You idiot, I’m going to Somerset for a week tomorrow, taking Eddie ‘cos he needs lots of country walks to get rid of some of them extra tires.

I’ll be leaving my beloved iMac in a dire state.  Last August my iMac’s superdrive went up shits creek, it wouldn’t eject a disc.  Got it replaced but… Well it happened again today.  I should have known it was coming because the drive had started making the same wheezing sound that it was making the last time I had it replaced.  ‘Cept now it’s beyond warranty land and I’ve kinda forgotten to purchase Apple Care.

Thankfully someone on macintouch has the answer, many have had the same problem and apparently turning the iMac on it’s front and initiating eject whilst jiggiling the slot with a credit card does, after many attempts get the bitch to pop its head out.

I’m annoyed because after the last August’s events I had cut down my use of the internal drive by using a standard dvd drive, rescued from my last PC form many years ago via a IDE->USB affair.  I’ve pretty much only used my internal drive for burning. Yet still the drive hasn’t lasted.  Something tells me that the combination of Vertical+Slot-Loading+Slimline+Pioneer isn’t a good thing.

I kinda hate patriotism…

I look forward to a time when we are a global village. But I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of pride when playing with the Everybody Hurts… I mean Votes channel on the ol’ Wii tonight.  The results have come in for “Is the TV you are watching now a wide screen TV?” and heading the Yes’s by region is the UK by quite a margin!  Crazy.  Lord knows how that happened.  The US is quite a bit down the list.  Dunno why I singled them out…

I’ve decoded yesterdays keynote and have worked out Apples long-term plan.

As Apple hoped, most saw the Starbuck’s part of the keynote as Ho-Hum, why because it’s simply an experiment.  My theory is that they are producing a discreet Wi-Fi Server for the retail sector.  Shoppers enter anything from Starbucks to Gap and for instance the Gap logo appears on your iPod and provides you with sale items, things Gap want you flog at that precise moment (the perk for the store), stock takes for other sizes of items you notice on the peg.  And to do this you will need an iPod (touch or iPhone or whatever future iPod is).

It’s also Apple answer to the “Big Ass Table” microsoft are hoping to get into the hotel and restaurant sector. Rather than you finding the establishments service, “it” finds you, or more precisely, your iPod.

Imagine the worth of having the de-facto standard for not only MP3 players but the device that aides shopping and purchasing.

Well today Steve made all my dreams come true.

I don’t use phones very often, pretty much avoid them like the plague, it’s a me thing. Therefore I only have a cheapo PAYG mobile, a contract would be money down the drain. This had never bothered me before, until Apple announced the iPhone, and suddenly being a phoney person has a major perk, making me majorly jealous of everyone who could warrent buying one.

Well woohoo. Apple are releasing the iPhone minus the phone! And iPhone without the phone should really be called the “Apple i”, but instead it’s called the iPod touch.

I followed the announcement on engadget as it happened, and kept refreshing the Apple Store page until it re-opened ready to get my order in. But when I saw the estimated ship date of September 28 I decided I’d better not pre-order it because I would only end up refreshing the order status every 5 minutes impatiently waiting, slowly driving myself insane until I end up crouched in a corner weeping.

I feel like a right silly sausage.

Unlike the plus and pro versions, the Spyder2Express I have doesn’t come with the Printfix software.  But bizarrely if you download Printfix Pro from the colorvision sitette you can run it in demo mode.  I thought to myself whilst trying it out ‘wow, this demo mode is letting me do everything!’, I even plugged my spyder in and hit return with the device centred in on a colour patch and it worked!

Only it was fooling me.  It was only after going through the patch charts for hours that I realised that whatever surface the sensor was on, hitting return resulted in an approximate colour to the one desired anyway.  It was doing sod all!

I’m so dumb!

I’ve gone mad and bought more stuff for my camera.

