It’s been a fair while since I mentioned my search for the perfect monospaced font to use in Terminal.app, MacVim, and similar apps. But there’s a new contender: Ubuntu Mono. (Click the picture for a bigger version.)
(Gruber kind of dismissed the rest of the Ubuntu family, but he agrees the monospaced fonts are nice.)
Well, I won’t get my Kindle Touch until Monday, but at least now that the Fire reviews have all posted, people are beginning to talk about the Touch:
Awkward delays arise, and repainting of the e-Ink screen sometimes lags. But, overall, the experience is quite good and, in some situations, noticeably better than using the previous iteration’s buttons. This is especially true of picking items from lists or selecting text in specific areas of the screen—touch, even on a screen that isn’t especially responsive, is simply much faster than navigating via repeated button presses.
Also this: “But if your focus is on reading, I would actually recommend the bottom of the line model. It’s lighter and more comfortable to hold in one hand, and the touch screen doesn’t really make the page turning experience that much better.”
So I got a new Kindle Touch
That’s okay. I can cope with delayed gratification. Except when suddenly everybody and their uncle is posting reviews of the Kindle Fire. Now I demand to know why the more exotic Kindles shipped before mine!
This is cute: an average font, created by averaging all the letters in hundreds of different fonts. It’s called AverÃa, and it’s free. Try it out!
Well! I mentioned the other day that Pixelmator is my favorite photo editor, and when 2.0 comes out, it will be awesome. And now it has, and it’s, well, maybe awesome is too much, but it’s pretty nifty. Maybe someday I’ll have time to post a review.
Here are some of my favorite tools for working with digital images.
Pixelmator. This is my go-to program for digital images, and someday they’ll ship 2.0 and it will be awesome.
Xee calls itself “a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser.” I agree. The best feature, for my money, is that it lets you losslessly rotate and crop JPEG images. You can do that with jpegtran too, but that’s a command-line tool. Those are great for batch jobs, but image cropping is almost always better done using an interactive GUI front-end.
Acorn is my second-favorite image editor. If Pixelmator wasn’t so darned good, this would be my favorite. Usually what brings me to Acorn is when I need to do something with filters and I can’t figure out how to do it in Pixelmator. The tech support is great, too.
Speaking of filters, I like to goof around with FX Photo Studio, too. MacPhun, the maker, also makes a cute one-trick-pony called Color Splash Studio which is worth the $2 I paid for it.
I also use a ton of different command line tools. I’ll write about those someday Real Soon Now.
Yesterday I did an “empty trash” command in iPhoto, to expunge 27 thousand photos I’d just deleted. Characteristically, the application hung. Well, it probably didn’t hang. After half an hour, I did a force quit, and on reopening the program and emptying the trash again, it told me there were about 5,000 photos to be deleted. Another 15 minutes wasn’t enough time for iPhoto to clean them up, so I force quit again, broke out a shell in Terminal and did:
$ cd ~/Pictures/ $ rm -rf iPhoto* $ cd ~/Library/Caches $ rm -rf com.apple.iPhoto
…which fixed things very nicely.
So ended a 27-month experiment with Apple’s end-user image management software. They also have a “pro” or “prosumer” product called Aperture, and if iPhoto is any indicator, I wouldn’t have it, even gift wrapped.
Between 2001 and 2009, I’d used my own set of tools to manage and manipulate my digital images, but when I got the MacBook, I decided to try iPhoto. That was two versions ago, and the things I disliked with ’09 weren’t fixed in ’10, and there wasn’t any sign they’ve been fixed in ’11 either.
What are those? Primarily two things:
Now, I had some other complaints as well. I don’t need face recognition, and I would like text search, but Apple evidently has the opposite set of priorities. I would love to have uploads to social media sites, but the iPhoto way didn’t win me over at first blush, so I used other tools.
Sometime this summer, I gave up on iPhoto. Since then, I’ve spent my free time copying files out of the iPhoto library and renaming them and filing them elsewhere. I’d like to have tags, but what I’ve learned in 30 years with a Unix shell is that find(1) is pretty good at finding things:
$ find . -name '*whatever*'
for some really tricky things, I break out grep:
$ find . -name '*whatever*' \ | egrep -i 'one thing|another' \ | egrep -v 'but not this'
Yesterday, I finished the conversion and (after making lots of backups in lots of places on multiple drives), I emptied the trash in iPhoto. My fan hasn’t run since then.
I also noticed that while those 27K photos took 41 GB of space in iPhoto, they only occupy 38 GB in the filesytem. What was iPhoto doing with the other 3 GB?
Recovering eight or ten percent of a dataset isn’t chopped liver, but the space saving may prove eventually to be even more significant. iPhoto is monolithic. (By default, at least.) You put your files in there, and it’s a huge black box and you don’t need to worry your pretty head about what’s going on inside. But the filesystem gives me all kinds of options about how to manage my image files. For example, I can put different subsets of the data on different media, with symlinks connecting one part with another.
