on photography (and by extension, many other artforms)

Ken Rockwell:

“Your equipment DOES NOT affect the quality of your image. The less time and effort you spend worrying about your equipment the more time and effort you can spend creating great images. The right equipment just makes it easier, faster or more convenient for you to get the results you need.”

[source]

“what do you listen to?”

iTunes Signature Maker:

People often ask me what music I listen to, and I find it difficult to describe my enormous music collection in just a few sentences. So I created iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) to answer in sound a question I cannot answer in words. iTSM analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent it.

iTSM selects a small number of your “favorite” tracks based on some simple selection criteria, such as the number of times you have played them or the rating you have assigned them. Then it analyzes the audio content of these files, combining a small bit of each of them to create the signature.

Mine is brewing now: takes a while. And without the use of any iTunes Store purchases, it won’t be all that accurate. Kind of a peek at what my collection was like before iTunes . . . .

Given that it’s open source, I suspect someone will add a hymn-compliant decoder that will allow iTMS tracks to be used.

[hat tip]

<update> Safari crashed without finished it, so I’ll let Firefox/Deer Park have go.

And here it is.

A longer version.

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I could have used this last night

I had to wrestle with installing OS 9/Classic on a Tiger system last night, and while I’m not sure this would have been easier, it’s miles cooler.

minivmac [nothickmanuals.info]:

Running Linux, Windows or applications like Firefox, Thunderbird and AbiWord from a USB flash memory device is old hat. How about a Mac 128K or Plus on a USB key? Using a ‘portable’ Mac system you can:

Fetch.Php

  • play with old system software and applications without dusting off your old Mac,
  • impress your friends, or show others what the older Mac system looked like,
  • use Mac on Windows and Linux.

What I ended up doing was opening up my iBook’s system restore disks and looking through the .images directories on each one til I found the OS9General disk image. NB: you need to look through the disks in the Terminal or in some other way that shows you files/folders that start with “.” ie, are invisible.

Mounted and copied it to my system, then ran the 9.2.1 updater. My OS 9 installer wouldn’t work and I know I can’t boot into OS 9 on anything I use anymore.

Then I could run my ancient copy of InDesign.

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