As a Mac user in a windows shop, I feel I need to use Mac applications when I can rather than the sometimes better open source alternatives to Microsoft products. I use Firefox because I find it to have two or three critical improvements over Safari, but Safari is getting there. I use iChat for instant messaging and I use Mail for all my email. iChat has its issues, but that's another post. This one's all about Mail.
During the average business day, I receive a multitude of email messages of varying priority. I found that it would be useful to be able to mark priority by color. Many email clients have this ability including Thunderbird, so I felt a little left out by Apple on this one. Searching the Internet, I found details on how to set up filters that will automatically change the color of an incoming email, but that's childsplay. I also found AppleScripts to manually change the color, which seemed like too much of a hack to me.
As it turns out, this functionality is built into Mail.app and, while it's not as user-friendly as a right-click option, it works quite well. Here's how to do it.
- Select the message you wish to change to a different color
- From the Format menu, select Show Colors. ( Shift-Cmd-C )
- Choose your favorite color-picker. I like the crayons
- Choose a color for the message.
It may not look like this did anything right away so choose another message and experience the beauty of your new colors. If you do this a lot during the day, just leave the color picker open so you have quick access to it. You'll need to re-open the color picker the next time you start Mail.app.
Happy coloring!
I've run across a couple good ones I had to share:
Photoshop Disasters: Pointing out how things can go horribly wrong if you don't pay your graphic designers enough. My guess is that these designers were hired because the responsible parties weren't willing to pay enough to get good ones.
Indexed: A web comic about life and the comedy inherent in graphs and venn diagrams. Her political views are pretty clear, but the comedy is still rich.
Ben Zvan Photography: There's some really good stuff here. I'm hoping to get some pointers this weekend.
So I had to do some "research" and I thought I'd share what I discovered.
So far, I've found that Maxim, FHM, Blender, Zoo and others all seem to have pretty badly designed, bandwidth-intensive websites. I'm guessing that they'd rather you bought the magazine at newsstands or just got a subscription. Maxim seemed to have the most obvious but least irritating problem. When paging through the Girls of Maxim, there are links to the right for "previous girl" and "next girl". As I was paging through the photos in one set, the same girl showed up as both the previous and next girl depending on what photo I was on. I don't think it's cookie related because I'm pretty sure I allowed cookies. On the other hand, it's not like I felt I needed to view their galleries in any particular order, so it was pretty easy to get over that one.
Somewhere in the combination of websites, my browser stopped loading some of the images. Not so good for image based content. Zoo was the most obvious there in that their navigation images of previous, current and next image didn't always have thumbnails and there was no alt text to display when the load failed. You could still click the spaces where images should be, so it wasn't a crippling problem. I suspect bad javascript is the culprit and I can't guarantee what site was the source of the problem since I had several tabs open.
Here's what I've found for style and quality of images so far. All the magazines seem based on getting sexy shots of girls and the quality of those shots isn't really the important part.
Maxim seemed to have the best quality photographs overall along with the best sets and props. Some of the more striking ones being taken with a dual-edgelight set up which is kind of an obvious aproach, but very effective. Their lighting, pose and composition were varied and interesting. They seemed to genuinely want to make good photos that happened to be of hot women in lurid positions and settings.
FHM had the least content. The composition seemed reliable and the poses varied in quality depending on the model in question. The lighting tended to be pretty simple and uninspired, usually a basic beauty light setup. One thing that they had plenty of though, was nipples. Lots of nipples. Generally sitting on huge bags of silicon.
Blender had the standard band promo photos from the record label. It's hard to identify a style there since all the photographs were taken by different people. It felt like trying to define what style defines comic books. Since there is no "Blender style" I'll have to move on from that one.
Zoo, was linked from either Maxim or FHM. I forget which. Again, they tended to have a wide variety of photographs where the important part was that there be a bare-breasted woman in them. Art was generally sacrificed to content, but sometimes they had some real stunners. I couldn't really define a style, but I'll keep trying...
Another thing that I noticed about all these magazines is that they were not above phoning it in and using promotional shots instead of taking their own and that they shared quite a bit among them. I was never on Stuff's website, but I saw several Stuff watermarks.
Anyway, I'll post some stuff from that shoot when it happens and we can all decide if I hit it on the head or not.
--Ben
I don't know if it's useful to anyone but me, but I was trying to figure out the best way to display a random image on a webpage. What I ran into for using Server Side Includes is that the image to show is defined in my css which isn't parsed by the server for includes and apparently include directives within class= statements are ignored with my server configuration.
Well, it seemed that there should be a simple way to do this. The result was to create a configuration-less perl script that displays a random image from the folder it's in. It currently only does files that end in .jpg, so I'll leave that change as an exercise for the reader.
If you just want to use the script, here are some instructions. In the directory where your source images are stick the code in a file whatever name you like as long as it ends with .cgi or .pl, I'd suggest something like randomimage.pl. Make the file executable (chmod a+x randomimage.pl (windows users are on their own)). In your html or css use the name of your file as the name of the image, something like "http://www.yourdomain.com/randomimages/randomimage.pl" would work nicely. This will work best if all the images are the same size so the web page doesn't look different every time and you can define the image dimensions in the html or css.
#!/usr/bin/perl
opendir (THISDIR, "./") or die "no such directory: $!";
@imagelist = grep { /.*\.jpg/ } readdir THISDIR;
closedir (THISDIR);
$max = $#imagelist + 1;
$imagenumber= int(rand($max)) ;
print "Content-type: image/jpeg\n\n";
open (IMAGEFILE, "<", "./$imagelist[$imagenumber]") or die "can't open file $imagelist[$imagenumber]";
foreach (readline (IMAGEFILE)) {
print;
}
close (IMAGEFILE);
Anyway. No guarantees. No promises. Code provided as is and free for any legal, non-malicious use.