For now, I’ve stored everything in a single master folder. Within that, files are stored by year (2001, 2002, etc.). Within a year’s folder, I typically store files by the month (01-jan, 02-feb, …). Since I take the most photographs when I’m on vacation, I sometimes put vacation photos in their own folder (04-vac, etc.). Finally, I have a separate folder for video files called ‘movies‘. Those files are typically 10x or 20x as big as a photo, but I only have a handful, so I manage them as a collection.
The files themselves are typically given descriptive names (accident-minivan-01.jpg, home-oleanders-07.jpg) etc. Because I do so much work from the command line, I don’t put spaces in the names. In lieu of a space, I prefer a hyphen (-) to an underscore (_) because it doesn’t require a shift key.
In my next post, I’ll run through the tools I use to manipulate images.
There’s a story about the world-famous green chili cheeseburgers served by the Owl Bar, and I’m here to tell you, they’re not kidding. The best cheeseburgers evah.
(Frankly, if you’re in New Mexico, Blake’s Lotaburger is pretty good, and here in California you can’t get a better cheeseburger without green chilis than the ones they make at In’n’Out. But the Owl Bar is in a class by itself. And as the story reveals, a lot of professor-types have taken that class too. The reviews on Yelp are wonderful in their cluelessness. Not just police have unit patches, kid.)
What was the New York Times thinking, running this piece (“Is your doctor open to alternative medicine?”).
I mean, I understand why quacks and charlatans promote “alternative” remedies: the same reason that Willie Sutton supposedly robbed banks.
I also understand why so many people are attracted to alternatives: because our healthcare delivery system is so messed up. The doctors created a system where they had a legal monopoly, in order to get rich. But it also encourages people to pursue alternatives. The poor do, of course, but even people with money, or insurance, avoid doctors. Our monopolist doctors overbook appointments, make us wait 1-2 hours after the scheduled time, and then try to cram our care into a 7.5 minute office visit. It’s like getting your medical care from the cable guy. By contrast, the quacks and charlatans have got nothing but time. They’ll listen to everything you say, nodding their heads sympathetically.
What I can’t understand is how the Times decided to run a story about being open to “alternative” medicine the same day they report Steve Jobs could have survived his cancer if he hadn’t wasted the first nine months pursuing “alternative” quackery like fruit juices, acupuncture, and herbal remedies.
Sadly, it’s not just geniuses like Jobs who fall for the nonsense that people are peddling. Just the other day, I met a woman who refused to get her kids vaccinated because of fears about mercury. She was just repeating things she heard, second-, third-, and seventeenth-hand. She is a victim of fraud, and her kids may become tragic victims.
I understand people selling these “alternative” medicines. But I don’t sympathize with them. They have a lot to answer for, and if there is any justice in the universe, someday they will.
(H/T: Althouse.)
Earlier this week, Politico posted an article about Godfather’s Pizza, presumably as a way to knock down Herman Cain. It was a sad little hit-piece, as you might expect. Cain hasn’t been at Godfather’s since the mid-90s, and even if he were, this “blind taste test” simply brings to mind the Reagan’s observation that “there’s a difference between the critics and the box office.” Regardless what some food critics think about the pizza, nobody can dispute that Cain led the company back to profitability.
When I was in college, Albuquerque was where we went for fun, and most of the time, our evenings began at Godfather’s Pizza. One of my friends (Joel) could calculate everyone’s portion of the bill in his head between the cash register and the table, including tip and tax, and accounting for different drink purchases. And despite that, he was a mediocre student in the math classes. I hear he works at a bank these days, although he doesn’t use Facebook or LinkedIn so I can’t be sure.
Another friend (Kevin) used to tick me off because he was a quicker eater than me. Suppose you have a three people sharing an eight-slice pizza. Everyone gets two slices, and then they have an argument about who doesn’t get a third, right? Not with Kevin at the table. He’d eat three slices as quickly as the rest would eat two. Then he’d look at that last slice sitting all by itself, and ask if anybody else wanted it. And we’d say, no, shucks, we’re not greedy, you go ahead eat it, Kevin.
I don’t say these things to slam my friends. Well, I do, but that’s not my point. After all, I’m sure if you checked their memories, they might have some less than 100% flattering memories of me, too.
What’s interesting to me is that we always ate at Godfather’s. It wasn’t even a question. We just did. The pizza was good enough, I suppose, but nothing special. My guess is that, since that Socorro had a Pizza Hut, when we went to Albuquerque, we wanted something different.
After college, I moved to Albuquerque and learned about Nunzio’s Pizza, which I liked a lot better than Godfather’s. You could purchase by the slice, so there, Kevin. And if you asked for anchovies, they wouldn’t lie to you and say “we’re all out, sorry,” the way most pizza places do. Sadly, Nunzio’s went out of business sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s. I’m happy to see the family has started over with a new pizzeria called Saggio.