's an end to them. Honestly, I rarely notice them any more. I notice more the rich text editor's lack of keyboard shortcuts or menu bar icons for commonly used commands. Daniel Jalkut is actively working on MarsEdit though, and I think they'll be there in the next release.
MarsEdit has made my life better. It's not perfect, but it improves. Within a year or two I bet it's 75% of WLW, and that's way more than good enough.
[1] Lost because I'm pure OS X at home, and because Microsoft has abandoned the product. Since it was about perfect though, it will be a fine tool for years to come. They've relabeled a "2011" version, but really there have been no changes.
[2] Ok, so I do open quite old posts with Blogger's editor.
Contrary to what's written here, my free version of Shazam was upgraded to a pay version ...
Shazam set to limit free iPhone app to 5 songs per month | Edible Apple
... until recently, Shazam was free and allowed users to identify any number of songs they wanted. But now, the development company behind Shazam is saying that new downloaders of the app will only be able to tag 5 songs a month. Users who want to get more use out of Shazam can opt to pay for a $5 pro version of the app, which will enable them to tag an unlimited number of songs in addition to providing them with new features such as music recommendations and enhanced search features. If you’ve already downloaded Shazam, then you can rest easy as the new pricing structure won’t affect you...
Except it did affect me.
I wouldn't mind the transition if iOS app updates were less automatic. I'd simply stay with the old version. The new version is really just a demo app.
Unfortunately iOS App updates are almost automatic, so there's a lot of room for these unwanted contract changes.
We're moving to software rental fairly quickly.
Facebook now allows us to download all of our personal information in one zip archive (Account:Account Settings: Download Your Information). That's good.
On the other hand, I realized today I can't block game posts any more.
Until recently when I moused over a Facebook "app" generated game posts generated by a friend's game use, I would see a small "X" to the right of the post. Clicking on that produced a list of options like:
Now I only see the first two. I can either hide a single post (pointless), or I can hide all from "Joe" (not what I want). I can't hide all posts from, say, "farmville".
Now I'm seeing Facebook App posts in my news stream - for the first time in a year.
Games are how Facebook makes its money. Even so, this surprises me. I wonder if it's a technical glitch ...
Update: Some game related posts from today still have the "Hide All ..." option. I wonder if some app vendors are trying to bypass FB's "Hide All" feature.
Update 11/21/10: Per comments this has been going on for weeks. I don't think it's a glitch. Strange that there's been abundant coverage of FB minor events, but none of this much bigger change. I'm going to have to start hiding all posts from my friends who use FB Apps that publish activity.
