Jun 17, 2009 3
I’ve thrown together a Quick Look generator for those Leopard users out there who have poorly named Bittorrent metainfo files. It’s a work in progress, so no warranties, but it works for me…here it is anyway.
For a more complete description, got to the Downloads page.
Jun 13, 2009 0
There’s a posting on TUAW about how to set your display’s gamma in OSX Leopard to match Snow Leopard’s. It describes in detail how to go about doing it without actually telling you what you’re messing with. It’s a concept that isn’t Mac-specific, though.
When I was working at an animation studio back in the late 90s, I was introduced to the avuncular Charles Poynton who has made a career out of sitting on panels, making recommendations to technical boards and writing books on video, color and especially gamma. I took a course from Charles along with some colleagues because we needed to implement color correction and set a mutual standard across our studios around the world. So knowing what it was we were trying to achieve was somewhat key. We had digital ink and paint and compositing people on SGIs, color artists on Macs, a renegade CGI team that switched from Maya to 3D Studio Max and then editors on Macs in Avid but did their viewing through expensive Sony Evergreen reference monitors. Finally, an art director who looked at the work on all of these systems and wondered why everything looked different. The majority of people don’t need to ever concern themselves with this stuff and should probably just move on.
Jun 12, 2009 0
Google Software Update, which vexes system purists everywhere since it’s installed silently when you install certain Google products, is set by default to autonomously execute on a daily basis. In Mac OSX, there’s no control panel or preference pane with which to change this annoying behaviour unlike in Windows.
However, I just found this page tucked away which describes how to set the update frequency for OSX (Windows users look here). You have to get into Terminal and:
$ defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval <frequency>
…where <frequency> is in seconds. Setting it to 0 (zero) disables it completely.
If you want to manually run an update check, you need to look in either
for a file called ‘CheckForUpdatesNow.command’ and run that. Convenient, huh?
If I get the time, I might hack together a Pref Pane for this.
Jun 11, 2009 0
Given that Fluid is having this disagreement with Gears, I thought I’d try creating a Mozilla Prism-based SSB instance for Google Reader. There’s a nifty theme for Reader called Helvetireader that I was using with Fluid. It also works with Prism but the instructions on this page didn’t work for me.
I had to take the webapp.css file from the helvetireader.webapp (which is just a zip archive) and drop it into the Prism instance (at /Applications/Helvetireader/Contents/Resources/webapp/). You could also just directly create this file – it’s contents are just a CSS import as described in that last link.
Unlike the Fluid-based SSB, Prism instances seem to require extensions, plugins and themes separately, i.e. per-instance. I guess this is a good thing and avoids the kind of snarl that Gears and Fluid are having.
Jun 10, 2009 0
Yet another incarnation of the impending Firefox 3.5 release, although it doesn’t seem to be up at the normal beta version download site which still has 3.5b4. Apparently, if you download 3.5b4 and then do an in-browser Check For Updates you’ll be fixed up proper.
