Computers & Tech posts page 12

Firefox tag groups removed

in

Firefox tag groups / panorama has been removed from Firefox proper. Luckily, they’ve moved the official source to a separate project as an extension called Tab Groups. The extension seems to function the same and migrated my existing tab groups to without trouble.

I guess there is benefit to having less code in the core Firefox project to maintain, but this is one of those cool features that sort of set Firefox apart from other browser. There is a Chrome bug requesting a similar feature that has 356 stars and comments praising the feature. Development apparently stopped in Firefox years ago, so maybe this split could actually increase development, but there’s always the chance that it doesn’t get updated to work with a new Firefox version at some point and disappears. At least the code is on Github.

I think the features has issues, such as slowness, moving around of groups when resizing windows, and a bit clunky of a UI, but is the best option I’ve seen for dealing with large numbers of web pages and multiple topics, particularly in the short term. Right now, I have 383 tabs in 28 groups, plus a dozen or so tabs in two other windows. Some of them I probably haven’t looked at in years. I think for long-term storage, local or “cloud” bookmarks are the best way to go. I’d like to work on moving most of my tabs to my delicious account, or better yet, my own site, but even then, I will want tab groups for day-to-day organization.

Raspberry Pi: playing with BerryBoot, RetroPie, and OpenElec

in

Played with my Raspberry Pi a bit more this weekend. I bought another micro-SD card and installed BerryBoot, a bootloader / OS installer sort of like Noobs, on it.

I installed RetroPie, a project that is built on top of Raspbian but with numerous emulators and a special interface that can be operated by a gamepad. It seems like it would be cool to condense all of my video game systems and even my oldest Mac (an SE) into a tiny box. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do much with it since I have to figure out how to get games onto it. It doesn’t have a web browser or other normal Linux stuff accessible from its special interface.

I also installed OpenElec, a media center. It has a dedicated interface meant to be operated by a remote control, though since I don’t have one of those, it operates a bit slowly by mouse. It has various media applications that can be installed from its interface, basically one for each of any online services. I installed quite a few and watched some old commercials on GetTV.

I’m thinking maybe I’ll eventually get a second Raspberry Pi to use as a media / gaming center. It’s easy to dual boot them using BerryBoot. It would be cooler if I could figure out a way to more easily switch between them, rather than rebooting. opensource++

ls colors for both linux and bsd

in

ls can have nice colors enabled to differentiate between file types easily, but the parameter is different between the BSD version (uses --color) and the GNU Linux version (uses -G). I have been setting up a “bash_profile”, among other things, to be shared between my users on all the POSIX computers I use. Some are Linux, some BSD based. I use Bash on both, and I wanted the colors from ls to be used on both with the shared “bash_profile” file. I couldn’t find anyone else’s solution for this, so I figured one out myself and will post it in case others want the same versatility. I simply test ls with one of the parameters and see if it throws an error. I then can set my aliases with the appropriate parameter. I do it like so:

ls --color > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    alias l="ls -F --color"
    alias ll="ls -lh --color"
else
    alias l="ls -FG"
    alias ll="ls -lhG"
fi

iBook Audio Issue

in

After running the utility Onyx on my computer to both clean it up a bit and change some settings, I suddenly found my computer having some troubles.  Dialog boxes would just beachball shortly after appearing, and the applications that created them would have to be force quit.  After trying to change my volume, I noticed that something was wrong with my audio, so I turned off the text-to-speech I had set up for dialog boxes.  After this, the beachball problem stopped.

But I had no audio at all.  On further investigation, I noticed the OS was not recognizing any audio devices, input or output.  I found a forum thread discussing this issue.  I couldn’t find the cause, but I did find a solution.  I simply had to download Quicktime from Apple and reinstall it over my current install.  Since then, I have full audio and no problems with it, and no unusual beachballing.

I’m not sure what happened that caused this problem, but it might have been related to the permissions check Onyx does on loading.  I hope to avoid it in the future.  I will be more careful using Onyx in the future anyway.

Disappearing iPhoto Library

in

Today, I noticed a strange thing while doing a bit of filesystem cleanup:  My entire iPhoto library, containing 8000+ images, had somehow turned into a 300k alias file pointing to nothing.  Concerned, I looked elsewhere to make sure I hadn’t just stored it in a different location for organization purposes and the alias had broken.  I hadn’t.  Then I remembered earlier today noticing that my hard drive seemed significantly roomier than normal.  I had just emptied the trash a couple days ago (usually don’t empty often, just in case), but there shouldn’t have been anything nearly that big in there.

Luckily, I use Apple’s Time Machine for backup, plus my own other methods.  In Time Machine, I went back about two weeks before the actual library was there.  Restored it of course.

I have no idea what happened there.  I hadn’t used iPhoto or been reorganizing anything around that area for a full month.  If I had somehow accidentally created an alias in the folder, there would be no reason it wouldn’t perform he normal action of appending alias to the name.

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iTunes CDDB info for the Yars

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In January, my former band The Yars released their first full album (they were all shorts or live while I was there). I’ve had a copy of it since then, but haven’t imported it. I had heard the songs tons of times as Dwight was working on them, so was certainly burned out on them. I also don’t entirely like the sound direction the songs have taken, and it’s a little weird listening to another drummer play them. And it wasn’t in the iTunes store, so they had no CDDB data. I wanted to wait for that. So I never got around to importing it.

Today I decided to. It’s been in the iTunes store and other venues for months now. But still, there was no CDDB in the Gracenote database that iTunes uses. I could go to the store and see all the track info, but there was no way to get it to the album. But I found this article describing how you can copy store songs to a playlist, then use one of Doug’s scripts to copy them to another set of songs. So I went to the iTunes store to copy them to a playlist. Unfortunately, the new fancy iTunes song playlist doesn’t allow this to happen. The songs are like HTML elements on a page. And I had planned to boycott getting new versions of iTunes because they had cut off support for third party access. But just recently I think the very features that were now causing me trouble, plus the full new version number, had enticed me. I found the “Column Browser”, which does have a Cocoa style list of the songs, but I searched every possible genre with no luck at finding the Yars.

