Printopia turns printers connected to a Mac into a virtual AirPrint-compatible printer. Does Apple actually realize how ridiculous the restriction to just a few HP printers with AirPrint is? They act as if printing is incredibly complicated. Why do you need third-party software if you don't want to be forced by HP to buy another disposable printer?
software - 31.1.2009 - 23.11.2010
Fat Cat Software - iPhoto Library Manager - since I was stupid enough to create a photo book on a different Mac than usual (well, the usual one was always busy), I guess I have to check this out to see if I can merge my books onto a single machine. It's a shame that Apple doesn't offer any merge function in iPhoto. With a notebook and a desktop, you quickly end up with separate libraries. If Lightroom supported book printing, I would have left iPhoto long ago. It's all a bit unsatisfactory.
Interactive Fabrication » Beautiful Modeler - wow, that is exceptionally cool.
Links
rfc1437 | Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form - Strong trends towards "throw away with archive and start from scratch" with slight options for "throw away, static archive and maybe shovel a part into the new platform if I find the time". The link shows where I'm currently playing around. Wordpress with a few small plugins and an nginx caching front.
Bitrot
I've been hit by this as well. My old blog software probably won't be able to survive unchanged. Old Python version (2.3), old (very old) Django (0.91), old PsycoPG driver (1.0), old PostgreSQL (7.4) and all of this on an old Debian (a wild mix of various versions with backports and custom programs and several failed upgrade attempts). Argh.
Well, I'm still torn between "rewrite" and "throw away". The latter has the charm that I won't have to carry all that junk around anymore. And honestly, nothing particularly interesting ever happened on my blog anyway. Maybe I can set up a wget mirror beforehand and dump the whole thing somewhere statically, as an archive.
Rewriting naturally has a lot of charm as well, but converting thousands of old entries (over 4000 articles and over 4000 links, plus almost 200 images) from 8 years (first entry on 3.11.2002) of blogging doesn't sound like fun. And presumably, thousands of the links are outdated and obsolete anyway.
No idea what I'll do, maybe I'll try to bring the Metaeule to the new box first, where I only have the problem that PHP4 is no longer in the Ubuntu repository for 10.04 and I therefore have to force the owl onto PHP5 (and that with code based on Wordpress 1.5 - I must really be crazy).
Or I try to install an ancient Debian with the packages used at the time - the box doesn't run in the front anyway, but behind other machines, so the hacking risk is rather low at this point. The Metaeule naturally also has a few thousand posts in the archive (only 8291, which is almost nothing), but if I can keep the old software running (some security patches have been applied over time, so it can actually continue to tinker along), I don't necessarily have to tackle it.
Somehow, the internet was also such a really bad idea ...
Twisted Orchestration Language in Launchpad - and someone has ported the Orc combinators to Python, using Twisted. However, I personally find Twisted rather disgusting to program, but if you like ...
Kilim - stumbled upon this while browsing the Orc documentation, a microthread library for Java.
Orc Language - haven't read anything about it yet, but it looks quite interesting. The core is Cor, a functional language without side effects, and Orc, which is built on top of it, is used for orchestrating services in distributed systems. The whole thing in a quite appealing, compact syntax on the JVM. One could certainly take a look at it as an alternative to Scala and Clojure, Java is integrated as an external service, which makes it quite easy to build distributed systems in which parts are implemented in Java. It reminds me in many points strongly of the ideas of Erlang (generally assume a distributed system, but still keep parts local for performance reasons), but I find the syntax much more pleasant. And with the JVM a much more widespread VM than Erlang's BEAM.
Interactive Fabrication » Beautiful Modeler - wow, that's incredibly cool.
Tornado Web Server Documentation - I really need to take a closer look at Tornado. For a side project, I've built a web service with web.py, which was shockingly simple (and dirty). Tornado is based on a very similar concept, throws Django-like templates into the mix and offers a good asynchronous server and support for asynchronous sockets and http requests right away. Could be a good alternative for web services that need few resources.
