tin-men

The end?

Graham — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:26:18 +0000

Maybe. I just don’t have tome for this anymore. I’m still on twitter, you can keep up with what I’m up to work wise at grahamgilbert.com and I’ll possibly come back to this once life slows down a little, but for now I think I’m going to have to put this one to bed.

Although I’ll probably think of a killer idea for a post next week…

Apple’s built in services are rubbish

Graham — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:41:17 +0000

When I started looking after Apple servers, I quickly learnt one thing:

Most of the built in services are rubbish.

I’ll admit, that’s quite a bold statement. Of course, there are plenty of things Mac OS X Server does very well (disclaimer: I’ve yet to try 10.6 Server, I’m referring to 10.5 Server here). We use AFP, SMB and DNS (for our internal DNS servers) and they work very well.

There are however, a couple of services that we use every day that are are positively prehistoric:

FTP
We needed an FTP solution for “real people”. These are the average users who just needed to send a large file to someone. Sure, the built in FTP server does the job, but it requires two things to happen. Firstly, you need to train your user on how to use an FTP application. Admittedly, not too hard as most of the Mac FTP clients are hardly any different from the Finder. The second is much harder. You need to rely on the recieving party to have an FTP client. This proved to be the major stumbling block. Enter Rumpus. The first major plus for it (apart from the easiest installation process I’ve ever been through for an FTP server!) is that is has a very simple to use web interface. It’s much easier to tell your users to just go to a web page, log in and click on “Upload files” than it is to teach them to use an FTP client.

Secondly, they have an awesome tutorial on setting up a “Drop Ship” – a form that only requires the user to choose the files they wish to send, put in the receiving party’s email address and click Upload. The files are uploaded, and an email is sent out containing a link to download the file through their web browser – no FTP clients, no logging in, just a simple link. And of course, if they want to use a traditional FTP client, then they can.

Mail
When I first started here, we were running the built in mail service that comes with Tiger. It was awful. It crashed regularly (to be fair, that was probably due to the failings of the previous IT person here), webmail was next to useless, when things did go wrong the logs were virtually non existent, there was no easy way to back up the mail store (and is there anything more important these days than a company’s email?) and finally, there’s no freakin’ “Out of Office” without some serious hacking. None of these shortcomings were solved by simply moving to 10.5 Server, so something more drastic needed to happen.

I’d used Kerio Mailserver at a previous client and it had worked well. It had everything we were lacking with the built in mail, plus full Exchange like features such as shared calendaring (although we’re yet to move from Meeting Maker – and don’t even talk to me about iCal Server. Have you ever used it? Absolute junk.) and shared contacts. Add in the stupidly simple setup procedure, and we were sold.

So there you go. Apple would do well to learn from these products.

findth.at (socially powered search)

Graham — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:56:38 +0000

For the past month or so I’ve been working on a little idea I had. I thought it would we cool if you could search twitter, delicious and google all at the same time. So, I made findth.at.

What does it do exactly? Well, the fine points are obviously supar sekrit (although I’m open to cash offers if you want to buy the software!), but basically it works like this:

We grab the search results from google
We search for bookmarks tagged with your search results on delicious
We search for tweets containing links on twitter
We mash them all together
You get the results that the internet are currently talking about!

I have been asked “what’s your pitch?”. To be honest, I don’t have one. I’d love to take findth.at further (to the point of it being my full time job if possible), but that’s not why I made it. I use it as my primary search engine now over google – it’s a lot better at keeping up with breaking news, generally finds cooler stuff and well, I made it so I’m a bit biased.

To quote the about page “…but we think people are just a little better” – and they are. Google might have all these really clever ways of finding stuff, but people only tweet about or bookmark stuff that they think is relevant. We just leverage all their big juicy brains.

Anyway, after two blog entries in two days I’m feeling a little giddy, so go over and have a look at findth.at (ta!). And please get in touch if you want to advertise on there, or if you’re a web 2.0 bigwig and want to talk about how we can take findth.at further.

how to treat herpes
drugstore buy acyclovir online
pet meds
hdtv torrent download movies free avi

My first hackintosh

Graham — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:50:00 +0000

I’ve been hankering after a smaller mac for quite some time now after finding my MacBook Pro a bit too heavy to lug around all the time. I need to keep my MacBook Pro as my main day to day machine (FireWire, optical drive and 4Gb of RAM being the main reasons), so selling it to fund a new machine was out of the question.

I looked at both the MacBook (not much lighter than my MacBook Pro) and the MacBook Air (how much?!) but they were quickly ruled out. With Apple having decided that they aren’t going to sell me a small laptop for a sensible price, it became clear I needed to go down the murky path of the hackintosh.

I looked at the two main contenders: the MSI Wind and the Dell Mini 9. The Wind looked nicer, but not all the hardware is working correctly at the moment and it requires a hacked version of OS X making software updates a pretty tricky business. A Dell Mini 9 (stock model with a 32Gb SSD – I upgraded the RAM to 2Gb myself) was ordered and it arrived a couple of weeks later (side note: what on earth is up with that? I can order a custom configured XServe and have it here within 5 days!).

I booted it up once into Ubuntu (it took me all of 20 seconds to work out why I’m a mac user…), then got on with the installation procedure. I won’t go into the details here, but it went really smoothly, no issues at all. I followed the “Installing Mac OS X Using One USB Drive” method over at the excellent MyDellMini forums. I installed without any of the extra languages, printer drivers or X11 to slim down the OS X install. I also ran Monolingual after I’d installed all my apps to trim out any of the legacy PowerPC code that Intel macs don’t need.

Over all, the machine is very snappy considering it cost about 1/6 what my MacBook Pro cost. It’s not a speed demon or anything, but it boots very quickly and is more than capable of handling web browsing, mail and text editing (the holy trinity for me).

So, what works, what doesn’t?

All of the hardware I’ve tried (AirPort, ethernet, microphone) have worked perfectly. I’ve yet to try the VGA output or SD slot, but by all accounts they’re fine.

The default keyboard layout is the same as a mac keyboard (alt on the Mini is command, windows key is option etc). I’ve kept it like this since I’m obviously used to this layout, but it seems like it can be changed easily. The main issue with the keyboard is the size – some silly keys are really small (the full stop key being the main one I keep missing) – but that’s the price you pay for having such a tiny computer.

Two finger scrolling doesn’t work properly – there is an option to enable it within the DellEFI software, but it doesn’t work very well (very jerky, only works for scrolling down and not up) – so I’ve turned that off. Tapping to click and tap-drag work nearly as well as on the amazing trackpad on the MacBook Pro.

The default colour profile has a blue/purple hint to it. I installed this colour profile (copy the .icc file to /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/ and then select it in System Preferences) and it looks fine – not perfect, it could do with more tweaking, but it’s not like I’m going to be running Photoshop on this!

Remote Disc works perfectly. I installed Office this morning using my MacBook Pro’s DVD drive and it went without a hitch.

