Disillusioned with iPhoto

I went around snapping about 30 pictures in the past 2 days from my iPhone of product options for my kitchen & some jewelry options at various stores, so that I can decide later at home.

Today I open up iPhoto, import the photos from my phone, and ask iPhoto to delete the photos on my phone. iPhoto just hung at this point trying to remove the photos from my phone. I finally had to force quit iPhoto.

Alas, when I started it again, I just had 11 photos on my phone & the imported photos from my iPhoto library were also missing. Basically, iPhoto just erased 1.5 days of my effort.

More than the loss, its the knowledge that I cannot trust iPhoto as my photo store is much more concerning to me. Considering that iPhoto is such an excellent product in terms of usability, I expected much more concern for user's data from it. And more to it, there is no data that I can include as a bug report to the iPhoto team, as the photos are gone from iPhoto & the iPhone. There is no record of them anywhere.

I guess I need to start another tedious cycle of finding another photo management software & migrating my photos to it. :-(

Mac keyboard shortcut to Maximize a window

I have sorely missed the simple keyboard shortcut from Microsoft Windows to maximize a window (alt+space x).

There are many other solutions out there for a Mac based on AppleScript & a 3rd party application to invoke it using a shortcut (like Quicksilver). But there is a way to do this for most applications without installing any other applications.

Almost every application has a "Zoom" menu-item in the "Window" menu which does the same action as clicking on the Maximize button on the left corner of the window.



So, here are the steps to setup a keyboard shortcut for this:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Go to "Keyboard & Mouse"
3. Navigate to the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab
4. Click on the "+" button below the list
5. Set the "Application" drop down to "All Applications"
6. Set the "Menu Title" to "Zoom" (no spaces)
7. Set any keyboard shortcut. I have set Cmd+Shift+M (opposite of Cmd+M which is the standard shortcut for minimize)



8. Click on Add
9. In the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab, scroll down to see "Application Keyboard Shortcuts" at the end. Expand it to see "All Applications". Expand this to see the new shortcut you just created.



10. Close System Preferences

You are done. Now go to any application, press your shortcut & enjoy a maximized view of the application.

Hebbar Tamil - A comparative study

Being a Hebbar Iyengar myself, I am much too familiar with the reactions of Kannadigas (people from Karnataka) & Tamilians (people from Tamil Nadu), when they hear Hebbar Tamil being spoken. It usually goes like "that sounds a bit like Kannada but is not Kannada" & "you may call it Tamil, but I cannot understand it at all".

And surfing around, I found this gem of an article
"A BRIEF SURVEY OF HEBBAR TAMIL'S VERB MORPHOLOGY"
comparing Tamil (as spoken by Tamilians) & Hebbar Tamil grammatically.

Although it has a heavy emphasis on the grammatical differences, the examples given serve as a light reading that reveals the subtleties of our language. I would recommend any Hebbar Iyengar who speaks Hebbar Tamil to read this article.

Bloxorz - nice puzzling block game

Here's a simple game of moving a 1x2 block by rolling/turning it over to finally reach a hole. Reminds me very much of Sokoban, but with some interesting twists including the absence of walls.

Play it to know more - it sure will bring down your productivity at office

RCDefaultApp - centralized application association management

I came across this nifty preference pane RCDefaultApp for Mac OS X, that allows you to manage all kinds of associations like file associations, default applications for various file extensions, url protocol associations at a single place.

Its a relief to be able to set the default browser, default newsreader or default application for .xxx files at one place, instead of hunting around for the settings in various applications like Safari, Mail, Finder, etc.

This is now one of my must-have utilities for Mac.

Tunnel - simple and strenuous game

I downloaded this port of the old arcade game "Tunnel" for the mac. You can check it out here

Its a really fun game, but the feature that really got me hooked was the use of the sudden motion sensor to play the game. It is real fun to pick up your laptop and start using it like a joystick (although its really strenuous on the wrist)

I would have liked the option to increase the speed to make it more challenging and a pause feature. But on the whole, a throughly enjoyable game :-)

Cheeni Kum title song rocks

The title song of the movie Hindi movie "Cheeni Kum" just rocks!!! I love the passion with which Shreya Goshal has sung the song.

I personally feel that she has bested her own previous top "Jadu Hai Nasha Hai"

Windows Scandisk better than Mac disk tools

I hate saying this... but it seems that the Windows Scandisk tool is better than any of Mac's disk tools (Disk Utility, fsck) at fixing disk problems.

I finally connected my external hard drive to a Windows system and ran Scandisk. That fixed all the problems with my hard drive. And now the hard drive mounts fine on a Mac too.

Sorry Apple!!! But this one goes to Microsoft :-(

Mac & FAT32 HDD problems

A file on my external USB hard drive failed to read today. The hard drive has a FAT32 file system, so that I can read the data from a Windows box and my Mac.

I suspect that the hard drive has some bad sectors (something I use to fix using "scandisk", when I used to run a Windows box).

I tried running Disk Utility -> Repair Disc from my Mac. It ran fine but the problem was still there.

I tried running "fsck" from Terminal, and it gave me a weird error "BAD SUPER BLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG ".

And googling just seems to bring me to the conclusion that nobody uses a FAT32 external hard drive with a Mac. Am I the only freak doing this??????