Ingredients for 3 persons:

• 400 gr. potatoes
• 100 gr. flour
• 1 egg

Everything has to be done quickly while the potatoes are still hot, so be careful not to burn your fingers.

"Gnocchi di patate" by ilmungo [?]

1. clean and boil the potatoes with their skin: Put the potatoes in the cold water and boil for around 20 minutes,
2. skin the potatoes directly when you get them out of the water. Be careful and hold them with a fork or a piece of cloth,
3. mash the potatoes,
4. add the egg and mix quickly before it cooks with a wooden spoon,
5. add 2/3 of the flour and mix with the wooden spoon,
6. on a clean surface, lay the rest of the flour and work the dough until you get a nice elastic consistency, merging with the rest of the flour,
7. cut the dough in four pieces and roll each of them on the floured surface in 1cm thick rolls,
8. cut the rolls in 3cm long pieces and place them on a tray,
9. sprinkle with olive oil,
10. cook in salted boiling water for 3-4 minutes until they float at the surface of the water.

"Making gnocchi" by ilmungo [?]

You can now eat them as a side dish with butter and sage or as a main dish with a sauce (tomato, ragü, etc.)

This userscript is an extension for flickr that will had a nice little sparkline with the evolution of the visits on your photos for the 28 last days.

Note that it will only work for users having already access to the flickr stats (i.e. with a pro account)

Here are some screenshots:

This script was developed for greasemonkey and not yet tested with Safari/Opera/Etc. If you happen to test it, let me know in the comments or by email.

For the installation, please follow these instructions:

1. Get Firefox
2. Install GreaseMonkey
3. restart Firefox
4. If you liked the script, think about helping me back and consider a small donation, click the paypal button on the right.
5. Click on the following icon and select "Install"
   

   Flickr More Sparkles

   1063 download(s) since 11 December 2008

This is a beta release of version 1.0 of the XCF Quick Look plugin. It is stable and should work with no problems, but the wilber-loves-apple team behind the development of this plugin wants to make sure it is ready for distribution with the Gimp.app package.

For now, it is distributed from this website, but is still need you to install the wilber-loves-apple Gimp.app package [2]. To get it to work, the installation is simple:

1. download Gimp.app from http://www.wilber-loves-apple.org/
2. install it where you want
3. download the following disk image (for Intel Leopard only)
   

   XCF Quick Look plugin (Leopard)

   5338 download(s) since 18 March 2008

1. right click on Gimp.app and choose "Show Package Contents"
2. Copy xcf_quicklook.qlgenerator to the package directory Contents/Library/QuickLook/ (create as needed).
3. launch Gimp.app at least once and enjoy.

I have been working with the folks from Wilber Loves Apple on a Quick Look plugin for displaying UFRaw sidecar .ufraw files.

You can preview the development result the .ufraw id file represents. This way, you can quickly view which sidecars you want to use to create versions of your RAW files [1].

This is a beta release. Please use this forum to report any problems.

1Screenshots

2Installation

Download the following

UFRaw Quick Look Plugin

Intel/Leopard

316 download(s) since 18 March 2008

, then mount it and copy the qlgenerator plugin it contains to your /Library/QuickLook folder [2].

1iEatBrainz is Dead

Final Update, November 2008

I hadn't tested iEatBrainz for a few month so I am not sure when this has happened but it seems that the servers are finally down, as MusicBrainz had announced a long time ago.

I am therefore not distributing the build for iEatBrainz anymore. If there is an interest in developping to get the new tagger compatible with Mac, I recommend you contact the Picard team and help them make it compatible with the Apple platform.

IEatBrainz development seems to be discontinued but it's developer had the great idea to release the sources on SourceForge. The version available around for download has never worked properly on my Intel based macbook and no one seemed to be ready to distribute a universal build.

