Tech

Warning: this is serious nerdy stuff. Not for the faint of heart. Carry on reading if:

• you know what Python is
• you have a blog, but not the easy kind like Tumblr or Blogger, something that allows you to write in HTML (or Markdown), e.g. Pelican or Jekyll
• you have a Flickr account and want to post links to photos or albums in said blog

What these two scripts do is simply to print out to console a nicely formatted <figure> tag with the static URL of a 1600 px (long side) version of your original photo and a caption with all the common shoot data (aperture, shutter speed, etc, like you used to have in the old times before artists got fancy and began shooting with iPhones; I know I used to record on a little paper notebook these data long before Exif was born). If that’s not available (for older photos I know flickr did not create such versions) the script will fall back to a standard “Large” size (1024 px long side).

Well it seems I have successfully ported my blog to Pelican. After hacking my way through jekyll to make the site look like I wanted it to look, I had the irresistible urge to try out Pelican.

And I liked it so much it seemed logical to spend a few more sleepless nights to make it work. Honestly though, that was easier than Jekyll; not sure this is due to the familiarity I have with Python, but it’s probably more to do with approaching the whole thing more organically, without switching this on and that off and see what’s the results.

Yes I know, the last post before this one is dated March 2015.

But stuff happened, and I will write another time about our recent move to Norway. This is just a brief post to mark the day that I have finally uploaded to github the latest iteration of my Jekyll blog.

If you fancy a bit of history, in 2012 I moved my blog to github & jekyll, then in 2013 I made some radical changes to the layout.

File naming has always been a bit of an obsession for me. Recently, after seeing the proliferation of too many duplicate filenames in my photography folder, I decided to solve this problem once and for all.

Something to bear in mind: using programs like iPhoto or Lightroom or Aperture (also known as DAM¹) you should not be worried about how to name your camera files, because these programs are made just for that, i.e. to manage your digital library and forget the intricancies of the filesystem. But for old maniacs who still like to feel like they’re in control of their files and not rely on the search tools offered by the new operating systems today (e.g., Spotlight), then carry on reading this because you could find something of use.

It’s been more than a year since I moved to a Jekyll blog hosted on github. I think I have never been so productive in this period of time, despite having a much busier life both at work and off-work (Valentina is here and she’s here to stay! We have now trespassed the 15 months mark, if she was a car I’d say we have a looser engine now – and it shows from the way she runs and skettles; she is just unstoppable).

It’s been years since I started using Google Calendar to keep track my sports activities. I guess there are countless apps to do this but all I needed is something basic that I can access from anywhere. Since I already have synced my iPhone with Google Calendar, I can basically enter data from wherever I am, even if there is no internet connection, and then have it synced back to my main repository on Google servers as soon as I’m back online.

I have been using iAccounts, a simple iPhone app to keep track of my passwords and other sensitive information, since 2011 (I also wrote a short note about it).

Recently David Pogue published an enthusiastic review of Dashlane; I tried it, got quickly pissed off because of the way it’s priced (sync between devices for a $30 annual fee? Are they nuts?), so what this review has done for me was only to renew my interest in finding a free, open-source alternative to keep my passwords.

I wrote something about this little iPad a while ago, and on reading again that piece I find that it still represent my thoughts today. Yesterday Apple held the official announcement and among other cool things¹ there was the iPad mini.

I’m disappointed by two things; first is the lack of the retina display, but I now understand what’s at stake here (and I can’t believe all the tech commenters do not realize this): you want the retina display, you need more power and more battery to feed it.

Rumors of an upcoming iPad Mini are abundant.

As usual, all the tech bloggers are very concerned with things such as pricing, market position, technical feasibility, etc. What a bunch of boring guys.

