Usenet 2: StackExchange and apple.stackexchange.com

A few years back two geek gods, Atwood and Spolsky, put Stack Overflow together. They were responding to the sploggish network of tooth grinding programming support sites of the day.

From that grew StackExchange. For geeks of a certain age, the current 61 sites feel like the 2nd coming of Usenet. (Once Usenet was great. Yes, I know that's hard to imagine, especially since you don't know what usenet is/was).

Among the 61 is the best Apple Q&A site on the web. It's where I look to learn and contribute. It's turbocharged my Google Custom Search engine for OS X search.

Here are a few others that personally interest me ...

• OnStartups - Stack Exchange
• SharePoint (Yech. But, for me, useful.)
• Photography
• Home Improvement
• Bicycles
• Travel

Sure sounds like usenet. For example: Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I wish I knew how Jeff & Joel were going to get rich from all of this, but I suspect they have ideas.

My MacBook Air case is a Ziploc baggie

I bought the 11" Air instead of the 13" because I wanted portability above all. It's a tough call, but Lion's 'full screen' integration with Mission Control makes that small display usable. For real work, of course, I add an external display.

So I didn't want to sacrifice portability by adding on a $30+ neoprene sleeve. The Air itself feels pretty study. It is, however, not waterproof. So I've been looking for a tight fitting 'case' that would provide water protection with a bit of surface protection.

Something like a .... baggie (I know what you were thinking).

For the moment I'm using the Ziploc 2 gallon Heavy Duty freezer bag: 13" x 15.6". The horizontal (13") dimension is a good fit, but it's far too long. I would prefer a 13" x 8" baggie. So I'm still looking, but for the moment the current bags are fine. Those I don't use up on the Air I use in the kitchen. The price is certainly right.

Back to the future: OS X Parental Controls, DVD Encyclopedias, and MacKiev

I was born into a world of progress. Things were supposed to get better, the old would fade away.

That was then. Now we live in a whitewater world. One year we get the iPhone, another year movie viewing fails. Bits and pieces of solutions come together then fall apart again. Cloud services come and go with bewildering speed (fear the cloud).

In this world all-but-forgotten DVD Encyclopedias are making a return to our home. That's weird.

They're coming back because OS X Parental Controls have failed me [1]. Lion's PC "bug fix" was the last straw.

Sure, I blame Apple -- but it's not their fault alone. For reasons both good (bypass tyrants) and bad (involuntary marketing) the web fights controls. I can't win this fight.

So, in addition to the child accounts we monitor by log tracking (%$$# OS X Log Viewer), I've created a completely open account on one of our machines. That account can be open ... because it has no net access. None at all.

This account has old-school local apps like iTunes (access to our media server, App Store and Ping disabled) and AppleWorks. The machine is old enough to also include a 6+ yo copy of World Book encyclopedia.

That old encyclopedia could do with a tune up. So I took a look at what's available in DVD land. Amazon has the 2011 copy of EB (Mac/Win) for $23. That's a good end-of-year deal, but I'm skeptical about the quality of their OS X software.

On the other hand, MacKiev, a Ukranian OS X dev shop that did a great job resuscitating Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing produces the Mac version of World Book Encyclopedia. It runs on both legacy and Intel machines all the way from 10.3.9 (!) to Lion. It's more money ($40) but I'll give it a try once the 2012 edition comes out.

I've really got to hold onto my old software going forward.

[1] Incredibly, iOS is even worse.

Migration of metadata from Aperture to iPhoto and Google's Picasa web albums

There can't be more than one person in a million who cares about this.

This post is for you. Please comment so I know I'm not alone. (Just joking, I know I'm alone.)

I've been curious about how metadata (title, comment, etc) passes between Aperture 3 and iPhoto 8.1.2 [8]

I ran an experiment today to find out. I started with a RAW image. I exported a JPEG version to the desktop then dropped it into iPhoto. I also, for the heck of it, used iPhoto's Aperture browser and dropped an image in that way. [5]

Here's what I found (see [6] below for a note on the table).

• n/d means not displayed
• e- means it can be seen in the EXIF details on Picasa Web album

Aperture Attribute Name	iPhoto Name		Picasa [4]
	File	Media browser	File
Version Name	n/d [3]	title	n/d
Caption	description	[2]	n/d
Rating	none	n/d	n/d
Keywords	keyword	n/d	Tags, e-keyword
Title	title	n/d	Caption, e-object name
Event Name	n/d	n/d	n/d
Image Location (text)	n/d	n/d	e-location
State/Province (text)	n/d	n/d	e-state
Image Location using Places	n/d [1]	n/d	yes [1]

So if you, for some strange reason [7], edit in Aperture but store in iPhoto, don't bother rating photos. You can, however, use the following attributes and see useful information in iPhoto 8:

• aperture.Title -> iPhoto.title
• aperture.Caption -> iPhoto.description
• aperture.Keyword -> iPhoto.keyword
• aperture.Version Name -> file name if specified during export
• aperture.Places -> not rendering for me in iPhoto 8, but it's stored correctly and Picasa Web Albums can use it.

When exporting from iPhoto to Picasa only iPhoto.title and iPhoto.keyword are used.

Based on this experiment, I crated a custom Aperture metadata set that included Title, Caption and Keywords. I also customized my Grid View - Expanded metadata (cmd-J) to include Title, Caption, Keywords and Version Name.

Update 9/7/11: It appears that the Aperture Project Name is written to JPEG EXIF during export and read by iPhoto during import. Most surprising.

