JamesX

And so another production comes to an end. Inheritance was a lot of fun and I probably enjoyed it more than usual because I didn’t have as much to worry about although for the next one I’ve already been warned that I’ll be a busy boy. The party last night was good, even though we were all completely exhausted. It was a good chance to catch up socially without having to discuss the speed of a particular set change, or how many times Ian made noises off. It looks like Clarabel had a good time too! The best part was sleeping in this morning - I only woke up about two hours ago (1pm) which is a very rare occurance.

It’s probably a good time to mention this new app I’ve been playing with. I can’t remember where I came across this one. It’s a simple little app that makes a timeline of dates and lays them all out nicely for you. Strangely enough, it’s called Timeline. To test it out, I plotted all the productions I’ve worked on to date and it seems to arrange things really well - it simply automatically adjusts the layout as you add more events. An exceprt from my timeline is below…

Obviously you can tweak all the colours and fonts etc. In any case, it’s pretty hard to make it look bad. There’s a video on their site that shows how it in action, which you can see here. Anyway, that’s all for now. Fame rehearsals start in two weeks time!

Anyone who uses a Mac knows how useful the folder label option is. For those who don’t, it basically changes the colour of the folder name to whatever you select, allowing you to easily, graphically group folders and files in the Finder. Hey Folders! takes it one step further by changing the actual icon of the folder to match the colour of the label.

It’s pretty simple, but it works and it adds that little extra flair to your folders. Oh and even though the site says OS X 10.3, it works on 10.4 too! Best of all, it’s free, so go get it now - visit Bronson Beta.

Syncing your phone and your computer is nothing new, especially for Mac users, but if you have a BlackBerry, the process isn’t quite as simple as you might think. The problem is that iSync (OS X’s built in device syncronisation tool) doesn’t natively support BlackBerry devices.

PocketMac

Luckily though, there is software available that does this quite well. It’s called PocketMac for BlackBerry and although it used to require users to fork out hard earned cash to obtain a copy, with a partnership with BlackBerry, the software is now a free download. The software supports a large range of devices including my new BlackBerry Pearl.

So why the blog entry?

Well it’s not as simple as plug and sync. In fact, it took me (and Richard!) a few hours, to work out what the problem was. When you connect the Pearl to the Mac, it asks if you want to mount the phone as a volume to share files. Naturally, most users would think, well I’m only syncing, so I’ll say “No”. The problem here is, if you say No to this dialog, the Mac will start a process called pcscd to mount the volume anyway, and when the BlackBerry denies access, the process hangs. After a few minutes, you’ll notice that your CPU usage hits 100% and stays there rendering the computer almost useless. Any attempt to kill the process fails, and even the support site for PocketMac doesn’t have a resolution for this stating:

If this has happened to you, reset the Mac (you’ll have to physically turn it off because pcscd is such a CPU hog). Then restart the Mac, connect the Pearl, answer YES on the Pearl, launch PocketMac, and the two will get along nicely ever after.

So the lesson here is, set the BlackBerry to automatically answer Yes when connecting to a computer.

That’s it?

Yup, that’s all. The PocketMac people are working on a solution, but I thought I’d post this up here so that anyone else who’s hunting for the resolution to this problem can find some help!

I meant to post about this a while back but I guess I forgot. Those who have been trying out the beta version of Photoshop CS3, the newest version of the popular creative software, would have noticed that it’s sporting a new, slightly unusual icon. You wouldn’t be wrong for thinking, it’s just a beta that’s why it has a weird icon, but the new icons represent a change in thinking for Adobe.

Since the adoption of the Macromedia product line earlier in the year, distinguishing the now extensive product lineup was a challenge that needed to be addressed. The new icons use a two letter code to represent the application (for example, Ps for Photoshop) as well as a colour that determines where the product fits in the design scope. The colour system was already used by Macromedia for some time, so it’s good to see it will be sticking around.

The question is, are there too many icon codes to remember? Click on the image above to view the full set.

Well it’s been a while since I last splashed out and bought a new gadget (almost a year with TomTom being the last major purchase in November 2005), but I decided I needed a compact digital camera. I have my big digital camera, but it’s just too clunky to carry around everywhere. Enter the Canon Digital Ixus 65. It’s a great little 6 megapixel camera with a giant 3-inch screen on the back. It’s small enough to fit in your pocket and loaded with a 2GB SD card, it can take a whopping 1800 odd shots at medium resolution. I got a great deal on it - just over $400 from an online store. The RRP is $580 so I’m happy with that.

I’m sure that the new purchase will inspire me to take far too many photos than I need to, which of course makes it tough to keep them all organised. Which brings me to Aperture. Apple recently released Aperture version 1.5 and this new update fixes many of the problems that stopped me from using it to manage my media when it first came out. Now that Aperture allows you to keep your photos in any folder instead of importing them into it’s “library” and it lets you keep thumbnails of images and burn the masters to CD for archiving, I think it’ll be a great asset to have. Time will tell of course, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

Tonight I’ve been playing around with (yet another) open source project called FreeNAS. As the name suggested it’s basically software that lets you create simple Network Attached Storage. The beauty is that it’s all compiled in FreeBSD so it runs on any old computer, you just have to pump up the hard drive space and use the web based configuration to set volumes and user permissions. I likened the install process to installing IPCop, only simpler.

Within five minutes I had just under 600GB of storage available to the network. One of the cool features is that it supports AFP, so the Mac can connect to it seamlessly. But if that’s not enough, this pretty much sums it up:

FreeNAS support in the current release:

Filesystem: UFS, FAT32, EXT2/EXT3, NTFS (limited read-only)
Protocol: CIFS (samba) , FTP, NFS, SSH, RSYNC and AFP
Hard drive: ATA/SATA, SCSI, USB and Firewire
GPT/EFI partitionning for hard drive bigger than 2TB
Networks cards: All supported by FreeBSD 6 (including wireless card!)
Boot from USB key
Hardware RAID cards: All supported by FreeBSD 6
Software RAID 0, 1 and 5
Management of the groups and the users (Local User authentication and Microsoft Domain)

So go check it out!