Sleep when you close the lid works (although I recommend disabling safe sleep to recover a large chunk of your hard drive back – OS X saves the contents of RAM to the HD before sleeping, so in my case 2Gb saved), auto sleep (sleep after x minutes of inactivity) doesn’t yet. It is supposedly going to be in the next version of DellEFI (a painless process to upgrade – run the app, tick some boxes and type in your password). I’m now running the latest beta of DellEFI and auto sleep works fine for me – others are reporting problems though, so your milage may vary.

So, that’s it – a fully functional 9″ mac. I will update this post as my hackintosh experience continues.

Saving MS Office files to Apple servers

Graham — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:46:31 +0000

I ran into a problem at work today; a user was unable to save any MS Office file to an AFP share that she clearly had access to. All other file types worked fine, but she was getting a permission denied error with Office files. After a bit of googling, it turns out that that Office saves it’s temporary files in /.TemporaryItems/folders. (local UID) /TemporaryItems where the local UID is the user’s unique ID on their local mac.

By default, the first user account created on a mac is 501, the second 502 and so on. The problem starts when you have multiple users with the same UID on their mac using the same volume – they’re unable to access their own TemporaryItems folder as someone else is the owner.

There are two solutions:

To use network login (not practical in this case)
To give the problem users a new globally unique UID

So here’s how to fix it on Leopard (the principle is the same in tiger, but you use NetInfo instead):

First make sure you’ve got another Admin user on the system. If there isn’t one, make one. You can delete it after you’ve finished.
When you’re logged in as the user whose UID you want to change, open Terminal.app and type in “id” (without the quotes) and take note of your current UID (e.g. mine says uid=504(graham), so my UID is 504)
Still in terminal, type in the following (once again, without the quotes) “dscl . -change /Users/username UniqueID old# new#” so to change my UID from 504 (obtained above) to 2345 I’d enter “dscl . -change /Users/graham UniqueID 504 2345″
Now log out of that account and log in as the other Admin user. Navigate to the user’s home folder that you’ve just changed the UID of. Right / Control click on it and choose Get Info. In the Sharing & Permissions pane click on the Plus icon and give the user Read / Write access to their home folder.

That should be it. I’ve done this several times now and it’s all worked out fine.

London calling

Graham — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:31:41 +0000

So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything on here. Quite a bit has changed in the past four months.

I’ve been at RMStudio for over three months now. I’ve loved every second (well, nearly anyway!).

I’ve picked up an iPhone 3G (I love that too).

And as you may have noticed, I knocked up a new theme because I was bored with the old one. It’s full of javascript-y goodness and as an added bonus, it looks like shite in IE. And I don’t care. They shouldn’t be using the devil’s browser anyway.

So, the job. I’m an all round mac nerd. I do a bit of web stuff, I look after servers, I fix people’s email (“no, click on send, not delete…”). On the whole it’s pretty cool. I’m learning new nerdy stuff every day (ever wondered how Mail.app stores the email addresses you’ve sent mail to? I know more about it than anyone would ever want to, and I also have a series of scripts that will populate that database with email addresses for when people migrate from Entourage and haven’t been using their address book properly – I might do a post on it if anyone cares), and I work with a bunch of cool people. They might be the only people I know who get as excited by the prospect of being able to run OS X Server on a virtual machine as me!

I’ve learnt that I really, truly, deeply hate Adobe Air apps. Thankfully the ones we use here all have a mysql back end, so I can write my own interface to access the data (well, I will be when I stop working until 7-8pm most nights!).

Living in London is pretty cool too. It’s a little impersonal; it feels (and is) much, much bigger than Manchester. There’s loads going on, but I’ve been too busy with work to do anything of note. I am looking forward to meeting up with a few twitter people at the filming of Diggnation next week (must remember to call Nik at some point…).

Well, that was a random post. Sorry about that. I just had a few things buzzing around my head recently and I’ve been annoyed at myself with my lack of blogging.

iPhone 3G

Graham — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:26:50 +0000

I’m sure I don’t need to inform any of you that the new iPhone was announced yesterday. There was me fully expecting to have to pony up another £269, as well as a more expensive contract, because let’s face it – mobile companies have a bit of a reputation for being greedy buggers.

But get this, O2 have come up with a new business model: (take note Vodafone and the others)

If you don’t shaft your customers, they’re more than happy to spend their money with you.

O2 are going to give me the same amount of texts and minutes, as much 3G data as I can eat (remember it’s twice as fast as EDGE, and EDGE isn’t that bad if we’re honest), and if 3G isn’t fast enough and I need WiFi, I now get BT Openzone as well as The Cloud (which covers pretty much everywhere I will ever go in Manchester and London), all for the same £35 a month. I would have happily paid an extra few quid a month for 3G speed and the Openzone access, but O2 really pulled it off and kept it all at the same price.

And they’re selling the 16Gb model that I’ll be getting for a measly £159 – £110 less than I paid for my original iPhone in November. All they’re asking in return is that I restart the same 18 month contract that I signed up for in November.

So, well done O2. If you and Apple keep this up I’ll more than happily buy a new iPhone every 8 months or so, and you’ve got yourself a customer for life.

Farewell Manchester

Graham — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:22:21 +0000

As those of you who are following me on twitter know, in a few short weeks, I shall be departing the rainy city and abandoning the lifestyle of a layabout student and moving to London to start work for a small company called RMStudio.

This rather large turning point has made me start to reflect on the four years I spent here and also to think about the future.

The main thing I’ve been thinking about was “did I waste my time doing a degree?”. On the face of it, the answer would be “yes”. I learnt virtually nothing useful on my course (we didn’t even touch any networking hardware until 3rd year – and the degree title was Computer and Networking Technology!), being taught circa 1999 HTML (font tags anyone? I actually got marked down for using CSS in one assignment), how to make basic games in C++ and how ancient processors such as the 8088 worked. Yes, I’m sure some of this is useful to some people, but not to me.

So, what did I find useful? There were several group assignments with me invariably running around people getting them to do work, and of course it teaches you not to leave things to the last minute after you get sick of being up at 5am trying to get that assignment done for tomorrow that you have had lying around for three months. Oh, there’s also the fact that I met some of the best people on this earth up here (leaving those people behind was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make) and will leave with some very fond memories (and some very fond “I think I remember what happened last night, but I’m not too sure” nights too!).

And of course there’s the extra pay at the end of it. Even in my starting role, I’ll be on several grand a year more than I would be if I’d not been to university. That should go some way to help pay off the debts I racked up when I was testing the beer to make sure it was safe for everyone else (what a public servant I am!).

So, what does the future hold for me then? As I said at the top, I’ll be moving down to London in a few weeks to start what should be my dream job – I’ll be making websites and doing other mac related geekery. Yep, basically what I do now, but I get paid for all of it (not just the web bit like I do now). Hai five!

Sure, I could have got more money selling my soul and joining an IT department at a large company or whatever, but I couldn’t face dreading work every morning (and wearing a suit! Yegads! Although I do look pretty good in a suit… ).

