Maria’s Guides

The miracle of publishing.

I cannot believe how quickly the printer put this book together. I’m holding, in my hot little hands, a copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide. This book went to the printer on October 9 just two weeks ago. The FedEx guy just dropped off 25 copies.

This makes me feel pretty confident that the book will be in Apple Stores on Friday at 6 PM.

And, in case you’re wondering, the book looks great!

• Computers: Tools, or tyrants?
  Looks like I’m not the only one thinking about how much we use computers. Insight from Leanne Powers.
  (tags: Internet computer time)

I really am a first order geek.

I recently wrote a lengthy account of my “Big September Gig,” in which I spent six days flying around northeastern Arizona with a team of 15 or so Russian photographers. You can read the first part of the story here.

On Day 5, I flew from Monument Valley to Shiprock Airport to Farmington Airport, by way of the San Juan River. What I didn’t mention in my account of that flight is that I had my GPS on and running, creating a track log of the trip. (Geek alert!)

Today, I was reading messages in an aerial photography forum I follow. One of the members, in an answer to another member, mentioned a Mac OS program called GPSPhotoLinker, which can link photographs to GPS data. I figured I’d pull the data off the GPS and record the coordinates of a photo location in the photo’s EXIF tags.

I sucked the data off the GPS in Mac OS with a one-trick pony program called LoadMyTracks, which saves in both the GPX format I needed for GPSPhotoLinker and KML (Google Earth) format. I brought the file into TextWrangler, my text editor of choice, and deleted all the unnecessary data to trim down the file. Then I loaded it into GPSPhotoLinker, pointed the software to a folder containing the 18 or so photos I’d taken during the flight, and sat back to watch the results.

Disappointment. The clock on the damn camera was wrong. Since the software uses time to match coordinates with photos, there were no matches. I have to reset the clock on the camera — preferably with my computer so the time is right — and try again on another trip. But this gives me a geeky project to work on. (As if I needed another one.) When I get it all working smoothly, you’ll probably find an article about it here.

Anyway, there is a side benefit to this. I also ran the KML version of the file though Google Earth. If you haven’t wasted time with Google Earth, you’re missing out on a great time-sucking experience. Without going into a full blown description or review, I’ll just say that you can take a GPS track, like the one from my trip, and open it in Google Earth. You can then do a “tour” that follows the track just like you’re flying along with me (but at least 3000 feet higher). If you’ve got nothing better to do, give it a try.

• Automattic Acquires Gravatar
  Good news for WordPress users who like the features of Gravatar. (Which reminds me; I need to get those icons back online…)
  (tags: blogging wordpress gravatar)

A postscript to the old mouse story.

A while back, I wrote a brief post about my friend Jo at KBSZ-AM and the circa 1989 mouse she was using on her circa 1989 Mac IIci. Oddly enough, the post was well received, Dugg over 1,000 times, and nearly caused me to have my hosting account cancelled. So it is with great caution that I add the postscript to Jo’s story.

A few weeks ago, Jo mentioned that her keyboard had stopped working. She didn’t actually ask for a keyboard — which is unfortunate, because I’m sure I have an old ADB keyboard floating around here — so I figured she’d gotten the problem resolved on her own.

She did. She bought a new Mac.

I saw it when I stopped by the radio station today to check some things on the steaming audio server I set up for them. It was sitting on her desk where the old IIci used to sit. There was a single piece of paper covering the keyboard to keep dust off it.

The “new” computer was a Bondi Blue iMac — the original iMac model.

“Welcome to the 1990s,” I said when I saw it.

The local Mac fix-it guy had sold it to her for $50. He charged her another $35 for the keyboard. (Unfortunate, because she could have used the keyboard connected to the eMac that the streaming audio software runs on and saved the $35.) While he was at it, he sold her a “new” printer, too.

(What’s really unfortunate is that there’s a Strawberry iMac sitting on the floor of my garage, waiting for me to restore the hard disk to factory settings and put it on eBay. I would have been just as happy giving it to her. I think it’ll run Mac OS 9.2. That would have saved her total of $85. But then I would have become the support person, like I am for my neighbor’s kids, recipients of my old iBook SE. When will I learn?)

Jo fired it up the iMac for me. I noticed the startup screen. It was running Mac OS 9.2. The desktop pattern was that icky blue/green wavy pattern that was part of pre-Mac OS X systems. She told me how much she liked those colors and was very pleased to see them on her desktop.

Then she fired up PageMaker (version 3?), which she uses to keep her “ledger.” (Remember, she does all the accounting for the radio station on her Mac. Apparently, she doesn’t use accounting software or Excel.) She pointed out the icons in the bottom of the PageMaker window, the ones that represent document pages. She told me that when she first opened her 17-page ledger, there was something on the screen (Launcher, perhaps?) that hid the page buttons. She was afraid to click the thing blocking the buttons. But the Mac Fix-it guy, bless him, told her how to make that go away.

She seemed very happy. It was a major step for her. After 18 years with the same computer, she’d upgraded. And the new one was only about 8 years old.

As she shut it down, she turned to me and smiled. “The printer’s a little quicker, too.”

Get a great deal on a USB hard disk from the Apple Store.

I’m in the middle of writing an article about my top ten favorite Leopard features (look for it on October 26 after 6 PM). One of those features is Time Machine, which I really think will simplify my backup procedures and help protect all of my data.

Of course, to back up an entire 500GB hard disk, you need a 500GB hard disk to put all the data on. So imagine my delight when I saw that the Apple Store has a 500GB high speed USB hard disk for just $139.95. Just in time for Time Machine backups.

Check it out here.