I know you’ll be pretty amazed by my artistic ability, as demonstrated here. When your pulse has stopped racing, you can look at this little Quicktime movie to see how I did it.
This was my first experiment with the Brushes app for the iPhone/iTouch, which would be little more than a toy if it weren’t for the sort of things real artists are managing to do with it. This guy‘s getting a lot of attention.
Thanks to John for the initial link.
I love swimming but have to admit that, when done as an exercise, it’s not always the most riveting occupation. So my latest gadget is an attempt to remedy that.
It’s an Aquapac case for an MP3 player, and when combined with an iPod and some waterproof headphones…
…it should allow me to listen to lectures from Cornell while ploughing up and down, thus enriching both body and mind. Prepare for some energetic and terribly erudite posts after the weekend!
(If you don’t notice any change, I probably listened to Britney Spears instead.)
For nearly a year now, I’ve been geotagging all my photos (marking them with latitude and longitude) with the help of a GPS logger that I hang from my belt. The upshot is that in Aperture, for example, I can right click on any photo, and select ‘Show on map’. Google maps pops up with a pushpin at the location of the photo.
My camera and the GPS logger don’t actually talk to each other. The photos and the recorded GPS positions are linked up using their timestamps after I’ve copied them onto my laptop. I’ve been using Jeffrey Early’s GPSPhotoLinker utility to do this, which has worked nicely, but this last week he released a new, renamed, and much-enhanced version: PhotoLinker 2.0.
This lets you browse your GPS tracks with a map interface, geotag your photos with a great deal of control, and is definitely the best Mac utility that I’ve tried for this stuff. I’ve been beta-testing it for a little while, but it’s great that it’s now public. Even if you don’t do the photo-geotagging thing, it’s a nice way to view GPS tracks. You can select from a variety of background maps.
Have a look at the introductory screencast to get a feel for what’s involved.
Recommended.
For those interested, in my case, PhotoLinker is just part of my ‘workflow’. The AMOD device records NMEA logs as plain text files, and appears as a USB flash drive when I plug it in. Chronosync fires up automatically and copies any new logs onto my hard disk, then runs a Makefile which uses GPSBabel to do some filtering and create GPX versions of the tracks. GPX has now pretty much supplanted NMEA as the lingua franca of GPS logs and PhotoLinker can read GPX files directly. I use Aperture to manage my photos, but I’ve told it not to keep them in its library: it manages them in an external directory, which also means that apps like PhotoLinker can access them easily.
If you’re entering a URL in the iPhone/iPod Touch’s web browser, there’s a handy ‘.com’ key to save typing. It can be used to enter other domains too.
But when you’re entering email addresses, there’s no such shortcut. Except that there is. It’s hidden away. Just press and hold the ‘.’ key.
(If you like this hint, you might also like this one)
My Mac Book Pro has a new baby brother. It’s a Dell Mini 9 on which, thanks to the instructions here, I was able to install Mac OS X.
I already had a properly-licensed copy of the OS, in so far as any operation like this could be properly-licensed. I ordered the Dell with 2G RAM, an improved webcam, a larger (16GB) SSD and a bluetooth module. Total cost: £277. Including VAT. And shipping. Oh, and a nice carrying case.
As soon as you pick the device up, you can tell from the construction that it’s not an Apple. But my first solid-state ‘Mac’ runs the OS really quite nicely. I had a vague idea that Apple software was only licensed to run on Apple-badged products, so I fixed that too:
However, there was one downside to the bargain special price I got from Dell. After ordering, I discovered that some varieties of this machine, such as those purchased from PCWorld or from Vodafone, have a 3G modem and a slot for a SIM. This doesn’t have it, and it would have been really quite nice. But then I might not have got some of the other upgrades, and since everything else, including a 3G connection via Bluetooth to my phone, seems to work fine, I’m really very happy.
On the Mac, I’ve always liked Apple’s standard Mail app. On the rare occasions when I need an email program on another platform, I use Thunderbird, from the nice people who brought you Firefox.
Thunderbird, I gather from those who have looked carefully into these things, is a very well-behaved email program. Its underlying code is sound, especially when it comes to IMAP. It lacks the polish of Mail, and has limited searching capabilities, but it’s otherwise a good choice.
So I was interested today when my friend Ray told me about Postbox, a Windows and Mac mail client that’s built on top of Thunderbird but adds a variety of new features, including more sophisticated filtering and searching, and looks a bit prettier. I’ve been trying it and it looks quite nice.
The great thing about keeping your mail on an IMAP server, of course, is that you can move between programs without worrying that your valuable messages will get swallowed up in a variety of different mail folder formats. So I’ll try this for a while and see how it goes…
My friend Phil Endecott has released his latest app for the iPhone, which makes your beverage the envy of all other nearby beverages. How? By making it glow.
You need a rather dark environment, but it’s great fun. LagerLamp is available from iTunes for 59p. Which, when you think about it, wouldn’t buy you very much beer these days.
Use at your own risk!
As an experiment, I’ve just read a whole Kindle book on my iPod Touch. And, rather unexpectedly, I went straight back and ordered another.
It’s not that the reading experience is the best in the world… though it’s not at all bad. The benefit I hadn’t predicted came from my always having my iPod in my pocket, and therefore always having good reading matter in my pocket. Even in the loo.
It’s a library that’s smaller than any single book I own.
And it’s a book that always opens up at the place where you left off. Useful if you just want to read a few sentences while waiting for the train.
And it’s a book that you don’t need to have the light on to read. Useful if you wake up earlier than your partner.
All these factors meant that I probably got through the book rather faster on my iTouch than I would have on a proper Kindle.
Or on paper.
Not what I expected.
“I would show you this on my laptop”, said a visitor to our company recently, “but it would take forever to boot up”.
And I realised how long I’d been living in a Mac world: for the last eight or nine years I’ve had a laptop where you open the lid and start typing pretty much immediately. (Camvine is an all-Mac shop except for the servers, which are Linux, and stay on all the time anyway.)
The slow start-up (and even rather painful resume-from-suspend) that people in the Windows world often experience has led to some modern machines having a minimal Linux installed alongside Windows, so you don’t have to wait for your entire world to load if you just want to check something quick on the web. Chris Nuttall, writing in the FT techblog, seems to be quite impressed with Presto.
My friend Ray Gordon recently gave me one of the most useful iTouch/iPhone hints I’ve had in some time. If you already know this, it is blindingly obvious, but if you don’t, you definitely want to!
On the iPhone keyboard, you can tap the shift key to switch to caps, and the symbol/numeric key to switch to the layout that includes commas, hypens, numbers etc. But did you know that you can touch those keys and then slide your finger to the character you want? When you release, the keyboard reverts back to the mode it was in before. So if you want, say, to insert a hyphen or an apostrophe in the middle of a word, you need just one click-and-slide, rather than three clicks.
Try it and you’ll never look back!
A quick way to get a VNC connection from a Mac to another machine’s desktop:
That’s it!
In general, browsing the web with Flash disabled makes for a more pleasant experience and saves a lot of horsepower on your machine. But it’s a pain switching it on and off for those few sites where it’s important.
ClickToFlash is a WebKit plugin which provides a convenient solution for Safari users. Flash content is replaced with a shaded image saying ‘Flash’. If you click on it, the Flash is loaded and plays, and you can right-click to whitelist a site so that their content always works.
There are, apparently, still a few rough edges, but I’m going to try it for a while and see how it goes.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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