In LA

If you are using dropbox, you can an additional 3Gb of free space for beta testing their new ‘Camera Upload’ feature. Follow this link for more info. I think this is neat.

If you’re not using dropbox, you’re missing out on a great online backup solution. It’s very cool –a folder on my machine is automatically backed up to “the cloud”. As soon as I add or remove files or directories within that folder, the changes propagate to “the cloud”. All my machines run the dropbox client for their OS, and this folder shows up on these systems and automatically stays in sync with the online service. It’s like a portal into that buzzword I’ve tired of, “the cloud”, but one that requires no work from the user. I rest easy knowing my important documents are stored outside my computer. If my laptop and home computer burn up in a fire, I can install the dropbox client on another machine and the folder will show up. Yay. They give you a couple gigs for free, and that’s what I’ve been using.

You can sign up for dropbox here: Welcome to Dropbox. I recommend¹ .

1. This is a referral link, so I will get a small amount of additional space if you sign up. I’d recommend the service regardless — what’s not to like about a couple gigs of free online space, accessible from OS X, Windows, Linux, etc [↩]

I want to try the multicam feature in the new FCP X 10.0.3 update, so I fire up Software Update. It checks Apple’s server and tells me that there are no available updates. How can this be? I’ve clearly got FCP X 10.0.2 installed, so the 10.0.3 update should appear. I run software update again, and again, with the same result. I ponder this a while, and then attain enlightenment.

Of course! FCP X is installed via the App Store application, and updates are likely also distributed via this route. –And so it is, I check for available updates in the App Store, and the 10.0.3 update is patiently waiting for me.

I’m happy to have found the update, but am a little surprised how unwieldy¹ the process of finding updates has become. Apparently I need to keep it straight in my head that OS, Safari, iTunes, and some other updates are always delivered via the system’s “Software Update” function, and updates for apps installed via the App Store (should I ever manage to remember their provenance) are to be found only in the App Store app. And then there’s 3rd-party apps that have their own update mechanisms — if I’m lucky they use the Sparkle framework, which informs me of updates as soon as the apps are launched –nice.

If I’m confused about where to look for software updates, other users may be as well. An easy stopgap measure Apple could implement would be to add a line to Software Update when App store App updates are available such as “there are also 32 available updates waiting in the app store for you. Launch app store?”. Here’s an ugly mockup:

I expect Apple will either do something like this, or will come up with some wonderfully elegant way to make this unnecessary, or will release a new Mac Pro². Maybe all of the above. If they make this happen via a Software Update, I hope I can find it.

———-update 2/16/2012
It appears Apple addressed this issue with today’s release of OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion”. All system and app software updates are now found and applied via the “app store” application.

1. One might say “Windowsy” [↩]
2. unrelated, but please please please [↩]

If you’ve got a bunch of clips in a Final Cut Pro Browser window, and you’d like to quickly generate a still frame for each clip, you can use the “Still Image” feature of FCP’s ancient “Batch Export” feature to automate much of the process. Here’s how:

The result will be a folder full-resolution PNG images, each named after its parent clip, deposited in the chosen destination folder.

I often end up processing directories full of such uncompressed images further using the excellent command-line Imagemagick utilities using the tcsh shell’s¹ “foreach” command to iterate through all the images.² It generally goes a little something like this:

$ tcsh
% cd directory_of_images
% foreach foo (*.png)
foreach? convert -geometry 330x800 "$foo" "$foo:r.jpg"
foreach? rm "$foo"
foreach? end

The result of this command is a set of JPEG-compressed images, one per clip selected in step 2, each resized proportionally to fit within a 330×800 rectangle.

1. This is also easy to do with OS X’s default bash shell, but I’m more fluent in tcsh. [↩]
2. You may prefer GraphicConverter, Photoshop, or MS Paint. Imagemagick combined with the command line is mad fast for both image transformations and automatically renaming files. [↩]
3. Switching to the tcsh for this because I have yet to internalize Bash's foreach syntax. [↩]
4. If you're unfamiliar with command lines and shells, please note that the "%" character here represents the tcsh command-prompt, the "$" in the previous line represents the typical Bash command-prompt. Don't type these characters in your commands, they're just here for show. [↩]
5. "foo" is a placeholder of my choosing. There's nothing special about the string "foo". You can replace it with anything you like, such as "image", "placeholder", or "your_mom". Just make sure to use the same string in place of all the "$foo" commands below. [↩]
6. Each time tcsh iterates through your commands, it will replace the string "$foo" with the filename of an image from the set chosen by "*.png", which is every file in the directory ending in ".png". Adding a ":r" to "$foo" indicates that tcsh should expand the filename but leave off the period and filename extension –in this case "$foo:r.jpg" removes ".png" from the file and adds ".jpg" in its place. The quotes around "$foo" are optional if your filenames do not contain spaces or special characters. [↩]
7. Removing the original png file because all I ever wanted were the tiny JPEGs. [↩]
8. One more note from Captain Obvious: If you try to copy and paste any of these commands, be sure not to copy and paste the superscript numbers that lead to these footnotes. [↩]

Agile Web Solutions has made the iPhone application “1Password Pro” available as a free download until December 1st. They way they’ve worded the announcement leads me to believe that today’s the last day to download the app for free. I think it’ll be $7.99 afterwards.

