5 megapixel phone

Showing the rest of the world what we have to look forward to, this 5 megapixel phone will be available in Korea later this year. There are images of the device here. And lots of criticism here. The criticism is pretty harsh in my opinion - I for one would like this kind of camera in a UIQ phone.

Update: ArsTechnica has a review of the phone.

Quick Icon Thumbnails

In order to quickly create a thumbnail icon for images I've been a long time fan of the great freeware contextual menu extension QuickImageCM. Simply right-click the icon and choose QuickImage:Add Thumbnail Icon and you have a great thumbnail icon. However despite its convenience, QuickImage suffers from a few problems. For slower Macs with a few contextual menu items installed there can be a delay of a few seconds before the menu appears. This delay increases with the number of icons selected, so if you try and right-click a selection of a few hundred images, the delay can run into minutes, during which you cannot do anything else while waiting for the menu to appear. This is extremely frustrating, so I set out to find a drag and drop solution.

Enter the $15 shareware DropIcon - this app is a good solution for the problem. This software hasn't been updated since 2001, but it seems to work well on OS X 10.3.5. I've tested it with over 500 images at a time without any problems, except a few images (perhaps 1 in 100) end up with erroneous black and white thumbnails. Running DropIcon on these problem images again did not fix the problem. I ended up using QuickImage on them to get the correct thumbnails.

Update: I recently discovered a program called dropBatch iconMaker. Apparently it's highly regarded.

New MKVToolNix

MKVToolnix has been updated, although there no mention on the developer's site about what's been added.

Mind games

There was an amazing article on News@Nature today about device implanted into the brain of a paraplegic which allows him to control his computer and television! Surely it won't be long now before this sort of thing becomes available to the general public. The possibilities boggle the mind - imagine answering and dialing your (implanted in your skull, naturally) mobile phone or unlocking your car and starting your engine. How about sending passwords and PIN numbers to computers, ATM machines or your home security system.

Cinematize 2

Cinematize 2 is out! The new version has some great sounding new features, including speed improvements and new export and clipping options.

iMovie the VCR

There was a nifty little hint on MacOSXHints today about how to script iMovie to start recording TV shows at specified times. Unfortunately you need some sort of Analog-Digital bridge or a DV camera with DV passthrough (which my 6-year old Sony PC10 doesn't have).

Site update

Updated the site! First I installed Marc Liyange's PHP Apache Module in order to experiment with PHP. Then I found a slick PHP random image script which led me to (finally) revamp the site's general look. Finally rid of those default Movable Type colours!

Humour on SlashDot

After years of reading SlashDot, I have finally taken the plunge and registered for an account there! The reason? The decrease in what usenet geeks call the "signal-to-noise" ratio. In the (possibly rose-tinted) past SlashDot comments were invariably insightful and technically impressive, but recently the surge in irrelevant comments has been quite irritating.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, it occured to me that given SlashDot's unique moderation system there might be some kind of preference where I could filter out the frivolous comments. But only if I registered. And, lo and behold, after registering and checking the user preferences section I found exactly what I was after! Once you log in, you can go to the Preferences:Comments page, and change the "Reason Modifier" for "Funny" to "-6". This will moderate all "Funny" comments down by 6, and thus guaranteeing they fall below my threshold of 2 (and guaranteeing I never have to read another inane joke about Beowolf clusters).

To illustrate my point about the number of wannabe comedians, this story about the recently-discovered giant apes in the Congo has 172 comments with no humour filtering. With humour filtering that number drops to 132. In my humble opinion having 1 in 4 comments making some kind of joke is far too much. And most of the jokes aren't even funny!!! I wouldn't object so much if the humour moderation was a bit more discerning, but when a one-line comment such as "An ape capable of killing lions ran away after a peek--that must have been one ugly face!" rececives the maximum +5 moderation for humour, I find I lose a lot faith in the collective sense of humour of SlashDot moderators. Apologies to whoever posted that comment, but this feeble joke would barely crack a smile if you told it in real life, why is it so funny on SlashDot?

Free eBooks for your P800

I was recently directed to ManyBooks.net as a good site for free books. There are a lot of the Project Gutenberg books here, but the layout and organisation is much better, and books are available in many popular eBook formats, including my preferred PalmReader (pdb) format. I'm a long time fan of the late Robert Heinlein, and given his many references to Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars series, I've always wanted to read them. So it was a nice surprise when I found book one of the series, Princess of Mars. Books two to five are also available.

