The Tao of Mac

Slightly reduce the horror

Rui Carmo — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:38:04 GMT

Essential survival tip for using iTunes 10 if you have aesthetic sensitivities or allergies to bad UI.

Twitter for iPad: Sharing content in Tweets

Rui Carmo — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:56:05 GMT

Took them long enough. But what about a decent upgrade for the Mac client, where loads of folk have been pining for some feature parity?

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I, for one, welcome my new amphibian overlords

Rui Carmo — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:55:00 GMT

It’s been a roller-coaster year – a manic post-Xmas season, a most welcome second kid, a miscellany of stress-related and personal annoyances and the omnipresent, niggling, scurrying rat race that is going on in mobile as everyone and their dog has a go at competing directly with the iPhone or riding the social media tsunami and getting beached on the reefs of mass-market irrelevance.

And I’ve just changed jobs.

The lenght of time and the patience involved in making it all come together would be daunting (and, let’s face it, quite boring) to recount here, but the short version is that after eleven years and five months at Vodafone Portugal (neé Telecel), I had a great farewell lunch yesterday with a bunch of my closest colleagues and friends, turned in my gadgetry (including, sadly, my iPhone), did a quick(ish), but sadly incomplete tour of farewell round the building and, this morning, after an order of magnitude shorter commute, stepped leisurely¹ into the Portugal Telecom headquarters and sat down at my new desk at SAPO.

Which just happens to be Celso’s old desk – an excellent omen, given that he’s my new boss and all (he, in turn, upgraded to a rather fascinating office that I think best never to write about for a number of entertaining reasons).

As you might expect, what lead up to this wasn’t an easy (or quick) decision to make, especially considering that I’m not getting any younger, have two kids (but slightly less than the usual amount of dogs, guppies or cats i.e., zero) and that regardless of my personal feelings and expectations changing jobs these days (and in a country where careers tend to be long, straight and conservative) is seen as more of a risk than an opportunity.

And considering the current state of affairs in the business world and Portugal’s widespread reputation of being one of the most inflexible and unrewarding job markets in Europe for both companies and professionals, I would be stark raving mad if I didn’t rate this as the best thing that could possibly have happened to me – even before the great welcome I got.

Most people would, at this point, wax lyrical about change and how it is a constant in the tech industry, moving on smoothly to reminisce fondly about their previous tenure. However, and due to my own rules, I can’t – although it’s impossible to leave people I’ve known for over a decade without thanking them for everything I’ve learned and the good fun that was had.

But I had to move on. I’ve been wanting to reset my career for a good while now, largely because long periods of immersion into any corporate culture (irrespective of company or industry) inevitably blunt your edge – despite having to part with some of my best friends (now scattered a bit throughout Europe) and some pretty interesting projects, I needed something completely different to do.

And, just as importantly, a completely different environment to do it in².

So a year or so back I started to consider my options, starting with the extreme premise that I would leave the telco world altogether. This partly to prepare myself for the most radical change possible, and partly because that would be the easiest way to do a full-on reset: I looked into going into “pure” sales for consumer electronics, detouring back into business marketing (in tech, but outside telco), re-joining consulting outfits, etc.

But opportunity knocked and I simply couldn’t miss the (truly once in a lifetime) opportunity of joining SAPO because, amongst many other things:

For those of you not working in Portugal, SAPO is the best Internet business bar none. It’s literally the best (and highest stakes) game in town
Portugal Telecom relies on them (er, us) as a steady source of innovation
The organization demonstrably believes in creating and focusing internal know-how locally, instead of systematically farming out development and integration
As a result, people I know, respect and admire have been slowly gravitating there for years, to build some of the more polished stuff I’ve had to compete against in desktop, mobile and TV
If I didn’t do it now, I’d regret it for decades to come

So I, er… Hopped over. There are a number of physical, mental (and, I’m told, dress code) adjustments to make, of course, but I’ve got an interesting team and quite a few challenging things to do already – which, as usual, I won’t mention.