Fat Cat Software - iPhoto Library Manager - since I was stupid enough to make a photobook on a different Mac than usual (well, the usual one was always occupied), I'll probably have to take a look at this to see if I can merge my books onto a single machine. It's quite annoying that Apple doesn't offer any merge function in iPhoto. With a notebook and a desktop, you quickly end up with separate libraries. If Lightroom supported book printing, I would have been gone from iPhoto a long time ago. Everything is somehow not quite satisfying.
The V4Z80P – A Z80 Based Laptop @ Retroleum - here someone not only builds his own computer with his own system, it's also a laptop. Or something similar anyway.
Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs - and Oracle begins to try to cash in on Java. If it works, Java could soon be in a similar situation as .NET: the free implementations lag behind the scope of the commercial ones. What this means for alternative languages on the JVM remains to be seen - but it will certainly cause some problems. However, the JVM world is large enough and equipped with enough alternatives, and Oracle is not Microsoft. Therefore, this could all just be a storm in a teacup and only affect the typical Oracle victims.
Kunsthalle Bielefeld: Der Westfälische Expressionismus - I think I actually have a reason to drive to Bielefeld.
Mediathek für Mac OS X - I need to check this out. After all, archiving is now the viewers' job thanks to stupid private broadcasters (and politicians who have made themselves their errand boys).
Panasonic DMC-GF2 Preview: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review - I hate you, Panasonic. Now I want the cute little GF2+14mm kit. Menno. First Apple with the MacBook Air and now Panasonic, everyone just wants my money.
Eventlet Networking Library - I need to take a closer look at this, the monkey-patching of standard libraries to make them trivial to use in an asynchronous environment looks very interesting.
Magic Launch - interesting little tool with which you can configure the application that comes up for a file when you double-click. Especially interesting if you want to open some files in different directories with different editors (e.g. because one project works with Netbeans and the Netbeans Python plugin, another one normally with TextWrangler and a third one with VIM for Unix compatibility). Or if you simply have a file extension that is used by different programs.
briss - a very interesting tool that can crop PDFs to remove unnecessary page margins, for example, to make the text larger on eBook readers. Especially with book readers, these white margins are absolutely irrelevant and the text enlargement does not always match the margin width, which often leads to annoying page turning.
Shotwell - stumbled upon this, a photo manager for Linux that is quite similar to iPhoto on the Mac. Will likely replace f-spot in the upcoming Ubuntu (which I think is a good thing, as f-spot is too primitive, even for casual users). Looks quite nice.
Hands on the VLC iPad App (Pretty Good) - if you want to watch movie formats that Apple's app does not support on the iPad, maybe VLC can help. Apple has approved the iPad app and it is now available in the AppStore.
TidBITS Watchlist: TinkerTool 4.2 - if you don't like the silly button arrangement in iTunes 10, here's some help. You can also disable Safari RSS support, which is quite helpful if you only use an external reader. And you can adjust all sorts of other things.
Fake - Mac OS X Web Browser Automation and Webapp Testing Made Simple. - by the author of Fluid, which I like to use for site-specific browsers.
iPad or Bust! - Blog - The Omni Group - OmniOutliner for the iPad? That would be great. Although for many things I now simply use Taskpaper because of the easy syncing. I still hope that more apps will use Dropbox as a file storage, but so far that's still quite scarce.
iFolder - I just came across this. Open Source from Novell that builds functionality similar to Dropbox. Only that you operate your own server (a Linux box, ready-made packages for Open Suse). The whole thing is built with Mono, clients for Linux, Windows and Mac. I haven't tried it yet (Dropbox works too well for me to feel a great urge for changes), but I think before the next renewal with Dropbox I could take a look at it. Hosting a Suse box somewhere (or getting the server to run on Ubuntu or Debian) shouldn't be the biggest problem and I'm already hitting the limits of the 50G option from Dropbox. What I haven't found is access to older versions of files - but I haven't looked through the quite extensive manuals yet.
HDRtist "HDR Software will never be the same" - Ohanaware - the software I used for the HDR test. No adjustment options beyond simple calculation strengths for the individual images. But the result pleases me and looks quite natural.
Creaceed - Hydra - I should check this out, as it has several tone-mapping algorithms and supports pixel mapping/morphing, so you don't necessarily have to work with a tripod (though of course you have to make compromises then). Additionally, it is available as a Lightroom plugin.
