Ok, I really like wallpapers. I have ~300 now. That’s too many to select manually. So I use OS X wallpaper shuffling function. It picks one at random at the time you set, I chose 5 mins. Great. Except…I gave up a dedicated wallpapers folder awhile ago. It was getting much to large to be useful. After much rearranging, I sorted my ENTIRE pictures folder solely by the content of the images. Great for finding things. Not so great for keeping the 400×900 images away from the wallpaper shuffler.

So, now what? One idea was an album in iPhoto. This has the little problem of having to add every damn wallpaper to iPhoto. I actually tried this method once, but it proved way too much work. This had to be done directly in the filesystem. Tonight, I had a great idea! Spotlight, the built in search! It can save a canned search as a smart folder. The difference between a regular folder and a smart folder is kind of like the difference between a regular playlist and a smart playlist in iTunes. A regular playlist contains items you dragged in there, a smart playlist contains things that match a criteria. So I wanted it to look for wallpapers.

Ok, that was easy. But, problem. The wallpaper selector evidently will not take a smart folder as a valid wallpaper storage directory! Oops! Ok, now what. Well, will it take an alias? A quick test showed it does! So I made a dedicated wallpapers folder, which contains only aliases. It also contains the smart folder, which makes getting those aliases easy. Anything tagged as a wallpaper shows up in the smart folder, which can be sorted by Date Modified so new wallpapers are easy to find. So while there appears to be a dedicated wallpapers folder, it contains only pointers to the real images in their proper locations, sorted by content. The wallpapers pref pane never knows the difference! w00t!

Ok, you are now thinking, “dude, this whole system relies on the image being tagged as a wallpaper somehow! What if the word ‘wallpaper’ was never added to the image metadata before it was put up for download? Are you gonna put that stuff in one by one??” Nope. This is where OS X starts getting REALLY awesome. Each file has a field attached to it, labeled “Spotlight Comments”. Anything you type here is indexed with the file by the metadata server, which Spotlight uses for its lookups. If you add the word “wallpaper” to this field, a search for “wallpaper” returns the image, even if there was nothing in the normal metadata about wallpapers.

But doing “Get Info” and adding that word for hundreds of images? fuckno. Still a lot of work. But computers were built so we wouldn’t have to do the same crap over and over and over. To the rescue comes Snow Leopard’s contextual services menu, and the OS X Automator program, which can take a series of actions and make them into a service. There is a built in action for “Append to spotlight comments”. I simply set this one up with the text ” wallpaper” (the space was in case there was stuff already there, and saved it. So….select all the files you want to tag and Finder > Services > Tag as Wallpaper. Done.

If you want that Service for your Mac, you can download it here. Unzip it and copy it to your ~/Library/Services folder. I am 95% sure you will need to be running Snow Leopard for it to work.

I really wanted to. It seemed like a such a great idea. Everything just syncs between my devices, file storage online from iDisk….

iDisk is ridiculous. It’s like Dropbox, but worse. The Dropbox folder can be navigated in Finder just like any other folder. It IS just a folder. The iDisk, obnoxiously, mounts as it’s own volume. Meaning you’re stuck seeing the damn thing on your desktop, with no apparent way to make it go away save for hiding all external drives. Not to mention it’s appearance on lists of drives in programs like iStat. You can symlink folders into Dropbox, and Dropbox will follow the symlink and sync the target as though it was in the Dropbox folder. For reasons unclear, symlinking a folder into the iDisk produces a “You can’t have symbolic links on your iDisk” message, instead of just bouncing the sync-er to the target folder. And did I mention there is no Linux client for iDisk? Whereas there IS one for Dropbox, meaning the ~/Dropbox folder on both my Macbook and my Linux box are kept synced with each other as well as the cloud? Lastly, did I mention Dropbox syncs a hell of a lot faster and more predictably? As in, you change a file, and it then syncs immediately, taking only as long as you’d expect to send the changes over the internets.

