Skip to content

Rob Griffiths

Fix Messages’ image pasting by killing its engine

Kirk McElhearn explains how Messages in Yosemite has trouble sending pasted images. These problems typically only occur between people who use AIM accounts in Messages; sending pasted messages when using iMessages' accounts seems to work fine. (I use an AIM account to keep iMessage traffic off my main Mac, and for its great screen sharing.)

Kirk's article details the fix, which is to kill the imagent process, which is what controls Messages. He uses Activity Monitor to do so, which works fine. But I have to kill the stupid imagent many times a day, so I wrote the World's Easiest AppleScript™ to do the work for me.

[continue reading…]



My post-CNN news sources

With the horrendous redesign of CNN, I quickly determined I had to find a new news source (or sources). After browsing the comments to my post, and doing some searching, here are the changes I've made in my news reading.

The first change is the biggest—I now use an RSS reader for the majority of my news reading. I've always used an RSS reader for most non-news sites, but preferred reading news directly on a web page (not sure why).

But as most sites seem to be heading in the image overload direction, I decided to find news sites with good RSS feeds, and read them using Vienna, my RSS reader of choice.

Why Vienna? I'll write about that in a future post, I think…but its excellent keyboard controls, and its ability to open articles in background tabs, are two of its key features for my reading habits.

The second change is obviously what sites/sources I use in Vienna. Here's my list of new sources, with both the web site and RSS URLs provided:

BBC - US and CanadawebRSS
UPI - Latest NewswebRSS
UPI - US NewswebRSS
Reuters - Top NewswebRSS
Reuters - US NewswebRSS

There's obviously some overlap between these sources, but that's OK; it's easy to mark/skip duplicates in Vienna. When I'm visiting a site on the web, all three (BBC, UPI, and Reuters) present a clean interface, without invasively large photos, and zero auto-playing videos or scrolling marquees. In short, all three are a joy to use on the web, unlike the "new and improved" CNN.

Sorry, CNN, but you've permanently lost at least one viewer; your new site makes it too hard to get what I want, which is news. The BBC, UPI, and Reuters understand that news is what viewers come to a news site to see. Perhaps there's a lesson there for CNN, if they can see it behind those enormous photos and CPU-sucking videos.



Send your Retina iMac’s desktop to deep space

Last week, I used the just-released Hubble Space Telescope images of the Andromeda galaxy to create a couple of desktop images for my Retina iMac. I liked the results so much that I spent some time collecting other suitable images from the Hubble site, and then cropping and/or scaling them to create interesting high-res desktop images. (I used Acorn for all the edits; it had no troubles, even with TIF images as large as 20,323x16,259!)

The end result is a collection of 50+ Retina iMac-sized (5120x2880) desktop wallpapers, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. Here's the full collection:

Tip: If you click on the caption below the image, you'll be taken to the source page on the Hubble telescope site where I found the image.

There are at least two versions of nearly every image—one or more where I cropped out an interesting area of the photo at 5120x2880, and one where I scaled down and then cropped as needed to get as much of the full image as possible.

There are three ways to get an image (or all the images):

Method One: One at a time

  1. Command-click on the image (anywhere other than on the navigation arrows) you'd like to download. This will create a new background tab (in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, at least), loaded with that image's high-resolution page on my OneDrive.
  2. At the top of the page you'll see a Download icon and text; click there to save the file to your Mac.
  3. Repeat for each image you want, and then organize as you wish, and set them up as rotating desktop images.

Method Two: Another way to get one at a time

Open the full folder on OneDrive, and browse/download directly from there. Click on any image, then click the Download icon to download the selected image to your Mac.

Method Three: Gimme the full set!

If you want all 54 images, just download this zip file from OneDrive.

Images courtesy of NASA/ESA, and full image credits can be found on the linked image page for each image reproduced above.



Why I hate the CNN redesign, quantified

Yesterday I ranted on Twitter about CNN's redesign:

This led to an exchange with a CNN staffer, and a couple people saying "me too!" But it felt it a bit unfair to criticize without specific data. So this morning, I gathered the data, and can now quantify my distaste for the new design.

I compared the current CNN homepage to the latest available on the Internet Archive, calculating how the space was used for each version of the site. The results were eye opening in many ways.

tl;dr summary: The new CNN design displays half as many clickable stories in the same space, with an image that takes 20% of the available screen, and sucks down over 20% of my CPU just to display its home page. Read on for the gory details.

Note: This follow-up entry details my post-CNN news sources and reading methods.

Please leave feedback for CNN if you share my frustrations.
Thanks to Raymond for posting this address in the comments.

[continue reading…]



It’s snowing…in slow motion!

It's just started snowing here in central Oregon, so I shot a bit of slow motion snowfall. The end result is very oddly mesmerizing (open the video in a new window to see it at full size):

The snow looks like some fake Hollywood effect when seen in slow motion. But hey, it's falling, it's sticking, and the kids may get a white Christmas after all!

I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday…I'm outta here to go play in the snow!



Fake fire … enhanced

To make our winter-air-blocked non-functional fireplace more visually engaging, I printed a huge fireplace image across multiple pages, and taped them to the fireplace blocker. The end result was usable, but definitely not professional:

So I set out to find a shop to print a 36"x48" poster of the huge image. And because this was clearly an optional project, I wanted to do it as cheaply as possible. After much web searching, I found Poster Print Factory. Their online poster creation tool was easy to use, and the cost ($35 including shipping) was the lowest I found by at least $10.

