Dean Putney

Macs in Parisian High Fashion

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I spent a week in Paris recently, and although I was on vacation, I was still on the lookout for Macs. I almost missed this homage to the Apple design while I was out shopping with my uncle. Fortunately, he saw this excellent window display at the Printemps department store and stopped me to take some photos.

The display case, several large windows long, was completely littered with Apple products. See if you can count them all. You can also see the reflection of the other side of Boulevard Haussmann.

Macs In The Media: Watchmen

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Watchmen, the just-released film adaptation of the dramatic and incredibly detailed graphic novel by the same title, is set in an alternate version of 1984 and 1985 America. Not all of the details of America have changed though, and most importantly, the Mac is still present. As the film neared its climax during the midnight showing I attended, a friend elbowed me vigorously to point out this key snippet: 

There comes a point in the film where one of the characters is viewing a bank of monitors. The camera shows a close shot of the character and just a couple of the monitors. In one monitor on his right, you’ll recognize Apple’s 1984 Macintosh ad being played.

That should make it relatively easy to find the Apple-centric easter egg without revealing the plot. Good luck finding the video of Big Brother’s defeat in Watchmen!

MegaZoomer Beats You Over the Head With Full Screen Everything

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Come with me on a journey: It’s two in the morning, you’ve been working on a report for ages and you’re hitting the hard part. You’d better do something to focus on this paper right now or you’re going to wind up fiddling with iTunes playlists and blindly posting on unsavory websites.

Enter MegaZoomer. With one stroke of command-return your paper just engulfed your entire screen. The WHOLE thing. You finish your paper in record time! The day is saved! Here’s an image of Safari filling my entire screen using MegaZoomer:

MegaZoomer can take any Cocoa-based application and zoom it up to the size of the whole screen. This means you’ve got great screen use for Safari, Aperture, most text editors and lots, lots more.

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It even works with Terminal for those… really important coding projects.

The only downside of MegaZoomer is that you have to have SIMBL installed. If you don’t already have SIMBL installed, I’d suggest you look into it not only for MegaZoomer, but for the myriad of other great plugins that require it.

[thanks Larry]

Dress Up Your Nokia As a Mac

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Can’t afford an iPhone? Me neither. That’s why I was so excited to see this photo of a Nokia phone dressed up as a Mac on Flickr. My old phone could use some panache.

A quick search through the comments shows that this is a theme from Dan Schwartz, and it’s compatible on quite a few different phones. It’s hard to find on his website, tucked into the About pages, but you can get the theme for your Nokia phone here.


Source: Dan Schwartz

The theme imitates the Mac without interfering with the phone’s functions. Dan used the application icons from Mac OS X’s system and one of the gorgeous Apple default backgrounds to give you the full experience. The theme even goes so far as to closely imitate the fonts used in the Mac system. All in all, these themes are an excellent escape for those of us who want to keep a little Apple with us all the time.

Secrets: Like Reading Your Mac’s Diary

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Have you ever dreamed up a new feature for an application, like using network drives for Time Machine backups, or changing the sounds Mail makes when you send messages? Sometimes these features actually are in the application, they’re just difficult to find and change. Most of them require you to know how to use the Terminal or find files deep in your Library or System folder.

Secrets from the awesome people at Blacktree lets you change those settings through a preference pane in System Preferences. Suddenly all those features your Mac’s been hiding from you are just a checkbox away. Be careful though, changing the settings marked as “dangerous” might not be a great idea.

EverSave Is My Knight In Shining Armor

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I really enjoy doing design work, but the weighty programs I’m using to do it make fighting the risk of losing my work a major battle. My latest project is laying out my resume on a grid to squeeze three pages of text into one. With all that fiddling, and switching back and forth between applications as I try to multitask, the software I’m using is prone to crashes. It was ugly, but thanks to years of practice back in the day, I managed to avoid a few serious issues thanks to a regimen of Command-S kung-fu training.