Now, syncing data. Supposedly the awesome thing. I would be free from syncing my iPod constantly to update my calendar and notes. Well, first problem. Notes don’t sync over the air to iPod Touches. They sync over the air to other Macs, and they sync through iTunes to iPods….but for reasons that are also unclear, they do not sync over the air to iPods. For that matter, Safari bookmarks don’t sync either, despite, again, syncing to the iPod via iTunes, and from one Mac to another over the air. (Yeesh, I think this one even works from a Mac to a Windows box).

Also, it seems rather haphazard as to when things actually DO sync. Exactly what triggers my iPod’s calendar to sync with my Mac’s is beyond me. It just seems to go when it feels like it at some point after I wake the iPod up and open the calendar app. I’m basically left doing a magic dance and making an event out of syncing my calendar, just like before, except without the USB cord. Except it really is a ritual dance this time, since I have no idea how to actually trigger the sync beyond opening the calendar and hoping. Unlike iTunes, which syncs immediately on connection, and tells you what it is doing throughout the process. Honestly, I think wifi iPod syncing would get this all done at least as well. I’m sure Apple will get to that one of these days.

Oh, and in case you forgot, the old song and ritual dance is still required to sync Notes and Bookmarks. Also, forget about your Contacts syncing until you actually open the Contacts app on the iPod. And even then, it will take several minutes. Unless you quit the Contacts app, then you have to go back to start. Syncing data through iTunes was as amazing as I had envisioned it to be. MobileMe, I envisioned, would scale that up and streamline it to use the internet instead of relying on the iPod sync. That is not the case. At all.

So, impressions on my free 60 day trial? VERY unimpressed. I will not be renewing. This is simply not what I was expecting. Based on how well Dropbox worked, and how well Apple’s own data sync via iTunes worked, I was expecting a magic combination of the two. What I got was, by comparison, under-featured, unpredictable, and just plain annoying. Seriously. Apple? You can do so much better than this. Get on it.

I just used linked my Linux’s box’s Folding@home log file into it, so I can view it anytime, anywhere.*

*Unless I accidentally modify the file, then Dropbox replaces my symlink with the new version. Hence why their wiki warns to only do this with folders, not files.

w00t!

Yes, this is in HD! Go watch it at Vimeo.com, not here, it looks much better as the 720p non-embedded version.

Hey, I haven’t posted in awhile! The main reason being Facebook has mostly replaced this blog as being my “personal news feed”. You may have noticed. I also shook up the links section a little bit, namely I spun off celebrity blogs into their own section, as it had the potential to get a little mixed up over there. And I added some new ones to the personal blog roll. Mostly all that was done after paging through Google Reader, and noting the blogs folder there contained a bunch of entries that weren’t on the sidebar there. And this particular skin arranges all links and categories alphabetically, sorry, nothing I can do there that I can find. Also, a note about the celeb section: the requirement to be in there is that the “celeb” in question actually makes the post themselves. None of those “glorified press release ‘blogs’” will be included. By and large, it’s for blogs I read not because I know the person, but because I like their work in one way or another.

And I really should post here more, maybe with more detailed thoughts, or, heaven forbid, pictures or something. I don’t know. This page is not dead, oh, heck no!

Me and my laser pointer! Also, I got Final Cut Studio, and made this while playing with it.

Also, the status of this blog……you may be noticing I post on it a lot less these days. That’s because I formerly used it as a sort of personal news feed. That function has been mainly delegated to Facebook, so I mainly only post here when I need to say something a lot longer.

http://kanyelicio.us/

God bless the internet.

Lulz.

Ok, it will be a week tomorrow! So far, so good. I wanted to sit around with the OS for awhile before posting my thoughts. What’s the verdict? Well…..part of me wants to write “meh”, but I think that is a little too harsh. When Apple sells something for $30, you know you probably aren’t getting anything mind blowing.

First the good: It’s better than Leopard. That’s the good news in a nutshell. I can’t think of anything it’s slower at, and it’s pretty slim. A barebones install takes just under 8.5GB. RAM usage is about the same.