Update Jay Tuley just contacted me to explain why a universal build had never been released. Basically, the TRM fingerprinting system provided by MusicBrainz will be switched off in the upcoming weeks/days. After that, even if you can run IEatBrainz, it won't find any result as the MusicBrainz servers won't be answering the requests.

This had been announced last october and is not the fault of the developer of IEatBrainz. I will leave the package up for a while if you want to try your luck. Once the servers will be switched off, the package will be removed and we will have to wait on a willing developer to take on the change required to support the new MusicBrainz interfaces.

When you want to extract a person with long hair from the foreground, it's often very difficult to select the hair as they are very thin and transparent and Everywhere. Using the lasso or the magic wand would be just impossible and forget about the path tool! Even the method introduced in Digital Photo Editing: Easy Selection is useless in that case.

What you need is a way to automatically select all this small bits of the picture and have semi transparent selections [1]. This is the technique introduced in this tutorial.

In this video tutorial, I show a full foreground extraction task that gets to this quick montage:

The idea is to use the inverted colour of the image to play with the colour contrast and automatically create a grayscale silhouette that can be used as to mask the hair.

You can jump to around 3mins in the video if you want to see only this technique as the video recaps quickly this technique to cut out the rest of the model with a layer mask.

This video presents the steps to take to extract thin or semi transparent shape with Gimp.

In this example, we had a very easy almost white background so it's easier to see the effect. However, this method will also work with a more complex background. You might however have to use it multiple times on smaller parts of the image with different settings for the curve and levels, depending on the colour contrast available.

Here is the different steps to follow:

1. duplicate the layer you want to cut out,
2. use the rectangular select tool and select around the specific part you want to work on and limit the layer boundaries to selection (under the layer menu),
3. We are now going to transform this layer to a mask for the hair. As we want a black and white mask, with the hair in white and the background in black, we start by inverting the colours of the layer [2],
4. the next step is to augment the black/white contrast to remove the unwanted details of the background. This is done by playing with the curve tool. Draw an S curve [3] and play with the points to get as much details as possible in the hair and remove all the noise in the black,
5. you should have a blueish/black layer, as we want it to be a black and white mask, desaturate with average values,
6. there will be some part of the layer that didn't come out white (like, in our example, the face), just draw in white with the paintbrush over these parts, beware not to destroy the work we just did on the hair. The important part of the hair mask are the hair "borders", so you can also go and paint the hair "mass" in full white, keeping the greyscale levels on the border,
7. if you still have too much noise in the background, you can use the threshold tool to clean it a bit. However, this tool will loose some of the details in the hairs, so don't go too far with it,
8. you will now have a pretty good black and white layer that can be transferred to a layer mask to extract the hair. The easiest is to go to the channel list and transfer one of the channel to selection,
9. go to your original layer, add a layer mask, filled in black (full transparency),
10. fill the selection, in the layer mask, with white colour. Only the hair and the head should now be shown from the original layer,
11. you can erase the layer we used to build the mask, and work directly on the mask of the original layer to extract the rest of the body (as shown at the beginning of the video).

This video will be useful for you to learn how to use the freeselect tool efficiently and will introduce the concepts of layer masks that greatly improve the edition of cutouts.

Because it uses standard tools, you could use it in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or other photo editing software with a decent toolbox. Here, the demo is done with Gimp, but I hope you'll be able to see how to do this with your preferred editing software.

The idea is quite simple and uses the fact that usually the front feature is contrasting with the background and often has a good contrast. It works in 4 steps:

1. draw a rough selection around the object to cut out with the free select tool,
2. change to the fuzzy select (magic wand) tool and in the options, set the threshold quite hight — around 30 should do it — and switch to substract mode,
3. click on the background around the object to cut out to deselect it,
4. transfer the selection to a layer mask and do corrections by painting in the mask.

1For Gimp Users

The Gimp in version over 2.4 introduces a new tool for extracting foreground object that is even easier to use but that is not discussed here. If you want to see how it works, check out this google video:

This action provides a more generic step for your workflow that will work with videos. Just select the playlist you want the files to be added to and it will do it for you. It can also create the playlist if needed.