First I bought a flash, ‘cos the built in one is too harsh and there isn’t much you can do with it.  Also, for some reason you can only push the shutter up to 1/250 when using the built in affair which ain’t no good with my shaky knuckles.  I bought the Olympus FL-36 which is their mid-level one.  Also to go with it I got a Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce.  Which is a peice of frosted plastic you shove over the flash to soften the blow.  Other neat things you can do is rotate it so that it bounces off walls, but I haven’t quite mastered the art.  I’ve no idea what I’m doing really.

When the flash is in the neutral position you can hear it moving some optic around inside its skull as you zoom in and out of things.  No idea what thats all about.

The other piece of nuttiness I’ve gotten is that lens I wanted.  I couldn’t resist it, it was eating me up inside.  It’s a lovely looking object, got a sort of matt look to it, and boy is it heavy.  Thing is at first I was totally dissapointed, I couldn’t even get it to focus on the right things. I even took a photo to demonstrate the problem I was having, and opened a support ticket with the store I bought it from.  The photo is here, and the deal is, I was focusing on where the spoon meets the ruler.

But after using it more I freaking love it, it’s like a game.  I don’t think it’s faulty but that it’s more um, quirky.  I might have sussed it, I shall now talk a load of crap.  I think that there aren’t enough stops around the focusing mechanism for the shallowness of the depth of field.  So I reckon the trick is, take a photo, see if the spoon is in focus, if it isn’t shuffle yer feet forwards or backwards a tiny tiny bit and have another go, hoping the new position will fall into a possible focus position.

Did that make sense?  I haven’t a clue.  Tell you what though I just love the photo’s I can get from it.  As usually Eddie is my subject, with this lens I can make really soft pastelly portraits of him that make him look verging on the sexy!

Some photos taken with it. 

My iMac Core Duo 20″’s screen hasn’t aged gracefully. Either that or it’s always been this way and I haven’t noticed until recently.

I quit smoking way before getting it, mind you, the cealing it pretty damn nicotine stained, but I don’t think that will damage an LCD being long since ex-smoke. Also, only the rear of the mac is facing a window, so there can’t be sun damage either. And yet, the default profile now looks like hideous brown poo.

I’ve profiled it using both superCAL and the built in apple affair, they help tons but I don’t necessarily trust my own eyes to do it correctly.

So I’ve bought a Colorvision Spyder Express. It’s a piece of plastic goodness that contains some kind of sensor. Plugs into the comp via USB and you dangle it infront of the screen and the software flashes different shades of colours and measures what the sensor is seeing to create a nice accurate profile.

Well, it worked great on my iMac. I thought it looked a little blue at first but that’s probably because i’m used to the poo. Now, after starring at it more it looks great, if maybe a little dark, I’m used to gamma 2.2 so it isn’t that, but I think maybe all the fudging the poo causes less light to get through.

Next I tried the Sammy TV I have the mac connected to via DVI-HDMI. With the express this shouldn’t be possible because you are supposed to go pro for multi-display set ups. But if you rename the profile file and also change the “desc” property in the profile you can trick it into letting you have more profiles on the same machine. I set the TV to “Movie” which is the only screen mode that disables the dynamic contrast, sure to confuse the spyder. Then let it roll. But hmm, it made a right mess. Gray’s were all over the show. I didn’t mind too much though because being a TV I’m sure its made for overly vivid video rather than accurate stuff.

The arrgh I’m having is to do with my iBook G4’s Display. I kind of expected a little trouble because this iBook screen has a very very bad viewing angle. But I’ve done it several times, I’ve even wrapped plaster tape around it to keep it nice and flush with the display but it always makes me a profile with tons of pink. Especially the OSX brushed metal windows show up the pinkness.

What am I doing wrong? Grr. I know for a fact that the one person who reads this is a graphic designer by trade, and so I presume he has done many a monitor calibration in his time. So… help!

Tried out the BBC iPlayer yesterday, or was it the day before?  Fuck, what the hell does it matter you shitting bastard!

