rrrrthats5rs.com » Don’t Shoot the Puppy: LOL.

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NewsForge | Switching art students to GNU/Linux: Yeah, great idea. Because what we want to learn in college is how to use a nice 3rd-party operating system, and free software like GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of things that will actually help in a career once we get out of school.

Punditry is all well and good, and truth be told I use a Linux distribution at home on my workstation and web server. but if I were a professional in the art or design industries, you can bet your ass I’ll be using Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Dreamweaver, and a bunch of other software that runs on OS X or Windows instead of a linux box with what is, despite all the loud claims to the contrary, software that isn’t as good.

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I was going to write something here about how great my weekend’s been going, but instead I’ve been sidetracked.

I was just at Central Market (the HEB near my house was out of both “frozen veg med” and puff pastry sheets), and they had this ugly display with a sign that said “get on the bunny train”. Obviously, it was an ad for Easter. Now, I’m not going to be sidetracked here into a discussion of how the Catholic church stole Easter from the “pagans”; if you really want to read something, try wikipedia: Eostre, Easter (particularly the " Easter Controversies" section).

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Wow, that didn’t take long at all.

I don’t know why (i.e., I can’t really narrow down the reason to anything specific), but I really didn’t like using Mail.app for my work email.  I don’t know; maybe it was the lack of a simple and quick solution to the “mark mailbox read” problem, maybe it was how slow some of the filters took to apply.  But in any case, I’m back to using Thunderbird for my work email; it just seems to work better.

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Oh, boy!

I decided to see if Mail.app 2.0 is cool enough to handle all the email I get at work (about a thousand messages a day).  I’ve been using Thunderbird exclusively for my work account for about the last 2 years, so it should be interesting to see how quickly I can adapt.

I’m already missing a few features that I really liked having in Thunderbird, chief among them the “mark mailbox as read”.  I know I can do that with applescript, and can even set a keyboard shortcut for it.  It’s just a pain that although the function exists in Mail.app, it doesn’t have a shortcut by default.

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Yes, it’s a bit of a pun. I’m not one to write TV reviews normally, but I felt it necessary today. I watched yesterday’s Good Eats this morning after work, and I have a few critical observations to make.…

So Apple announced a lot of new stuff on Tuesday at MacWorld San Francisco; am I impressed?  Let’s see:

Steve Jobs started off with the usual crap about Apple sales and revenue; that doesn’t really mean anything to me.  I guess it’s nice that Apple is making money, but it’s not all so exciting to someone who isn’t a stockholder.

And then the new product announcements (AKA the stuff I actually wanted to hear about): iPhoto 6:  OK, so it’s iPhoto, but they added “photo casting”.  Way to take a meme and expand it, Apple.  So this is really just a way to subscribe to an iPhoto collection that’s been shared.  It’s nice that it’s not permanently linked to .mac, but I’m not sure how useful it’ll be, until 3rd-party applications (like, for example, the popular “Gallery” PHP photo-gallery) reverse-engineer the protocol to add support, so that you can view these “photo casts” online before you subscribe to ’em.  And apparently there’s new photo-editing features, like a full-screen mode and “instant edits” (or whatever terminology Apple uses).  Nifty.  But I’ve got Photoshop.  And Adobe’s new Lightroom (the free public beta is only for the Mac right now) seems to be a replacement for both iPhoto and Aperture, so iPhoto may take a back seat once Adobe pushes Lightroom out of beta.  Pass. GarageBand 3: Hm.  Let’s see:  all that really changed in GarageBand this time was the addition of the podcast creator.  Granted, it’s way easier to use than Mega Seg or CastBlaster.  But I don’t make podcasts (yet); what’s the point for me?  Pass, until I decide to start writing music or recording a podcast. iWeb:  This is apparently the “new thing” from Apple’s software division.  OK, it’s a nice web page editor.  The templates are kinda neat, but I’m limited to only using the templates; there’s not an easy way (that I’ve seen so far) of creating my own templates (or, for that matter, starting with a blank page).  Yeah, I can take X random template and modify it to fit my needs, but that’s not really the same thing, ya know?  Maybe Apple will sell “iWeb Theme Packs” just like they sell “Jam Packs” for GarageBand.  Ooh, they could call them “Memory Packs” or something saccharine like that.  The integration with the rest of the iLife suite is nice, but I’m not a big fan of the giant .mac advertisement every time I open iWeb.  And where’s SFTP (or even FTP) publishing to an arbitrary server?  If I have to publish to a folder every time I make a change, and re-upload the entire thing to my hosting provider, it’s probably not something I’m gonna plan on using all the time, you know?  Especially if I create a media-rich site like Apple wants me to, full of pictures and movies.  And if my “podcast” page gets to be more than one or two episodes long, it’d take hours to re-upload the site.  Pass (for now). iMovie HD 6:  Hm.  I haven’t used iMovie that much, since most of the movies I acquire are already perfectly edited.  But I guess it’s nice that I can now open multiple projects at the same time; the lack of an MDI in previous versions of iMovie was something about which I read a lot of unfavorable reviews on teh Intarwebs. Pass, until I start editing the raw files from my ReplayTV on my laptop. iDVD 6:  Yeah.  I’ve got DVD Studio Pro.  I didn’t even bother installing iDVD.  Pass. iTunes 6.0.2: Hm.  I was irritated by the “mini store” when I launched the newest version of iTunes yesterday, especially given the measly 768 vertical pixels on my laptop’s display.  But it was easy enough for me to click the “hide” button and go on with life.  And to all of the privacy nuts out there who are freaking out because Apple is being sent information about what tracks they’ve got selected in iTunes:  I’m concerned about privacy myself, but come on; it’s easy enough to turn off and ignore.  Go after someone who actually means to do evil with your data for a change.  Or stop using the product altogether; sometimes the self-proclaimed “protectors of privacy” on the internet are worse than Jesus’ fan club.  No, I don’t want to be “saved” on this particular issue.  Yes, I’m OK with that.

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Update 2009-05-09: I gave up on this long ago, and switched to using Mail.app.  If you haven’t upgraded to the Thunderbird 3.0 beta, give the Lightning plugin a try.

Warning: This is a very tech-heavy post. So look out.

I get calendar events from my co-workers from time to time, and since they all use Outlook (and I refuse to use Entourage), it’s really more of an irritation than anything else; if I want to put those events into my iCal, I have to save the text of the message to a file, then drag it into iCal. And easy as that is, it’s more effort than I want to go to.

So I thought, “this might be a great thing to use Automator for”. Especially since I hadn’t found anything useful for Automator to do up to that point. Trouble is, there’s no actions to add iCal events (that’s .ics files ya know) from arbitrary files into iCal. Luckily, so long as iCal is your default handler for .ics files, simply opening them (the ics files) will create new events in iCal.

So:

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Nintendo Zelda Twilight Princess (Revolution/GameCube) Gameplay Footage:

Via digg.  What can I say?  It’s awesome, and I’m definitely buying this game as soon as it comes out, even though it’ll probably mean I have to fix my gamecube or buy another…

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MilkandCookies - A Persistent Image: Wow.  Just, wow.  It’s a movie about kids making a stop-motion movie.  It’s even shorter than what I’d call a “short film” (about 2 minutes long), but it’s definitely worth a watch.

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