Can't go fast if your ISP won't let you
Bandwidth shaping… heard of it? Well if not, you should at least be aware of it. Bandwidth shaping is where your ISP (Internet Service Provider) indiscriminately chokes your bandwidth to a near trickle… no matter how much you actually pay for. This is a practice that many of the ISP’s feel is their right; they don’t want you using their bandwidth for their competitors VOIP service for example. Michael Geist writes in the Toronto Star about how bad it’s getting with Rogers in particular. Amber McArthur of City TV even did a story on it.
As a small business owner I am outraged that this is even allowed. I have a legitimate need for VOIP as my means of customer support. I have a legitimate need for P2P networks and torrent networks to pass around documents and programs in the open source world. The main form of distribution for Linux is over bittorrent and Rogers (my ISP) has all but disabled the Gnutella network and crippled bittorrent so bad it’s nearly unusable. And my VOIP (Skype in my case)? After a few minutes my calls are dropped and redials are often futile. All this from a company who states “Blistering speed, for sharing large files and much more.”… BULLSHIT!
What can we do? Blog about it. Blog often and link to every article you can about it. Make this a well known phenomenon and raise awareness so the government and ISP’s alike can no longer ignore this gross injustice.
[tags]net neutrality, bandwidth shaping, ISP censoring, bandwidth limiting[/tags]
SCREEECH HALT 3
Isn’t karma a bitch! How many of us are guilty of Microsoft bashing? How often did we poke fun at the long delays for the release of Vista? And now we eat humble pie? That’s the bast way to describe Apples latest official statement concerning the release of Leopard that is now slated for October.
What went wrong? For the first time since Jobs return to the throne, it looks as though the Apple has dropped the ball on it’s normally concrete marketing model; tease, rumor, fake-out, release on time (or release early)… This has been the way of things for so long, it almost hurts to see Apple fumble like this. More often then not, we are not even aware of a potentially earth moving product release until “Boom!”, it’s upon us like the Sunday chores.
Growing pains. Apple is becoming a big, big company with many devisions and many responsibilities; they are now a multi-media conglomerate with big ambitions. They have iTunes, they have hardware, they have software and they are pushing for the iPhone (blamed for this particular delay). They are certain to feel the same speed bumps that their counterparts in the industry have felt for so long. As the statement so eloquently remarks, “Life often presents tradeoffs…”, so we had better get used to seeing life-just-happen to Apple like it has been to the rest of the industry.
[tags]Apple Inc., Leopard, OS X 10.5, iPhone[/tags]
Mighty mouse vs. Speedy Gonzales
How can any self respecting speed freak like myself not make mention of a mouse accelerator or two. That is something that has always driven me nuts about OS X; the maximum mouse speed is just too darn slow. Back in the day when I was running OS X 10.2 on a fruity iMac with a puck mouse, I found a great little preference pane app called USB Overdrive (now supported by Senlick). I used USB Overdrive faithfully up until a few weeks ago. It was great for making a multitude of USB devices go stupid-fast, but I only use one USB device, my mouse. What I wanted (with the onset of carpel tunnel syndrome) is a fast mouse with very fine accuracy and acceleration controls.
What I found was SteerMouse, another preference pane app that allows for finer tuning of the mouse tracking speed and sensitivity, etc… it also allows for detailed button programing (up to 16 if you like). Though SteerMouse is by no means worlds apart from USB Overdrive, I was pleasantly surprised with it’s interface and feature set and think I will stick with it for some time to come.
So just how fast do I have my mouse set? My mouse travels at about 180 ppi. To put that into perspective for you, I can go from adjacent corners on a 23″ HD cinema screen by moving my mouse little more than few inches; just the flick of my wrist.
[tags]USB Overdrive, SteerMouse, mouse acceleration, software[/tags]
Witch app is witch
Two of the best feature of OS X as of late have been Exposé and application switcher (cmd+tab). The later is only useful if you wish to go from one app to the other, back and forth or whatever. The former, I find, is great for when working with multiple websites, or image files or other such things that might look quite dissimilar. Where I find Exposé really falls apart is with a multitude of code files, who when seen zoomed out in an Exposé spread, really have no differentiating characteristics and your left having to hover over each frame and wait for it’s toolbar tip to pop up and tell which window it is.
So what’s the perfect solution? A combination of both would be ideal. Enter Witch (now offered from Many Tricks), a remarkable application/window switcher that really suites my needs. Witch marries the individual window selection possible with Exposé and the tab-trough, labeled functionality of application switcher. Of course it’s customizable to the nth degree but I use it fairly stock and where I find it really excels is when I am switching rapidly back and forth between two windows of code in the same application, i.e. two or more pages in CSSEdit or Taco HTML Edit. Witch, instead of being just an application switcher, is a window switcher, perfect for a guy like me who has nothing short of a dozen windows open at any given moment.
[tags]OS X, Many Tricks, Witch, CSSEdit[/tags]
Rename those files
You ever have a bunch of files with names, like those from your digital camera, that just don’t mean anything to you? You want to find that picture of Suzy by the sea that you shot in 2005 but can’t for the life of find it because DSC000129.jpg isn’t the most descriptive name? I ran into this time and time again in my wedding photography days. An average wedding would yield over 500 images (scanned from film back then) all with these meaningless numeric names. I had my own naming convention then; customer name, event date, roll letter, frame number (e.g. smith-20020631-c-15.jpg). The problem I found is I used to spend hours manually renaming my files to match my convention.
