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!

Amongst the Apple announcements the other day was the renewal of the iWork bundle of apps.

This is the version of iWork I’ve been waiting for as it finally includes a spreadsheet app. Boy was it worth the wait, it’s everything I could have hoped for and more, I love the way you can stick mutiple smaller spreadsheets on one sheet. So easy to throw things around.

They’ve also added a contextual bar to the apps, rather like the “ribbon” thingy in the latest MS Office, except unlike microsofts it doesn’t look like it was thrown together by someone enduring a fit. Instead it’s nice and svelte.

Finally a spreadsheet on the mac that doesn’t run like a dog. Wooo.

Installed the developer preview of leopard onto an external drive yesterday.

Bullet points shall convey my thoughts…

• It feels faster than tiger, which is surprising because my iMac is a 32bit core duo and leopard is stuffed full of 64bit stuff.  It might feel faster because I hadn’t had a chance to stuff the drive full of crap.  But still, peeps with 32bit mac’s need not worry about a speed hit.
•  I was underwhelmed by the features.  I’m hoping i’ll be pleasantly surprised by hidden nuggets, but right now i’m not holding my breath.
• Finder is hugely disappointing.  Quickview is good, but despite the iTunes-esq appearance the rest of finder still just feels like finder.  It just isn’t a shell you expect in 2007.  There’s no paradigm shift.  No breadcrumb bar.  No tagging.  No editable extended attributes support.
• Yeah quickview is pretty nifty, it opens files incredibly quickly, even things like spreadsheets open in a flash, and I was impressed that it showed tabs for the different sheets in an excel spreadsheet I tried.
• Spaces is going to come in useful for those times that I leave an app on my TV and don’t fancy turning it back on just to drag it back to the main desktop.
• Time machine is so so easy to set up and it works well.  However, I choose a network location.  Then went back to leopard today and tried Time machine and it complained that it hasn’t been set up.  Reason was that I hadn’t yet in that session visited/mounted the network location.  So you still need to be careful of that, and create automounts for network locations.  Which I might add finder still offers up no help for.
• So yeah, I get the feeling network support ain’t going to be any better in leopard.
• The new dock looks nice and flashy at first, but it didn’t take long for my eyes to grow tired of it, it looks a tad cluttered.
• Still no way to turn off display outputs at will.
• Apple seem to be moving away from having pop-out sidebars for setting attributes.  Such as in iCal.  Now when you create a new event you double click it and a nice looking floating palette emanates from the event.
• The menu bar doesn’t look any better in real life than it does in the screenshots.  Even worse, when you click an item the drop down menu is more opaque than the menu bar and looks completely out of place.
• And that’s all the weather.

Crazily, even though OS X went all mental on me it wasn’t long before I had everything back as it was.

As I expected I resorted to re-installing OS X with the “archive and install” option.  It essentially keeps your User folder as it is, but replaces all the folders that have something to do with OS X itself.  And all the folders that are replaced are nicely archived away for you in a folder.

This method of install works a treat on OS X and restoring everything has been so much easier than it was when ether I had to do anything similar with windows.  Probably because all the apps keep their settings and support files in logical folder locations.  Rather then been crammed into a registry where settings are difficult to migrate into. and mix and match

Most of my apps worked fine, some that didn’t I could get working by manually finding the things they require in the archived /Library dir.  Things like Audio Unit Components and the the like.

Only with 2 apps so far have I resorted to reinstalling.

All this ease has done little to please my paranoid side however.  I cannot stop from wondering what could have possibly caused the problem.  Whatever was messed up was something at the heart of the OS, because it was only seconds into booting before getting dumped to the terminal.  Something that shouldn’t be written to in every day use, so I can’t help thinking it must have been caused by the hard drive itself.  It had shutdown fine the night before.

So am I going to start finding files randomly getting corrupt? ugh.  I’m not sure how I could diagnose the issue.  All the hardware tests I’ve tried so far have come up fine and dandy.

Why I must have strange neighbours and a neat way to store your personal info.

Yesterday I was using my iMac when suddenly a bluetooth dialog popped up offering a jpg, I was the only one in the house but still I instinctively scanned my surroundings.  No poltergeist had gotten out it’s PDA.  Still, I nervously accepted it. And that image you see was the fruit.  Very…Odd.  I especially am concerned that judging by it’s wonkyness it appears to be a poster.  So now I’m thinking, is this stuck on my next door neighbours wall?

Even worse I didn’t think I had bluetooth enabled, I’d hidden the menu icon, but obviously not actually disabled the functionality.  Well I have now.

I’ve come up with a neat idea.  Use keychain acess on the mac to keep personal info, like pin codes and shit that you might often forget.  I haven’t read about this anywhere else so I can only presume that i’m either a genius for coming up with it, or there’s some major security based reason for not doing this.