HDR PhotoStudio: HDR photo software, HDR merge & editing, BEF plug-in, realistic HDR imaging - and another software that focuses on correct color representation and not this silly pseudo-HDR look.
Bug 560738 – No Mac-style keyboard shortcuts - woah. Since November 2008, there has been an open bug in Tomboy (note-taking program for Linux, Windows, and Mac) that the Cmd+Anything hotkeys on the Mac all do not work (or sometimes at least limited for cut/copy/paste) ... somehow one might get the impression that Tomboy is not really widespread on the Mac ...
Fiat lux » Extracting iPhone Backup Data with mobilesync-inspect - and another tool that is available for OS X and Windows for this purpose.
iphone-backup-decoder - Project Hosting on Google Code - the same again as a command-line script in Python. Possibly even more interesting for me than the GUI tool.
iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor - since iPhone backups are binary files and a friend now has problems with a corrupted backup, I linked this tool as a precaution, with which you can extract files from potentially defective iPhone backups, as long as the basic structure of the sqlite files is still somewhat clean.
Menial » Base - and if you just want to quickly take a look into a SQLite database with a GUI tool, this shareware tool doesn't look so bad.
Tomboy : Simple note taking - because I looked it up again: it now also works on OS X. However, it is still extremely buggy (scrolling artifacts, no standard key bindings, you have to blindly fiddle with the bottom right corner to resize the window, the handle is missing). It is based on rather fresh libraries that are not yet really up to the best Mac-UI standard. But to access notes from Linux Tomboy and sync via Dropbox, it is sufficient.
Introducing Bibble 5 - don't forget the old acquaintances. Bibble 5 is also available in a Linux version and Bibble 5 also has Asset Management (which LightZone lacks). Major disadvantage of Bibble: they refuse to implement DNG with, in my opinion, rather silly arguments ("we don't want to work with Adobe-converted files and explain why the results look different from those from original RAW"). This leads to cameras with direct DNG output (Ricoh, Leica) not being supported and my converted old formats from the Kodak DCS 520, which has not been available for many years, also not being supported. Quite stupid, because otherwise it is quite close to Lightroom in structure.
kbarni's bibble plugins - Plugins - various plugins for Bibble, some of which are free. If I actually get involved with Bibble, this would certainly also be an important point.
LightZone « lightcrafts - stumbled upon it by chance, nice image editing software for RAW photos. Written in Java, therefore available on all platforms (Windows, MacOS X and Linux). No usable software for managing the image archive included - this has to be realized externally - but images are edited non-destructively, results saved in JPG files (including the stack of applied tools). All in all, it looks quite nice and could be an alternative to LightRoom if I find a usable image archive software for Linux (at least a more usable one than I have so far - unfortunately, Picasa does not support Panasonic-RAW in the Linux version).
Well, I'm Back: Video, Freedom And Mozilla - why Firefox does not include support for H264. I personally think it would be better to use the technically available codecs of the installed system and leave it up to the user which codecs they want to have. I do understand Mozilla's argumentative position on this matter, but I think it could be rather negative for the spread of Firefox in this case - or in the long run could lead to a fork of Firefox and Firefox+OS codecs. His arguments about "pushes software freedom issues from the browser to the platform" are, in my opinion, nonsense - because he himself writes about the Flash video fallback, which requires a non-free Flash plugin ...
MeshLab - and so that I have a chance at all, here is a link to an open source software for converting and editing various mesh formats. Also available for OS X and specifically targeting the editing and repair of meshes from 3D scans - this will probably also be the way for me to determine my model from SL via OpenGL-Capture from the real model.
IPhone Remote - Plex - and the iPhone becomes the ultimate remote control.
Plex Media Center for OS X - poorly blogged, because I might want to build a small media server with a Mac Mini. With the mountains of digital photos I have now, automatic slideshows on a large monitor might be quite nice.
HDR photo software & plugin for Lightroom, Aperture & Photoshop - Tone Mapping, Exposure Fusion & HDR Imaging for photography - might be interesting at some point and the software is available for Mac and Windows. And there is also a plugin for Lightroom for integration.
