My friend, Cor Bosman, recently put some time into building the Wetpixel People Finder, which allows members to register their location on a Google Map.

I have really enjoyed being a part of the Wetpixel community because its global community facilitates meeting up with other underwater photographers while on location or during transit. Through Wetpixel, I’ve met a great group of people in various locations around the world.

O’Reilly’s Big Book of Apple Hacks, by Chris Seibold, is now available in bookstores! The book includes 100 software and hardware hacks for Apple computers and Mac OS X / Mac applications.

A few of the hacks are mine, which is exciting. One is a tutorial on how to put a second hard disk into a MacBook Pro. The other two are short photography tips with iPhoto in mind.

This is too hilarious not to post.

I am (in general) a happy Mac user, but it is good to maintain a sense of humor… and as soon as that X300 fired up Vista, it would have ruined everything. ;)

This is really, really annoying. My parents have internet service provided via DSL from the convoluted company that is/was Yahoo!/AT&T/SBCGlobal. In the past, if I wanted to send email from my mail client while I was at home, I had to change my SMTP server to match AT&T’s supported server and use my parents’ account for password authentication. This is annoying enough. But recently, Yahoo!/AT&T/SBCGlobal has started requiring sender email registration to send e-mail from their already-locked down SMTP server (!). (read more »)

I just installed Fring for iPhone, and it is the best community messaging application I’ve seen for the device (what is Fring?). AND, it supports VoIP in the form of Skype and SIP (!). This is the application I’ve been waiting for, and is a really compelling reason to jailbreak your iPhone.

I fired it up and gave Victor A. a call using SkypeOut. Other than the standard latency that one expects from a Skype -> mobile phone connection, everything worked perfectly, and the sound quality was quite good.

Fring even runs in the background, which is really cool. I’m not sure how much battery power the thing sucks down, but it certainly is really great to be able to use Skype on my iPhone! I’m sure the 3G version will give the iPhone enough bandwidth to be able to take advantage of VoIP when out of WiFi range.

Fring supports Skype, SIP, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM/iChat, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, and Twitter.

Congratulations, Fring developers! You get a spot on my iPhone’s home application page.

I was just forced to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.3 after my 2.1.3 version was hacked. I didn’t hear of any security bulletin informing the world that 2.1.x had been abandoned. Normally, Wordpress folks continue to provide minor security updates. I was hacked the last time this happened, too.

The bad news is that Popularity Contest won’t be working until someone can figure out how to make it wp-cache compatible again. :)

Special thanks to Alex King and Chris Kacerguis for their immediate help during a time of crisis!

I am a big fan of Twitter because it’s basic infrastructure that people can choose to use in whatever way suits them. I use it as a conduit to update those twits that follow me, to update my journal sidebar, and to update my Facebook status. I can update easily from anywhere in the world where I have access to SMS.

I have phone notification via SMS turned on for only a very select group of people — a small subset even of those that I “follow.” However, it seems that anyone out there can direct message me in Twitter — even folks that I do not even follow… and these tweets use the “phone notification” master privacy setting, which has to be “on” if you want SMS delivery at all. This is a completely flawed approach. There should be an additional setting that says something like: “Only notify direct messages from people I follow” or “Never notify from people I do not follow.”

At the moment, I get lots of direct messages from Twitter users I have never heard of. These go direct to my phone as SMS messages. I don’t really want to get advice SMS’ed to my phone from strangers.

Here’s a typical exchange:

Eric: [complains about something. makes veiled cry for help.]
Stranger: @echeng omg lol you need to take it easy!

I see that reply as being totally intrusive, even if the stranger didn’t mean for it to be taken that way. The problem isn’t the stranger; it’s Twitter’s lack of sophisticated privacy settings.

I’ve submitted feedback to Twitter about this. They said, “good idea!”

I hope it gets implemented soon.

If you don’t “get” Twitter, don’t worry — I won’t try to convince you to use it. But the stats speak for themselves: most people I’ve convinced to give it a try are still using it.

Just under a year ago, I installed a second 160GB 5400 drive into my 2.33Ghz MacBook Pro and configured the two drives as a striped RAID 0 array. In addition to increasing storage space two-fold, my machine felt faster. It was totally worth the “risk” of having two spinning drives in a striped configuration, and after 10 months of continuous usage on boats in various countries around the world, my trusty Mac was still running well (thus proving wrong the countless awkward 15-year olds who spread tales of my stupidity on sites like Digg).

