® Andy’s blog of blogs

How many steering wheels are there?

I’ve long had a love for things that light up in interesting ways, particularly if they’re time pieces too. Reckon it’s the old hippy in my wishing I lived in a word of groovy progressive tunes lit only by coloured oil projector lamps … tempered with something of a 70s vibe given my love of interesting light up digital stuff too, probably so I can tell the time in the darkness of my groovily lit world ;-).

As an aside I’m currently listening to some very suitable music by Pete Brown & Piblokto so the lights are right down in my study and I really need that oil projector on now!

Anyhow, I own a gorgeous Nixie clock for my living room, I’ve a collection of interesting watches including a lovely classic red LED one and several of Tokyoflash’s finest, and I owned several of Mathmos‘ classics, years before lava/glitter/fibre optic lamps were considered fashionable and hence were ten a penny!

I’ve decided however that this clock is a step too far in terms of unreadability despite it being a shiny colourful looking beast! However, if somebody would like to buy it for me for Xmas I’m sure I’ll give it a go ;-).

On XP for years and years I’ve used a bit of software called Oubilette to securely store the password details of the 1001 sites that I’ve logins on. It’s a superb bit of simple software which has never ever missed a beat. When moving to a new machine looking up passwords becomes one of the things you do most regularly since, whilst it’s easy to the move the majority of stored passwords in Firefox across to an another machine, there are always some that don’t make it across the export/import boundary. Hence the requirement for “an Oubliette” for OS X … since I need to have a single secure repository that I can open on my multiple systems. The good news is that there is an answer and it’s an excellent one!. KeePass is an open source password safe application and furthermore it’s been ported to run on various operating systems, including both XP and OS X. And here’s the clincher … it’s got an import plugin on XP from Oubliette :-). So a simple import, and bit of tidying up whilst I’m about it, and now I’ve got an ultrasecure password safe that runs on both operating systems and will happily access a common file!

Ironically another thing that I was hugely dependent upon on XP came from the same guy who wrote Oubliette! It’s called KeyNote and is considered one of the best outliners/note takers out there. Superb, fast and very fully featured, it let me maintain a very effective electronic notebook for all things work and personal. I spent lots of time trying to come up with a suitable cross platform replacement. I tried things like Wikidpad which is a Python based local wiki but sharing files was a little involved given a local database approach and the UI terribly clunky. I could have used Lotus Notes, but to work properly it’d require a server based Journal database and I’ve not got scope for one of those. Therefore in the end after a bit of contemplation, I went with one of the best known freemium offerings … Evernote. Now I’m used to it, I’m a fan! It’s not as flexible or as a good at tree building as KeyNote since it’s basically a timed log of things, but it is again rampantly cross platform, and most importantly replicates data between the different machines and a web version too very efficiently. I find the client application on OS X is better than the one on XP, mostly because the OS X one helps you predicitively when tagging items, unlike the XP one which simply gives you a text field and expects you to remember your own rambling folksonomies or else end up with a random spread of similar tags!

I’ve got many many PowerPoint presentations from over the years, and so one key tool in my move to the Mac has of course being Office for the Mac. The other day when somebody wanted a read-only copy of a presentation I was impressed at how easy it was to create a PDF version on the Mac. Duly created I attached it a note, sent some other urgent notes, and then went about my business. A while later I came back and checked to see whether my important notes had gone out since a call was about to start, only to find them stuck behind the mammoth and I’m mean fucking mammoth note containing the PDF I’d created! My 15Mb PPT had been turned into a 80Mb PDF … WTF!!

It turns out that the default approach to creating PDFs isn’t very smart! Sure they’ll be beautiful and hi-res and all that, but they’re too fucking big! A wee bit of squirelling around found me the answer and so here you go … it all comes down to previewing in Preview and then saving a PDF with an appropriate Quartz filter. Here’s a post on the Apple Support site with some pre-done filters, and here’s another blog post which explains about how to create more filters yourself.

Once I’d installed the filters and worked out how to invoke them most easily, my 15Mb PPT was reduced to a more reasonable 9Mb PDF.

A few weeks back I was lucky enough to get a new MacBook Pro as my principle work machine. For good reasons not the newly announced no button model, but a highest spec previous model, and plenty shiny enough for me.