So there you go. University was probably worth it since I had lots of fun, met great people and didn’t do a great deal of work for most of it whilst managing to get enough credits to make my way through. Now it’s time for the real fun to start!

Say hello to Gluco

Graham — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:55:14 +0000

Some of you may have visted firesuite before. It used to be the home of my vlog, but since I’ve not updated it for ages, and I don’t see myself having any inclination to do so again, I thought the domain was too good to waste.

So, I thought I’d use it for a project I’ve been thinking about for a while. Say hello to Gluco. It’s the first theme that I’ve made for Rapidweaver that I’m making commercially available, and it can be yours for the bargain price of $12.99 (US). You can find out more about it at firesuite. A screenshot is after the jump.

Busy

Graham — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:15:06 +0000

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet on here recently. I’ve been busy making my final project for uni work propperly.

I’ve also been busy eating toast.

And drinking tea from my apple mug.

I’ve also unfortunately had to read lots…

of pointless…

books.

But, I’ve finally got it working now, and am half way through the report. The end is in sight!

Replyr

Graham — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:36:55 +0000

Firstly, I’d like to say this wasn’t my idea. Mat came up with the initial idea, and did most of the leg work (and came up with that oh so trendy name ). I just provided the applescript that made it work.

Right, now I’ve absolved myself of all responsibility, time for business. On Flickr there’s no way to directly reply to a comment, so the general practise is to show who you are replying to by putting “@username:” before your comment.

What Replyr does is get a list of all usernames on the page currently active in Safari – no other browsers are supported since this uses Automator (usually the people that have commented before you, but there are some odd cases where it pulls other user names. I might fix it in a later release). It then shows you a pop up where you can choose which username you want to reply to and then copies it to the clipboard.

This gets really useful when you bind it to a Quicksilver hot key, so your hands don’t ever need to leave the keyboard.

Included in the zip file is the original Automator workflow so you can see what it’s doing, or there’s a pre packaged application with a nice icon ready to be dropped into your applications folder.

Things that will break this:

Activating the app when a page other than an individual photo on flickr.com is active in Safari.
Using a browser other than Safari.

Download Replyr.zip

TweetIM 1.8.3

Graham — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:42:34 +0000

I’ve just uploaded a version of TweetIM that should fix any problems you’re having with it not updating your status in Adium. There aren’t any other fixes so it shouldn’t break anything (hopefully!).

Let me know if it doesn’t work in any way. You can get it over at the original post. Enjoy!

Preloading images for links in CSS

Graham — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:51:58 +0000

There is a pretty common problem when using semantic html and css for your navigation: having a little pause while the a:hover image is loading. Sure, it only happens once, but what if you’ve got several images for several different links? Let’s take the main navigation bar of my work site, grahamgilbert.com as an example.

Firstly, the markup I used. Ideally you should be using unordered lists for all your navigation since it helps screen reading software and the like.



home
resume
portfolio
personal
contact

All pretty standard so far. Each link has two classes (in this example, .home and .homecurrent for when it’s the active page. This isn’t required, but I used different images in the links to show the user which page they were on).

Now, you’d normally put something like this in your css:

#header a {
display: block;
height:300px;
width:120px;
}

#header a.homecurrent {
background-image: url(images/css/common/home-current.png);
}

#header a:hover.homecurrent {
background-image: url(images/css/common/home-current-hover.png);
}

This will of course work perfectly well, but you will have the pause while the hover image loads, which is what we want to avoid.

To get around this, fire up your image editor and put the images side by side like this:

In this example, each part of the image is 120px wide, so we will only show the first 120px of the background by specifying the width, and we will then change the position of the same background image for the hover. Since it’s the same image, we don’t need to specify another background.

#header a.homecurrent {
background-image: url(images/css/common/home-current.png);
}

#header a:hover.homecurrent {
background-position:-120px 0;
}

I’ll just quickly explain the background-position property since you may not have seen it before. The first value is the change on the x-axis and the second is the change on the y-axis. So here we’re telling the background to move 120px to the left and not change on the y-axis, which will show the second half of our background image.

All change

Graham — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:04:10 +0000

Well, haven’t I been a busy boy? I’ve no idea why I just asked that since it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll know the answer. Anyway, the answer is an emphatic YES!

Incase you didn’t know, I’m currently in my last year of university. And that’s a pretty busy time, with final project deadlines looming and trying to get a job. And that has meant I’ve let things slip around here – particuarly by using a pre-built WordPress theme. I know, it’s bad for a web developer to use someone else’s theme.

So, I’ve been working on a new one. It’s not quite finished yet, and I’ve not even looked at it in IE yet (although this may be the one where I finally tell people with IE6 to bugger off. I don’t think I can deal with that pain without being paid for it ), but I’m hoping it will be up either this weekend or the next. So look forward to that (I bet you’re all on the edges of your seats aren’t you?).

Speaking of looking for a job for after I graduate (see what I did there?), if you are looking for or know anyone that’s looking for a full time web developer, could you be so kind as to be directed towards my portfolio site at http://grahamgilbert.com. Ta very much my lovelies.

Stuck at IE7 forever?

Graham — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:15:20 +0000

As you may or may not know, the Internet Explorer development team recently proposed a new meta tag that will specify which version of IE your site has been coded for.

There has been quite a large uproar within the web design community, mainly since if no version is specified, the page will be rendered as if you were viewing the site in IE7 – which whilst not as bad as the steaming pile of dog’s doodoo that is IE6, it’s still not very good at rendering standards compliant code.

Personally, I think this is actually quite a good idea. Every time a new version of IE is released, many sites “break” since the designer has had to hack their code in various convoluted ways to get it to render correctly. This could put an end to all of this, with your site appearing as it was intended for all time (ish).

However, in my (admittedly half baked) opinion, there are two ways that this could be improved.

Firstly, there is the issue of the default being IE7. Supposedly the latest build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid 2 test. This means that for all practical purposes, it’s pretty much standards compliant (finally!). So why not default to IE8? That means that there shouldn’t be any need for conditional comments targeted at IE7 any more and will speed up development times when building your site.

Secondly, there really needs to be support with other browsers. I don’t see any point in saying “my site will work fine in IE7, but I don’t have a bleedin’ clue what it will look like in FireFox or Safari”. As far as I see it, the point of this tag is so that once the site is built, it will look all spangly forever. So, if you have to come back and change the site when a new version of WebKit or Gecko (the rendering engines for Safari and Mozilla browsers, respectively) breaks your site, you might as well fix it up for IE as well.

Battery Review

Graham — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:06:54 +0000

Taking the mickey out of children? I’m so going to hell. But he is annoying.

Project365

Graham — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 20:01:25 +0000

On 01/01/07 my computer was set to take a photo with it’s built in iSight at 7am and 7pm. Whilst the computer was turned on, it did this every day for a year.