If you open keychain access, which is probably in Applications/Utilities, but it’s just easier to quicksilver it, you can manually add keys.  Click the wee +.  And look, the password box is multi-line, you can write an entire paragraph in there if you wanted.  So go do it.  You seem to need to manually enter your login name and i’m presuming its best not to forget.

Also important, after adding a new one, you need to immediately open the new item and go to the access control tab.  Click Ask for keychain password.  Also, whenever you revisit this item always click “Allow Once”.  If you accidental click “Allow Always” or you discover that it seems to be letting you view the item’s password box without entering the password go back to this access control tab and remove “Keychain Access” from the list of applications.

There’s a list of Categories on the left, but i can’t seem to get them to do anything, my keys always just end up in “Passwords”

Hey, I should have investigated this more before turning to wordpress.  Seems there’s a special item for making notes.  “File->New Secure Note Item”.  Hmm, mind you, unlike the password type, I cannot see a way to undo having accidentally allowed access always.

So yeah, ages ago I went mad and spent an unspeakable amount of money on a bundle of music software by Native Instruments. I guess I was feeling frifty.

Thing is, I have certainly not had my moneys worth. Although from scratch the bundle only shipped with 3 of the 12 components being a universal binary (that is compatible with an intel processor based macintosh computer) they had promised (including in print on the box) that they would all be ready by updates within a couple of months (I read that as 2 months), and as such the bundle was sold as being for owners of intel macs, it even had the universal badge on the box, as you can see. Heck as well that was november 2006. It is now March 2007, 4 months and counting since purchase and I am still waiting for 4 components of this bundle to be made compatible with my machine.

It is completely disgraceful for this company to have promised, nay, sold a software bundle for intel machines if they were not confident of having the whole thing running within good time.

Whats worse in my opinion is that they haven’t even apologised. You can check all over their website and there isn’t an ounce of regret.

The other day my iBook endored yet another gravity based accident.  It was on top of my un-made bed, hidden by the folds of the duvet.  I looked upon the mess and figured that won’t do, so I flung the duvet into the air like you do and watched helplessly as the iBook screamed through the air.  When I picked it up one of the seems had separated but it clipped back together.  Also, it seemed to have that cheap plasticy creaking sound when fingering the unit.  Thankfully it seems to be OK now.  This things been through such hard times I’m surprised it even boots.

Just finished reading iWoz

It’s about Steve Wozniak and is a riveting read if you’re interested in tech nonsence, I thoroughly recommend it.   I’m insanely jealous of the guy though, I knew he was a bit gifted in the clever department, but I had no idea quite to what extent.  He pretty much designed a personal computer, from scratch… with no help by anyone.. when such a thing didn’t even exist.

I’m going to be totally cruel now though because after reading this book, it kind of confirms what douglas coupland jokes about in his book jPod, whereby a character quips that all the genius IT engineers out there are essentially autistic.  For me, at least, the quality of the writing is appalling, I would go so far as to say it reminded me at times of the blathering’s of a primary school pupil.  He also has a tendency of repeating himself as much as thrice in the space of a short paragraph.  Sure, my english skills are probably no better but I wouldn’t dare write a book.  So yeah, it just shows that all his brain tissue ended up on the engineering side.  And as for those practical jokes….

Oh yeah, I would just like to correct him on one thing (not that he’s ever going to read this), theres a chapter about a music festival he organised (the US Festival) and he ends the chapter by declaring that since woodstock he’s the only person to have set up a music festival on countryside land like this.  And that no one does it anymore either.  Well hmm, I’m not sure about america but these things have are still going on around europe and have been ever since the 60’s.  There’s hundreds of them, all yearly… Glastonbury of course, Reading/Leeds, V, Roskilde… the list is endless and i’m sure there must be tons in america too.

Apple have finally unleashed the i’m a mac adverts on the UK and i’m both impressed and surprised by their choice of actors.

Mitchell and Webb are probably now best known for their self titled sketch show, which alternated between strokes of genius “numberwang” and slight pointlessness.  Before their sketch show they played the two main characters in sitcom “Peep Show”, which I love so much.  God I hope they do some more.

Problem is, as much as I love Mitchell and Webb I’m not sure they work quite right in these adverts, maybe it’s because i’m used to the american ones.  Mitchell’s tone of voice isn’t quite matter-of-factly enough for the PC character, and I’ve seen Webb play idiot characters too many times to go with him as the mac guy.  Hmm, i’ve just realised, i’ve presumed which is Mitchell and which is Webb, when I actually have no idea.  It’s the ant and dec syndrome.

Noticed something a bit off about weather services.

The top one is from the mac’s dashboard and the bottom is captured from the Wii.

So my question is, which one it so be believed?  I would have thought all weather services would get their info from the same source, such as sheffields met office.  So thats odd.