That’s when I came upon Renamer4mac. At the time (circa OS X 10.2) there weren’t many options, in fact this app was the only one I found. Now days there are plenty kicking around but I have stuck with Renamer4mac because it has never failed me. So what does it do? It’s a batch file re-namer that by using any number of search and replace, insert, overwrite or numbering actions, can rename a whole folder worth of files to whatever you want in a heartbeat. That’s the way I like it… fast!
[tags]Renamer4mac, Power4mac, file renaming, images[/tags]
Drill, don't dig
This is one of those tools you don’t even remember you have or know that you use until, one day, you find yourself on someone else’s computer, looking in vein for it in the contextual menu. I’m talking about FolderGlance (2.0.1) and if you haven’t installed this phenomenal preference pane then you are truly missing out on the most useful contextual menu extensions I have ever come across.
I started using FolderGlance back in Mac OS X 10.2 (if I recall), simply because I wanter a faster way to navigate around my system then digging one step at a time in Finders column view. Once I started to get the hang of it’s features and operation I was really able to tap into the power behind FolderGlance. It is a finder-less Finder that allows instant drilling into folders, plugins, apps, etc… without having to stop and think about it. I can scream through a complex folder architecture as fast as I can move my mouse. No clicking, no hot keys, just pure, unadulterated mouse surfing.
What do I take advantage of the most? Drilling into plugins. I am not a big fan of the Finder. Using the finder is like climbing a really long flight of stairs; the only way to get to the top is one step at a time. The other thing that bothers me is Apple locks the gate to all the things it doesn’t feel you need to know about. To get into a plugin, for instance, you have to open the contextual menu and select “Show packages contents” which, in turn, opens up yet another Finder window. URGH! So if finder is like climbing a flight of stairs, then FolderGlance is like sliding down the railing… a greased railing. Take that same plugin; right-click, then just fall into the contents. Open a folder if you like, open a file if you like, read the a snippet of the content of a file, drag a copy of a file or folder somewhere else… all with just one or two clicks tops!
I spend a great deal of time going in and out of RapidWeaver theme files (a plugin of sorts) and without FolderGlance it would take me twice as long. If you hate the finder as much as I do, give FolderGlance a try.
[tags]FolderGlance, Mac OS X, Finder, RapidWeaver[/tags]
SCREEECH HALT 2
For years the recording industry (RIAA) has had us shackled when it came to digital music. If I buy a real CD at a brick and mortar, I can play it in my car, I can play it in my friends car, I can play in my house, on my computer… I can copy it to tape, I can copy it to another CD, I can copy it to DVD, I can copy it to VHS if I really wanted to… I can sell it to my friend, I can trade it with the creepy man down the street for some moonshine if I want to… But buy it on line? I can stick it in one library and play it on one stinking mp3 player. WTF! It’s a criminal tax in reality. It assumes that because you’ve procured your music with a computer, you are in fact a criminal who will do unlawful things with that music as though music in digital form is SO much easier to move about in underground circles than that impenetrable fortress of shinny, disk-like encryption they call “CD”.
Well one brave, forward thinking company, EMI, is braving this front and committing to be the first to go naked into this realm. For the first time, a big record label is putting up their entire catalogue up for sale DRM free. Ahhh, I can feel the relief… free at last… no more DRM… What’s this? Apple wants an extra 35¢ for this freedom? Taxed again!
The moral of the story… nothing in life is free.
[tags]Apple, EMI, DRM, RIAA[/tags]
Automate batch
As a web designer I cannot live without Adobe Creative Suite, in particular, Photoshop. Unfortunately, whether it’s my own lack of knowledge of the app or whether it’s just poorly designed, but I am really unable to find ways to crank up my workflow performance to that next level. I have learned hot-keys for nearly everything I do regularly with the app, and most of the hot-keys for those things I don’t, but to me, it just feels like I have to repeat far to many thing for my liking.
I do, however, applaud Adobe for batch edits (as limited as I feel they are). I am certain I do not use batch edits at their full potential but when I do use this kit little function it does save a whole whack of time. For those of you who don’t what I am talking about, under the “File” menu in Photoshop, you will see near the bottom, a selection that says “Automate”. In that menu you will see “Batch”. What batch edits lets you do is run recorded mind-numbingly repetitive task in an hands free, automatic fashion. I won’t get into how to write for an action for an automated process; there is a great little how-to under “Help > How to Customize and Automate > To automate a task”.
Where do I make use of automation? Well honestly, not nearly as much now as I did during my wedding photography days. Back then I would write actions for color correction when a batch of film came back from the lab a little off. I would have actions for scratch filtering, black and white conversions, sizing, etc… Now days my primary use is for creating thumbnails or compressing folders worth of images for the web. It can turn hours worth of work into a few minute worth of background processing.
For a good article to get you started using actions to crank up your productivity, visit this page.
[tags]Adobe, Photoshop, Creative Suite, webdesign[/tags]