In fact, I don’t know what I’ll be writing about from here on, or in what language – this site was originally created as a sort of outlet for my urge to keep on the bleeding edge when I was doing Marketing stuff, drifted off into the wild west of web design for a while and later subsisted largely on my need to file away miscellaneous notes on arcane technical topics when I spent stints in Engineering.

It then turned into a sort of mobile browsing lab for testing phones (there are oodles of WAP and mobile hacks squirreled away in the cracks) and, of course, was all about the Mac until the iPhone changed the world.

Incidentally, and for the record, Apple’s music event today was a major disappointment for me, not just because of the lack of wireless iTunes syncing and backup for iOS devices or the balkanism in their content distribution model but also because someone has clearly been drinking far too much social media Kool-aid, shattering my illusion of Apple’s immunity to pointless hype. But hey, we’ll get iOS 4.2 in November, which despite a tad late, isn’t half bad.

I do know that I won’t be spending two thirds of my time speaking and thinking in English now (or the same percentage of time dealing with purely mobile tech), so I have to find a new direction of sorts – closing down the site won’t happen, but a change in what passes for an editorial line is a given, and the notion of getting a couple of friends on board to post links and short pieces is at least worth revisiting.

But it makes a pretty good testing ground for a number of things I have to get to grips with (including picking up the arcana of web design, my oft-neglected mistress) and I still maintain gigantic lists of tech resources of all kinds that come in handy nearly every day, so I think things might actually get a bit more interesting around here.

Oh, and did I mention the office is crammed with Macs, iPads, Android devices, and… Ah, nevermind. My own Mac has yet to arrive, sadly (a mini of ironic provenance and use is making do) and I have no iPhone now.

But more on that later. I have another amazing, fun new toy that I literally have to wrestle from my kid, if you’ll excuse me, if only because it makes quite a bit of noise…

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¹ Well, reasonably leisurely, given that today was also the first day of pre-school for my eldest, which is a bit more important in the grand scheme of things. Fortunately, everything went well there as well – the school’s still standing, at least… ↩

² And believe me, the environment is so completely different from what I’ve experienced for the past few years I’m starting to wonder what took me so long… And this just on the first day. A modicum of balance will soon set in, I suppose. ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

"I, for one, welcome my new amphibian overlords" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Wednesday, September 1^st 2010. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Homebrew Cray-1A

Rui Carmo — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:17:53 GMT

This is some major geekery. Calling it amazing would be a serious understatement, and makes running emulated ROMs to play dinky games seem like, well, kiddie stuff (via jwz, master of the extraordinaire).

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Ramadan 2010 - The Big Picture

Rui Carmo — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:05:50 GMT

Amazing shots, as usual – and there’s an iPad in there, too.

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Endgame

Rui Carmo — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:40:33 GMT

This was (and still is) one heck of a week – although work per se has been relatively light, I’ve been prancing about all over the place for a number of reasons that will soon become public and have had a bunch of bad nights in a row (part stress, part kids, part breaking my own self-imposed rule regarding using computers well after 10PM).

The upshot of it all is that I have a monster headache, my guts are churning and I feel like something the cat wouldn’t even bother dragging in, which, despite being rather an improvement on how I felt (much) earlier in the morning, is not how I’d rather feel with lovely sunny weather outside.

Fortunately, curating my massive address book (multitasking with watching the kids) has proven to be a suitable low intensity occupation while this state of affairs lasts – after years of relying on Exchange as my prime contact database and keeping MobileMe as a backup, a complete switch-over begs for going over the whole thing manually – largely because I’m re-assigning folk to groups and removing extraneous info, for the Mac’s three-way merge (I was syncing the whole enchilada to Exchange, MobileMe and Gmail sync) is nothing short of brilliant – comparing it with other (forever unmentionable) contact syncing solutions, it is light years ahead.

But enough of that – address book technology is definitely not something I want to revisit for many years to come, except for my homegrown .vcf scripts.

Quite a lot of other writing has been happening (or, rather, accreting), so there will be a couple more posts soon. For now, and largely for the continued entertainment of those of you who know me personally, the only thing of relevance is that my talk proposal for this year’s Codebits seems to be enjoying quite a bit of acceptance, so do consider signing up and popping over.