If you’ve an iPhone and you think there’s a chance you might use this application to manage your passwords or store encrypted notes, you might as well download the app. You can always delete it later. It might even be a useful thing to have if you don’t use the companion OS X desktop application, which is fantastic.

Here’s a link to their app and press release: This year we’re thankful for you: Get 1Password for iPhone for free!

I like writing, sketching, and I like to play with the odd electronic gadget, so I thought this IOGear “Mobile Digital Scribe” (AKA the GPEN200N) seemed an intriguing device. This weirdly technologized pen can be had for $44.95 at Amazon.com, at least until the end of September.¹

I bought and received mine, taking funds from my geeky-and-probably-unnecessary-device budget. A close look reveals that there are two parts to this gadget; The pen and the base station. The base station clips to a piece or pad of paper, and is used to record the movement of the pen, it features a single button that can be held-down to turn the base station on and off², and can be pressed quickly in order to indicate that the user is sketching a new page (up to 50 pages worth of scribblings can be recorded at a stretch). The base connects to the computer via USB cable, and the included software will instantly transfer any recorded notes to a specified location on the computer as TIFF images. The USB connection also charges the base station’s internal battery. The pen uses a couple of those tiny watch or hearing aid batteries, and shuts itself off whenever its not moving, so apparently they don’t need to be replaced often.³

I connected the base to my computer, updated its firmware to 1.76 so that it’d work with Mac OS X, rebooted my computer, unplugged the base, clipped it to some paper, wrote a bit, then plugged the base back into the computer. Everything I wrote transferred over to the computer automatically as a tiff file (deposited into a folder I’d pre-designated), and looked very very good. I’d guess that the base unit stores pen movements in a vector-based format, which is then rendered to a tiff file after it’s transferred to the computer.

I tried the bundled OCR⁴ software, “MyScript Notes Light” on Windows XP inside VMware Fusion. On my first test, it worked surprisingly well. Subsequent tests were not so successful. I think it gets confused when it tries to emulate the layout of text written in lines that are not completely horizontal. I also scribbled a couple of Chinese characters (ni hao) and it recognized those and converted them to text (in a separate pass with the OCR software set to simplified Chinese). There’s no reason that the high-resolution TIFF images created by the pen couldn’t be opened in more capable OCR software, perhaps resulting in more usable transcriptions.

Mouse mode does work, the pen can be used to draw and drag on the computer. A click can be executed by pressing the point of the pen down or by clicking the pen’s side button. There’s a bit of lag, which would suck for gaming, but mouse mode could potentially be of use with photoshop (note: the pen is not pressure sensitive).

I half-busted one of the base unit’s clips trying to clip it to a stack of paper larger than it can accept. So my recommendation would be “don’t do what I did”. Other than that hiccup, my thoughts on the IOGear Mobile Digital Scribe (or GPEN200N) are positive so far.

1. It’s currently marked down from $129 (WTFLOL) to $64.95, and then there’s a $20 mail-in rebate. [↩]
2. It took me a day to figure this out –the little guide it ships with says nothing about this, and holding the button produces some bizarre twiddlings of items on the base station’s LCD display, animations that don’t appear to portend an imminent shutdown, before it indeed shuts down. [↩]
3. Whether or not those batteries will ever need to replaced will depend on whether or not I tire quickly of this new toy or actually find it useful and take notes with it daily. [↩]
4. Optical Character Recognition – it converts one’s writing into text. [↩]

I’ve driven past this psychic’s storefront on Sunset Boulevard a number of times, and I’m always tempted to park, run over, and assist Carmela with the spelling on her sign. I’d be like a spelling-obsessed vigilante superhero. On the other hand, I tend a ‘B’ rating from the health board is a good sign when it comes to restaurants (“B” stands for “Better”). Maybe misspelt signs are the mark of a gifted seer?
 
> Candles Incents Books
> There Is No Probleem
> That I Can’t Solve
> Marriage Love Health
 
I don’t mean to knock Carmela for the mistakes on her sign. Her first language may be that of the spirit world, not necessarily English. But one would hope that sign-printing companies would do some double-checking, even if it’s an automated spell-checker of the kind built into Microsoft Word or OS X, before forever committing the words to vinyl.