Then I found out about EverSave. EverSave is another quiet little freeware menu bar item you don’t know how you lived without. It’s got two key settings: time increment saving and application switch saving.

Time increment saving is pretty self explanatory, and I’m a little hesitant to use it for fear of losing my Command-S embouchure. Application switching saving just saves your current work every time you switch to another application. It’s a great time to save, since processing-intense programs seem likely to crash when you switch back to them, and it doesn’t interrupt your work flow.

EverSave also lets you choose which applications you want to automatically save, so you can keep it from accidentally pushing out new web code or overwriting your programs with new errors. You can also turn EverSave on and off through the menubar or through a customizable hotkey.

Take Firefox on Safari

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Want the power and Windows compatibility of Firefox with the sleek look and style of Safari? Since the update to Firefox 3, it’s been difficult to find a good theme to transfer Safari’s UI experience. Luckily, takebacktheweb.org has two excellent themes that will make you feel much more at home in Firefox.

The GrApple Yummy theme is almost an exact copy of Safari, right down to the tab stylings. GrApple Delicious is slightly different, mostly in the look of the tabs. The feel of Safari is still there though, so this might be a nice middle ground. It could definitely be handy in telling the applications apart if you have both open at the same time, as I do when I’m testing web site compatibility. Both themes come in “blue” and “graphite” styles.

Ads Getting… Bigger? Make Vimax Ads Disappear

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I’ve received two “friend tech support” complaints about slow Internet access and seeing lots of ads for Vimax on just about every website all of a sudden. Today, I found the solution thanks to an article on Boing Boing referencing an Apple Support thread on the issue.

The software causing the problem is related to your DNS. Instead of showing your usual ads, they’re replaced with the offensive advertisements. Mulder on the Apple Support thread provides this insight and fix:

Reinstalling Mac OS X will not solve the problem, as it’s not with anything in OS X. If you have no Trojan Horse, then it would seem your ISP is doing this. So try this:

Open System Preferences > Network > Configure > TCP/IP and paste these two DNS servers into that field:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

click Apply Now and quit System Preferences. Then restart Safari and see if the problem continues.

Results as follows: “Its worked zoop!! Zoop!!” and “I too obtained immediate results – thank you!“. If you have any problems, consult the thread itself for details on the debugging process and solution.

Sleep Deprive Your Macbook With InsomniaX

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As a student, one of the main advantages of having a laptop is that you can study in quieter places with fewer distractions. As a photographer, you’re probably excited about using your laptop for tethered shooting on the go.

Here’s the paradox: if you try to shut the lid to focus on your term paper while you’re listening to music, or want to put your laptop in your backpack while you’re shooting, everything turns off.

Thanks to InsomniaX, you can get complete control over the system’s sleep cycle in a neat little menu item. To get this functionality on my old iBook I completely disassembled it and removed the bits that detect when the lid is closed. You don’t want to do that!

Download InsomniaX! Go ahead and listen to your music! Fill your hard drive with photos direct from your camera! The world is your oyster.

Mac Make: Macbook Pouches

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As I’m preparing to spend away all of my money for a Macbook my classes require, I’m starting to think about protecting it. Not just protecting it, but protecting it in style. I like the custom made Macbook pouches on Etsy because I know that if I buy one, I’m probably never going to see someone with the same pouch. There may be a handful of others out there, but they’re so few and far between that you can consider your purchase unique.

fernfiddlehead has a barrage of Macbook envelopes that look excellent. There’s a simple pattern to their dimensions, but the fabrics available are vibrant and exciting:


This one has a matching power cable pouch.

Canon 5D Mark II and MacBook Pro Make Excellent Team

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If you’re looking for a compact, efficient solution to shooting and editing high definition video, you’d probably be very interested in Florent Porta’s work with the new Canon 5D Mark II and a Macbook Pro. The video above (best appreciated at the Vimeo page or at Dailymotion) was shot in three days and edited in two. This was released shortly after the last Macbook/Macbook Pro announcement, so it likely wasn’t on the latest Macbook Pro.

