So after starting to use Maperture to geotag my photos, I’ve discovered that exported versions don’t include the GPS EXIF data (masters are ok). A few people have noticed this problem(1, 2), and there is a “fix.” This fix involves storing your piccies outside the Aperture library, which seems like a really sucky option to me.
I’ve found that exporting a project, and then reimporting it is an alternative solution. Evidently something doesn’t get updated when Maperture changes the original files (though the metadata turns up in Apertures info), but this gets re-done when the project is reimported.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t support DNG files. It will let you try and tag them, and adds the “Geotagged” keyword, but doesn’t edit or add the GPS exif data.
If you don’t use garageband on your mac, you can remove all the files in /Library/Application Support/Garageband and get about 2Gb of free space.
Instead of deleting mine, I shifted it to an external hard drive. Next time I started Garageband, it asked me to point to the new location. From googling the issue, it’s not clear whether you can reinstall the files if you delete them permanently. There appear to be some versions of Leopard that came with a second disk that has the files. My Leopard came on a single DVD.
MSNBC has a very cute rss reader… I use Newsfire which seems to work ok, though now seems a bit short on bells and whistles.
Make sure you spell authorized_keys(2) with a ‘Z’ when creating the public key file after running ssh-keygen! It took me a while to catch on that my spelling it with an S was stopping it from working (tutorials here and here for example, or google ssh keygen). If you don’t enter a passphrase the ssh will be passwordless, so don’t let your computer get stolen if you opt for this…
Always running out of space on your computer? Have iTunes and an iPod or two, and a lot of photos? I just cleared out 3Gb of thumbnails for my iPods that I never look at. Just remove the folder “iPod Photo Cache” from your iPhoto or Aperture library.
I haven’t felt the need for a playstation for many years, not until I saw a demo of this clever PS3 puzzle game. A cross between your typical platform game and one that M.C. Escher would have made.
So I found this old perl module Astro::IRAF::CL.pm which is a perl interface to the IRAF cl. It’s rather old and doesn’t work because the ecl is too high tech for the old module. I fixed this by changing the CL.pm file on line 127:
my $t = Expect->spawn('cl') || croak "Cannot spawn CL: $!";
to
my $t = Expect->spawn('cl -old') || croak "Cannot spawn CL: $!";
so that the module uses the old cl rather than the extended one. I also changed the maximum line length allowed in the _break_into_strings subroutine to stop error messages. I ran into trouble with too long lines (help pages say see hconfig$iraf.h, mine is a binary however) so put it back. All seems to work fine….
Here’s a clever way to show a bunch of images, good ones too…
Also, I like the way Aperture 2 shows the photos inside an album with a mouseover.
I recently realised (from the Aperture forums I think) that for the Aperture vault feature to work nicely one needs to have a Mac OS formatted drive to backup to. Previously my external drive was DOS formatted so I could read it from my PC, and the backup took forever. I also had this problem, which appears to have gone away, though I’m not sure if it was related. Now with my Mac OS Extended partition, the vault backup of my 25Gb library doesn’t even take a minute.
I’ve been playing with Hugin, an application for making panoramic images from a set of overlapping photos. Here’s an example, which shows how the images are screwed around to make things line up… in this case I didn’t take different exposures into account when the photos were taken.