Wrigley’s Extra Cool Breeze: A review

Graham — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:26:26 +0000

As suggested by a few people on twitter, here’s my very serious review of the daddy of all chewing gum, Wrigley’s Extra Cool Breeze.

This delightful bit of confectionary comes in a very attractive metallic blue package, with an ingenious strip of red plastic which aids the consumer in opening said beautiful packaging. Inside you will find 10 pieces of minty goodness wrapped in a shell that crunches to reveal soft, minty chewing gum. The gum itself has a distinctly delicate mint flavour (what a cool breeze tastes of, presumably), and the wonderful flavour lasts a surprisingly long time.

But buyer beware, when you come to that last piece that has been at the bottom of your pocket for a couple of weeks (and usually through the washing machine once or twice), that amazingly crunchy shell will become all soft and icky (yes, icky is a word – so there!). However, this does nothing to impair the flavour of the actual gum, which will perform as expected. Result.

Wrigley’s Extra Cool Breeze is available from all good confectioners (or that skanky garage at the end of the road) and has an SRP of £24.99. Maybe.

DRM build into hard drives?

Graham — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:35:15 +0000

I was perusing the BBC News Technology page on the way in to university this morning on the iPhone and I had to read this article twice in an attempt to make some sense from it.

Apparently Western Digital are putting DRM right into hard drives. So how on earth are they going to manage that one? Maybe I’m being a bit simplistic here, but to a hard drive isn’t all data just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s? And it’s up to the operating system to decide what to do with the data?

So how will this work? And even if it can’t be circumvented (and let’s be honest, I give it a week at most before someone’s found a way around it), which serious file sharer will buy one of these drives?

I was planning on going on the whole “DRM is dumb” rant here, but I’d be wasting my time. We all agree on that one.

It just annoys the hell out of me.

Gimme ur iPhone plz

Graham — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:37:45 +0000

I was intending to write a nice big post about my iPhone experience and all the related things, but lots been happening, so you’ll have to make do with a video instead over at my vlog, firesuite. Enjoy!

London Calling: Live blogging the UK iPhone launch

Graham — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 10:31:01 +0000

And so the anointed day came to pass. Graham and Nik are the first two people in the iPhone queue. I’ll be writing on here as long as my battery lasts, so enjoy.

Thursday 10:27am: Been here for two hours now. Camp iDay is set up and coffee is in hand. The Apple reps have already come out to say hello. My mac is getting dirty from the filthy London air…

11:26am: And we’re still the only people in the queue. Had apple PR asking if we want to be on TV. I think tomorrow I’ll only be capable of grunts after three days of little to no sleep.

12:40pm: We had a visit from a guy from The Cloud. He wants us to wear a Cloud hoody in exchange for a rather nice bribe. I think I’ll take him up on the offer!

6:04pm: In the Apple Store giving our macs a little drink. Have been wearing my Cloudy hoody in exchange for food and tea. There are now five of us in the queue, and I’ve been giving interviews all day to the press. I still suck at it. And it’s only going to get worse. Hoping the rain stops tonight so I’ll have a chance of getting a little bit of sleep.

Friday 5:08am: Didn’t get any sleep unfortunately – central London seems to attract a few drunk people at night (hence the non-blogging). A very nice chap from Apple brought us out a cup of tea about an hour ago, and about five minutes ago the 7th person to join the line turned up bringing a gift of wine gums. I’ve been reading the press so far of our holy quest (will be writing more about that another day – one or two of the articles made my first exposure to the mainstream press a not entirely pleasant one).

1:15pm: It’s been a busy day so far. Given more interviews than I can remember and I still haven’t slept. We’re getting ready for the final push now. Just need to sort out the escape route after we’ve got our JesusPhones and we’re pretty much away!

Sunday 11th November
I’ve just about recovered now. And yes, I have in my hands the first iPhone in the UK. I will write a full round up of the experience over the next week.

Wordpress 2.3.1

Graham — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:59:44 +0000

I’m in the process of upgrading to Wordpress 2.3.1, so please excuse any funkiness over the next few days.

Edit: I’ve switched to another theme. I need to redesign tin-men anyway, so maybe this will give me the kick up the bum I need. My old theme was playing silly buggers with 2.3 for various reasons.

Screencast: A simpler Dock in Leopard

Graham — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:45:10 +0000

Dislike the new Dock in Leopard? Watch the video to see how to change it.

Click To Play

Download (mp4)

Tweet IM 1.8.2

Graham — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:46:57 +0000

Here’s yet another update to TweetIM. This is a minor bug fix that sorts out updating the Adium status that broke for some reason in 1.8. So, cheers to Isaac for the fix.

Download TweetIM1.8.2.zip

MTUG: Nerds who occasionally leave their homes

Graham — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:35:11 +0000

Hello there. I’d like to intorduce to you to MTUG. “MTUG? Wtf is that?” I hear you cry. It’s Manchester Twitter Users Group. I know it’s nerdy (and possibly a bit dirty – stop laughing at the back!), but you’ve got to call it something.

Here’s the deal: You start following our special twitter account (http://twitter.com/mtug) and when I’ve started following you as well all you need to do is send a direct message to mtug and it will be redistributed to anyone that mtug is following.

Why on earth would I want to make something like this? Well it’s mainly to keep our twitter feeds clear of stuff like “@nikf I’ll meet you at Kro in 5 mins”. I guess it must be pretty annoying to everyone else, so they will only be delivered to the people who sign up. The messages are sent to people that the mtug user is following, so even if you stop following that account you’ll still get the direct messages. If you want them to stop, either email me though the form at the top of this page, message me on twitter or send a message to the mtug user (everyone will get it, but I’ll see it!).

Now for a little disclaimer: Whilst I’ve tried to make this app as bug free as I can, it is reliant on twitter not screwing things up (which it has been known to do), so I’m not responsible for you getting messages 15 times or for your messages being left in the ether.

Another thing you should bear in mind is that your username as well as a ‘:’ are included in the direct message to everyone so they know who it’s from – so adjust your direct message length accordingly (especially if you have a long username like mine).

Let me know if anything goes wrong!

TweetIM 1.8.1

Graham — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:55:41 +0000

I’ve fixed a few bugs related to special characters in TweetIM 1.8.1 today. If you’re a current TweetIM user, just download the script and replace your current one with the new one. If you’ve not used TweetIM before, it’s probably best if you head over to the original post to see what all the fuss is about

Download TweetIM1.8.1.zip

The Manchester twitterers met

Graham — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:21:04 +0000

Yesterday saw the inaugural Manchester Twitter Meet. Personally, I had a really good time. It was good to finally put a face to the names that keep popping up in Twitterific. It did start to look a bit shaky when I got two tweets telling me that people were dropping out, but there was a good turn out in the end. In fact, I had such a good time that I totally forgot to take any photos until about half past 7.

There were your usual nerdy topics on conversation – how freakin’ awesome Macs are, web design and the shock that Anna doesn’t use Flickr (and she’s a photography student!).

Anyways, I’m gonna fix TweetIM’s three bugs before I pass out from exhaustion. See you at the next meet guys!