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Objective File System

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This is a modification of part of a previous post.

each file is stored in two databases: the normal hierchical db and an objective db. The hierarchical db is used for speed and for compatibility with current file systems. The objective db is used for metadata and other information less critical to basic file operations.

The objective db contains much of the metadata (non file operation related stuff). Each file type is an object type in the database, inheriting from the basic file object or one of its children. Each file type will have its own attributes as well as actions related to it. The actions may consist only of OS functions related to it, may also include application calls, and could even include user/other created scripts and functions related to the file type. The actions would provide the data from the file to the system or other function that is necessary for it to operate (functions and applications would all have a defined standard interface to them).

Workshop Paradigm

in

apps + files organized by job/workshop

example: music making workshop has music creation apps + users personal (and other’s shared?) music files

different users have same apps (tools) but their own files (works)

different jobs/workshops may use same tools ie music making and music listening workshop may both need some listening tools

Leopard:Mac OS X.5 first impressions

***finder:
yay, finally can save default view settings, including column width and sort column, to be applied to all folders. this is huge for me
quickview thing awesome. been wanting something like that for a long time.
-plays movies and sounds
–movies pop up fairly small, must press full screen button to see big
-text documents readable, probably much better for just reading them than using textedit
-excel spreadsheets even viewable, though formatting severely messed up at times, sometimes unreadable, very slow to open
-ichat logs even viewable
-easy, just hit space to open, space to close again.
-can navigate to other images in same folder with arrow keys
-can put in full screen via button, no apparent keyboard method. in full screen, hit unintuitive tab or shift tab to move to next or previous items in same folder. arrow keys do nothing, why not use them just as they were used in regular quicklook
slideshows seem to have disappeared completely. can view images, one at a time only, in full screen
icon set nicer, easier on eyes
coverflow somewhat interesting for image folders, though probably won’t use it.
-makes windows bigger if smaller than certain minimum size
-movies get first frame view, sounds get nothing special
sidebar thing too wide, can’t go by just icons anymore.
-search thing seems interesting, but doesn’t provide very useful results, as they don’t appear in a normal find type dialog where you can refine the results or group items. crashed the finder once
feels a bit more solid and streamlined
trash – finally one can view items in the trash. they cannot be opened, but previewed by icon or in quickview
can turn off warning when changing file extension, a very annoying thing unalterable in previous versions
-also, finder highlights all of name but extension (except via second click) when editing name
***spotlight
must reindex upon install, index manages to miss some things such as iphotos
new search results windows finally part of an application, the finder, so they no longer get lost
new search results window not nearly as nice, no arrangements by kind whatsoever, results all bungled together in one of standard finder views (except columns). no simple buttons for limiting search either.
-image results not nearly as nice, must type “kind:image” after query to limit to images, then use standard finder view
***System
guest user accounts, been wanting that for a long time too. just concerned about it deleting the guest account every time, may limit its usefulness: if let people login as guest to create a project, they’ll need to put it somewhere special so it won’t get deleted, as I understand it.
can finally work with groups without downloading server utilities. is in accounts pane. seems quite easy to create a group and assign users (from GUI users only) to them
all preference panes more streamlined, often fitting on one screen now. except that a lot of the functionality for some things, like network settings, must be accessed in a seperate “advanced” screen
***Network
not sure about new placement of firewall settings, hopefully the appropriate firewall activates when related port opened in Networks
***Textedit
autosave feature nice, but defaults to every 30 seconds. Items on desktop then refresh their icon every 30 seconds.
search highlighting is nifty, caches eye quite well. should highlight all occurrences and keep highlight on for a while so you can see them while perusing document
***spotlight
must reindex everything
***install
takes forever, much longer than it should. the dvd media verification really took forever in itself, though I figured I should run it through for the first go. xcode install takes quite forever itself, not done through normal installer.
preserved many, though not all, of my preferences that have corresponding preferences in the new system
***Safari
so slow. pages take noticably longer to load. app itself slow. has improved greatly after several uses
some pages functionality broken. my online banking doesn’t work
bookmarks menu – submenu items pop into awful places, sometimes covering up the items below the parent so you can’t continue to the rest of menu, can’t access items it covers without closing entire menu and starting over
return doesn’t allow editing of bookmark names as it does items in finder, elsewhere
find much nicer, inline bar at top doesn’t open popup, highlights items brightly, highlights all occurrences, should highlight all brightly (only does one at a time)
javascript seems much faster, at least to select all comments for deletion in wordpress

***iCal
noticeable problem, info pane seems to have been removed. get info by double clicking which brings up small popup near item. not as readable.
-not nearly as quick for people like me who leave the info pane open.I have virtually no reason to click on an item unless I want info on it.
-opens in view mode first, must click edit button to edit or Command E
-is somewhat more concise though, leaving out extra info for items without it
must now hit return to edit name instead of double clicking. more consistent with finder behavior, but slower
***Terminal
ls: colors no longer automatically provided with color output
>console: still works, font seems weirder, perhaps harder to read
-often has some error messages near top when first entering
-still no multiple screens
less: new less much slower, does weirrd scrolling thing
***etc
quicksilver dock icon appears now
drop shadow seems more significant, makes things look further behind current window
computer runs hotter it seems
computer runs noticably slower overall.
inconsistencies continue in command keys used in different applications, often unintuitive and arbitrary. Command L in AddressBook and Command E in iCal edit entries.