Indigo Jo Blogs

Last month I got myself a digital camera with money I'd been given by relatives for my 30th birthday (£30 each from most of them, and I have plenty of aunts and uncles on my Mum's side). I decided I needed some decent image editing software if I'm going to sell any photographs (and since I'm out of work at a bad time of year to be an out-of-work agency van driver, and office temp agencies aren't interested in me, I thought it was as good a money-making idea as any). At first my eyes fell on Bibble Pro, a RAW processing package you can download, of which I was aware through blogging its updates on my other blog. However, I happened to go into the computer shop in the Bentall's department store in Kingston on Thursday when they had their last copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements for £50 (it usually costs nearer to £70), beating Bibble Pro by some margin. So after some consideration, I bought it.

Continue reading "Photoshop Ailments" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: charlie brooker, i hate macs, mac, linux, opensuse, suse

This Monday Charlie Brooker (Guardian columnist of Nathan Barley and TVGoHome fame) told the world why he hates Macs in the most-read page on Comment Is Free this week. He not only hates Macs, but also people who use them and "even ... people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did". Thabet @ Eteraz agrees with him. Brooker reckons that "Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui" and that the "I'm a PC/Mac" adverts, which in the UK feature a comedy duo called Mitchell and Webb, whom I've never watched, are "devastatingly accurate" for the wrong reasons:

[Mitchell & Webb] are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers."

Continue reading "And I'm a Penguin (but my Mac's well weapon)" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

OSNews: Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers?

OSNews regular Thom Holwerda on how Apple, who used the title above as a slogan when launching the current version of Mac OS X (Tiger) in 2005, has done a bit of photocopying of its own for the upcoming release, codenamed Leopard. Most of the new features it is offering have been available elsewhere in the industry for years, even decades, most obviously Spaces, a funked-up version of the virtual desktops presently available via a third-party add-on to OS X (and as standard in Linux). (More here, here and here.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, kubuntu, apple mac, emac, linux

On Sunday evening I finally got round to ordering the new hard drive for my Mac (a 120Gb Seagate). It arrived on Tuesday morning by standard first-class post, which was unexpectedly early, though they do say on the dabs.com website that "low-value" items may be sent that way. I put it in the wardrobe, still surrounded by most of its packaging (minus the cardboard boxes) while I read up on how to disassemble my Mac so that I could replace the existing one. The procedure turned out to be staggeringly complicated.

Continue reading "My Mac and Ubuntu" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: linux, mac, osnews, alcibiades

OSNews recently published a really poorly argued piece by a former Mac enthusiast who subsequently became a Windows and then a Linux fan (Why I will probably never buy another Mac). It lasts for five pages, and in the first page he goes from becoming a Mac enthusiast while other office workers were being lumbered with PCs, through the whole history up to OS 8 and 9 and Windows 98: after that, he says, the quality of Mac hardware went down, the price stayed more or less the same, the operating system became vastly less reliable and fell behind Windows, and the community did not want to be told that their hardware was a poor choice compared to a PC running Windows.

Continue reading "Why I will probably continue to buy Macs" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

The Mozilla Foundation released version 1.5.0.1 of Firefox here. I looked at the release notes before downloading to see if there had been a fix for that bug which causes pages apparently to spontaneously reload, which affects the Mac version and causes the loss of any data you have entered into any web page like, say, your Movable Type blogging interface, since the last reload, and there wasn't. I downloaded it, started using it, and lo and behold, it did spontaneously reload an MT composition page on me. That's the last time I use that app for any serious use until they get that problem fixed. Not sure if it affects Linux or Windows.

(Tag: Firefox)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

BBC NEWS | Technology | End nears for Mac version of IE

And a good thing too in my opinion - it's easily the worst browser for the Mac and cannot even display Hotmail properly (then again, Safari can't log out from Hotmail properly, in my experience, which is far more serious). The browser I've been using solidly for the last few months is Camino (but see this bug report, which I filed myself).

Posted by Indigo Jo at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For the year and a half I've been a Mac owner, my Mac's monitor has had niggling monitor problems - bits of colour in places they shouldn't be. This usually means a "halo" effect, with the red, green and blue in the wrong proportion in parts of the screen, varying from day to day between three areas. So today, I put my eMac in the car and took it round the M25 to Bluewater, where there's an Apple Store with its "Genius Bar".

The store sent someone out with me to carry it from the car park to the shop, and they put the computer in the back room for the 90 minutes or so between them and my session. When my session came, the problem was pretty easily identified as the TV set next to the computer which, having an unshielded speaker on its right side, was issuing a magnetic field which interfered with the monitor, causing the weird colour blotches. So, the only solution was to move the TV. That job done, they had their staff take the computer back to the car.

Now, what other computer company does that for their customers? Admittedly they didn't have to actually put in or change anything, but I was really impressed with the service even though I didn't spend one penny in the store today.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)