Saturday, 25th February, 2006

Unsettling

mac tech

What with all the hoo-haa about the Safari Vulnerability recently, I did the sensible thing of turning off the 'Open "safe" files after downloading" option in the preferences.

(I'm a cautious girl at heart)

Just there now though, while trying to get the latest Remote Capture.app from Canon, I clicked on a .sit.bin file and waited, expecting to have to go to the Finder and unstuff it manually.

But it was already unstuffed

So I tried again, and this time Safari didn't open it. I have no idea what's going on sometimes...

In a similar vein, I was a bit narked with the new phone I got the other day. The little joystick thing didn't work properly — if I went 'up' it would take me to the media player, if I went 'right' it took me to the "write new" part of the message menu.

I removed all the shortcuts, thinking that might be it, but nope — still borked. So I started a thread in the K750i group on Flickr.

Several useful snippets of information later, I thought I'd leave fiddling with it until after the weekend. But yesterday, before me and my friend went off to Preston to look at bikes, I thought I'd show it to him and see what he thought.

"Here, see what happens — you move up and it takes you to... oh"

Bloody thing was working properly

Normally that happens to me — people call me over and say "Why isn't this working?", and just through the magic of being in close proximity to me, it starts working.

It's quite embarassing to have it happen the other way around

...

And in another slightly related vein, at round about the same time, the two of us were having a collective giggle about the IT Crowd, when suddenly my phone rang...

"Hi G, we're having problems getting the projector to work"

(It was a colleague)

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

"Um, hold on ... [pause] ... Oh. It's working. Cheers"

Meet The Extended Family

macs collection

Wow, I actually did something I said I'd do whilst drunk for a change. As promised, a list of all the Macs (and other related stuff) in my attic.

I have, over the years, used a variety of Macs. The first one was one of the original 128K ones back in 1984 (although I had used an Apple II a few years before that — it was the first machine I ever wrote a program on )

That was followed by a Plus, the a bit of a pause, then a IIci, a IIsi, an LC475, an LCIII ... and then I lose count

Ebay though, is a wonderful yet dangerous thing. I have a bit of a nostalgic soft-spot for old Macs you see — I can't bear to see such beautiful and characterful machines disappear into land-fills, so I compuslsively snap them up for the odd fiver here and there whenever I see them.

(Somewhere, in the dim depths of my TO DO list, is the item "set up Mac Museum")

Also, when friends or colleagues are getting rid of old inventories, I invariably get a phone call saying "We're chucking out some Macs — do you want them?" — at which point I start salivating.

Originally, I thought I could use them all for stuff — I'd networked a few together with LocalTalk cables and was on the hunt for one that could act as a LocalTalk -> Ethernet bridge, but in a rare moment of clarity and common-sense, I realised that this was ridiculous, and shoved them all in the loft.

I mean, when your collection of Macs takes up more space than your bedroom, it's time to take action, surely?

Here then is a list of them all You'll have to take my word on the fact that they do all work, but I'm not dragging them all down just to fire them up and take shots of their "About this Mac" screens to prove what system they're running

• Macintosh Classic (System 6)

  An Ebay rescue

• PowerMac 4400/200 (System 8)

  A donation from friends

• Macintosh IIci (System 7.1)

  A rescue from somewhere I used to work — it was called "Doobie".

• Macintosh Plus (System 3)

  Ebay again

• PowerBook Duo 280c (With a Duo Dock II) (System 7.5)

  In the late 90s, my pride and joy She was called "Baby" and I wrote my first ever "combine a databse with a website" thing on her¹. She was also the Mac I first started exploring video on — I would create frame-by-frame animations on her in Photoshop, then build them all together in Premier.

  Things have come a long way eh?

• Macintosh IIsi (System 7.1)

  This was called "Spliff", and it and Doobie (above) were the two Macs that used to form the entire Scan publishing system. I would take Spliff down to the printers by bus, because I didn't have any external disks big enough. One day, I nearly dropped him in a corridor, but cushioned his fall with my chest.

• Macintosh Quadra 700 (System 7.1)

  Ebay again — God knows why I wanted one of these...

• PowerMac 5600/160 (Which I can't find a link to on apple-history.com, but it's essentially the same as the PowerMac 5400) (System 7.6)

  I'd been after one of these for ages The successor to the original Macs, and the precursor of the iMac I guess. I foolishly thought I could use this as my LocalTalk->Ethernet Bridge — but it doesn't have Ethernet

• Macintosh IIfx (System 7.1)

  Salvaged from the repro house I used to work in. My old boss used to ponder on how it cost him several thousand pounds to upgrade the RAM to 8MB

• Macintosh IIsi (System 7.1)

  Ebay — one I've salvaged parts from to get Spliff working properly.

• PowerBook 160 (System 7.1)

  I am a complete sucker for PowerBooks ...

