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Aperture

Having taken lots of photos while on holiday, I’m becoming a real fan of Apple’s Aperture software – designed to help photographers manage their workflow. Workflow, by the way, is something that professional photographers apparently have and that people like me aspire to.

Anyway, at $299, Aperture is a somewhat pricey but very nice piece of software. It has a bit of a learning curve, but is blessed with some really good tutorials. You get a DVD in the box with an hour or so’s instruction, there are tutorials on line on the Aperture site, but if you’re considering buying it and want to know the sort of things that make it different from say, iPhoto, I recommend Apple’s introductory on-line seminar, which is well-produced. There’s also an advanced one.

A warning, though; Aperture is one of those few things that makes you realise that Moore’s law hasn’t yet given us all the processing power we could possibly need. Make sure you have a pretty beefy Mac if you’re planning on using it!

qsf

11 Sep 2006

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Back home…

…after a fabulous week in the Pyrenees. The Val d’Azun now rates amongst my favourite places on the globe.

I may post more about it in due course – the blogging equivalent of inflicting my holiday snaps on you – but for the moment I’ll just make you jealous with the view we’ve had from our bedroom window for the last week:

Gaillagos

qsf

8 Sep 2006

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General

Happy talk?

RyanAir has just announced that passengers will soon be able to make mobile calls on all of its flights.

I have mixed feelings about this; It might be very useful to get email into my Blackberry while in the air, or to be able to send one saying that the flight was delayed. But the idea of having to sit next to somebody who’s making a long phone call, in the cramped confines of an economy flight, doesn’t exactly fill me with glee. We need to make sure that, from the beginning, there’s a strong in-flight ettiquette which says that you only make calls from the back of the plane, or something similar.

With a bit of luck, the roaming charges will be sufficiently high that most people on RyanAir flights (like me) won’t be able to afford to make the calls…

qsf

30 Aug 2006

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NeoOffice 2

Those splendid chaps over at NeoOffice have released the first completely free beta of version 2.0.

NeoOffice is OpenOffice with a Java-based Mac front-end; this means that you don’t need to run X11 to use it, and it integrates rather better with many Mac features – most notably the native Mac fonts and printing.

NeoOffice has been around for some time, but it is now based on OpenOffice v2, which means that it’s the best solution for Mac users wanting to embrace the increasingly-important OpenDocument formats.

qsf

30 Aug 2006

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General

EDST

I imagine most people in the States will know about this, but those of us elsewhere who interact with the US regularly may not know about Extended Daylight Savings Time.

DST in the US has traditionally gone from the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. This is almost, but not quite, the same as here in the UK, so for the majority of the year, California is eight hours away, except for one week, when it’s nine.

From 2007, US DST is being extended by roughly one month, in an experiment which is expected to show substantial energy savings. For 2007, DST will run from Mar 11 to Nov 4.

Anyone planning meetings conference calls in the spring might need to know about this… and make sure that any software they use knows about it too!

More info here and here.

qsf

29 Aug 2006

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Hubster

We’ve been playing with a new way to make a single PC into a multi-user machine. It’s based around the idea that a simple USB hub could be the basis of a thin-client terminal. We call it Hubster.

More information on the Ndiyo site.

qsf

28 Aug 2006

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General

Photowalkthrough.com

Are you a Photoshop user? If so, I heartily recommend John Arnold’s tutorials at Photowalkthrough.com. He takes fairly ordinary images and, in these multi-episode video tutorials, walks you through what he does to them, why, and how.

This is fabulous tuitiion, but not for those in a hurry; each tutorial is typically in four parts of 20-30 mins each. But it’s time well-invested if you can get away from other distractions. I watched one on a long flight recently and learned a vast amount.

qsf

28 Aug 2006

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Maps optimised for humans

I’ve never used Microsoft’s Mappoint mapping service in the past, but it has a rather neat option when requesting directions, called LineDrive™ – this attempts to produce more useful directions, such as you might sketch for someone on the back on an envelope.

This is the route from my house in Cambridge to my brother’s in Southampton, 130 miles away:

Cambridge to Southampton

I think this is rather nice, and an efficient use of screen space; ideal for mobile devices. Just as long as you don’t ever stray off the route…

Thanks to Christine Herron for the link.

qsf

27 Aug 2006

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More Youtube goodness…

Treadmills can be so dull if you just run or walk on them. This should give you some ideas for the next time you’re in the gym…

qsf

27 Aug 2006

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Taking the plunge and flashing

I, like many millions of others, have a Linksys WRT54G wireless router at home. Generally, it’s been fine, but recently I’ve found myself having to reset it every few days when connectivity just seems to go away. Updating the firmware from the Linksys site didn’t help.

So today I took the plunge and installed one of the free alternative firmware distributions available: DD-WRT. This is a scary process because if it fails for any reason, your router can become unusable and require quite a lot of tweaking to get it back up and running again. And you won’t be able to read web pages about how to do it because you’ll have lost your connectivity. (Well, I suppose you could bypass the router and plug straight into the modem, but it’s still a nuisance.) There’s even a new verb for this – bricking – which means turning your hardware into a brick.

Figuring that these alternative OSes wouldn’t be so popular if failure was a regular occurrence, I downloaded lots of files and web pages which would help me recover in case of failure, crossed my fingers, and installed DD-WRT. And… phew!… everything went very smoothly.

I’ll need to give it some time to see whether it solves my lock-up problem, but whether it does or not, I’m very impressed so far. The management pages are, if anything, rather nicer than the official Linksys ones, and there are numerous extra capabilities for those who want them. They’re too numerous to list here, but key ones for me include the ability to boost the radio power, to set up static DHCP entries, to monitor the signal strength of wireless clients, and to SSH into the router from outside.

Browsing the web also seems noticeably faster to me now. I can’t imagine that overall data throughput has changed – that must be limited by my cable modem speed – so I’m guessing the snappier feel comes from the built-in DNS server which caches entries by default.

Anyway – all very cool so far. We’ll see how it goes…