With the significant upgrade of the new Macbooks and the Canon 5D bringing fantastic high quality photo and video to consumers, a few thousand dollars certainly goes a lot farther and a lot lighter than other shooting and editing solutions. Some suggest that tethering for video might even work, but there doesn’t seem to be any real solid confirmation on that.

Folklore: Burrell’s Exit

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We’ve been following the stories of Burrell Smith for a while now and gotten to know him and how he thinks. Of course, Burrell was not the only person invested in the Macintosh’s success. The sheer amount of work put into the project could not have been achieved by the team if it weren’t for Steve Jobs’ special brand of encouragement. Andy Hertzfeld’s stories describe Jobs’ powers of persuasion using an analogy to Star Trek: the reality distortion field.

Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field convinced people to agree to absurd deadlines, work much harder, and even agree to stay at Apple when they really wanted to quit. Burrell watched his colleagues at Apple try in vain to leave. Eventually, Burrell came up with the perfect plan to “nullify the reality distortion field” for when it was his time to quit:

I’ll just walk into Steve’s office, pull down my pants, and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that? It’s guaranteed to work.

Read on at Folklore.org for the exciting conclusion of Burrell C. Smith’s tenure at Apple: Are You Gonna Do It? [Folklore.org]

[Photo Source]

Vintage Coke Machine Office

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Craftster.org member DogGrrl posted pictures of their excellent room, painstakingly painted and decorated to look like a diner. Just the murals are impressive enough to warrant it a second look, but buried on the fourth page of the thread is a link to DogGrrl’s office:

A vintage Coke machine on the outside…

and an impressive iMac house on the inside!

DogGrrl says:
To compliment my new dining room mural I bought an old unworking coke machine, gutted it and then sent it to a friend to weld some shelves onto it. Tada! Here is my new new computer cabinet! The Pepsi and Coke picnic coolers I am using to house my files/office stuff.

Well done indeed. There’s a nice keyboard tray in there, a shelf for the printer, space for files and a phone, and the inside of the door is neatly multi-purposed as a magnetic calendar and note holder!

Survive Time Warner’s Viacom Blackout with TVUPlayer

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With Viacom demanding higher fees for their channels to be run on Time Warner Cable, it looks like you might have to turn to the Internet for your Colbert Report and Dora the Explorer. That time might come as soon as tonight, with a blackout on Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse Network customers threatened for tonight at midnight.

Fear not. With TVUPlayer you can watch most of the 19 channels that might be removed if an agreement can’t be reached. At least you can watch the key ones: Comedy Central, Spike TV, Nickelodeon and MTV are all available to stream. The quality’s not great, but it’s better than nothing isn’t it?

Folklore: Creative Problem Solving

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Woz playing Defender. Source: Folklore.org

Now that you’ve been introduced to Burrell Smith, you can get a feel for the kind of eccentric behind the original Macintosh. This is a charming guy, a hard worker, and a creative character. These types of people are the foundation of Apple’s success through innovation.

While it’s great to read these examples of creative things that these employees have done, it’s much more valuable to understand how they got about becoming this type of person. The story “Make a Mess, Clean it Up!” from Folklore.org provides that key analysis using a lesson in Burrell’s style of video gaming. Notice that even in the first few paragraphs, the idea of innovation comes to mind immediately.

Working 90 hours a work week requires frequent, and highly effective, work breaks. In the center of Macintosh work area in Bandley 3 we had a ping pong table, a nice stereo system, and a Defender video game machine. We found that competitive play gave us a jolt of adrenaline, and a refreshed mind-set when we resumed work. We also learned a lot about our coworkers and how they excel during competition. While playing Defender one day I got some great insight into how Burrell accelerates his own learning process.