The Tumblr Backup app is ready for its first beta... - for those who use Tumblr and have a Mac, there's now a backup tool. I might check it out for my small image Tumblr.
TodoPaper - and for those who need TaskPaper on Windows, help is provided here. Another option would be to simply use Dropbox to transfer the files to my Windows machine at work (or run it under Wine on Linux).
OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs - export & import to Google Docs, Zoho, WebDAV - sounds cool. With a suitable application on the iPhone, you can then quickly view documents that you normally edit at home in a desktop application.
Official Google Blog: Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more - and this is then the worst Picasa-for-Mac release I have seen in a long time. When adding folders, the thing kept crashing and it doesn't even find all the folders in subfolders and completely ignores some, the sorting into the flat folder display is completely incomprehensible and chaotic, and sometimes the thing just quits when you look at it. Sure, the face search is cute (though I rarely photograph people, so it doesn't really help me much), but it consumes resources endlessly during import.
wxMaxima - because there is a good OS X version. Thanks to the Schockwellenreiter for the link.
Is blender really equal to the competition? - good high-level comparison (so nothing for feature counters) based on the author's personal experiences.
Review of 3D Engines for the iPhone - interesting overview of available game engines for the iPhone.
KeyCue - find, remember, and learn menu shortcuts - not uncool. Just hold down a modifier and it shows a list of hotkeys. Practical if you don't know all the hotkeys yet and want to learn them (because the keyboard is indeed faster than mouse around).
RapidMiner - Data mining in open source. Seems quite interesting, might become interesting at some point. In Java, so it should also run on OS X.
Calibre - free software for managing eBooks and synchronizing with the PRS-505. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Update: this thing is great! By far better than the included Sony software - and together with Adobe Digital Editions, you can easily buy your books from Thalia and transfer them to the device without any problems. Due to the DRM on books from regular sources, you need to use Adobe Digital Editions for reading (and probably for downloading as well), but otherwise you can fully use Calibre as a replacement for the somewhat cumbersome Sony software.
macvim - Google Code - another VIM version for Mac, but one with better support for various Mac techniques. And better integration (e.g., many standard keys are supported). In addition, it is based on the current version.
Scripting Drawer für Acorn - my favorite image editor is Acorn - because it's so small, fast and sleek. Plus, I can program it in Python. And with this plugin, the windows get a Scripting Drawer à la Nodebox - with which you can then run the Python code directly, without always having to navigate through the filter menu. Nice!
Stainless for OS X Leopard - interesting project: a multi-process browser for OSX. Essentially similar to Google Chrome (each tab is its own process), but further in that each process can have a local cookie storage and separate auth sessions. So for example, you can be logged into multiple Google Mail accounts in the same browser in multiple tabs, without any problems.
Nik Software, Inc. - will soon also support Lightroom (Viveza is leading the way). Great - this will make some tasks even easier with Lightroom.
Alien Skin Software: Bokeh - interesting software for creating bokeh effects. Unfortunately, it's only available as a plugin - I prefer standalone programs.
OMVViewer-light a Secondlife Text Client - could be quite interesting for on-the-go use, if I can't or don't want to start the full interface.
ExpanDrive: Ridiculously simple SFTP and FTP drive access on your Mac - also worth a look, after all I have tons of stuff lying around on SFTP servers. And while the Cyberduck is nice, I would actually prefer to use the Finder - at least, if the result is usable.
Instant color schemes for your Mac with ColorSchemer Studio OSX - and since I always use the same boring color combinations in SL, something like this might be useful.
Intaglio — Macintosh Drawing & Illustration - looks good, I should check it out. Specifically, the ability to use texts as paths could be interesting for me
VectorDesigner - and another graphics software that I should take a look at. Vector graphics would also solve some of the text problems (for SL I sometimes need text on paths and text as paths, which is rather cumbersome to do with Acorn).
Filter Forge - wow, they have a Mac beta! And it works in Photoshop Elements (though only on Windows - on OS X apparently only the big packages. Damn). Hmm, I think that would be something to test - because seamless textures is the only reason why I still need Windows, even if it's only in an emulation.