It took about a week, but the poster arrived and the quality is fine. It's printed on relatively thick stock, and the image itself looked stunning. So now, our artificial fire has been enhanced by a high quality poster overlay:

So much nicer to look at than the silvery surface of a piece of foam insulation! Anyway, if you're looking for some inexpensive poster-sized prints, I was happy with what I got from Poster Print Factory.



Span one large image across multiple printed pages

I was looking for a way to print a large image across multiple pages, so I could make my own do-it-yourself poster-size printout. By way of background, I wanted to print a huge virtual fire, to cover a piece of insulation we put in front of a drafty fireplace in the winter. (We don't like to burn wood, so the fireplace goes unused, but staring at a piece of shiny foam insulation all winter isn't all that interesting.)

Conceptually, this seemed pretty easy: find a huge image, open it in some app that handles images, and print. What I found is that doesn't work, at least not in the apps I had at hand (Acorn and Preview). After some web searching, I stumbled across an odd but effective solution: use Excel.

Open a new blank Excel workbook, then select Insert > Photo > Picture From File, and select your massive image. Now when you hit Print, you'll see the output spans multiple pages. I used Page Setup to select a borderless US Letter size, and printed out 16 pages of a roaring fire.

After some cut-and-tape operation, the drafty fireplace's insulation became more visually appealing:

Note that this was a "proof of concept" operation, so I printed in draft mode (hence the vertical striping on the printout) and wasn't overly careful about lining up the pages. I had originally planned to print the final version on glossy photo paper, but instead opted to buy a 36x48 poster-size printout from an online vendor. (I haven't yet received the print, but when I do, I'll post about its quality. Until then, though, I don't want to link to the vendor, as I don't yet know what I've bought.)

I knew Excel could do a lot, but I never thought to try it for printing huge images across multiple pages.



Fun with iTunes’ new math

Unlike my previous incidents with iTunes and iOS devices, today's report isn't on a sync problem per se.

It's more like a math problem which then leads to a sync problem. Here's the tl;dr version: I have an iPad with 5GB of free space, and I cannot add a 1.8GB movie to it, as iTunes eventually tells me it needs another 526MB of space in order to do so.

During the attempted sync of this movie, iTunes displays some horridly bad math skills; just watch the video to see.


Here's the video at its full size (1164x1056).

I have no idea how to resolve this, short of restoring the iPad, which I'd rather not do. (I've already unsynced and resynced everything, in an attempt to straighten out the math, but to no avail.)



Use your Marketing department to drive away prospects

I needed to install a demo version of Parallels Desktop for Mac to work on an issue some of our Many Tricks customers are having with Witch.

On Parallels' site, when I clicked the "Try It Free" button, I was greeted not with a download, but with a dreaded email harvester:

Unless I was willing to provide an email address, I was not going to get the demo. To Parallels' Marketing department, I'm sure this is viewed as a huge win: "Look, if we require an email address to get the demo, we'll build a massive mailing list of potential buyers!"

But to a prospective customer, what this harvester says is "we really don't care about your experience, we want to harvest your email address."

An email harvester is only as useful as what it harvests. And from me, and I suspect many others, it harvested a "I only use this for junk mail" email address. So while Marketing is collecting a huge list of email addresses, that list is littered with any number of useless addresses.

Contrast this approach with VMWare's Fusion demo download: Click one button, and the download begins. In the past, VMware also collected email addresses, but it seems they've realized that building a huge list of mainly worthless addresses is, well, worthless.

Unfortunately for Parallels, using the demo is even more annoying than downloading it, "thanks" (again) to the Marketing department.

[continue reading…]



Revisiting iTunes/iOS sync issues

After getting my iPhone 6 in early October, I was initially excited by all the cool tech in my new phone. Until I tried to sync it, that is. I eventually got so frustrated that I emailed Tim Cook for help. From that email, I wound up talking to Apple's engineers, who eventually solved my sync issues—it turns out they were related to duplicates of long-ago-purchased songs.

Welcome to
Sync Hell

And for a while, things were great in iPhone 6 land. Then I ripped a few new CDs, and noticed that they didn't show up on the phone. Uh oh. Even worse, when I looked at my iPhone in iTunes, the Music section contained hundreds, if not thousands, of the dreaded gray dotted circles.

This seemingly innocent symbol means that the indicated song did not sync—the information about the song made the journey to the phone, but the song itself did not. Argh! Read on to see how I muddled through this issue, with some advice that may, or may not, help you with your own sync issues.

If you don't want to read everything, here's a tl;dr version:

  • My iPhone sync issues returned, along with a huge-fake-but-limiting amount of data shown in Other.
  • There's a known-to-Apple "very slow performance" issue in iOS/iTunes that can make some iPhones sync very slowly (fixes have been made, but not yet released).
  • A factory restore failed to complete until I rebooted the iMac.
  • After the restore, the sync worked, but I still had a huge Other category.
  • After the iOS 8.1.1 update, the huge Other category vanished.
  • I had to manually unsync/resync a number of songs to clear their gray dotted circles.
  • It may help to do a voodoo dance, sacrifice three Nokia phones, and rub your stomach while patting your head before syncing.

Read on for the gory details…except maybe for that last item, which I totally made up.

[continue reading…]