The action will return the list of iTunes tracks that were created.

To use it, download the following package:

AddMediaToPlaylist.dmg

1393 download(s) since 20 September 2007

and install the action file in your ~/Library/Automator/ directory.

This action was inspired by an hint from MacOsXHints.com provides a basic applescript.

There are some subtleties in transferring this script to an action to fetch your list of playlist, support non English localisations and work with folders. Check out the script code if you want to learn a bit on how to implement complex applescript actions. If there is the demand for it, I might make a tutorial out of that.

The file is localized in French, English and Italian, if you want to make other translations, just let me know.

1 Principle

This is an action for Mac OS X Automator that takes a special path pattern and will try to rename the files it get in inputs according to that pattern.

We call it a "path pattern" because it can contain elements that will be replaced for each file with information coming for the meta data stored in the file.

1.1 Example of moving photos

Let's make an example. The script supports the EXIF meta data field included in photo files by your camera. It can therefore use them to move the images.

Example Results

Let's say you have a bunch of images that you would want to move in directories named from the date they were taken at, like:

• 2007
  • 08
    • 12
      • IMG_1.jpg
      • IMG_2.jpg
  • 07
    • 25
      • IMG_3.jpg
• 2006
  • 01
    • 28
      • IMG_4.jpg

You can set the path pattern parameter of the Automator action with the pattern: %Y/%m/%d/

The action will extract information from the EXIF data and replace the special markers in the pattern:

• %Y will be replaced by the year
• %m will be replaced by the month
• %d will be replaced by the day

the directory structure will be created and the file moved in the right directory.

There is more detail later on how the patterns work, but this is the basic idea.

2 Installation

Download and open the following disk image. Check out the license and move the MetaDataMove.action file in the directory /Library/Automator/ (for a particular user) or /Library/Automator/ (for all users) [1].

MetaDataMover download

2952 download(s) since 21 November 2008

Extract the archive and inside you will find MetaDataMover.action, move this file in the directory /Library/Automator/ (for a particular user) or /Library/Automator/ (for all users) [2].

3 Using the Action

Once installed, you will find the action in Automator under the Finder application. Just drag and drop it in the workflow just after an action that returns a list of files.

The action will return a list of the moved/renamed files.

Here are the option:

1. do you wish to copy or move the files, default is copy,
2. what path pattern should be used. This is the pattern for the moving/renaming of the file. The default is for EXIF patterns: %Y/%m/%d/,
3. in which root directory to put the new files. The path pattern will be applied from that directory. The default is the directory where the current file is,
4. you can check this option and follow the action by the "View Results" action from Automator to do a test run,
5. you can check this option if you are OK with the action overwriting existing file. The default is to not overwrite existing files, see 5.3.

4 Special Patterns Elements

Most of the pattern — except for the date notation in the EXIF case — elements follow a simple notation, they are the name of a field in the file metadata with columns (':') around. You can use more than once the same marker in the pattern if you wish.

The available meta data fields change according to the file type you are passing to the action. The main fields for photos, music files and PDF are discussed later. Generally, the action uses ExifTool by Phil Harvey and therefore, the fields read by this tool can be used, for more details, please see ExifTool tag names documentation.

The action also offers some basic pattern elements:

• :basename: is the name of the file, without extensions,
• :ext: is the extension of the file, with the period (.),
• :cnt: will be replaced by the clash avoidance (see 5.3) counter if a file with the same name already exists, otherwise, it will just be removed.

5 Detailed Behaviour

Here are the specifics on how the action deals with the different possible cases.

5.1 Trailing Slash

If the path pattern finishes with a /, then it is taken as the directory where the file should be moved, without being renamed.

5.2 File Renaming

If the path pattern doesn't finish with a /, the last part of the path is supposed to be the renaming pattern for the file. If it doesn't contain an extension (. followed by something), then the extension of the original file will be used.