What’s different? I’ve kept a text document on my desktop I could add things to. Some of my favorites:

-Lock on sleep/screensaver can be put on a delay, so it doesn’t require a password right away

-The Spaces icon. When you are switching spaces, it does not have an arrow, instead the white box that shows your active space slides. This is one of quite a few new Core Animation effects. Another one is when you click and drag the selection box on the desktop, after you let go, it fades out rather than dissapearing.

-You can minimize to dock icon! Hiding is no longer needed! Yes, there is an option to make the little yellow traffic light kick the window behind it’s application icon rather than to right side of the dock. So you don’t have to use the hide function to get rid of window without cluttering up the Dock. Which brings us to….

-New Expose! It now shows the windows in a grid with labels below them. It’s a lot cleaner looking than the old one. It also shows minimized windows as tiny icons at the bottom. You can also trigger it on an app by clicking and holding the app’s Dock icon rather than using F10. (F10 still works, if you prefer. F9 still triggers All Window mode, and F11 still clears the desktop)

-System Profiler shows network connection type in the Network overview. (Ethernet speed, Wifi mode ([a/b/g/n] and speed, Wifi channel, S/N ratio, and BSSID). AirPort menu shows signal strength for available networks, and can be option-clicked for the same info as System Profiler. Quite a few of the built-in extras can be option-clicked for extra stuff too. For example, the volume menu, when option clicked, can change the I/O devices or launch Sound Preferences

-There’s a cool new monospace font called “Menlo”, which replaces the venerable Monaco font. (You can see it in my new header up there^)

-System Profiler shows HDD rpm speed, assuming the drive supports sending this info. Also, “Ethernet Devices” is it’s own section under Hardware, which will list your dedicated NICs (ethernet chipsets and wifi cards) and some info about them, like the interface the connect to the system with. There’s also a section for WWAN devices.

Ok, the bad? It doesn’t feel THAT different. Sure, there’s the nice little touches mentioned above, along with other stuff. It honestly doesn’t seem THAT much faster to me. Maybe to folks with older hardware, but Leopard generally didn’t seem that bad to me. Although maybe I’ve already started to get used to it. Oh….and K64….

You may be aware of a huge flap by some people about Snow Leopard’s x64 version of the kernel, called K64. Namely, that only the Penryn and Nehalem Xserves boot it by default. And many machines with 64bit CPUs cannot boot it at all, because they either have a 32bit EFI, or an arbitrary lock. (The 32bit EFI thing is really an arbitrary lock itself, as a 64bit loader is not needed to start the 64bit kernel.) Many people are up in arms over this, apparently not realizing what it means. K32 can run 64bit apps, which is where 64bit mostly counts. K32 also supports PAE, so unless your machine has more than 64GiB of RAM, it will all be recognized, and 64bit apps can access all of it, even if they are running atop K32. So, essentially, K64’s changes:

-Increases RAM limit from 64GiB to 16TiB
-May be slightly faster, assuming everything works with it.
-32bit kexts cannot load, so odds are not everything works with it. Kexts include drivers, so if you have something lacking a 64bit driver, you will need to run K32 to use it
-Despite being capable of being faster, many report it is not, likely due to compatibility issues.

For the record, I have a Mac that can boot K64, and I know of multiple ways of enabling it. I have not bothered, there really isn’t a point.

Oh, and Snow Leopard stops doing the “Lable GiB as GB” thing. Unlike Linux though, which labels it GiB, the Snow Leopard solution is to count drive space in base 10. This is NOT how the system actually counts it, as the df utility and third party software that queries disk usage, like iStat*, still shows base 2. But, System Profiler, Finder, and Disk Utility all show sizes as base 10, and there is no apparent way to make them show base 2, even with a proper “GiB” label. I have, however, been inspired by this to use the proper terms and labels, so I will be referring to RAM as “GiB” and “MiB” from now on. Deal with it if you don’t like it.

*The new version of iStat Menus has an option to show base 10 instead.

…is going to be awesome. (yes, I have launch day delivery on Snow Leopard, it just hasn’t shown up in the widget yet)