Category Archives: Macgeekery

Plaints and laments, curses and maledictions

It took me a rather long time to switch from Mac OS 8.6, with which I was perfectly happy, to OS 10.2; of course, having vowed, upon one traumatic system upgrade, never to do another such thing again, that meant I didn’t upgrade until I bought a new system. But I upgraded, and aside from the delights of the built in apache server, all the goodies of open source software, and a system that allowed software to crash gracefully without bringing the system down with it (Netscape 3.75, I am NOT thinking of you), there was another pleasurable discovery: I didn’t have to use AppleTalk any more.

Now, it may just have been me on whom the AppleTalk gods frowned, but I found AppleTalk an unmitigated nuisance. I had a Lexmark printer cabled to the G3 with one of those split cables – pre USB, it all was, back when no self-respecting company ever produced any such thing as a Mac driver for its own products, so it was all third party patchwork. And the printer needed AppleTalk – or didn’t need AppleTalk, I think I’ve repressed the memory – and if I dared change that setting then I’d be half an hour getting the chooser to recognize the printer again. It interfered with printing, it interfered with the internet settings, and in general, it interfered with user satisfaction.

Why the peroration? Because I have spent the evening trying to transfer my old mail archives from the G3 to my latest system (running 10.4), via a cross-wired cable, with all the file-sharing functions, invoking that curs-ed AppleTalk, and it will not work. I couldn’t remember how to work OS 8.6, though I did succeed in finding the archives. It took me two Babylon5 episodes to get the computers to recognize each other, and then they decided they were using incompatible profiles. So I’ve gone back to USB-and-pray, because the computer has no USB port of its own, the USB port is on a PC card, and the USB-PC card destabilizes a system that works very well. It’s not even responding to Venusian curses and bits of the Verdi Requiem – “Confutatis, maledictis”.

Oh the picture? An accident with the camera, one of those with some artistic merit. Seemed to suit.

Programs worth extolling: DoubleTake, Skim, PDFLab

DoubleTake. A recent MacWorld article (Software Treats, August 2007) put me onto the excellent DoubleTake, a shareware program that enables the stitching together of multi-shot panorama photographs. I’ve accumulated quite a number of these over the years, but never had the patience for manual assembly. DoubleTake takes away most of the grief: It is extremely easy to use, with direct drag and drop from the Finder or iPhoto (or who knows else), live previews of changes in scale, orientation and exposure (among others – but no independent colour adjustments that I can see), and the ability to save into a number of formats. Its matching is remarkably accurate in most instances, and if it misjudges, then all you have to do is drag the added photograph into rough alignment and let the software refine. I’ve now put together 2 – 7 photograph panoramas, most in well under fifteen minutes. I’m putting them on a separate page, in the form of iframes to allow for scrolling of the wider pans.

Skim. Courtesy of MacResearch, I discovered Skim, which satisfied a yearning for something that would let me annotate PDFs on screen in the same way Adobe Acrobat does (which I don’t have on Mac). The program is freeware, and under active development (having reached v 0.6.1). It has replaced Preview as my default PDF reader.

PDFLab. I take full advantage of the ‘Print to PDF’ functionality in OS X to reduce the amount of paper I print out. Periodically I would go in search of a means of assembling multiple PDFs into one file, encounter intimidating strings of command-line instructions which would induce me to back away slowly, and resolve that I could live with numbering them sequentially and sticking them in one folder until I had the hour I would need to work out and document the methods described. MacWorld to the rescue again, by introducing me to PDFLab. Again, it really is as simple as dragging and dropping, or clicking add, setting files in order, hitting the appropriate button, and typing in a filename. I’m sure it’s invoking all the command-line magic, but it certainly didn’t take me an hour to produce my first PDF!