This is the first blog post I’m writing from my Asus Eee-PC 901 netbook PC. In terms of hardware, I think it’s a marvel. It looks slick, is small enough to retain that true gadget factor and seems exceptionally sturdy. The Atom processor feels snappy enough and runs XP with ease. But I don’t. After more that a year of Vista it’s amazing how many things about XP bug me. It’s really one of the worst Windows versions when it comes to usability. And besides, all the security updates and stuff make my netbook less fun than I think it could be. This is why I find myself looking for a better OS for my tiny new friend.
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How cool is this? A Firefox plugin that raises the bar for all other image browsers. Installing it will add a small ‘play’ button to images on Flickr, Picasa and tons of other sites. Clicking that button open the PicLens screen where you can intuitively browse through the gallery in 3D. Very easy to set up, and a surefire way to impress your friends.
http://www.piclens.com
One of the minor gripes I have about my digital camera is that it stores the MPEG4 videos I records in Apple’s Quicktime format. Not only does this format not speed up time in any way, it’s also hard to process or convert to other file formats. I would have preferred AVI, simply because its far more common on Windows PCs and pretty much any software can load and save AVI files.
While googling for a good converter I came across MP4Cam2AVI. If you can decipher it, the name pretty much says it all. It converts typical digicam MOVs to AVI. And most importantly, it does so without decoding and re-encoding the actual image data stream. Unlike with other solutions the image quality is not affected, it simply changes the video’s file container to AVI. That takes less than a second on my PC, and if you like, MP4Cam2AVI can batch process multiple files for you.
One of the first things I do when I install Firefox is go to the advanced javascript settings and unselect “Move or resize existing windows”. There are tons of pesky sites out there that resize your browser window through irritating scripts, and this keep them from doing so quite effectively. As with all technologies though, there are occasional sites that use similar scripts for good. Some open popup windows for images and adjust their sizes to fit the content for instance. With the javascript setting I described above, this leaves me with a non-resizable popup of the wrong size. Usually a very small one with large contents. Grrr…
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Even though I’m pretty much stuck using Windows for work, I’ve always been fascinated by alternative operating systems. Years ago I had a dual boot system with Windows 2000 and BeOS 4.5, and a couple of years ago I played around with Linux on older machines. None of these solutions were very useful though. Having to switch back to windows to use Photoshop or having an old PC take up desk space isn’t very convenient. This is where virtualization software like VirtualBox comes in.
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One of the few problems wth free software is the fact that the authors usually do not have huge marketing budgets to promote their work. This is why I didn’t know about Synergy until Matt Cutts blogged about it. It’s also why it took me ages to find a decent backup tool. I was just about to pay for a mediocre shareware solution when I came across Cobian Backup.
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I’ve been using this trick for years but it seems it’s never really been blogged about. When saving JPEG files using the “Save for Web” feature (”Save for web & devices” in CS3), the quality slider exhibits some strange behavior. Increasing the quality setting by a single percent usually adds only a little extra file size (about half a kB for the test file I used). Going from 50 to 51 with the same file added a full 10 kB. There’s also quite a difference in image quality between 50 and 51. In fact I feel 51 looks pretty good and is the optimal setting for most web projects. Anything above that is a waste of bandwidth, except perhaps for photography portfolios and such.
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Safari on Windows not only has it’s own font render engine, it’s own brushed metal look, centered window title, it also adheres to the Mac OSX convention as far as button ordering goes. Just consider how truly arrogant it is of Apple to do this. Why would they even consider this when the users they’re targeting have been using Windows for years and have grown accustomed to clicking the left button without even looking…
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It’s always based on an ‘Intel’ open source engine, and Macs are pretty much PC’s nowadays in terms of hardware. My guess is that technically, nothing has been keeping Apple from releasing a Windows version of Safari for years. And now they have. I for one am glad, as Safari is highly standards-compliant and might lure more people away from Internet Explorer. Competition is good, and if the PC version of Safari is anything like the Mac version I’m pretty sure people will like it.
http://www.apple.com/safari/
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A while ago, my wife Verina and I had a ‘digital photo scare’. It looked like some of our most precious photos had been lost duing the latest cleanup of Verina’s computer. I spent an entire morning searching her system for any and all JPEG images and was ultimately able to find all of them in folders with names like ‘backup old computer’ and ‘digital photos old’. Oops.
There were a couple of things wrong with the way we were handling our photographs.
- No backups - harddrive failure would have meant disaster.
- No photo management - using different PCs to load the photos off the camera, not erasing the camera’s card, sharing them through obscure folders and moving them from one Windows install to the next had really taken its toll. I found 10,000 files which turned out to be only 2,900 unique photographs.
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