Now, bear with me for just a few moments, because all I want to do is tell you why I’d like an iPad Mini:

1. to read pdfs; using every now and then my wife’s iPad I realize that it is the best way to read magazines and study/annotate scientific articles. A smaller iPad would be just fine for me because otherwise I would end up just leaving it at home.
2. to collect my photos in a portfolio (which means at least 32 Gb for me).
3. to mess around with snapshots (I won’t say “edit” because I feel that real editing can only be done with a bigger computer); I have had recently so much fun playing with Snapseed and Diptic on my iPhone that I think using them on a larger display would only make things even more fun. What I’m thinking is iPhone shots, not Nikon D7000 shots, instantaneously zapped to the iPad Mini via iCloud.
4. Aperture/Lightroom library editing on the go; there are these apps (Pixelsync and Photosmith) that allow you to do what I think is the most tiresome yet essential activity in photo editing – pruning the bad apples, deciding what’s a keeper. I would like to use one of these apps while I’m watching The Wire on the couch.

So that’s all I want to do on an iPad¹. And if I could do these things on a much cheaper device (€200-250) then I would seriously consider buying one.

Last time I wrote something about this blog, how I moved everything to Jekyll and modified the original themes.

Then Ian tweeted about that issue that I had with the fonts, that the blog looked differently when viewed on a PC or a Mac. And he also added that embedding fonts was easy.

So I looked around and in fact it was easy; more importantly, there’s plenty of open source fonts made available by Google. What was not easy was to decide which combination of fonts to use.

If somebody would actually read these posts he’d start thinking something like “what a loser”.

Here I am, a fairly old git, waiting for his first baby, with too many things to do at work (and off-work), losing precious sleep hours to relocate his blog on GitHub.

And what the hell is GitHub, asks the non-geek. Well, GitHub is basically a VCS (Version Control Systems¹) that allows programmers and hackers to exchange and host their coding efforts; but it does more than that, such as the possibility to host also personal blogs for free.

A short recap on how to build and install open mtb maps under OS X.

Essentially, a shorter version of the detailed instructions given on mtb-forum.it, written for my own convenience – but I thought somebody could find it useful especially to see the result of using different ‘styles’.

##tools

• gmapbuilder: to convert the OpenMtbMaps into the .gmapi format.
• MapInstall/MapManager to install the .gmapi files into the system, ready to be used by Basecamp and/or copied into a Garmin gps.
• Basecamp (also available on the AppStore): the main application to view and plan routes.

##data ##

I was very happy about my hackintosh, everything going smooth and easy… until it all broke down and I was left with no computer for almost a month.

And what was even stranger was that also Filippo’s hackintosh, built at the same time as mine, went down only a few days after mine. If computers were organic, I would have thought about some sort of mortal sickness.

Ok let me say that there’s a happy ending to this story: the motherboards were not dead but only in a coma. It was necessary to reinstall the bios and use an external graphic card to redirect the display because for some reasons the integrated HD3000 gpus were not working.

I used to love macstories.

It’s edited by a fellow italian who writes excellent english (unlike the rest of us), and it was a place to read reasoned commentaries that I enjoyed.

But lately, like most of the other tech blogs, it has changed to a collection of commentaries on brainless apps, such as: twitter clients, calendar and reminder apps, plain-text editors. I’m the first one to acknowledge the importance of simple apps to make our everyday life easier, and in fact I’ve been using Simplenote and NValt for ages. But come on, do we really need to read and review shitloads of stupid apps to keep track of menial tasks? To write using fucking Helvetica? Yet another app to see what the hell I’m supposed to do today or to share crappily filtered photos?

And so I have waited a long time for a new macmini to replace my old one¹. Apple did have something for me in the store, which was the 2011 server version with Intel Core i7, but it was definitely too expensive (€1000 with 4Gb of ram and not even an SSD or a GPU?).

The reason why I wanted a faster computer? Mainly because of Aperture – too damned slow (and the Nikon D7000’s 16Mp files didn’t help either). Having a snappier machine to do some iMovie editing was an added bonus, but apart from that I must say that everyday tasks² are still handled perfectly by my even slower Macbook Air 1.4ghz – a proof that a computer ‘feels’ fast not because of the cpu but because you replaced that clunky old drive with an SSD.