--Ben
I've searched around the Internet trying to find the lyrics to Son Oh Son by Boiled in Lead. Now, it may be that they didn't write the song, but it's the only place I've heard it. Since I wanted to put some of the lyrics on my whiteboard at work in honor of St. Patricks day, I transcribed them and am making them available here:
It's up in the kitchen, down in the hall
Billy's the father of his sister's child
Took her down to the merry wood
There he shot his sister dead
He go back to his mother's home
Welcome to me my son, my son
[down by the green wood side]
Son oh son why are you so pale
I've been down to the green wood hunting quail
There's no quail away down there
I've been down there shooting the white tail deer
No pistol kills a deer
Oh Billy where's your sister where?
Oh mother oh mother, make my bed
For I have shot my sister dead
Then son, where will you go
For your father will kill you when he comes to home
He'll burry you under yon hill
If he doesn't kill you I surely will
Happy St. Patricks Day!
--Ben
Some marriages come with children, ours comes with toys. Hmm, that doesn't sound right. Anyway, I finally picked up my new EOS 5D to be my primary camera. I'll still keep the 10D around for the long telephotos since it has more pixels per inch on its smaller sensor. I'll do some comparison shots at some point.
Those who have actually listened to me on the subject of digital photography know that the magnification factor of the 10D has been bugging me for years. I have a very nice 17mm lens that functions as a 28mm lens on the 10D. When I put it on the 5D however, I was tickled pink to have my 17mm lens back. If you're not familiar with how that works, go look up digital focal length conversion factors. This article is okay, but it doesn't mention the effects perspective like this one does.
I'll still be using my EOS 3 since I have a lot of film left in my fridge. I just bought a changing bag so I can develop my own film at home. It saves a couple bucks and it's a fun and toxic thing to do in your basement
--Ben
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Giada De Laurentiis is difficult for me to watch. It may be the way they're trying to make her show the American version of Nigella Bites. I think she could be a good host if her show wasn't trying to be so artsy. Also, her head looks huge to me.
Anyway, I watched her Everyday Italian show a while ago and was pleasantly surprised to find that her recipes are pretty dang good. The show I watched was Italian Comfort Food and one of the recipes was Turkey Osso Buco. She said that the original dish was Veal Osso Buco, but turkey worked great too. The basic idea is to brown the meat on the stovetop, sweat a trinity mix in the same pan, then braise the meat for two hours in the oven with the trinity, some fresh herbs, white wine wine and chicken stock. The first time I made it was with chicken and it turned out great. The legs had no tendons left because they were all cooked to yummy gelatin. I'd skin the chicken next time because it seemed to get an odd texture in the long cooking. It probably made the sauce much better though.
Venison is a meat, like squid, that is best cooked in one of two ways: hot and fast, or low and slow. So the second time I made osso buco was with venison, red wine and beef stock. It worked out great. Lots of flavor, tender meat like a brisket. Good stuff. I guess I'll have to see if I can watch Giada for more than a few minutes at a time because this is now a staple dish for me.
--Ben
Looks like I need to add a "Computers" section to my news page here... Done.
So, I use iChat on a fairly regular basis at work. It's great for getting a slightly quicker response to questions. (He says as he waits for a response to a question.) But I discovered an interesting problem and figured that I wasn't alone for once.
When I open up a new chat using the iChat menu-bar icon, I get a second, identical window directly behind the first. Not a big deal. I just close the second window and go on with my chat. It started to get a little annoying though. After a couple of quick googles, I found a forum thread over at Apple that dealt with the issue. They suggested deleting the com.apple.ichat.plist preference file which I had deleted earlier for a different reason. They also suggested deleting the com.apple.iChatAgent.plist which I haven't tried.
Anyway. I found one possible solution. If you're having the same problem, check out this thread at Apple.
I just saw an article on Gizmodo pointing to a paper written by Adam Gershowitz about smartphones and reasonable search and seizure. Based on prior court decisions, all the items on your person are open to search if you are arrested for some miscellaneous crime. Now I need to figure out how to enable a PIN on my Palm.
Comics
AppleGeeks
The Awkward Yeti
Chainsawsuit [new!]
Ctrl+Alt+Del
Doghousediaries
Doonesbury
Formal Sweatpants
FoxTrot
Happle Tea [new!]
Hyperbole and a Half
Indexed
Joy of Tech
Kate or Die!
Lunarbaboon
Our Valued Customers
RealLife
Romantically Apocalyptic
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Scenes From A Multiverse [new!]
A Softer World
Sci-ence
Sinfest
Three Panel Soul
Wondermark
XKCD
Blogs
Almost Diamonds Antihero As I See It Black and WTF Caerwyn Farm and Spirits The Catty Life Domestic Sluttery Engrish For Goodness Sake Gizmodo Greg Laden Le Zèbre Bleu Lefse and Kimchee Lifehacker Light-test Linux in Exile Man Bytes Blog Photography is Not a Crime Post Secret Photoshop Disasters
Arts
New Pictures 8: Sarah Jones
Minneapolis Institue of Arts
04/18/2013—02/02/2014 - Free
31 Years: Gifts from Martin Weinstein
Minneapolis Institue of Arts
11/02/2013—08/31/2014 - Free
New Pictures 9: Rinko Kawauchi
Minneapolis Institue of Arts
02/20/2014—08/10/2014 - Free
Finland: Designed Environments
Minneapolis Institue of Arts
05/10/2014—08/17/2014 - Free
Music
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
at State Theatre
06/21/2014 \ Doors 8:00pm
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