Categories
Editorial Other

have you pleased anyone lately?

I was having a tinker with MarsEdit last night, trying to get it to run a preview of my blog posts as I work on them. Still can’t get it working but in the process of reading up on it I read found a very interesting post on the developer Daniel Jalkut’s blog about his attitude to ‘approval seeking’ as facilitated by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. It so closely echoed my feelings on the subject that it could have been written for me or even by me. Here’s where it really hit home:

Many folks use the internet as a valuable tool for research and connectedness, but also as a dubious source for ego-validation. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. How many of the following questions do you care to know the answer to?

How many people are following me on Twitter?
How many hits on my home page?
Has any high-profile blogger linked to me recently?
How many people are @responding to my tweets?
How many comments on my latest blog post?
How early does my name show up in a Google search?
How many people are buying my app/t-shirt/CD/craft?
Who left positive feedback on eBay/Amazon/iTunes?

If you’re interested in the answers to these questions, it’s probably because you are concerned on some level about whether you matter or not. But more specifically, when it comes to the internet and other people you may reach by way of it, all these questions boil down to whether you have pleased anybody lately.

I ticked ‘Yes’ to five of those, but only because the last two don’t really apply to me. Ouch.

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Categories
Photographic Pictorial

b&w details in 50mm

In the process of putting this blog back together using a new WordPress template I wanted to post some more image-heavy stuff to try out the new look, so what better excuse to pop on my shamefully underused 50mm f/1.8 Nikon lens and have a wander around my place of work. Much easier than trekking out somewhere exotic in London in the middle of the coldest winter in 30 years!

All these shots were made using the D700’s B&W mode, something I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole on other cameras but which works quite well on the D700 due to the options available for tweaking the tonality and the contrast. I personally prefer my B&W shots a little bit punchier than I was able to muster using those options so some of these have had their shadow and highlight levels tweaked in CS4, but otherwise as shot.

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Categories
How-Tos iOS & Mac how-tos

how to sync your Macs with Dropbox – for free!

Dropbox.jpgHappy Christmas, everyone! I hope you all got what you wanted and/or what you deserved. 😉

My Christmas treat to myself was to spend the evening geeking out with my Dropbox setup. It’s a free service that basically allows you to keep certain files constant across multiple machines. You create an account, download software to the machines you want to use and it creates a folder called ‘Dropbox’ on those machines. Whatever you put in the Dropbox on your computer is uploaded to the server space (where it’s secure unless you mark it ‘Public’), and is subsequently downloaded to the Dropbox folders on all the other machines you’ve set it up with, maintaining consistency no matter what machine you use.

It’s probably easier to understand if you just try it. It’s completely free, works with Macs, PCs and iPhones – sign up via my links and you’ll even get 250MB extra space on top of the standard 2GB, as will I. Plus, if you follow five of the six ‘Getting Started’ tips once you’ve signed up you get another 250MB free!

I’ll admit I wasn’t sure what to use it for at first. However, combined with the free iPhone app that accesses your server space, I found it was useful for syncing work documents like callsheets or scripts, as well as being a simple and free way to distribute large files like zip archives of photos for friends and clients.

Finally, I started using it instead of the Sites folder for storing the local copies of the code that runs my websites so that I can make edits on my iMac and be able to pick them up later on the laptop, with no effort copying the files between the two machines.

However, I felt like I was missing out on some cool uses, so I started investigating syncing the settings of regularly used applications ike Safari, iCal, Address Book, Things and 1Password, and this is how I did it.

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Categories
Editorial Other

it’s tinker time

I like to mess about with my websites – gives me something to do during the holidays/days off other than watching TV, drinking beer at 11am or arguing with idiots on Eurogamer. 🙂

This week I’ve latched onto a lovely new theme called ‘The World in 35mm‘ for Pixelpost. It’s working nice over at The Daily Exposure and it basically solves my long-standing problem with comments and photograph info in that it elegantly hides and displays both below the photo, on the same page, with no fancy stuff that people using browsers like IE will struggle with.

My current info/comment solution was a hand-tweaked version of Lightbox, which is pretty cool but apparently doesn’t play so nice with said stupid browsers. I think this will work a lot better.

As I haven’t really got any idea how to run a test-version of my site privately while I tweak, I’m going to have to start faffing around with the live version so if you visit over the next few hours and days you’ll probably notice it looking a bit odd. Feel free to laugh at my appalling coding skillz as I tweak and tweak again!

Cheers, folks.

UPDATE: I’ve had a good look at how the template is written and the work that would be involved trying to make my current look fit into the way 35mm does things, and it’s far too much effort.

So, new approach: I’m going to try and rip out the info/comment code and implant it into my baby…

UPDATE 2: Holy crap this is far too much effort all round. I’m going back to my original plan – make 35mm look like my glass eye…

UPDATE 3: And it’s done! I need to tweak the About page as it’s not ideal (how the heck do you do columns properly without forcing their position?) and the News page needs to be tweaked to match the top menu properly, and I need to do the Dark CSS sheet so that the Styleswitcher works, but to all intents and purposes, BOO-YA. That was a whole morning of fun 😉

Categories
Editorial Other

…and we’re back!

Further to yesterday’s unpleasant discovery that something in my back end was b0rked, I went ahead and upgraded all the Pixelpost files to the latest version and that appears to have fixed it. Who knows what I did…

I hope your Christmas week is going nicely. I’m off to do some food shopping and to think about how to rejuvenate my blog sans comments and try to make it fun for me again…

See you round!