TweetIM 1.8

Graham — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:17:44 +0000

I’ve spent this evening working on getting TweetIM some recognition on twitter.com, so now when you post using the latest version twitter will now say “from TweetIM” instead of “from web”.

Anyway, you can go and grab it from the original TweetIM post, and remember to let me know in the comments if anything is broken or if there are any features you would like to be added.

Graham is easily impressed

Graham — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 23:34:34 +0000

The past couple of days I’ve been hard at work giving grahamgilbert.com a much needed overhaul (go an have a look – I’m pretty proud of it – and give me work while you’re at it!). Why does this concern you, I hear you ask – well, ok then, you’re not asking that, but I’m going to tell you anyway.

So there.

Anyway, my text editor of choice is TextMate. It’s quite possibly the best text editor I’ve ever used, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Right, to the point. I discovered a handy new feature today. What it basically does is automatically make a link for you. Sounds simple I know, but it saves a metric buttload of time when you’ve got to add a load of links to a page. All you have to do is get the url into your clipboard – like when you’re browsing and want to link to the page when you’re writing a blog post in your favourite text editor (oh, didn’t I tell you? TextMate can post to WordPress too). Then just highlight the text you want to link, bash Control – Shift L and Bob’s your uncle.

Sounds simple, right? What really impressed me was that is goes out onto the internet and grabs the page title you’re linking to and puts it as the title of the link.

Now that I think about it, it doesn’t sound that impressive.

It impressed me anyway… But I guess I must be easily impressed!

Manchester Twitter Meet

Graham — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:37:51 +0000

[graphic by Nik Fletcher]

Calling all Manchester Twitter-ers! Nik suggested that we need to have a bit of a get together (via twitter, naturally), so we’ve decided on 22nd September 2007 (if this doesn’t work for you, leave a comment – it’s not set in stone yet).

What will we be doing? Having a few beers and probably tweeting more than our phone bill would like!

What do we need from you? Suggestions on where to go really – ideally in the centre of Manchester (makes it easier for everyone to get there, y’see). Either leave a comment on this post, or get in touch via my contact page or twitter.

[find us on Upcoming]

Using a network drive with iMovie ‘08

Graham — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:02:26 +0000

Here’s a quick screencast to show you how to use a network drive (such as a USB disk attached to your AirPort Extreme) with iMovie ‘08 using a symbolic link.

Download the iPod version (m4v)

Download the medium version (mp4)

Download the large version (mp4)

iMovie ‘08 overview

Graham — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:09:13 +0000

This was uploaded to YouTube using iMovie ‘08 and it hasn’t done a particuarly good job. Here’s some higher quality versions for you to download:

Download iPod version

Download Large version

Bandwagon

Graham — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:57:30 +0000

Last week a tweet popped up on Twitterific about getting free hosting for a year with Dreamhost if you buy an application called Bandwagon. Free hosting for a year when you buy a $24 app? Bargain!

This application automatically backs up your iTunes library to Amazon’s S3 service or to your own FTP server. Since I was looking at changing hosts for my sites anyway, this seemed like a pretty good deal, so I signed up.

That’s when my troubles began.

To start off with, this application is beta. That means that there will be bugs and errors. But I thought that since they felt confident enough to charge for it, that it must be pretty much finished and nearly ready to come out of beta. But I was very, very wrong.

To start off with, it seems very much unfinished. The close button on the notification window is on the right. How many mac applications have you seen with a close button on the right? That’s correct, none.

It also crashes. A lot. Like every hour. It manages to regularly take up more than 150% of my processor time and most of the time only uses one core for some reason. This is on a MacBook Pro with a 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo in it, so it’s not a slouch by any stretch of the imagination. Bear in mind that this application is designed to upload a lot of data (60Gb in my case) over the internet and since most people’s upload speed isn’t that fast, the application will need to be left running unattended during it’s initial upload for quite some time. The first few nights I left it running, I woke up to find my MBP sounding like a 747 with my computer totally unresponsive until I did a Force Quit.

These are common problems according to their support forums, so I have to ask the question: How on earth do they think they can charge for this?

You do NOT charge for beta software. Especially when it doesn’t work properly.

Let’s compare this to the other application I’ve been beta testing, Skitch. I’ve not had it crash once, and it’s performed exactly as it should do every single time. And how much did I pay for it? Not a single penny (although I’m definitely buying it when it comes out of beta, providing Plasq don’t charge stupid money for it).

There is a new version of Bandwagon due out this week, and it is supposed to fix the main problem I’m having (I.E. it not working), so I’m looking forward to actually using what I paid for! I hope the developers sort it out, because this product has huge potential, I just can’t help feeling ripped off. A car company doesn’t expect you to test out the air bags in your car for them, I don’t see why I should have to put up with an application that I paid for not working.

As a side note, when I was writing this post Nik IM’ed me an image that sums up what he thinks about Bandwagon. Enjoy! [link]

Starting Skitch using Quicksilver

Graham — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 10:33:20 +0000

If you’re lucky enough to have got hold of an invite for the Skitch beta, chances are that you’re loving it more than you could ever love your own children. For those who don’t know, it’s an amazing screenshot taking application. It has a nice feature that allows you to press command – shift – 5 to bring up the cross hairs to take a screenshot whenever the application is running. You can of course have Skitch starting when you start your mac, but this does take up resources on your computer (not much admittedly, but it still takes some). What if there was a way to assign command – shift – 5 to start up Skitch and then switch to the cross hairs mode…?

But there is! Using my favourite application of all time, Quicksilver. Here’s what you need to do.

Firstly download this file: SkitchQuicksilver.zip

Then you need to double click on the zip and pop the resulting file in the following folder:
~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions

Restart Quicksilver.

Now activate Quicksilver and hit command ‘ which will bring up the triggers pane of the preferences.

Click on the plus icon at the bottom of the window and choose HotKey.

In the pop up window, type enough of Skitch Screenshot.scpt to get it to show up, then choose save.

Now you need to double click on the triggers section of the new hot key you just created. Choose the Settings tab, and then click on the Edit button to set whatever key combination you want. I have it as command – shift – 5.

Now head over to the Scope tab and choose Disabled in the selected applications from the drop down menu. In the box, type Skitch.app. This is only needed if you set a key combination that is used by Skitch.

This script will start Skitch and bring up the cross hairs. If you want it to do something else, open up the script in Script Editor and find the following line:

keystroke "5" using {command down, shift down}

And then replace the 5 with whatever you want to do (you might want to change the Quicksilver hot key to reflect the change). The numbers in Skitch are:

5 – Crosshair
6 – Full Screen
7 – Frame

That’s it. Enjoy. Comments and feedback are appreciated.

TweetIM 1.7

Graham — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:03:11 +0000

The latest greatest version of TweetIM is now up for your downloadble enjoyment. It now features support for Microsoft Messenger (that application is a right pain in the bum to script) as well as Adium, iChat and Skype. It will grab any url you enter (if the url will take the character count over the 140 limit) and convert it to a Tiny URL courtesy of TinyURL as well. Go give it some love.