Last year I didn’t have time to prepare anything (or hang around much more than, er, some of the colder bits after dark, if you’ll pardon the pun) but this time I’ll try to make it worth your while.

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iWork: About the iWork 9.0.4 update

Rui Carmo — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:32:53 GMT

EPUB export in Pages. ‘nuff said.

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MPEG LA’s AVC License Will Not Charge Royalties

Rui Carmo — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:23:50 GMT

…provided video is free to end users. Zealots (notably WebM partisans) will bitch about little licensing details, but this pretty much puts the nail in the coffin for Flash video (in iOS or otherwise) until significant technical improvements point to a truly mainstream alternative.

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Limbo

Rui Carmo — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:50:04 GMT

Around this time every year, I start planning for Autumn – getting back to work after Summer usually entails a number of housekeeping chores like archiving oodles of e-mail, clearing out my address book, going through my projects for the Fall and re-shuffling my schedule to accomodate a new batch of recurring meetings, and on top of all of that I usually sketch out plans for what I intend to do regarding such hobbies as I can manage having, jot down a few notes regarding the silly season’s memes du jour, and start checking (well in advance) if I need new warm socks.

It’s been mostly the same for around a decade, but this year it’s all going to be different.

For instance, I don’t plan to spend a whole lot of time archiving e-mail (although I’ve added another attempt at building a Xobni-like tool to my To-Do-If-I-Ever-Find-The-Time list), I’ve wantonly archived the bulk of my professional address book and plowed out my schedule as far as early November, with the notable side-effect that I am not going to attend the iPhone 4 launch parties (either of them).

Oh, I will get one. But later, quite a bit later. No sense in rushing things, and, by the way, I couldn’t care less about the antenna design – for me, it’s a computer that happens to make calls, not a phone, and we enjoy an order of magnitude better coverage than most countries…

As to the mobile industry’s recurring (and seemingly endless) bouts of madness, I’ll keep a wary eye and try not to bother – I will eventually re-approach the mobile gadgetry space from another angle (I’ll probably always be wired for mobile first and everything else second – pardon the mixed metaphors), but for now I’ll just try to enjoy spending time doing other stuff.

The socks, though, are definitely something to deal with ASAP – I’m in dire need of an entirely new wardrobe…

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Inkling - Interactive textbooks for iPad.

Rui Carmo — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:45:39 GMT

Welcome to the future.

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Dropping Text

Rui Carmo — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 18:26:33 GMT

There are now three editors with Dropbox support on the iTunes store (and two more coming, one of which is already public and looks pretty good), which means that I can finally manage this site entirely from any iOS device – although not yet in the easiest way.

My current workflow has been fairly stable for a while – all long-form drafts for posts here start off in Evernote in some way (usually on my ageing iPod as a rough bullet list over breakfast), and are revised across whatever device(s) I happen to be using until the time comes to post the result as a Textile document to the site – which happens via Dropbox.

Up until recently, the final review would happen on a “regular” computer, but that’s changed as more ways to access Dropbox came about. Although I actually pay for Evernote at this point because of its excellent feature set and multi-platform¹ support, I don’t use a lot of the advanced features (except for offline access and OCR), so using both Evernote (which, incidentally, does not support editing anything other than plain text notes in iOS) and Dropbox feels somewhat redundant.

So it was with a great deal of interest that I started keeping track of simple note and text editing apps with Dropbox support – the Dropbox team seems to have little interest in adding editing and more flexible offline support to their iOS apps, and independent developers have started addressing those gaps.

The three apps currently on the App Store are, as of this writing, Droptext, Nebulous Notes and Elements, and I’ve been taking a look at them as time allows.

