The Daily Thing

G. Dan Mitchell, we’ll call him Dan, likes to take photos. Oh how he LIKES to take photos and they are some seriously awesome photos (checkout his work at gdanmitchell.com). Dan and I have been talking back and forth on Twitter about things we’ve noticed in the latest version of Apple’s OS X operating system Snow Leopard. I haven’t really noticed anything weird, well except for mail being REALLY stringent on authentication, but then I read Dan’s blog post this morning. He can’t print.

This is a minor problem for most people but when you’re a photographer or a designer, well printing is something you just can’t live without.

The first problem I encountered was that the Epson 2200 sitting next to my computer no longer appeared in the the printer dialogs in Photoshop. Knowing that Snow Leopard supposedly will add new drivers as needed I tried to use the 10.6 preference panel to add drivers for the 2200. No luck – the system didn’t even see the connected printer.

I finally went to the Epson web site and followed their instructions which include:

Install Rosetta from Apple install disk.
Download the most recent pre-10.6 drivers for my printer and install.
Download and run their updater for drivers under 10.6
Done. Now I can see the printer via its Firewire connection… but not, as far as I can tell, via its USB connection.

So, I fire up Photoshop and try to make a test print using a black and white image. Things seem to be going more or less OK as I work my way through the usual setup and print process: Photoshop manages colors and all. But the print emerges looking very green and way too dark. I attempt to download and reinstall the Epson profile for the Epson Premium Lustre paper I’m using at the moment. Installer downloads… but won’t run.

I do a restart and try the profile installer one more time – still no go. Since the photo was one that I had not previously printed I decide to remove one variable and instead print a color image that I had successfully printed right before installing the update to OS X. Again… very greenish and far too dark. (G. Dan Mitchell)

One of the things that I’ve noticed is FTP droplets from Transmit no longer work. Not sure if this is because Transmit is still 32bit or if the protocol is being blocked or what. The droplets open and act like they’re transferring but nothing gets moved to the server. Mail is also constantly warning of certificates, even after you hit OK and can’t figure out which mailbox to send through if you have multiple (even with a default set).

Hopefully Dan will get his problems worked out soon. Until then there is no way I’d recommend installing this on a production machine, which I already have. Wait a week or three until all the quirks and bugs are worked out.

Recently I’ve been suffering from Information Overload. I have way too many RSS feeds from way too many sites I like to read. The problem is obvious, it’s nearly impossible to read ANY of them. Where do you begin? How do you organize them?

So recently Shaun Inman’s Fever was brought back into my field of vision. I’d looked at it before but wasn’t sure it was what I wanted in a feed reader. It basically works by giving articles a temperature. The more an article is discussed (linked to) in your RSS feed the higher the temperature is. There’s a section called Kindling for feeds you want to read everyday and one called Sparks for link blogs and news sites to basically build heat.

That’s what’s revolutionary. There are only 3 sections forcing you to figure out what is important to you. Once I started my introspective journey I was able to pare my Kindling, the things I want to read daily, down to 20 feeds. Totally manageable. The 20+ Apple sites who basically regurgitate the same articles are now in the Sparks feeding my Hot page. The 40 or so Design sites are also in Sparks buiding heat. Windows sites? Sparks. News? Sparks.

Then another idea hit me, why don’t I add Twitter and Friendfeeds. Then I can see what’s on the top of everyone’s head in real time. So I started adding people like Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, etc. Now Fever has become incredibly more useful. Not only am I seeing what’s hot in my RSS feeds but I’m seeing the discussions that are taking place in real time and what everyone is talking about. The more feeds you add, the better the sampling. It’s kind of like going to a restaurant you’ve never tried before, looking what everyone else is eating and then ordering that. Well, maybe that’s not the best analogy but I’m hungry and you get the idea.

So what’s the gist. Get Fever. Try Fever. You need a web server with PHP and MySQL. If you have CRON setup you can have the feeds pulled all the time, otherwise it only pulls them when the browser requests a page. If you plan on adding a lot of feeds I recommend CRON. Shaun Inman, the maker of Fever and Mint, has an installer that makes sure your server is compatible. If it is you’ll get a code that you enter on the download page and then you can purchase Fever. If Fever isn’t compatible with your server it won’t let you buy it. How nice is that? If you’re on MediaTemple Fever works fine with your server.