Real Mplayer

There was a nifty tip on MacOSXHints today - apparently the codecs from the latest RealPlayer are usable in Mplayer. This is useful if you want to convert streaming RealVideo but the codec is too new for Mplayer.

Spamadelic

Ok ... I've been discovered by one particularly dorky spammer. He's just posted a spam comment to every single previous post! I am now investigating the options. There is a good summary here, but the best bets seem to be MT-Blacklist and SCode. However according to this page, SCode hasn't been tested with MT 3.x yet. In the meantime I've turned on comment approval, so comments will no longer appear on this site until approved by me. Sorry about that, hopefully it won't last long. Watch this space!

Flippin' ecto!

I've heard good things about some blogging software called ecto and decided to try it out today. Installing it was a bit of a pain, it turned out I needed some files that were included in a full Movable Type 3.x install but not included in an MT 2.661 upgrade install. I ended up in the ecto support forums where with some very prompt help from the author managed to get it working.

I've now been playing with the software for a couple of hours and, essentially, I love it. There are a few areas where it it still manages to outfox me, most of them are to do with ecto's WYSIWYG Rich Text editing interface. There is also a plain HTML interface, which is mainly what I've been using. Even though the entries in plain HTML look the same as they do in the Movable Type entry screen, ecto's interface is infinitely better, largely because of the vast speed increase the whole blogging procedure undergoes.

Other highlights have been ecto's clever HTML tag shortcuts For instance you can copy a destination URL into the clipboard, switch to ecto and highlight the phrase to be hyperlinked, press command-shift-U and hey presto you have a hyperlinked phrase. Simpler stuff like command-I and command-B work as well (this sounds like nothing, wait until you've have typed <i> and </i> a few hundred times). Also worth a mention is the highly illuminating graphical breakdown of the program in the ecto support forums.

It's Symbolic!

I occasionally need to FTP into my home Mac in order to retrieve some file or another. The Mac is set up with two hard disks with certain default folders (like music and pictures) both residing on an external drive with aliases in my internal drive's home folder. However when I FTP in, these aliases don't work, which means I have to trawl through a whole load of folders to get to the appropriate folder on the external disk. This is pretty annoying For a while I've been vaguely aware of symbolic links, and had always intended to look up the syntax for creating one, but with the usual million other things to do it was only recently that I noticed an app on VersionTracker that puts a symlink command into your contextual menu. Just like that, problem solved! Now when I FTP into my home folder instead of seeing a file called 'Movies alias', I see the actual directory. Update: I've recently read a few reports of people deleting a symbolic link, and not realising this will delete the original item as well. Be warned :-)

Upgrading to Movable Type 3.11

Upgraded this site's underlying software from Movable Type 2.661 to Movable Type 3.11 today. Following the upgrade instructions got me into trouble straight away simply because I uploaded the required files as the root user instead of from my user account. This gave all my files the wrong owner and group, which caused mt-upgrade30.cgi to give me this error:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user: 'thoughton@localhost' (Using password: NO)

After poking around a bit, I figured out that simply using the Finder instead of FTP to copy the required files from the MT-3.11-upgrade-en_us folder to my CGI-Executables folder solved this problem. Opening mt-upgrade30.cgi in a browser now produced some upgrading messages. Opening mt-upgrade31.cgi finished the job. Movable Type 3.1 should now be installed! But first I had to iron out a few problems.

The first thing I noticed upon logging into the new MT 3.11 installation was that the screen was all mixed up, with some new background images and some old (version 2.661) background images. Rebuilding the entire site fixed this, but on my first few rebuilds I got permissions errors involving index.html, index.rdf, index.xml, rsd.xml and archives.html files. Using the Finder to change the permissions of these files so that the group owner was 'www' and had read and write access fixed these rebuild errors.

Voila! Logging into the site worked fine now. One of the first things I did was to go to the preferences section and uncheck 'Use Old-Style Archive Links'. This switches the individual archive entries to have meaningful names (like upgrading_to_mo.html instead of 000090.html). Rebuilding after this produced a new permissions error involving MT's local archive path (on this site the path is tim/weblog/). Using the finder to change the ownership of the folder so that it was in the www group with read and write access fixed that problem.

I soon realised that the new site did not have the category icons anymore, but copying over topicon.pl and topicon.cfg from my old MT install followed by a rebuild fixed that! So far everything else seems to be working. Watch this space!

Update: Due to the extra two levels in the directory structure of the new meaningful-name archive files I also had to update some image paths on the archive templates.