Droptext was the first one I came across and used, but the current version suffers from the rather annoying shortcoming of not allowing you to create new folders (something I hope to see fixed upon the next update, supposedly due soon). So up until now it’s only been useful enough for updating old content on the site and adding some notes to pre-existing locations. But it lets me browse my entire folder tree and copy/paste stuff from one file to another with ease, and was therefore a lot more useful than the standard Dropbox app.
Nebulous Notes, my current favorite, goes a little farther and lets you edit and delete files just fine, although it can’t remember the last edited file and I still need to resort to the standard Dropbox app to upload images (which is OK considering that I don’t do that very often – the linkblog images are automatically captured by Yaki, so they don’t count). Sadly, it doesn’t do any sort of offline caching (yet), so I need to be online to publish. That is something I actually avoid for it’s all too easy to click a link, check e-mail, etc. and get sidetracked, so it’s still not ideal as I’ve grown accustomed to do a bunch of changes on my laptop and then let Dropbox sync things – another thing that I can’t do on iOS at the moment.
Elements, which I haven’t tried yet, focuses on managing a single folder of text files with panache and a number of editing-oriented features (such as word count and TextExpander support). I would have a go at it if it had broader horizons, but despite an e-mail exchange with the developer I don’t think it would be a good fit at this point, for it will stick to manage files in a single folder for the foreseeable future.
PlainText is still under active development, so I won’t discuss it here other than point out it exists and will become the underpinnings of its author’s little family of popular apps. It’s definitely one to watch, and one I’ll be trying when it comes out.

All of the above, however, cry out for having some sort of preview mode. Besides offline editing and syncing, the thing I find myself needing the most is a clear view of what the drafts will end up looking like, and as a result I spend quite a bit of time copying drafts and pasting them into a little clunky webapp I wrote that uses this amazing JavaScript-based Textile renderer. I managed to get that to work offline fairly easily thanks to adding an HTML5 manifest file, but it got me thinking – how hard would it be to get any of these apps to render not just Textile or Markdown, but just about anything else (including code in several programming languages) by allowing folk to upload their highlighter/renderer scripts to Dropbox and have the apps run them inside a (local) web view?

I floated that notion to some developers with mixed reactions – some thought I was talking about rich text editing, something you can’t do with the current iOS UIKit and that requires significant effort to implement from scratch (best to wait until Apple spins off their iWork editing engine and folds it into a later version of iOS…), some thought it was too techie a notion and another is at least considering it (although it won’t happen just yet).

It’s still early days, though, and there’s always the chance that any of these apps (as well as Dropbox or Evernote) will evolve into a better writing environment. But one thing’s for sure – four competing apps addressing the same space make it plain there’s a need to be filled.

Me, I’m betting on the fifth app. It will take a while to surface, though, so I’m polishing up that webapp a bit more and making do with it and Nebulous…

—

¹ If you discount their lack of Linux support, which occasionally bugs me quite a bit. ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

"Dropping Text" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Saturday, August 21^st 2010. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

KeePassX

Rui Carmo — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 08:11:12 GMT

KeePassX is a classic password management app that has a number of endearing features, including (most importantly for me) working, binary database-compatible Linux, Windows and OSX versions. It doesn’t look very native, but it does the job.

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Color Scheme Designer

Rui Carmo — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:32:03 GMT

Neat. Am sure to have a use for it soon.

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Google Reader, Amazingly Better

Rui Carmo — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:27:12 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Monday, August 16^th 2010.

A Safari extension that’s making the rounds and makes Reader look positively amazing on the Mac.

Update: Now ported to Google Chrome as well.

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Wishlist

Rui Carmo — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:37:33 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Sunday, March 25^th 2007.

If you’re looking for my Amazon.co.uk wishlist, it’s here.

This is a short list of the things I find interesting enough to contemplate buying (I’ve outgrown the “gadget freak” stage some years back, but it’s always nice to contemplate my options).

Rather than the old, verbose format I had for this page, I decided to be a bit more systematic and use this URL as a scorecard for gadgets and software I’m likely to lust after every now and then, and why I won’t buy some of them anytime soon. Score reflects likelihood of acquisition and not product value.

