Keys Corner

I bought an i-Blue 747 GPS track logger recently. You can pick one up, new, on eBay for around 40 – 50 Euro. The idea is to use it to tag photos with their position – our cameras don’t have GPS receivers built in, and often when we get back from holiday, its difficult to remember where exactly we took which pictures. If you set the clock in the (digital) camera before you set off, the time-stamp from the GPS log, together with the position data allow you add the exact position of each photo to the EXIF data that the camera stores when each picture is taken.

The problem is, few GPS loggers come with any software for downloading and processing the track data on a Mac. I’m not aware of any that supports OS X “out of the box”. However, there is lots of third party software around which can be used to read out the scans and process them on the Mac. It takes time to track them down, however. So here’s what works for me:

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Apple is using the Olympics to market it’s Macs and professional image processing software, Aperture, to the press photographers attending. They’ve set up 50 workstations with 30” Cinema Displays and all the necessary software (Photoshop, Aperture, and more) for the pros to use in the Kodak Photographer’s Center. The set-up is being managed by Joe Schorr, Senior Product Manager of Photo Applications, who is also learning a lot about how the Apple applications can be improved by watching the pros working under very tight deadlines.

Sounds like a great idea – gets the best possible quality feedback on their photographic applications and the photographers get excellent support using the Apple set-up from the Apple experts.

Incidently, Kodak are publishing the Olympic Picture of the Day on thier web site – their take on the best photograph processed in thier center on each day of the Olympics.

We have just installed Aperture and switched to shooting our serious pictures in RAW format with the goal of using Aperture to organize the 1000’s of images we have on the Macs and to optimize the pictures when we upload them to the Macs. I’m currently working my way through Apple’s “Aperture 2 – Professionally Manage Digital Photographs“, which is a learning by doing course which involves you managing and manipulating several hundred digital images on the accompanying DVD ROM. I’m finding it an excellent way to get familiar with Aperture, depite the book containing a number of typos (mostly wrong command short-cuts).

I have been tearing my hair out, fighting technology, at home this last week.

Firstly, I have been trying to get a decent wireless LAN connection from the office to the cellar. The problem here is that the floors in our house are made of reinforced concrete (and, I suspect so are at least some of the cellar walls). We also have stairs in the stairwell which have metal trays containing large tiles. The result is, that the signal is fairly weak when it arrives in the cellar room where we want to use it.

Adding a repeater on the ground floor only makes a marginal improvement. I bought a couple of PowerLAN converters from MSI, which allow you to treat the electric wiring in the house as an ethernet cable, but each floor seems to be on different electrical phase, which means that although I get a great signal from any power socket to any other socket on one floor, we don’t get any signal at all between sockets on different floors. Grr!

For the moment that project (being driven by the desire to get a Squeezebox Duet working in the cellar) is on hold while I scratch my head. It is not helped by the fact that at the moment, the user forums for the Sqeezebox Duet indicate that the controller loses the WLAN signal at irregular intervals…

The other problem area is Mac OS X 10.5.2 – I had been happily experimenting with using Apple’s Time Machine to ensure completely up to date backups (in addition to making a full backup using Retrospect every two weeks). And it was working very well, I even used it to restore some accidently deleted data. But a couple of days ago my Mac Mini started having a kernel panic every time that Time Machine started running. Some searching on MacFixit quickly threw up the probable cause – a corrupt sparse image containing the Mac Mini’s backups on the Time Machine drive. And sure enough, repairing the image using Disk Utility shows a great number of errors, starting with these ones:

Unfortunately, technology has also defeated me here – after running most of the night, the Disk Utility crashed while fixing the errors and now crashes every time it tries to continue processing the file. I will have to wait for Apple to fix this one, or delete my backups and start again.

Update (2008-05-15):
I discovered I could mount the partially repaired sparse image and then deleted the last backup made by Time Machine. After doing this, Time Machine is working again. I’ll feel much more secure, however, if Apple issues a fix to the problem to stop it happening again.

I’ve bought several external hard drives recently to use for backing up under Leopard. Getting them reformatted from the pre-formatted Windows NTFS partition to Macintosh Extended Journaled has been unexpectedly problematical – usually the best chance has been to reformat (on the Mac) to MS DOS FAT format and then try to change the partition to Macintosh Extended Journaled in a second step. But it seems to depend on the drive’s controller hardware as to whether this is successful.

Carl Bach has published a way of getting Maxtor drives re-formatted. In fact – in my experience – the method works very well for drives from other manufacturers too, even cheap no-name 2.5” external drives have allowed themselves to be changed to Mac format using his method.

Maybe, one day, it will be possible to run Palm applications on an iPhone. Style Tap have produced a proof-of-concept demo. It may seem strange to want to do that, but some people have Palm applications which they would like to continue to use. You can use Parallels or Fusion to run Windows applications on a Mac, so why not run Palm apps on you iPhone?

(via TUAW)

There was quite a lot of publicity earlier this year, when Apple struck a deal with EMI to sell their entire music collection without DRM (copy protection: digital rights management) on iTunes. And I have mentioned a couple of times, that you can buy albums without DRM from magnatune at a price which you choose.

I noticed yesterday that CD Baby also offers high-quality DRM-free downloads of albums in MP3 format. The nice thing is, the artist sets the price and gets 91% of that price passed on to them by CD Baby, who only retain 9% to pay for the bandwidth. The albums are mostly priced at around $15, which makes them a great deal for all the parties involved.

For the last few weeks I have being using a couple of extensions to the “Services” menu which is available for all applications in Mac OS X:

• CalcService (download link)


• WordService (download link)

Both applications are from Devon Technologies, whose DevonThink I also use to index and find documents on the Mac.

CalcService allows you to type a formula or equation into any document or web form, and it calculates the result and inserts it into the document. Useful if you need to add up several items and add VAT to them, for example. WordService allows you to perform many different useful tasks in a document – insert the current date, or the path to a directory where a document is stored, or change the format of line feeds in a document.

Both utilities are free – recommended!

If you’re thinking of buying an iPod nano, The first comprehensive review that I have seen is on AppleInsider.

I’ve always had problems putting my Mac to sleep. Sometimes, especially if I have been playing iTunes, it wakes up again immediately. This can happen 2-3 times before it accepts it should go to sleep. I just spotted some advice on MacFixIt for people having this problem with the new aluminium keyboards – connect the keyboard to a USB hub, rather than directly to the Mac.

It works for the older white keyboard in my case – the Mac mini now goes to sleep immediately, every time more often.

Update (2007-09-12): After I posted this, the situation did improve, but I’ve since had occasional problems getting the mini to go to sleep. An improvement, but the problem is still present.

NeoOffice can now print at higher resolutions than 300 dpi. This makes a big difference if you want to print graphics, and if you want to print text documents which include fine lines (e.g. tables). Quoting from the release note:

Due to some restrictions in NeoOffice’s underlying OpenOffice.org code, printing resolution has always been limited to 300 DPI in NeoOffice. While many older printers only support 300 DPI, this restriction caused many newer printers to print high resolution images at a reduced resolution.

Fortunately, after much effort, we have been able to remove these restrictions and we are pleased to announce that NeoOffice 2.2.1 Early Access can now print high resolution images at the resolution supported by your printer

Get the patch here. (And get NeoOffice 2.2.1 Early Access, which includes support for the Mac OS X Spellchecker and Address Book and experimental support for Office 2007 Excel and PowerPoint files, here)