The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jul
4
A Quick Review of Syrinx – A Native OS X Twitter Client
Filed Under Computers & Tech on July 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment
I recently moved to a new machine (a hand-me-down G5 20″ iMac), and when it came to installing my new apps I decided I’d had enough of Adobe AIR and the whole idea of web apps pretending (poorly) to be native apps. I like OS X, and I want the full power of OS X in my apps. I also like how OS X apps all look and work similarly to each other. You just don’t get that with AIR apps like Twhirl (which had been my Twitter client up to that point). Not long before I got my new Mac listener Scott had contributed a short review of Syrinx to the NosillaCast, so I decided to give it a go.
I took and instant liking to the app because it’s a proper OS X app, because it uses the OS X keychain to securely save my password, and because it has Growl support. The fact that it’s free also helps of course! I’ve been using it for a month or so at this stage, and I’m still happy enough with it to keep it as my current client on all three of my Macs. It’s also under very active development at the moment with updates coming out regularly, so I have high hopes for this app’s future.
Jun
11
Reflections on the WWDC 2009 Keynote
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 11, 2009 | 2 Comments
This is not going to be a full rundown of everything that was announced at Apple’s 2009 World Wide Developers Conference, not even nearly. It’s just my opinions on the things that caught my attention. If you don’t know what Apple announced you can watch the Keynote on Apple’s site.
Lets start by having a look at how I did on my predictions. I did pretty well over-all, as is to be expected when you don’t predict anything too exciting or special, but I did get one very major prediction wrong. I was adamant that there would be no new hardware at this evening, and what did Phil kick off with? New MacBook Pros! That was a total surprise, and not just to me.
Mar
18
Thoughts on iPhone OS 3.0
Filed Under Computers & Tech on March 18, 2009 | 4 Comments
Yesterday Apple held a press event to release details of the next version of the iPhone software, called version 3.0. You can read some of the highlights and watch a video of the whole presentation at Apple’s website. I sat down and watched it late last night, and have to say I was impressed. I was expecting to finally get some of the things I’ve really wanted, but I was blown away by the scope of this new release, and in particular, just how many new tools they are putting into the hands of the developers. Apple are notorious for inflating numbers through generous interpretations of terms, but even when you bear that in mind, 1,000 new APIs for developers to use is impressive, as indeed is 100 new user-level features from Apple themselves.
Feb
26
Why I Don’t Like RedHat Enterprise Linux
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on February 26, 2009 | 1 Comment
NOTE: Although this post references experiences I have had in work, the opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone.
If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed my anti-RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux) outbursts today. I could keep twittering to try make my point, but sometimes 140 characters is just not enough, so I figured I’d blog about it instead and then tweet out the link to the blog post when I’m done.
In work we run two kinds of Linux servers, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS. We pay for RedHat, we don’t pay for CentOS (because it’s free). CentOS is based off the RedHat code base, but has some of the fancy stuff stripped out. Clearly, you would expect RHEL to give you the better experience since it has more features and you pay for support. Unfortunately, in my experience that’s just not how things are shaping up. CentOS has been completely problem and stress free (as well as financially free), while RHEL has not been such a smooth ride. Sure, most of the time it works just fine, but it definitely generates more stress for me than CentOS does, and that’s paid-for stress!
Feb
14
First Impressions of the Postbox Beta
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 14, 2009 | 2 Comments
As some of you probably know, I’m a long-time Thunderbird user, from back when it still had the cool blue Phoenix logo, and when what we now call FireFox had only just changed from being called Phoenix to FireBird. In other words, from when Mozilla still looked at BOTH their browser AND their mail client as being important products. Since those days I’ve watched in horror as Mozilla first neglected Thunderbird, and then abandoned it. While FireFox has gone from strength-to-strenght, Thunderbird has languished. The project was effectively thrown out of Mozilla and left to fend for itself. It also lost its lead author, and has stagnated. It’s a good mail client, but it’s behind the times. It’s missing simple features like a tabbed interface, and FireFox 3’s new, non-retarded, way of dealing with problem security certs. For all these reasons I was very excited to see the announcement of a beta version of Postbox this week. It’s a fork of Thunderbird being led by Thunderbird’s old lead, so in many ways, it’s a glimpse of where Thunderbird could have been, had it not been neglected by Mozilla. It definitely is a beta, but it’s a glimmer of hope at long-long-last!