Last Update	Item	Cost	Pros	Cons
2010
Aug 19 ~~Jul 21~~ ~~Apr 10~~ ~~Nov 30~~	Canon S95 ~~Canon S90~~	$400 ~~€369~~	I’ve been meaning to get something between my 350D and Lumix DMC FX-33, and any of these three seems like a good mid-point – the ~~S90~~ S95 fits my spartan “less is more” attitude (more info here), and the TZ7/TZ10 would be a nice step up from the 33. The TZ7 has a decent zoom, for starters.	I can’t really justify spending money on any of them given the time I have for photography these days.
	Lumix DMC TZ7	€254
	Lumix DMC TZ10	€340
Jul 12 ~~Jun 19~~	~~OmniPlan~~	$149.95	I like the idea of having a clean, polished native project management app.	Had a good look at Merlin, which is what I’d get instead if I needed. Plus there are now loads of free apps that mostly work, most real project management is done via web apps these days.
Jun 19 ~~Feb 17’08~~	~~Apple TV~~	$329	Smaller than my PS3, better UI.	The Mac mini won – it’s dead, Jim. No content for Portugal (or most of Europe), no DivX support, no DLNA support.
Jun 19 ~~Jun 29~~ ~~Jan 19~~	~~OmniGraffle Pro~~	$149.95	The best diagramming application on the planet, period. Visio replacement.	Have found umpteen ways to use Powerpoint to do pretty good diagramming over the last year, couldn’t justify the expense.
Jun 19	iPhone 4	TBD	Amazing display, better camera.	Not sure it’s worthwhile given that I have a perfectly good 3GS and don’t really want to carry the phone around at home. Will surely be bloody expensive for, as a matter of principle, I only buy unlocked phones (I believe in customer choice).
2009
Dec 17	Panasonic Lumix GF1	€809	After reading this essay and this review, I couldn’t help but wonder if I shouldn’t get one and enjoy it.	Expensive as heck, including the extra pancake lens.
Nov 5	LaCie Network Space 2	TBD	Storage appliance with smarts, of which I’ve heard nothing but good things (reg. older model)	I don’t really need it and have been trying to wean myself off the “home server” notion
Nov 17 ~~Oct 25~~	~~27” iMac~~	€ 1799	Sheer lust, can be used as an external display	~~Don’t use desktop machines anymore, can’t justify it for home use~~ Just got the new mini instead. Also, many folk have been having hardware issues.
Oct 25 ~~Oct 14’08~~ ~~Jan 19’08~~	~~Cinema 23” Display~~	€ 899	(poof)	The 27” iMac makes it look like a bad deal, so it’s out of my list now.
Aug 1	LG BE06-LU10 Blu-Ray burner	€ 300	Nearly cheap enough, even though DVD media is still cheaper	Recording backups I can only read on a single device until Apple makes up their mind about including internal Blu-Ray is a risk.
Aug 1 ~~Feb 17’08~~	~~PX-B920SA Blu-Ray burner~~	TBD	~~Would likely solve all my backup problems. Plextor hardware tends to last ages.~~	There are now cheaper and better alternatives ~~What I really want is an external USB or Firewire drive that I can hook up to any Mac or PC.~~
2008
Jan 19	Blu-ray writer	~$400	Blank disks are now around € 20, and provide 25GB of capacity for off-site backups.	1TB hard disks are 60% cheaper than current writers, ~~lack of support from Apple.~~

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Housekeeping

Rui Carmo — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:21:34 GMT

Given that I’ve been managing this site’s content entirely using Dropbox for a year now (or thereabouts) with resounding success, I’ve decided to take the plunge and literally drop (if you’ll pardon the pun) the whole codebase for the site’s Yaki engine, templating and whatnot into it as well.

This will let me do minor tweaks from my iPad (I have an astoundingly long list of cleanups I never get around to do) and ensure I have a ready backup of the whole thing on a couple of machines (plus the occasional Time Machine snapshot) without having to think about pushing and pulling stuff using Mercurial.

I did toss in the entire repository as well, which is sure to be fun if a trifle redundant – Dropbox’s basic version management is OK, but I prefer Mercurial for diffs and “proper” management and history.

