Future Topics

These notes are probably not going to be understandable but if you scan you may get a look at what will come soon.

Applescript
Blogger- control and apple c, can't switch tabs,
Links: technorati, blogroll, stumbleupon, bookmarks synchronizer
firefox extensions
Post to metaefficient about monitors.
talk about future monitor tech?
Ask Christian why he used reply instead of commenting for monitors
Google answers (also send to Blaise)

Powerbooklove

Soft
Address book photos show up in mail.
Changing desktop photos.
JuhNuh Sayqua - The lists I make do not explain it. And I have had trouble explaining to my brother what makes the difference but the mac is much easier to use. It feels friendly.

Hard
Monitor turns off. There are times when I'm listening to music when I don't need the monitor on at all. My Dell never allowed this.
Sweet keyboard.
Many times runs very cool.
Long battery life.

Powerbookhate

• Keychain keeps prompting me for password. You are supposed to be able to reenable applications but I don't see them listed in order to do that. This problem started after I changed my keychain password then changed it back.
• iTunes doesn't have way to do a direct import of mp3 files from internet. This means two copies of the files.
  
• iPod doesn't seems to support shuffling of playlists.
• Powerbook wakes from sleep to check email. Not sure how to turn off.
• Dock stickies often do not allow new characters at end.
  

Non-Apple

• Firefox doesn't have way of disabling extensions without unistalling them.
• Firefox opens TextEdit on startup.
  
• Neooffice lags behind typing when working on an encrypted file. This might be fixed with beta java 1.4 updates.
• Neooffice has slow startup. See above.
  

12 inch superdrive Powerbook with Panther

Soft

• Mail program- "reply all" replies to sender too. No bullets. There is somewhat of a workaround with special characters but the option to insert this doesn't show up for me. It does show up for others on my computer. (Apple tech support was not able to fix this but they did clear away all my old emails while trying.)
• Address book- has no way of telling you which addresses are unfiled. In minimized mode you can click forward to next address but not in max (it would be useful to scroll in max for bulk editing.)
• Firefox crashes a lot.
• Apple techsupport seems as bad as PC support for complex questions
  
• Dock Inability to distinguish programs- The taskbar was much better at allowing me to distinguish what my minimized documents were. A text label was better than a tiny snapshot with an even tinier icon. I have my icons set to the largest size but all I can distinguish is some white and grey which I assume to be text and then a blotch in the right corner.
• Dock often has too many windows for same app- iChat has three.
• Dock loads mini-windows when I would prefer main one. Often I will click on Firefox icon and it will load the download window.
  
• Always creating new finder windows by accidentaly clicking outside the browser.
  
• Computer appears to lock when switching users- I believe what is happening is that the account not currently being used shutsdown due to non-use so that when you switch over and the screen is dark and appears non-responsive you may think it is locked.Spotlight
• Spotlight can't seem to search on exact strings. i.e. "these words in a row". It is not instantaneous and difficult to use while it is searching because link placement changes as the list grows.
  
• Excessive power use- closed it disharges in about a day. The thinkpad I used seemed like about a week.
  

Hard

• Even with Ignore Accidental Trackpad on I keep going to strange places in the document.
• Sometimes noisy and hot even when not doing much. (Battery recharging?). Note: This problems seems to have disappeared.
• 12 inches ends up being too small for multiple docs.
  

Uploading images part II

Since I can't get Iphoto to import I installed the Canon ImageBrowser utitlity and tried to upgrade to the current version- 5.01. After attempting to upgrade I got message "int error" and then the program halted. Instructions on the site indicated I might need to install an earlier version so I downloaded 3.6 and tried again but got the same message. This indicated that maybe 3.2 would be good but this was not available on the site.
I called Canon which was quick to respond, polite and unhelpful. After having me do meaningless tasks they blamed Apple.

Update:I've been able to install with Apple's Image Capture which works much faster than Iphoto did. I would like to get the Canon browser working so that I won't have to manually rotate photos.

TV Power consumption

I want a new TV. I've been thinking about a projector because in addition to viewing it might be useful for some projects I've been thinking of doing. I wanted to check the environmental correctness of this so I went to metaefficient and it mentioned the low power consumption for LCDs as compared to CRTs. I did a bit of searching for a while but could find nothing about how projectors compared to LCDs.
I continued to search for a while becaue I'm stubborn and seem to like to not work on anything productive. I remembered there were those stickers with the star that I was always removing from electronics. I searched around some more for "ratings" "eco" and "star" before finally landing on energystar . Energystar has no specific ratings on any product or categories of products.
Amazon had energy information where the manufacturer decided to trumpet it. I finally found energy consumption stats at B&H.
I still have no other info about other environmental concerns that might help compare the different technologies (eg manufacturing processes, durability). But my basic finding for a sampling of comparable sizes was very surprising: CRT (Sony 36 inch 240 watts), LCD (Sharp 36inch 224watt), Plasma (Sony 37 inch 350Watts). (I would choose a smaller size but plasma screens seems to start at 37 inches.
The popular suggestion that LCD is multiple times lower than CRT (metaefficient suggestion, Viewsonic, etc ) may need to be reexamined. The indication that LCD and Plasma are roughly equivalent may not be right.
It is hard to compare a projector since it doesn't have a fixed size but the one I am looking at the Epson Powerlite S1 (1400 ANSI lumens) is 200 Lumens and should project over a much larger area.

Before finishing I decided to check if this discrepancy was due to the larger sizes of the TVs I was looking at. There a differences here but nowhere near what is stated in articles 14 inch CRT 60 watts , 14 inch LCD 40 watts).
*Obviously there will be differences between manufacturers but this further indicates that the type of technology is not the best way to predict power consumption.

Google's hung up on search

Here's a hell of a lot of steps to add a link to categories to your blog
How to use delicious for blogger. You can manage to get the actual links in your blog by using Technorati tags inserted inside using Greasemonkey and then using the results of searches as the links. But

• It's a bit slow as the search gets generated each time.
• One time a character was dropped and it made the links seventy pixels tall instead of 70% of the rest of the pixels. Maybe this was my fault.
  
• Sometimes the 70% text is difficult to read.
• It's not going to be perfect because it will be search based.
• I would like to have users be directed to a category automatically when they enter. (Probably and easy JavaScript hack.)

Google seems hung up on search. Sometimes pre-defined structured data can be a good thing. It's why Yahoo's People Finder returns a few likely results with their address and phone number while searching for someone's name in Google returns information about the summer camp attendance of somebody's father.

iPhoto poops on me

• I've attempted to upload from my Canon s45 three times and it craps out.
• iPhoto's folder and rolls make no sense.
  Supposedly I should be able to preserve the information contained in my old file structure by moving folders into iphoto one at a time. See this from apple's site:
  

  You can also drag individual photos or an entire folder from the Finder into iPhoto's photo viewing area. If you drag a folder, a film roll is created with the folder's name. If the folder you import contains subfolders, film rolls are created with each subfolder's name.
  

  
  I have found this doesn't work. Update: What may work is to be in a folder and then do the import from there.
  

• I am unable to create new rolls. Mostly this is grayed out but if you go to the top of the library folder and select a few photos it isn't. Even then when I execute the command nothing happens. I have never had a roll besides last roll.
  Update: My new take on rolls is that they aren't supposed to work unless you are importing them from the camera. This makes intuitive sense except that I would still think you should be able to create a new roll.