A couple of months ago, I read about the first MacBook Pro with a SSD drive installed, and then saw a video of a MacBook Pro launching 17 apps at once. I instantely became intrigued about getting a SSD into my computer. My normal computer activity involves constant multitasking while hitting the disk hard in apps like Aperture and Adobe Photoshop. Even using a striped RAID on my notebook, I wait a lot.

And so, I made a change. (read more »)

I noticed something interesting today. On March 4, 2008, I posted a message about repeated spam calls to my mobile phone from 562-228-7160 (a problem many people were having). Google picked up my entry on March 5th, because the hits started coming in. By March 7th, my journal post on the subject had been hit over 3,300 times. (read more »)

Anyone out there have an opinion about QuickBooks Online? I hear that it cannot import files, and must communicate with financial institutions directly. This seems like a deal-breaker (e.g. how do you download American Express data?).

OK, so I may or may not have had a jailbroken iPhone with a broken YouTube instance. There are dozens of guides on the web that claim to have a solution for the iPhone YouTube problem, but none of them worked for me except this one… which happens to also be bundled with directions for jailbreaking iPhones with firmware v1.1.4. (read more »)

Wheeee! (read more »)

OK, this is driving me nuts. I have a HP Laserjet 1300 that is shared to a Windows PC. On previous versions of Mac OS, I was able to browse to it and add it very easily. But now that I have installed Mac OS 10.5 Leopard from scratch, I can’t find any way to see that printer.

This is strange because my 2nd machine, which was upgraded to Leopard from Tiger, still has the printer installed, and it works.

I installed Gutenprint, which some folks say helps, bit it also didn’t work. I also tried to share out the printer from my other Mac using Bonjour, but not username / password combination will allow me to authenticate successfully.

Any tips?

I recently reconfigured my MacBook Pro (of RAID fame) to use an MTRON MSD 3000 32GB SSD drive as a boot / apps / Aperture database drive, plus my existing 160GB ATA/IDE drive as a second data drive (and overflow application area).

Everything SCREAMS now, and I couldn’t be happier. (read more »)

Here are some apps I use or think might be useful as a Mac user (long list!). I use most of them. (read more »)

I’m taking advantage of 2 days at home to revamp the way I backup my MacBook Pro (multitasking rules!). It seems like I do this every couple of months, but one of these days, I’ll get it right. (read more »)

Using Aperture 2, I exported the wave shot I posted in the last entry, and it came out a large blemish / artifact in the sunball. After some more testing, I discovered that it was an effect of the Shadows adjustment. (read more »)

Let’s imagine a world without Akismet, which has so far blocked over a million spam comments here in my online journal. If it took 1 second to delete each spam comment, I would have had to spend over 280 hours deleting spam.

SuperDuper! 2.5 is finally out, and it’s compatible with Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). The first thing I did when I arrived at home last night is to start backups of both my desktop and notebook to a NAS box over gigabit. Check out what SD is reporting as effective speed.

1.96MB/s is hardly “effective”

This is over a gigabit network. When I go direct file copies to the same NAS box, I get average write speeds of around 30MB/s.

I still believe that file operations over Mac networks are broken.

I don’t regret upgrading to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). The network improvements (no more 1-2 minute SPODs!) and Quicklook are features that have improved my productivity a lot. And luckily, I haven’t been hit by many of the compatibility bugs out there. There are, however, still a few things that are driving me crazy:

1. SuperDuper! still doesn’t work. Not having a way to make a bootable backup is making me very nervous — especially when I’m in the field.
2. Carbon Copy Cloner won’t automatically mount sparse disk images. This is bad because it’s the only way I do automated backups (to a sparse image on the network). It’s a known problem. Mr. Bombich plans to fix it in version 3.0.2, but it’s been months without a peep.
3. Keyboard freezes occasionally when Microsoft Office 2004 is running. Infuriating.
4. The new open/save dialog box doesn’t show mounted network volumes at the top level. Instead, it asks you to browse through servers in the SHARED section. Not convenient — and sometimes, it mounts a duplicate share using a different protocol.
5. No RAW converter update for the Canon 1Ds Mark III. This isn’t Leopard-related, but it still sucks. I can’t use Aperture with any new images I’m shooting until Apple releases a RAW update.
6. My Apple mouse sometimes freaks out and sends the cursor across the screen instantly. Also not Leopard-related.

Did I mention that I hate computers? I just hate this one less than I did my old Windows boxes.