Safari 3 Beta

Graham — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 14:00:11 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of excitement over the release of Safari 3 for Windows, but Im quite surprised to see relatively little written about the OS X release. Well, here’s what I think about it: I freakin’ love it. (N.B. please excuse me if I’m messing up my versions of Safari, I must have used it for all of 2 minutes when I got my mac to download FireFox)

I tried it out as soon as I could and I loved it. I’ve now switched fully from FireFox 2, and I’ve no regrets. The only thing I’m missing are mouse gestures. If you’ve never used these before, basically you click and drag with your right mouse button in a particular direction and something happens.

For example if I clicked and dragged to the left, the browser would go back. Drag down and up and the browser reloads the page. You get the message. I’m sure this will be coming to Safari 3 at some point, but I really do miss it.

Now for the good stuff. The thing that sold me on Safari? Being able to drag tabs into their own window, or being able to drag them onto other windows. Beautiful. My favourite thing is the ability to merge all windows into one single tabbed window.

I know it’s been in Safari for ages, but not being able to use the keychain is something that really irked me about FireFox.

Anything else I like? I’m quite partial to how it organises bookmarks. The general feel of the application is very slick. The animations are really, really cool. Just drag a tab off the tab bar to make it into it’s own window. See that little thumbnail of the page? Awesome.

What isn’t beautiful however, is the brushed metal look. Christ it’s ugly. Thank god for Uno which has banished the disgusting brushed metal look from my mac.

I’m sure I can think of more things I don’t like, but that will have to wait.

BTW, all the screen shots in this post were made with the fantastic Skitch. If you can get hold of an invite, get one. You’ll love it.

TweetIM 1.6.2

Graham — Wed, 23 May 2007 08:14:23 +0000

TweetIM 1.6.2 is now available for download. Enjoy! See the original post for installation and usage instructions.

iTunes and Last.fm

Graham — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:32:06 +0000

I just found out that my favourite scrobbling app iScrobbler is still in development. It’s much nicer than the Last.fm one and hides away in your menu bar. I strongly recommend that you use iScrobbler rather than the Last.fm client. Just pop it in your startup items and you’re away.

I’ve been using Last.fm for quite a while, and one of the features that I like the most is that it records what you listen to and builds charts and things. To do this, you need to be running their client, but I was finding that I quite often forgot to start the Last.fm client, so my songs weren’t getting recorded. To stop this from happening, I’ve knocked up a quick Applescript that will start Last.fm and iTunes. It will also quickly pause and then start iTunes playing again if it’s already open. This is so that Last.fm will pick up the currently playing song. I’d use Quicksilver to launch this, but if the thought of applescripts scares you, I’ve made an application that does the same thing too, so you can stick it in your dock or wherever you please.

Download the applescript version

Download the application

If you’re using the applescript version with Quicksilver, you’ll want to stick the .scpt file here:

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions

TweetIM: Twitter, Growl, Quicksilver and Adium

Graham — Tue, 15 May 2007 22:22:48 +0000

For updates to TweetIM bookmark this post, or follow me on twitter. My username is grahamgilbert.

TweetIM doesn’t work on Snow Leopard, and there are currently no plans to update it.

A few weeks ago I posted about a script I’d found that allows you to update Twitter using Quicksilver (my script is based off Ted’s script). Well, I decided I wanted to do more. I made a script that changes your iChat status, but then discovered that several already exist. D’oh! So, I made one that changes your Adium status. If Adium isn’t already open, it’s left as it is, but your tweet is still posted. Of course there’s Growl notification (I love Growl nearly as much as I love Quicksilver).

Thanks to the latest Adium update, it seems that pretty much all applesctipt support in Adium as been broken. Until this is fixed, my hands are tied with regards to getting this working. Sorry guys.

Download TweetIM1.8.3.zip

Features:

Updates your status message in iChat, Adium, Skype and Microsoft Messenger (as far as I know, this is the only script that supports Microsoft Messenger).
Will shorten urls if necessary using TinyURL.
Will tell you if your tweet goes over the 140 character limit, and gives you the option to edit the tweet or continue posting.
Growl notification of the posting process – lets you know if your tweet got to twitter or not.

Please report any bugs you find. I’ve tested as much as I can, but I’m sure there will be some freaky cases where it doesn’t work.

Anyway, enjoy!

If you do use it and like it, why not show me some comment love? I know people have been downloading it, so why not let me know if there’s anything you’d like added?

Download TweetIM1.8.3.zip

To install it, download the script and extract the zip. Copy the resulting file to:

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions

Restart Quicksilver.

Note that some people have said that the script still doesn’t show up in Quicksilver. If this happens to you, open up Quicksilver preferences, go to the Catalog section, click on the Custom tab and drag the ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder onto the window. Quicksilver will now show the script.

Next you need to fire up Keychain Access and make a new password with the following gubbins in it:
If you are logged into twitter.com in Safari or Camino, you do not need to follow this step

Keychain Item Name: http://twitter.com
Account Name: Your email address
Password: Your Twitter Password

That’s it. Now you’re ready to actually tweet. First, fire up Quicksilver (Ctrl + Space is the default), hit the full stop key (or period for our colonial cousins) and type your message. Then hit tab and type out as much of Tweet
as you need to, then hit return.

Supported IM clients:

iChat 3.1.8
Adium X 1.0.3
Skype 2.6.0.137
Microsoft Messenger 6.0.2
~~Proteus 4.15 Beta~~ Currently disabled in version 1.8.1

Unsleepable for RapidWeaver

Graham — Wed, 02 May 2007 21:34:48 +0000

I started working on this mainly so I could learn how to make themes for the wonderful RapidWeaver, but it turned out good enough (I hope) to release. It’s basically a port of unsleepable (a variation of which is on this site). So here it is, if you have any suggestions, comments or whatever, feel free to drop me a line.

unsleepable.zip (94kb)

Note that this site does not use RapidWeaver. It uses WordPress.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

Graham — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:32:36 +0000

I’ve been looking for Pirates of Silicon Valley (imdb) for quite a while. It’s a movie about the beginnings of Apple and Microsoft. It’s pretty good. Anyway, it’s on Google Video.
[via]

Using 802.11 g and n networking together

Graham — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:50:42 +0000

I’ve seen this question pop up quite a lot on the maccast forum, so here’s a little tutorial on using your shiny new 802.11n hardware without experiancing the drop in performance you’ll get by having 802.11g users on the network. I’ll also cover how to share an AirPort Extreme and the USB hard disks attached to the Extreme with all the users of the network, regardless of network hardware.

Right, first things first. I’m assuming you’ve already got an 802.11g network running already and that you know how to secure the network. Use WPA and all the usual stuff. This is specifically for the Apple AirPort Extreme and Express base stations, but the principles apply for most routers.