It’s a multitude of immense bouts of stupidity. It only works on Windows, so first, being that I tossed out my boot camp installation a few months ago I kicked up Parallels, which I have a pretty standard XP install on.  So that’s stupidity #1.

First had to sign into the site with my beta invite login.  Here’s stupidity #2, the beta ID wasn’t my iPlayer Login, it was just to access the page where you sign upto iPlayer.  So I had to created yet another login.

Once i’d got a login I choose a show to download.  Ironically the big show on the iPlayer page that day was one of those celebrating Stephen Fry’s 50th, I say ironically because he’s a well known Mac advocate, even going as far as saying he hates windows and Microsoft in general with a passion.  So I choose that one.

It then gave me a sorry message because my system had failed the check list.  Oh I can’t use firefox. Stupidity #3.

So, in Internet Explorer now, tried again.  Chose the same show, this time I got 4 happy green ticks.  Yay…oh, not yay.  Despite the ticks my set up is still wrong, it tells me to look at the point with a red X.  Cept they’re all ticks.  All happy green ticks.  Stupidity #4.

Googled my problem and discovered it’s so specific that I need Media Player 11.  No mention of this by the beeb.  So upgraded Media Player and tried again.  Stupidity #5.

So logged back into the site again, chose the Stephen Fry thing, then guess what.  I’m still not ready, I now have to download iPlayer. Why the heck didn’t the process begin with this?  Stupidity #6.

So I installed iPlayer, went back to the site, chose the Stephen Fry thing.  It then added the show to the iPlayer apps download list.  Pheeeeww.  Ah, not much is coming though.  Left it for a good hour.  Still 0%.  Stopped the download and restarted it.  Nothing.   Stupidity #7.

Life is too short.

If I was the BBC I’d immediate scrap the iPlayer and sack everyone involved.  Just put the shows on an infrastructure already established.  iTunes, or maybe even Joost. It’s simply a waste of resources and license payers money to construct your own.  Just stop it now.  Please.

I want a new lens for my camera bitch.

The friend who got married the other day bought a canon 400d to take on honeymoon pro. First thing that struck me about that camera compared to my e-300 is the speed of the menu, it’s really zippy, whereas mines more of a “down – pause – down – pause – select” affair. The big thing though is that along with the standard kit lens he also bought quite an interesting fixed-zoom lens. They are sometimes referred to as a “prime” lens, for reasons which are lost on me. But the advantage is that not having to cater for zoom allows the manufacturer room for other things, including a really big aperture. You’re able to take photo’s indoors with no flash and only ever a minor increase in ISO level. So of cause, I now want one.

Problem is, canon owners have the luxury of a back-catalogue of lenses stretching back to the stone-age, there’s thousands of the damn things. The lens mount my olympus uses, called the “Four-Thirds” standard was developed purely for the digital age and as such there’s only a modest selection to choose from so far.

Olympus don’t seem to care to create the sort of lens I’m after, luckily Sigma make their lenses for all the current crop of mounts including the four-thirds standard, which is what my camera uses. They have just the lens I want! The Sigma 30mm f1.4. But it’s freaking expensive, around 380 USD and goes for around 270 quid over here.

I could by an OM lens pretty cheap, which work on my camera using an adapter. But you lose Auto-Focus which ain’t no good.

I’m guttered actually because I had a winning bid for the Sigma on ebay but some crazy fool out-bidded me right in the last minute, I was just seconds too slow increasing my bid. So now i’m pissed off at myself for not using a bigger maximum bid in the first place.

There are a number of things I would like to see in Leopard, missing from the WWDC build. I think I’ve come up with an OK idea for adding some of the functionality of the windows taskbar whilst keeping the grace of the OSX dock.

My mock up should be self explanatory, when an app has multiple documents open it’s position in the dock should open out and list the documents, click on the titles to switch between them. Too avoid over-use it should only be apps which would benefit which get support for this doodad.

Whatdya think Steve?

Ha, I’ve just noticed, my mock up thinks pages documents have psd extensions.  Silly mock up.