-fn-

[1] This really surprised me. In the past this metadata had been preserved. I wonder if an Aperture update made it incompatible with my older version of iPhoto. Although iPhoto 8 couldn't read the location metadata, it was in the EXIF header because Picasa could read it.
[2] Something odd happened here. I'd assigned a Caption on Import and that's what showed up in iPhoto. I suspect it was IPTC metada from the RAW image.
[3] This can become part of the file name on export from Aperture. The iPhoto.title attribute can be set equal to the file name by batch update. So there's a way to pass this to iPhoto if desired.
[4] Exporting from Google to Picasa Web Albums using Google export
[5] This isn't something you'd normally do. It just saves a @500K JPEG Aperture uses as a preview images. Still, it's interesting to see what happens with the metadata. 
[6] When I tried to create this table I again mourned the passing of FrontPage, Windows Live Writer (all but gone) and the great wysiwyg editors of old. Neither MarsEdit (this tool) nor iWeb do tables. So I downloaded SeaMonkey (88MB - once that was a lot). Since I remembered Netscape Composer I had a major flashback with fascinating visuals.
[7] I'm stuck in iPhoto until Apple changes Aperture's iPhoto import to include more metadata. Also, I don't trust RAW for archival storage. I save JPEG and discard RAW.
[8] I haven't updated to iPhoto 9, the dead fish smell has been offputting.

Migrating Contacts from Outlook/Exchange server to OS X Address Book via MobileMe

For the past year I've had one set of Contacts in Outlook/Exchange server and another set in OS X Address Book/MobileMe. My iPhone pulled in both sets, so they met there. (I'll omit the added complexity of how I sync to Google.)

This worked quite well, but now I need to bring all my Contacts into OS X Address Book. There are several ways to do this [1], but in the midst of some quick Google searches I remembered I'd written about this. I like my approach best, as detailed in two 2009 posts (neither of which rank highly on Google fwiw [2]):

• Gordon's Tech: Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone (5/2009)
• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts (11/2009)

The value of this approach is it uses Apple's own software to manage the Outlook to Address Book translation. The problem is that it requires MobileMe, which is no longer publicly available. I'm hoping Apple will do something similar with iCloud -- assuming they don't shut Windows out entirely.

The software I use is the Contact Sync tool built into MobileMe for Windows. These are the components:

1. MobileMe (alas, closed to new users ... maybe iCloud will work one day?)
2. Outlook 2007 running on XP (in my case, in a VM)
3. MobileMe Control Panel for Windows (no support for Outlook/Exchange, only Outlook standalone)
4. OS Address Book.

The first step is to get a copy of my Contacts into Outlook 2007 at home.

1. Clean out all Contacts from Outlook 2007.
2. Using MobileMe control panel and "sync reset" I sync everything from MobileMe into Outlook 2007.

Second step is to copy my Contacts from Exchange Server to a PST file. This has the added benefit of transforming X400 style email addresses to standard format.

Third step is ...

1. Back up OS X Address Book contacts.
2. Add the PST file as a data file and drag and drop Contacts into a subfolder of Contacts (see above articles for details, this is how Apple's sync software treats OS X Address Book Groups -- as Contacts subfolders).
3. Sync again to get them all to MobileMe and inspect MobileMe.
4. In OS X sync to get them all to Address Book.

I'm reminded of something I'd forgotten -- how vastly better Outlook is for managing contacts than OS X Address Book -- especially since Microsoft Access can manipulate Outlook contacts. It's reason alone to have my VM keep synchronizing with MobileMe.

[1] CSV export doesn't work very well. There are some utilities that probably work; one reader of mine had success using Plaxo.
[2] A splog that had stolen a post of mine ranked higher than my stuff. Maybe I should start taking Google's ads?

Lost and found: putting contact info on iOS and OS X login screens

Most people are reasonably honest, and for some integrity is a point of pride.

So if you lose your iOS or OS X device there's a good chance it will be found by an honest person. Alas, at that point they're stuck. They have no way to know who to return the device to, especially if it's encrypted (as it should be).

It's easy to remedy this for an iOS device. You can make any image the background for the iOS login screen. I typed my contact info into an iOS Note, saved it as a screenshot, then made it my login background. For good measure I taped a business card into the back of my Speck iPhone case.

Things aren't as easy for OS X, including Lion. There's no tool for changing the login screen background, you have to hack it. On an Air, you can't even tape a business card or write contact info on the battery. (Yes, you could try a Sharpie on the back. That takes a Vulcan dedication to logic!).

For my Air I put my contact info into the password "hint" box. If someone clicks on the question mark next to my name on the login screen they'll see it. This is subtle though, so I'll probably hack the login screen too, and use a pixel editor to put my contact info there too. I did something like this once with a digital camera.

Apple should make it easier for honest people to help us out ...

Update: Yay! There's an official way to do this in Lion. KimH had the tip in comments. I'm starting to like Lion a bit more ...

Gmail and Google Contact Groups: At last, simple paste of a list of email addresses

I've not seen mention of this, but for me it's the biggest improvement to Gmail/Google Contacts in months. Heck, it may be the most valuable thing Google has done for me in 2011.

Years ago, when Gmail was definitely beta, we could create email "lists" (Groups) by pasting a list of email addresses into a text field. Gmail would digest the list and create a Group. Google removed this functionality, perhaps to reduce abuse by spammers. Instead we had to create Groups one member at a time. This was a serious PITA for the various sports teams and organizations I work with.

I gave up hope that Google would ever restore this functionality, but today I discovered they have -- probably in the past few weeks.

It's subtle, but the UI for creating a Group, or adding email addresses to a group, is now an expandable multi-line text box. If you paste in a list of email addresses Google will match them to existing Contacts and add the Contacts to the Group. Failed matches become new email-address-only members.