December 26th, 2009
My brother got me an Eee PC mini notebook computer for Christmas. I want to say right off the bat that I’m very grateful for the gift: it will be useful for testing web sites on Windows as well as allowing me to run Adventure Game Studio. What follows is more a complaint about what Windows users accept as how computers are.
It was covered in stickers. There were stickers on each side of the display, pointing out things that would presumably be on the screen when I turned it on. The trackpad had a sticker over it explaining the pinch-to-zoom gesture that everybody knows from the iPhone, yet iPhone users were never “helped” with a sticker on the screen.
When I powered it on for the first time ever, I was presented with the “Windows did not shut down properly, do you want to start in Safe Mode?” screen.
During Windows set up, it:
- Tried to connect to the Internet automatically.
- Told me it could not connect to the Internet and I’d have to configure it myself later.
- Immediately asked if I wanted to connect to the Internet to send my registration information to Microsoft.
When I launched Outlook Express, a wizard walked me through the process of connecting to the Internet (even though I was already online), asking if I already had a dial-up account or wanted to sign up for one.
Fortunately, the PC wasn’t pre-loaded with too much crapware, which is a good thing. I’m finding it hard to read the thinly rendered text used in most of the system; fortunately Safari for Windows does it’s own text rendering. Like my MacBook, it supports two finger scrolling, but the cursor turns into a tiny scrollbar graphic (in case I don’t know what’s going on?) and the page jerks around instead of moving smoothly.
My dad bought a MacBook Air for my mom, and I spent a long time setting it up. On the whole, it was much more pleasant experience, though in the interest of fairness I’ll say that using Migration Assistant over a network connection is annoyingly unreliable.
Tags: eee pc, windows
Posted in Personal | Comments Off
December 9th, 2009
I confess, I have some minor narcissistic tendencies. For example, the App Store search bar on my iPhone usually contains my own name, so I can check on the ratings of my apps at a glance.
That’s how I noticed this new review of FatWatch, my weight tracking app for iPhone:
It does exactly what it says it does, but it’s far too expensive and the developer seems to have abandoned it. Get one of the free weight apps and save yourself the dough.
Ouch!
In a world of disposable mobile apps, FatWatch might seem expensive, but it’s actually quite cheap for what it does: tracking your weight against a moving average in a well-designed application. The average is key; it’s the only useful way to track a human being’s weight, and none of the free apps can do the math for you.
For devotees of The Hacker’s Diet, it also lets you import your weight history from the old Palm Eat Watch app and export it to your computer any time you choose.
As for the other concern, I assure you that FatWatch has not been abandoned. I use it every day! I suppose it is overdue for an update, but that’s only to add new features, as (save for a minor cosmetic issue) no bugs have been reported in FatWatch 1.4.
The good news is that I recently completed a contract project that puts me in a comfortable enough financial position to devote time to a FatWatch update. So, watch this space, and if you’re interested in beta testing, wait for an announcement soon.
Posted in FatWatch | 3 Comments »
November 29th, 2009
There is a wealth of information available in the UNIX manual pages, but it feels a little silly to be reading text out of a terminal window, especially since I paid so much money for all this fancy font rendering technology.
Here are some alternatives:
To view a man page in Xcode’s documentation window, simply select “Open man Page…” from the Help menu. For some reason, I hadn’t noticed that menu item until I read this hint on accessing it via AppleScript. Nicely formatted and references to other man pages are hyperlinked.
Bwana allows you to read man pages in any web browser, by registering itself as a protocol handler for man: URLs. Once installed, you can type man:perl in your browser’s address bar or open man:perl at a command prompt to read a manual page in your browser. Like Xcode, cross-references become hyperlinks, but it formats text using Courier. Source code is available, so I guess if I care enough I can do something about it.
Finally, a surprisingly short incantation will open any man page as a beautifully formatted document in Preview:
man -t perl | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app
The -t option tells man to output PostScript, and the -f option tells open to put its input into a temporary file and pass that along to the specified application.
After reading that hint I set about writing a shell function so I could type manp perl to open Perl’s manual page in Preview. However, Preview’s PostScript to PDF conversion is kind of slow, so I wound up writing something slightly more sophisticated:
function manp {
local M=`man -w $*` # Get path of page source.
if [ -z $M ]; then return; fi # Quit if it doesn't exist.
local N=`basename $M .gz` # Extract the name of the file and
local P=$TMPDIR/man.$N.pdf # use it to create a PDF file name.
if [ ! -e $P ]; then # If the PDF file doesn't exist,
echo Creating PDF for $N...
man -t $1 | pstopdf -i -o $P # generate it.
fi
open $P # Open the PDF version.
}
Then I went back and read the comments, which contain a dozen or so different versions of the same idea. But mine’s the best! Copy and paste it into the your .profile if you agree.
Posted in Nerdery | 1 Comment »
