My latest toy: I’ve got a Pantone Huey, and it’s great. Such devices have been around for a while, but most of them cost hundreds of dollars.
Now I can drag my photos from one display to the next, and they stay the same colour…
Category Archives: Apple
True Colours
mtr for Mac OS X
MTR is a useful command-line utility which combines ping and traceroute to display the path packets are taking between two machines.
I’ve compiled mtr-0.71 it for Mac OS X, and you can get it here: mtr.zip.
The zip file contains a universal binary, a man page, and a README file telling you what to do with them.
If you like this, you might also like my ports of wget and bacula-fd.
Kitty vs Frontrow
Ah, lots of fun stuff this weekend. Here’s a great video clip showing what the kitten of today likes in the way of toys.
Thanks to Tom Coates for the link.
Vienna
Vienna is a very nice RSS reader for the Mac. And it’s free.
I used to use a separate RSS reader in the early days of blogging, but stopped when Safari supported all the basic functions I needed, and did so very nicely. I’ve often considered switching to Firefox as my main browser, but I haven’t seen any extension which does RSS as neatly as Safari.
Vienna might just be nice enough to persuade me that a dedicated reader is a good idea again, though, which would free me to consider other browsers. Worth a look, anyway.
Fast user switching?
Hah! That’s nothing. See Giles Turnbull’s post on ‘Fast OS Switching’. “Until very recently, this sort of thing was just a daydream…”
I’ve also been doing some fun experiments with virtual machines.
Going underground
What’s this?
It’s the entrance to a shop. Seen from below. It’s part of an nice set of photos of Apple’s new retail outlet on 5th Avenue, taken by Neil Epstein.
I also went to a Mac store today, in Palo Alto, to have a look at the new MacBook.
Much to my surprise, I found myself definitely drawn towards the black version, though not, I think, enough that I would pay the extra $150 Apple charges for black. I heard Tom Standage comment a couple of days ago that only Apple could charge for the colour that everyone else was using anyway!
The case has a slightly matt finish, so it’s probably a different material designed not to show the scratches in the way that the black iPods did, and it may cost a bit more. Probably about $2 more.
But if the case is now matt, the screens are now glossy, in the style beloved of Sony and others. They make photos look very nice (unless you have fingerprints on your screen) but in general I’m not a fan because they reflect too much. Remember the old days of CRT screens when you had to position your computer so your back wasn’t towards a window?
Otherwise, I think this is a lovely design at a reasonable price and deserves to do well. Anyone who’s had to replace the hard disk inside one of Apple’s other recent laptops will also really appreciate how easy it is on these in comparison.
New TextMate Screencast
Screencasts are very popular at present, and for obvious reasons; there’s no better way to demonstrate the features of some software you’ve written, or to learn more about software you own.
Here’s a new one by Allan Odgaard, the creator of the TextMate editor, which regular readers will know is one of my favourite pieces of Mac software. This one shows you some of the handy facilities for editing HTML in TextMate.
The best way to keep up with new hints is through the TextMate blog.
Media Centre time
The time has come. My old and beautiful DVD player – a Pioneer DV-717 for which I paid £600 a long time ago – is starting to fade. It lost the ability to play CDs some years back, and it’s now regularly having problems with the scratches on rental DVDs as well, while other drives play them just fine. It was time to replace it. I could, of course, have bought a replacement at the supermarket for half the price I once paid for a region-free mod for my Pioneer. But they don’t make them like they used to – anything looks like a piece of junk when placed next to the 717. And, anyway, DVD’s are so last-decade….
More on Google Calendar
Ah… cool. Not only can you subscribe to Google Calendars using iCal but you can subscribe to iCal-published calendars from Google. When you go to add another calendar, you can choose to add one with a ‘Public Calendar Address’. Simply put in the URL of the .ics file that you’re publishing from iCal, and it works fine.
TextMate
TextMate is a fabulous text editor for the Mac. The best way to get a feel for its capabilities and see what all the fuss is about is to look at some of the screencasts.
Here’s one about writing screenplays.
Here’s another about Python programming.
And there’s an excellent new one about how to customise it which is well-worth watching, especially if a bit of shell-scripting doesn’t disturb you.
Highly recommended.
Virtualisation continued
Just to prove it works, here’s a screenshot of Ubuntu running in a VM window on my Intel Mac:
This is using Parallels Workstation, which is still definitely beta, but shows lots of promise. I hope they make their money quickly, though, because it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple included this functionality in the next release of their OS.
There are a benefits of this over BootCamp besides not having to reboot. One is that the disk image is just a file, and you can clone it and move it around – so you can run your virtual machine from an external hard drive, for example. Also, it can be substantially smaller – you have to set aside 10G or so for BootCamp, while my 4GB ‘disk’ for the virtual Ubuntu installation is actually less than 3GB on the disk – presumably because the disk isn’t full and it does clever things with compressing sparse images.
I did a slightly more interesting experiment with this, too – see the Ndiyo blog for more info.
Boot Camp
Wow! This is really interesting! Especially since I’ve just got a new Intel-based MacBook.
My trouble is that I don’t have enough disk space even for everything I want on Mac OS, let alone for another OS as well. It’s the single biggest problem with having a laptop, I find…
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