I have to wonder when hosting companies (or Dropbox themselves) will catch on and start offering this kind of seamless, trivially easy website content management – editing my site on my laptop’s filesystem or via one of the increasingly popular Dropbox-enabled mobile clients beats FTP and SSH any day…

Stay tuned for some notes on Dropbox clients once I find the time.

☯ (comments allowed)

"Housekeeping" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Wednesday, August 18^th 2010. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

git

Rui Carmo — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 08:19:03 GMT

The SCM du jour, not as useful as Mercurial to me but with a number of followers largely due to a few prominent projects managed with it and github.

Date	Link	Notes
Aug ‘10	Git for the lazy	A moderately broad introduction.

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Carpe Terram

Rui Carmo — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 21:19:20 GMT

It is only fitting that with my leave/vacation drawing to a close, balance should feel just around the corner (yet still unobtainable). Toing and froing at the whim of kids and family has allowed for some (yet still not enough) rest, even though reading has afforded most quality time to fill the gaps.

But I’ve also been tinkering again with Twitter OAuth (seeing as the official Python library still doesn’t support it and has numerous bugs related to deleting and retweets I decided to pick up another one and run with it, implementing the stuff I needed), doing random backups (gotta revisit the state of the art in portable Blu-Ray recorders some day), and generally making more time for myself by unsubscribing from a bunch of mobile-related RSS feeds I don’t think I’ll be needing anymore.

Oh, and I’ve also been goofing off playing games when the kids are asleep.

I think that started when I came across a flash-frozen copy of Quake III Arena sitting on an old external drive I’d mothballed when I phased out most of my Firewire gear.

All of fifteen minutes later I was running the latest build of ioquake3 on my dual-head mini and cursing the lack of a scroll wheel on the Magic Mouse whilst reacquainting myself with the wonders of 3D ballet avec des rocket launchers et railguns. It’s always been the spatial orientation exercise I ever had, and playing Capture The Flag always brings echoes of Ender’s Game.

An hour of trouncing bots later, I was checking out the (very passable) frame rates my Dell Mini 9 could achieve under Ubuntu just for the heck of it (and guess what, it is roughly twice as fast as the machines I used to play on).

That was the gateway drug for gravitating towards “old school” gaming and trying (yet again) to get MAME to work so that I could try playing R-Type (incidentally, did you know there’s a whole Wiki to it?).

After a few false starts (crashing it on Linux until I got the arcana right, getting it going on the Mac without a hitch but finding it inconvenient to play at a desk, etc.), I ended up spending 800 Wii points to get the Virtual Console version.

That is great fun to play (and bloody convenient, thanks to the Bluetooth controller), but apparently ported over by idiots, since the view is a claustrophobic squeezed down window over the standard playing area, with the result that it’s all too easy to crash by moving up and down to peek at what is outside the screen or get zapped by something lurking just above or below it.

Later on, while looking for a slower-paced game I could put down and resume later (and much to my amazement) I got hooked into Civilization Revolution on the iPad via a rather roundabout way – I had tried the PS3 demo a few months back, gotten the iPhone edition for free as a one-day promo, and when I eventually stumbled across the iPad one I just took the bait.

The 126MB download took longer than I expected, but that was nothing compared to the solid four-hour hole it made on my Saturday afternoon while I vied for world domination across land, sea and air, tapping and dragging units in a frenzied daze as I expanded an unfeasibly aggressive Roman Republic across the board.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have an armored Mongol horde getting restless – they do love their blitzkrieg, but they can’t load the tanks on the battleship by themselves…

One week to go until I go back to the office – better enjoy it, I guess.

☯ (comments allowed)

"Carpe Terram" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Sunday, August 15^th 2010. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

jQuery Mobile

Rui Carmo — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:56:07 GMT

At long last. Although they are still at the concept design stage, it all seems well thought out and structured, just like the main project. And the browser grading table is a must.

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Gollum, a git-based Wiki

Rui Carmo — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 22:15:38 GMT

A lot like the Yaki engine that powers this site, but without the HTTP optimizations. Still, I might borrow a couple of ideas from it in the future.

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