• PowerBook 145 (System 7.1)

• PowerBook 100 (System 7.1)

• PowerBook 150 (System 7.1)

• Macintosh Plus (No idea )

  The only one I haven't turned on yet — it's at work

• Macintosh IIci (System 7.1)

  I think this was an Ebay one too

So, including CuChulainn, Erin, Emer and Creidhne, I make that 20 Macs in total

There are other things, of course, but they don't count as "Macs"

• Newton Message Pad 110

  I had a brilliant idea for this little thing — but because of a hangover, I totally screwed up.

  I met up with Jon last Sunday, and I'd thought beforehand that it would be really cool to get him to sign this Newton, then get him to post it to another blogger to do the same, and again, and again, etc.

  Like a "real-world meme" if you like

  But, as I was hungover, I forgot to take it with me...

• Newton Message Pad 120

• Displays: 17", 14", Portrait Display

• Printers: StyleWriter 1200, ColorStyleWriter Pro

...and there are a few Non-Apple things:

• Some old scanner

• SPARC Classic

• BBC Model B

  Oh yes I cut my teeth, as I suppose a lot of people my age did, on a BBC Model B. BASIC, Elite, loading stuff from tape before we could afford a disk drive, an AMX Mouse, MINI Office, Repton 3...

  ...happy days

• A Random x386 thing that I'm ashamed to admit I own.

The thing is though, what I really want to own, is one of these

(¹ It was just a Claris Works database, but I'd set up some cunning 'search and replace' scripts that exported the information along with hidden fields to that it ouput proper HTML The very cunning thing though, was that I also set up some scripts to export it as Quark XPress tags — meaning with just two clicks, I had a website and a text-file to import into Quark )

I hate you

The Hidden Agony of Transvestism

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Whilst taking photographs of herself, and maneuvering the camera into a different position, Siobhan cricks her neck

Over-processed

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

(I had to really push this one — the graininess of using ISO-1600 was just too much. I should have set it lower really, it was sunny enough)

Well, technically I don't think you can call it a "virus" — a trojan maybe (although some are insisting it's a worm)

I remember there being viruses for the Mac before we all moved to MacOSX — I can't remember what they were called (although I did get stung with the AUTOSTART one that got in via infected CDs), but there was a nifty little app called "Disenfectant" that zapped them all AFAIK. And it was free

Remote

photography

I have, you may have noticed, spent the afternoon doing myself up and taking pictures. It always amazes me just how few of the ones that I take are "good enough" to share — something in the region of about 2-3% (guesstimate)

This out-of-character behaviour (it's been ages since I did this) was prompted completely by an email conversation I've been having — for two reasons:

(1) Someone was demanding to see a picture of me in a specific thing, and I thought I'd try again — seeing as every time I try and take such a picture, I'm never happy with the outcomes¹

(2) I'd started thinking about how I used to take pictures with my little Ixus, and how the EOS 300D had changed things...

...basicaly, what I used to do was hook the AV-out of the Ixus into the back of the telly that used to be in my studio. That meant that I got a sort-of live preview of what a photo would look like (approximantely) before I took it.

It meant I could pout, and pose, and pout some more — and when I was happy, press the self-timer and run back to pout a little more before he picture got taken.

Not ideal, but if I'd had a remote control, it would have been excellent

The thing with an SLR is, because of that very same "single lens reflex", you don't get a live preview. You can't because the sensor doesn't get exposed until the little mirror flips up out of the way when you press the shutter.

That's just how SLRs work

So, the best I could get was an image on the TV straight after I hit the remote — which was OK, because I could just take loads of pictures until I got something good.

But I got rid of the TV, didn't I? The only thing I have now is a crappy little thing with just an aerial input in the back. Nowhere to plug in a camera.

And it's because of this that I've been a lot less enthusiastic about self-photography recently. All the times I've done it, I've spent ages getting made up, and only had a bunch of crappy shots to show for it — because I only get to see them after I upload them onto my Mac.

It's quite depressing really — to spend that long doing something, and flick through all of the outcomes only to realise that you've got nothing to work with

...

But I had a brainwave earlier, as I was explaining all this in an email — why not use my laptop as the screen?

Canon (as I presume most camera manufacturers do) have a little piece of software called "Remote Capture" that let's you control your camera via USB from your Mac (or PC). I've used it in the past, before I had a remote, opening the shutter by using my toe on the space-bar.

This is one of those shots...

...it's not one of my best, but you can see that I'm not holding the remote like I usually am, and one of my feet is out of shot at the bottom. That's where the laptop is

But you can use Remote Capture with the remote control as well. Whenever you release the shutter — remotely or on the camera itself — Remote Capture pulls the image off the camera and displays it.

It's a bit slow — but it was good enough for me today. I still didn't get too many usable ones, but I got enough for it to have been a worthwhile couple of hours.

(¹ Am now happy I am so not uploading the shot though Not to Flickr, anyway)

Ah, yes, sorry Left leg is in shot, underneath right leg which is pressing the space bar. Looking at it again, I can see why that might look a tad double-jointed

Still — it's better than that one of me on the grass at Pauline's. I'm really disfiguring my ankle in that one

Old School eh?

It's not the same — I need to see what the camera is seeing. Without my self-delusional interpretations.

I mean, c'mon — how may times have all of us looked in a mirror, yet bore no relation to that image when we took a picture?