Now I’ve been an NT/XP user longer than the vast majority of people. Reckon it’d have been an NT 3.1 Beta in early-1993 when I first started developing on it. So two things are interesting about my migration or at least embracing of the Mac and OS X - firstly it was a bit of a culture/system shock for about a day but since then it’s been very quick and natural; and secondly it’s not total since I’m not giving up my XP machine anytime soon because …

The simple reality is that there are some applications that I use regularly on XP that simply cannot be matched on the Mac. The most important two are MediaMonkey and Faststone Image Viewer. I use MediaMonkey all my MP3 management including ripping, file management, tagging, resampling, and device management across a big range of different MP3 players. Mac users are seemingly so enamoured of the frankly crappy iTunes that there’s very little else available for OS X, and definitely not as fully featured as MediaMonkey! I’d hoped that SongBird might step into the fray, but frankly it’s not good enough! As for Faststone Image Viewer, clearly there are many very good image editing applications on OS X. However, in terms of something that is able to so effectively browse, file manage, and batch process my many many pictures, again nothing (well that I’ve found for free because I’m cheap) comes close.

Maybe I’ll ultimately go the route of running XP on the Mac using VMWare or Parallels desktop, but for now I’m running two physical machines since both have strengths for now.

Anyhow, there are many other applications or at least functional requirements that I’ve grown very attached to on my XP boxes, and so a large part of the challenge of moving across to the Mac has been finding comparable applications. Oh and yeah as noted above … being cheap I wanted them to be free ones! With the witching hour upon me tonight, I’m going to stop for now, but I plan to blog the various applications that I’ve found that have met my needs in a range of areas, along with any other killer tips I found that have helped me along this path. Both a record for me, and maybe a help to any others!

I’ve got a bit of a thing for geeky and/or retro watches that light up. My collection includes a great classic red LED watch, and some of Tokyoflash’s finest.

Would love one like this one please if it ever moves beyond a concept!

I’m not sure whether I should be impressed at the iPhone ingenuity, or instead feel driven to hunt the “band” down and punish them for defiling a Page/Plant classic!? Then again I’m probably one of the few mega-Zep fans who actually is rather tired of Stairway to Heaven, and even bought a Rolf Harris version for a bit of a change.

Anyhow, you decide by watching this …

So I once bought a very early TV-attached Pong game for a bit of a laugh. It was so basic it had no scoring system and you used marbles to mark your score in dimples on top of the console. Analogue electronics at its best.

Here’s another way of playing pong.

Perhaps you’re worried about experiencing rampant nomophobia when your ‘phone runs out of juice at just the wrong moment, or the thought of being without your choons on the move and having to acknowledge the world around you drives into a psychotic terror!?

Well technology is your saviour … and further more you’re going to look groovy

Piezoelectric clothing is sort of predictable but hydroelectricity on the move is more left field! I wonder if I’ll be able to get some styled by Jimmy Choo, rather than Startrite on acid?

So I’m going through the pain/joy of moving to a new laptop. My battle worn but bullet proof T42p is being replaced by an second-hand T60p to go alongside a new Macbook that I’ll be getting soon. Reckon I’ve had the T42p about three and a half years and remarkably it’s still run the original XP installation since as I said … bulletproof hardware with bulletproof software if managed properly.

However, the downside is that I have a very, very, very tweaked and personally optimized installation and now I’ve got to try and replicate that on my new machine. Hence, begins lots of headscratching as I try to rediscover how I tweaked things originally.

First off … Firefox. I’d held off upgrading to Firefox 3 on my old box, but with the Flash/Firefox 3 problems now fixed I’m starting with Firefox 3 on the new one. The vast majority of my core plugins have long been available for Firefox 3, but there was one that was never going to be there. To set the scene, I always try to maximize the useful real estate in applications and so I hate superfluous menus, toolbars and icons. Hence I’ve used a Firefox plugin called MenuX for many years which allows(ed) me to hide all the menus and instead access them via a single button in my icon bar. However, MenuX was never developed beyond Firefox 1.5! I hacked it for Firefox 2.0, but thought that for Firefox 3.0 it was probably a step to far. Consider my immense joy when I discovered a Firefox 3 plugin called Personal Menu that does exactly what I want.

Anyhow to the real purpose of this post. Basically I’m planning on capturing key tweaks and hacks in a number of posts. Both for my personal records but also to share them with others who might find them useful.

I’ve always considered the download manager in Firefox a bit of a “give away” since by default it’ll show a history of what you’ve downloaded. You can clear its entries via the privacy options, but somehow I had my existing installation delete each entry automatically once it’d finished downloading. This isn’t an option accessible via the usual options UI so …

You need to start by accessing the advanced configuration  options by typing about:config into the location bar.

• To get Firefox to clear the download manager history set browser.download.manager.retention to 0 to clean up the moment the download is completed, or to 1 to have them cleared when you quit Firefox. The default value of 2 discards nothing.
• Documents you’ve downloaded are also added to the My Recent Documents folder on the Windows’ Start menu. Disable this by setting browser.download.manager.addToRecentDocs to false.
• Finally junk the popup download complete notification by setting browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete to false.