5.3 File Clash avoiding

If the option overwrite is not checked, the action will avoid replacing an existing file with a file it is renaming. The action has two choices then:

• if the path pattern you specified uses the :cnt: special marker, it will replace this by a counter.
• otherwise, the action will add a counter at the end of the file name, just before the file extension. The action will start with the counter at 1 and try to write the file, if a file with the same counter already exist, it will increment the counter until it finds a new file name.

6 Introduction to Photo meta data

6.1 EXIF Date Patterns

The photo files containing EXIF metadata can use another special notation to extract the date when the photo was taken (as described in the previous example). The date pattern format is the one provided by the strftime tool. Check out its man page for details. Here are useful fields:

6.2 EXIF Patterns Elements

You can also tell the tool to extract other EXIF information by putting the EXIF field name between columns (:) in the pattern. For example, %Y/%m/%d/:Model:/ will put the photos in subdirectories by date and then by model of camera.

7 Introduction to Music files meta data

Most of the modern music file formats like mp3 support meta data fields to store the name of the track, the performing artist, etc... The action can extract these fields and can be used to organise a music collection automatically.

8 Organising PDF Documents

You can also use the automator action to organise your pdf documents if they contain the right metadata. If the author of the file has tagged it with the right information, you can extract his name, etc... etc...

9 Other file formats supported

This automator action is based on the great ExifTool library. It will support all metadata format supported by that library. For details on each format and the tags availlable for that format, see the exiftool tag names documentation page or go directly to the format you are interested in from this list:

• JPEG
• EXIF
• IPTC
• XMP
• GPS
• GeoTiff
• ICC_Profile
• PrintIM
• Photoshop
• Canon
• CanonCustom
• Casio
• FujiFilm
• HP
• JVC
• Kodak
• Leaf
• Minolta
• Nikon
• NikonCapture
• Olympus
• Panasonic
• Pentax
• Ricoh
• Sanyo
• Sigma
• Sony
• Unknown
• DNG
• MinoltaRaw
• CanonRaw
• KyoceraRaw
• SigmaRaw
• JFIF
• FlashPix
• APP12
• AFCP
• CanonVRD
• FotoStation
• PhotoMechanic
• MIE
• ID3
• Jpeg2000
• BMP
• PICT
• PNG
• MNG
• MIFF
• PDF
• PostScript
• ITC
• Vorbis
• FLAC
• APE
• MPC
• MPEG
• QuickTime
• Flash
• Real
• RIFF
• AIFF
• ASF
• DICOM
• HTML
• Extra
• Composite
• Shortcuts

10 Development and Localisation

You can get the development version of this action from the repo git repository.

If you want to propose a path, first clone the repository on your local drive:

make modifications, commit them to your local repository and format a patch for emailling to me with:

The script is already localised in French, Italian and English. If you want to propose a new localisation, contact me.

Changelog

15 February 2008

• update version of ExifTool to 7.18

13 February 2008 first update

• allow - in path pattern and tag values. This was previously replaced by _,
• trim blank spaces around tag values,
• use file creation/modification date if there is no other data information in the meta data,
• some little optimizations,
• replace / in tag names with _.

• 10g Poppy Seeds
• juice from half a lemon
• juice from half a lime
• zest from both the lime and the lemon
• 100g butter
• 100g sugar
• 125g Demerara sugar
• 2 eggs
• 4 table spoons of milk
• 275g plain flour
• 150ml natural yoghurt
• 1 tea spoon of bicarbonate

Start by mixing the butter and the sugars together then add the lemon, lime zest and juice, poppy seeds, the eggs, the milk and the yoghurt. Mix well and finally add the flour and bicarbonate.

Place paper cups in your muffin tin [1] and distribute evenly the mix. Don't fill them out too much as it will raise while cooking.

Cook in a preheated oven at 190oC for around 30 minutes. Check with the point of a knife that it's cooked inside; the knife should stay dry and clean.