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

Here’s the shocking, photographic evidence, which proves what so many have wanted to know for so long: It is possible –nay, simple, to upgrade the firmware of the Creative Vado HD on a mac, using the Windows-only Vado firmware updating application¹, running inside an instance of Windows XP in VMWare Fusion. How exciting!

If this upgrade makes it so that my Vado HD stops freezing every-other time I connect it to my computer, that would be fantastic. The reboot process for the Vado involves opening it up and removing the battery². This is a very annoying process, especially after I’ve spent the effort to slip the thing inside its protective silicon case³, at which point the battery door is inaccessible. I’d bet that’s something they fixed in the first firmware update, or else this thing would have accumulated a greater number of negative reviews by now.

Technorati Tags: Creative Vado HD, filmmaking, Garbanzo Beans, Hack, hot deal, Macintosh, OS X, Vado HD, software, unix, video, virtualization, vmware fusion, Windows XP

1. v1220 [↩]
2. It’d be nice if, as on the iPhone, one could reboot the Vado HD by holding down an unholy combination of buttons for a few seconds. Requiring users to open up the device and manually power-cycle it is bad design and/or optimism regarding the device’s stability to the point of naïvete. [↩]
3. That silicon case is tight during the installation and removal process, I’m worried about tearing it just for a reboot [↩]

Oh how I hate the above error message. It’s not that it’s completely uninformative, but it’s a perfect case of “so close but yet so far”…

Anyone who uses as many external disks on a Mac as I do is apt to occasionally have trouble properly unmounting and ejecting those disks¹. Before unmounting a disk, it’s necessary to stop accessing files on the disk. This is often an easy thing to do –if I’ve loaded a file from an external disk into an application, I just close the document or quit the application entirely. If I’ve goofed and am still using files on the drive, OS X will refuse to unmount the drive and will display the error dialog I’ve pasted above.²

But often it’s less than obvious which application or function built-in to the operating system is using a file on the drive. There are applications that don’t play nice, and keep file handles open to files on a disk even after you’ve closed all documents that use those files³. There are functions built into the operating system that access files on a disk without calling any attention to themselves. This error message could and should be a hell of a lot more informative and useful.

A simple set of commands in Terminal⁴ can reveal which application is using a file on a particular disk. Since this information is available, is incredibly useful, and can be quickly retrieved in the Terminal, I see no reason that it is not just included in the initial error message. Telling me that a disk is still in use is not nearly as useful as telling me that a disk is still in use by Microsoft Word, or that a disk is still being shared with another computer.

In this case, the terminal command “lsof | egrep -i 400Gb” reported that a process named “smbd” was still using the drive. Since I’m a Unix geek this is useful information to me, but since OS X tries to also be useful to people who wouldn’t know a Samba daemon if it ate their grandmother, this process should be simplified. In an ideal world, the error message above would read “The disk ’400Gb_Thing’ is in use by OS X’s Windows file sharing. Would you like to stop sharing this drive and eject it?” and would feature both “OK” and “Cancel Ejection” buttons.

This is a no-brainer. Apple, please fix. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Final Cut Pro, Macintosh, OS X, software, unix, Win2K, Windows, Windows 2000, Windows XP

1. It’s a good idea to actually unmount disks prior to unplugging them, modern filesystems need to be given a proper send-off before disconnection to keep the data in good shape. [↩]
2. Windows users (and I am one), please refrain from feeling smug at this tale of Mac woe. Don’t get me started on the Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” dialogue and how much fun it is to try to remember the model numbers of each of my external drives so that I can find them in that list. It’s unconscionable that this feature wasn’t redesigned for Windows Vista. They must have used a single USB drive as the test case. [↩]
3. I often just have to quit Final Cut Pro before ejecting a drive for this reason, sometimes it just won’t let go of a file even when all FCP projects have been closed and I’m looking at an empty Browser [↩]
4. “lsof | egrep -i portion-of-disk-name”, or in this case “lsof | egrep -i 400Gb”, without the quotes. [↩]

Can I get a hallelujah? I wonder what took so long?

My Sony Mylo 2, a device only useful to me because it is a very good wireless Skype phone, will be going up for sale on eBay after Skype launches its long-awaited iPhone app tomorrow. My apartment just isn’t big enough for the both of them.

Articles on the impending Skype application for iPhone:

• Sneak Peek at Skype for iPhone, Available Tuesday
• Skype for iPhone: It’s official
• Review: Skype for iPhone

I suspect it’s only a matter of time before enterprising iPhone hackers manage to circumvent the app’s wifi-only restriction for VOIP.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPod, OS X, Skype, VOIP