So, the first thing that most people have trouble getting their heads around is that each router (including the AirPort Express) is running it’s own wireless network. So the next thing you’ll want to do after you’ve had that crashing realisation is connect an ethernet cable to one of the ports on your 802.11g router and pop it into the WAN port on the back of your Extreme. Now fire up AirPort Utility and set up the network normally using the Assist Me thingie but select 802.11n Only in the Radio Mode section (5Ghz is less crowded and is faster, but 2.4Ghz will give you better range. It’s up to you which you choose). Now when it’s all set up you’ll need to choose your Extreme again and go to the Base Station menu and select Manual Setup. Choose the Internet tab and for the DNS Server type in the IP address of your 802.11g router (mine was filled in automatically) and for the Connetion Sharing pulldown menu choose Off (Bridge Mode). That last one is very important since your 802.11g router will be trying to dish out IP addresses (assuming you use DHCP; which most people are. If you don’t have to type in each computer’s IP address on your network, then you’re using DHCP) and your extreme will as well if you don’t set this.

Now you should have your network working pretty well. The next thing I wanted was for the other clients to be able to see my AirPort Disks. This is relatively easy to do, but you must have a firewall on your 802.11g router (or whichever router is connected to the internet). This is so that your data remains secure. This should work without any configuration, but you should secure them. Go to the Manual Setup screen of your Extreme in AirPort Utility and choose disks. You can select from here how you want to secure them and if you want guests to be able to access them or not.

Finally, it’s time to get the AirPort Express sorted so all the computers can use AirTunes. In AirPort Utility choose your Express and go to Manual Setup. Firstly set the security to the same as your 802.11g router, and set the password to the same. If you use WEP encryption, put a $ symbol in before the actual key. Make sure both the 802.11g router and Express are using the same channel and then type in the MAC address of the g router. To set the channel on your g router (make sure it’s not set to Auto) and to find the mac address you should refer to your router’s manual. For mine, I go to a web based admin page by typing in the IP address of the router and choosing wireless networking. It’s all pretty obvious, and if it isn’t your manual will help you. The last thing you have to do is allow your Express to link up with your g router. My router will just search for other wireless devices near by and then you just need to hit a check box. For other, you’ll need the MAC address (or AirPort ID as Apple calls it) and to type it in manually.

There you have it, 802.11 g and n devices working happily away without any of the so called drawbacks.

Desert Island Apps

Graham — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 13:40:49 +0000

Recently on the British Mac podcast a new feature has started up called Desert Island Apps. If you’re not from our lovely rainy little island, there is a feature on BBC Radio 4 called Desert Island Discs where celebrities come on and choose five records that they would take with them if they were stranded on a desert island.

Anyway, time to get to the point. The idea is you choose five Mac apps that you can’t live without. I’m going to ignore all the usual things like Microsoft Office and the iLife suite, and focus on lesser known apps.

Quicksilver is my first choice. I truly couldn’t live without it, I use it literally all the time. Basically it is an application launcher, but it is so much more than that. To start off with it is instant with its results. You know how Spotlight takes a moment or two to come up with results? There’s none of that with Quicksilver. It also seems to be psychic. It nearly always comes up with the right result, and if it doesn’t it learns for next time.

But the real beauty of Quicksilver is in the other things it can do. It can manipulate files, run scripts – pretty much anything that you can think of. And if you can think of it and it isn’t there then you can probably find a plugin that will make it happen.

My second app is Feeder. Its made by Reinvented Software, and it is used for the creation and management of RSS feeds. I have a couple of podcasts and I use it to make my feeds. Sure, creating RSS feeds isn’t particularly difficult, but it is a bit of a pain in the bum. Feeder just makes it easier since it handles the creation of the feed, and it will also upload any other files needed to your webserver. In short, it does what all good apps should do – takes something tedious and repetitive and make it quick and easy.

Keeping with the “making something tedious nice and easy” theme comes app number three – CSSEdit. It is a visual CSS editor that uses webkit (the rendering engine that Safari uses) to display your edits in real time. Its especially useful to me since it can pull a website from the internet (such as your wordpress blog that is running on your server) and apply your custom styling to it.

And speaking of blogs gives me a lovely link to my next app. TextMate is my default text editor. Now I know what you’re thinking “I already have TextEdit, why do I need another editor”. Well, there are editors and there are editors, and this is the latter. There are countless add ons, it recognises what language you’re writing in (that’s computer language) and has code completion. It does everything I need and more than I will ever use.

My last application is MPEG Streamclip. My digital camera records in plain old MPEG and of course, iMovie only likes more modern formats. So I use MPEG Streamclip to convert my videos into a more iMovie friendly mp4 format. This can be done with many other tools, but this one is not only free, but it is really rather fast when compared to the others.

Well, there are the five apps I’d take to a desert island with me. Hope they’ve been useful to someone.

Emo my computer

Graham — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:31:49 +0000

Emoscum.org isn’t dead! That’s right, we’ve posted our first video for nearly a year. It’s a spoof of Pimp My Ride (Or Chav My Motor as I prefer to call it). We’ve been intending to do this for months and months, keeping that minging old case around hasn’t been pleasant.

Anyway, you can see the video and subscribe to the feed to get all our videos automatically downloaded into your iTunes by heading over to emoscum.org.

Twitter, Growl and Quicksilver

Graham — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 00:35:10 +0000

[edit] I’ve since created my own modification of this script that updates your status in various IM clients with your tweet. See the post for more details.

I’ve been addicted to Twitter for a while now (my twitters are in the sidebar of this site), but I’ve not found a good way of twittering on my mac. Sure, there’s twitterific, but I didn’t really get on with it (although after just installing it, I discovered the auto hide function – it taking up space on my screen was the main reason I didn’t like it). There’s also a dashboard widget for updating, but that can be quite slow to respond too.

I think I’ve finally found the perfect solution – for me anyway. I absolutely love Quicksilver. If you don’t know what it is, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of places that will extol it’s virtues, so I’m not going to bother. Basically it’s an application launcher on steroids. Soviet bloc female body builder steroids. Growl is a notification application. It tells you when certain things are happening. For example, it pops up a little blob when my bluetooth mouse is in range. It lets me know when I’m connecting to a network and what IP address I’ve been assigned. It gives me a preview of any email that arrives in mail. Things like that.

Anyway, here’s the meat of the post. Go to this web site, and download the growl-ified version of Tweet, and then head over here and follow the installation instructions. You obviously don’t need to copy the code into script editor or anything, just save it where it tells you to. Then it’s as simple as activating Quicksilver, hitting full stop and blathering to the world. Tab, typing TW then return.

Spiffy.

Star Wars isn’t dead

Graham — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:17:18 +0000

According to George Lucas there will be more Star Wars stuff other than what’s been announced. Sweet!
[Via]

Let’s Terminate piracy!

Graham — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:02:37 +0000

What. The. Hell. Is. This?