To check out Fever visit FeedaFever.com

Lets say you’re working on a web project and you only have a certain number of pixels wide for some text. Maybe you’re tired of the traditional greeking and want to do something different to show your designer flair. My friend have I got the site for you, blindtextgenerator.com

blindtextgenerator.com does what similar sites do by allowing you to pick the number of paragraphs that you want but it does so much more. See what your font would actually look like in pixels, change the greeking to Kafka, Panagram (the quick brown fox), a-z A-Z 1-9 (great for picking font families and faces), or even use an excerpt from the play Cicero in original or english.

Open up the advanced options and you can even choose from a palette of regular fonts found on the web, change the font weight, style, line height, font size and then, when you’re all done, grab the css for it right there on the page.

Creative Techs and Luminous Works have a pretty cool preview video up of one of the new features in Adobe’s Creative Suite 4. New to Adobe Illustrator is the ability to create multiple art boards and set bleed preferences. Using the new art board tool you can even resize the art boards using their handles like you would any graphic.

What I (personally) would use this for I’m not sure but it sure is cool.

One of the cooler apps for the iPhone that has recently came out is the Wordpress app. Prett cool that you can blog directly from your iPhone, upload photos and edit old posts when you need to. Pretty cool. Now isn’t that better than the traditional “Hello World” post?

Here’s something damn funny from The Onion, “World of World of Warcraft”. You have to ability to play a player playing the World of Warcraft.

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

So if you’re like me you probably use iGoogle as your home page but did you know you can customize the header (image behind the words google) with your own pictures or graphics? Here’s a cool tutorial from the gang at Google on how to make your own. Not really that hard at all.

Google Developer’s Guide: “A theme is custom design for the iGoogle page. You define a theme in an XML file that contains key-value pairs for iGoogle page attributes, such as background and text color. A theme can be as simple as a color setting for the header background and iGoogle logo, or it can include multiple images and dynamic behavior.

A theme has one or more skins. A skin is a particular design for the iGoogle page. For example, you could have a theme that displays different skins depending on the time of day.

Each skin is represented in a themes specification by a different ConfigMap (configuration map). A theme is essentially a collection of configuration maps. “

Not to sound like a battery commercial but, for some reason Energizer batteries are lasting longer than the Duracel batteries I’ve used for years in my bluetooth Logitech mouse.

Duracel batteries normally last 3-4 days. The Energizer have been in there since last Monday and the low battery light has yet to start blinking. I may be forced to change my buying habits if this continues.

Photo by lynnieb (aka Linda) via Flickr.

Blizzard released another patch this morning for the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft just a week after patch 2.2.0 which added a ton of new features including Voice Chat. This latest patch adds new content for an Octoberfest style “brewfest”, Halloween-esque items and quests and a host of new graveyards.

For the uninitiated graveyards are where your spirit goes when you’re killed in the game (this can be frequently). Once you’ve been killed you must run your spirit back to your body to resume playing or take serious penalties and resurrect at the graveyard. Distances in the game are set to mimic real life distances and running from the graveyard to your body can take several minutes (10 minutes is the longest run I’ve ever had). More graveyards should help speed up game play (and satisfy the whiners who don’t like to run).

We just got back from the Apple store where I picked up one of the new aluminum wired Apple keyboards and I must say, it’s honestly the best keyboard I’ve ever used. No I mean it. I’m a peripheral sort of guy and this is really the best keyboard I’ve owned for both Mac and PC. Typing is VERY easy and really fluid.

We also grabbed the $19 iPod video cable from Apple. It works with any color iPod and plugs directly into the headphone jack. From there plug it into the RCA jacks of any TV or converter. No problem. Be sure to go into your Video Preferences on your iPod and enable TV out. You can set it to ask you each time so you have the option of showing it on TV or reviewing.