Feb
7
Quick Review of Maperture
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on February 7, 2009 | 2 Comments
Maperture is a free geo-tagging plugin for Apple’s Aperture photo management and editing software. This plugin will not be of interest to everyone. Unless you care about inserting latitude and longitude information into the EXIF data of photographs, you will have no interest in this what-so-ever. In fact, I’d go even further, I’d posit that this initial version of Maperture is only for people who care about embedding location data into their photos, but who don’t have a GPS device. Future versions (one of which is in beta ATM) will be of more interest to more people, but right now Maperture is for those of us who need to use Google Maps to find the co-ordinates of our pictures because our cameras can’t do it for us. This software really feels like a 1.0 product though. You can see it has massive potential, but right now it’s still rather rough around the edges.
Feb
1
Aperture 2 – First Impressions
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on February 1, 2009 | 12 Comments
As those of you who follow me on Twitter, or listen to the many Podcasts I appear on may well know, I recently got a copy of Apple’s pro photo editing program Aperture 2. (Thanks again Allison, it was a great Christmas present!) In case people don’t know what Aperture is, it’s a tool for sorting, organising and editing your photos – a very advanced version of iPhoto if you will. It’s really designed for people who shoot RAW and who shoot a lot, but it’s not a pixel editor like PhotoShop. The closest analogue would be Adobe’s Lightroom. Also, for context, I’m moving to Aperture from iPhoto’08, so I’ll be using iPhoto as a reference point a lot while explaining what I do and don’t like about Aperture.
Jan
18
DeskLickr – Flickrize Your Desktop on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on January 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment
This week I went hunting for a piece of software to automatically change my desktop wallpaper using Flickr as the source. In particular I wanted it to use my set of desktop wallpapers on Flickr. There are solutions to do this kind of thing on Linux and Windows, but since I use OS X I had to go find one I could actually use. In the end I found just one solution that worked well, the donation-ware app DeskLickr.
DeskLickr is definitely one of those apps that does just one thing, but seems to do it well. I’ve only been using it for a few days but so far I’m very happy with it. I set it up, then forgot about it and watched my background change to a new photo every 30 minutes. It could be argued that the Flickr configuration could be a bit clearer to understand, and it could definitely be argued that it would be nice to have more options for choosing photos from Flickr, but, it works, and that’s the important thing.
Nov
29
Photomatix Pro – First Impressions
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on November 29, 2008 | 4 Comments
Anyone who’s been following this blog for a while will know that I’ve been experimenting with HDR for most of this year. I started off with the cheapest solution I could find so that I could be sure I really wanted to go down this road before spending a lot of money on more professional software. It can’t be denied that I got some good results with the process I’ve been using until now, but I was never completely happy with the results. In particular the level of haloing was really starting to annoy me. Today I bit the bullet and spent $99 (about €80) on the stand-alone version of Photomatix Pro from HDR Soft. The reason I went for the standalone version is that I don’t have photoshop and am not planning to buy it any time soon (probably never as long as it costs extortionate amounts of money). I haven’t had much time to play with it yet but I though I’d share some of my initial thoughts and results.
Oct
16
The iPhone on the Go
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I’m on my way literally clean across the country as I type this. This is my first real test of the iPhone ok the go. First impressions are very good. GPS is working better than I expected and 3G coverage is a lot more common than I’d expected. I just downloaded the WorsPress app I’m posting this from over 3G in Litrim of all places! Definitely better than I’d dared hope. Also, the iPhone’s auto correction REALY comes into it’s own when you’re typing in a moving car!