International Rule Of Manhood #27

Graham — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 23:29:09 +0000

The girl who replies to the question “What do you want for Christmas?” with “If you loved me, you’d know what I want!” gets an Xbox. End of story. [link]

The Cult Of Mac

Graham — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 13:02:29 +0000

My copy of The Cult Of Mac arrived today, and it’s beautiful. I’ve only had time to read a few pages, but it’s amazing. I had to go for the hard cover version since I think it’s going to live in my living room. Next to the AirPort Extreme. And the AirPort Express. And more often than not my MacBook Pro.

I ought to be doing some research for university, but I’m off to read some more. I’m up to looking at what people do with the stickers, but I’m really loking forward to the tattoos. I’m hoping to get a bit of inspiration for my next one.

I may be getting a little bit obsessed…

Think

Graham — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:27:55 +0000

I found a rather nifty app today. It’s made by Freeverse and it’s called Think. Basically, it allows you to concentrate on one application by dimming everything else. There is another app that does this called Backdrop but Think works better for me, mainly because it’s got a built in application switcher to choose the focused app, but it also allows you to switch to any other application, then switch back to your focused app.

This has been rather handy in helping me to stay in Word when I’m writing my assignments… I need all the help I can get!

Danger Joe

Graham — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:52:16 +0000

The happy Dave

Graham — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:47:49 +0000

I live with a retard.

Country (Mighty) Mice

Graham — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 14:26:05 +0000

Last weekend the girl and myself decided that we wanted to see some green (no, not that kind, naughty) so we hopped onto a train that deposited us in Buxton.

It was snowing. I’m not too fond of snow.

It was also bloody cold. Not too fond of that either.

It was quite nice to get out of Manc-land for an afternoon though.

Is there a point to this post? Probably not.

Ah yes! The point! This will do! My mouse died yesterday after four loyal years of service. It has been replaced by a Wireless Mighty Mouse. It’s a little wierd, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. I love the scroll ball, and the side buttons haven’t been as hard to press as I’ve read on various reviews. I’m still getting used to having to lift off my left finger when I’m right clicking, but I think I’ll do ok with it. I’ve got two weeks to take it back anyway.

That is all.

AirPort Extreme

Graham — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 21:50:56 +0000

Look what popped into my grubby little mitts the other day? My word, 802.11n is fast. I’ve got it plugged into one of my existing routers using ethernet, so the network won’t be slowed down by my 802.11 b and g clients along with a couple of USB hard disks. It’s really very cool being able to access my media drive anywhere in my flat.

The range is awesome (I’ve not been able to get less than full signal according to the wave thing in the menu bar), and did I mention that it’s freakishly fast? If you want to get around the silly laws in the UK about not being able to have wireless equipment that use the 5Ghz frequency (not saying that I recommend you do, or that I am doing it…) you can just choose another country in the AirPort Utility.

I only ran into one problem with my setup, and that was backing up. I use SuperDuper! for my backups, and this doesn’t like NAS (Network Attached Storage), so I was forced to look further afield for my backups. I already had ChronoSync for keeping my USB thumb drive synced up with my mac, and it turns out it likes my network drives too. But I did have problems getting ChronoSync making bootable drives, so the drive that backs up my macs internal disk is still sat on my desk. It’s not too bad, since it’s on my desk to charge over night anyway.

Over all, this is one sexy piece of kit. And I now have another router in my living room (up to three now!).

Time to get healthy

Graham — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:47:08 +0000

I decided last weekend that I was going to get healthy, so I went into town and picked up a pair of Nike+ trainers and of course I has to get an iPod Nano to go with it…

I went with the 4gb red one – my god it’s nice. It’s replaced the 60gb full size for day to day use. I will continue to use the big boy iPod for long journeys and stuff though.

Anyway, running. I went for my first run yesterday morning, and the Nike+iPod stuff worked great. Unfortunately, my feet didn’t hold up as well. I’ve got some lovely blisters on the sides of my feet, but I’ve since performed surgery on the insoles and they were fine for my little run tonight.

So yes, I’m going to be a healthy geek. I’m following a plan that is supposed to get me from being a total beginner to running 5km in 6 weeks, as well as joining the Zero2Hero group on flickr for a little bit of motivation, so we’ll see how I get on. I’ll be posting updates on here as I go on.

Manchester Student Guide

Graham — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 01:12:56 +0000

I hadn’t intended to let the world know about this for a few more weeks, but somehow it seems to have been discovered by Mancubist (cheers for the link by the way!), so I guess I might as well let you all know about my latest project.

Manchester Student Guide is meant to be a kind of alternative student guide to Manchester. You know, the lesser known places and stuff. Actually, stuff it, I’ll just put in the about blurb from the page:

Manchester Student Guide: Your guide to the important things whilst at university. By that we mean the really important stuff like pubs, clubs, curry houses, places to go and just as importantly places to avoid like the plague.

So there you go. We’re looking for writers to help us out, so if you fancy it head over to MSG and let us know.

Twitter

Graham — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 22:35:32 +0000

I’ve just become addicted to Twitter. It’s like web based crack. Argh! It’s in the sidebar anyway.

And it’s slowly coming together

Graham — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 22:21:21 +0000

You know, I’m starting to think that it may end up being a good thing that all my posts have gone kaput. Sure I’m sure my google page rank will plummet, but I’m sure I’d never gave gotten off my arse and updated it for ages.

Anyway, I’m sat in my living room watching The Transporter (yes, using my rather tasty iLap) whilst my flatmate is working on quite a nice new design for his band’s site. It’s not live yet, but it will be soon, I’ll link it anyway – iDresden.

iLap

Graham — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 19:03:01 +0000

My rather delightful new iLap arrived today, and I have to say, my boy parts have never been so happy!

Seriously, it had improved my typing speed quite a bit since the computer is at a more natural angle, and the slope with the front cushion helps my RSI.

The front cushion is detachable so you can use it on a desk as well, and it’s pretty comfortable on there too.

And of course, since it’s raised up an inch or so off the desk / your lap so your computer runs a little bit cooler too.

It seems to be a little pricey to me (�55) and it was a pain in the bum to get hold of. I had to get my local Apple reseller to order it in for me – which reminds me, the Digital Store in Manchester are great. They know their stuff and will order in anything they don’t stock. Which is more than I can say for the retards who work in the Apple Store. But that’s a whole different rant…

It’s all going so well!

Graham — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:02:19 +0000

Not two minutes after I posted about losing all five years with of posts, I found that our ceiling was leaking. And the emergency 24 hour number for us to call doesn’t actually get you anyone who knows anything about it. He sounded rather surprised…

So now I’m waiting for the plumber to arrive when I should be in uni doing my assignment.

Bugger.

Ok, I’m stupid

Graham — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 23:17:39 +0000

I managed to delete the database that tin-men lives in. I’m looking for a backup, but I don’t think I’ve got one any more. So, all my posts, comments and internal stats are gone. At least I can start afresh, right?

I’m going to be making a new layout when I get a spare afternoon, and tin-men will be reborn. Or something like that anyway.