Blog from the Loft

This has been a very Apple centric month. I finally upgraded my very first mac, a pre-Aluminium iMac from Tiger to Leopard. The upgrade process was very easy. The next morning, I discovered that my new iPhone is no longer recognized by iTunes ! It worked before the upgrade.
The problem only exists with iTunes. When [...]

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Yes. I got one. Spent total of six and a half hours. Worth it? Yes. Weather was nice, a little hot but not too much. Apple staff were very nice. Especially Alex — She worked the line. Gave out (free) water, candy, went to get sunblock and more candy, even picked up a pizza for [...]

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Just wrote up a review for this little scanner. Great automatic document feeder. Great scan quality, and speed. Just wish it is cheaper. Read and watch the full review here on the review page.

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I have been using the text mode emacs up to now. On Windows (yikes!) I uses the xemacs with windows extension, which is pretty nice. Quick googling found me Carbon Emacs. It has been updated, universal binary and Leopard. Highly recommended !

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I started working on one of my internationalized applications on the new Mac. I realized I did not install “gettext”, which is required by the make-messages and compile-messages scripts. I want to avoid installing things into OS X if I can. Then I found the easy way out:
1. Install poedit for os x. I need [...]

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I started using Leopard, and I swore my keyboard froze once in a while. I thought it was iTerm or something. Until this morning Apple software upgrade told me that there is an upgrade, and it solves the problem. So I was not seeing things. It was a bug! Read and download the update here [...]

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Part of the reason I was waiting to switch from using Windows XP (gasp) as my Django development platform to OS X is that it is actually easier to install the platform on XP. Windows does not come with any of the tools, so it was a matter of installing the version that I need. [...]

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is it just me? If you go to smartusa.com, try to sign up on the email list (click “insider”), and enters nothing on the contact form, you get an error saying “required fields are in red”. However, nothing is in Red. Does not work with Firefox nor Safari on the Mac. Yikes! I thought the [...]

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Seems like a normal workflow to me. When I import my pictures from my camera, I import them into a “year” project and a “year-month” album. That become their default “location” in Aperture. However as I arrange my pictures, I want to move them into other projects and albums.
Because of the way Aperture use projects [...]

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I finally got my home digital music solution implemented. You’ll need:

one 20inch Apple iMac
iTunes
FrontRow
Logitech Harmony 880 Remote Control
A sound system with a receiver that supports digital music input (e.g. an Onkyo TX-SR674 7.1 Channel Up-Converting A/V Receiver

Three key things make this work:

the iMac screen is big enough to be used across the room when [...]

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