Make a Mess, Clean it Up! [Folklore.org]

Folklore: An Introduction to Burrell Smith

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Source: folklore.org

I love hearing and reading stories about the people who made great things happen. In much the same way that I enjoyed “Classic Feynman” and shared the book with many friends, I share with you the beginning of the Apple Macintosh. Andy Hertzfeld’s website, Folklore.org, chronicles the early days of Apple Computer and the creation of the Macintosh. It does more than that though, it brings back all the fun had in creating it, and gives us a first look in the original Cult of Mac: its creators.

Quite a few of the stories follow Burrell Smith. Originally hired as an Apple II service technician, Burrell was an amazing hardware engineer and generally crazy guy. It was his hardware and circuitry work that made the original Macintosh a reality.

“I’ll Be Your Best Friend” introduces you to one of the key men behind the Mac through his introduction to Andy Hertzfeld:

Toward the end of my first week as an Apple employee in August 1979, I noticed that someone had left a black binder on my desk, with a hand-written title that read, “Apple II: Principles of Operation”. It contained a brilliant, concise description of how the Apple II hardware worked, reverently explaining details of Woz’s epic, creative design hacks, in a clearer fashion than I’d ever read before. I didn’t know who left it there, but the title page said it was written by “Burrell C. Smith”.

Later that day, in the late afternoon, I was approached by a young, animated, slightly nervous guy with long, straight, blond hair, who entered my cubicle and walked right up to me.

I’ll Be Your Best Friend [Folklore.org]

Nostalgia: Shufflepuck Cafe

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For those of you who remember the good old days of the Error Bomb and the SE-30, you may remember the old Broderbund game Shufflepuck Café. You were thrust into rough and tumble space bar, clearly the outsider, forced to prove yourself in a true game of wits and agility: computer air hockey. It was a simple game for simple times: a handful of wacky alien characters, mild nudity, and an animated screen crack when your opponent scored. Ah to go back for one more round.

But you’d need a vintage Mac for that, and you threw yours out with your velour leisure suit years ago. Fret not! There are a few free possibilities for a quick match on OS X! None line up perfectly with the original, and for that I am exploring the avenues of emulation, but in a pinch these will do.

TuxPuck is perhaps the most reminiscent of the original, with a character closely resembling Princess Bejin. It is, however, limited in the characters you can play against and might need a bit of massaging to get it to play.

Shufflepuck REVOLUTION provides a bit more variety in the way of characters, including Woz and Jobs as opponents, but it’s also updated the system with 3D graphics. Unlike TuxPuck, Shufflepuck REVOLUTION insists on playing in fullscreen, which is a bit off-putting if you don’t know that right away.

The quest for the perfect OS X Shufflepuck match continues!

Comic Book Contest for Apple IIe

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I recently started reading comic books from the 80’s that I’m borrowing from a friend. Every issue is a blast. The most interesting thing about these comics is that the advertisements in them are actually worth reading. There are bits for other comic books, grinning kids with Ataris and other paneled strips hawking Nesquik. It’s pretty cool, and even now I kind of want to buy some of that stuff.

I’ve read a couple issues of the Flash, paged through a Green Lantern or two, but I really got hooked on Groo the Wanderer by the MAD magazine comic artist, Sergio Aragonés. Groo is great, but the real surprise was on the back of issue 6 in this ad for “The Nutty Over Payday Instant Winner Game”:

Yes, if you won the grand prize, one of five Apple IIe computers could have been yours!

eMotion + Wiimote

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I’m very interested in Wiimote projects for the Mac for two reasons. One is that the guy who came up with the idea (Johnny Lee) is an alumnus of my university. I’m so into his work that I even went to his thesis defense. The other is that my mom is a sixth grade teacher, and I helped her convince the technology department at my old middle school to buy two Wiimotes for her to use with the projector and iMac in her classroom.

Setting up the Wiimotes with the whiteboard is a snap, especially with the Wiimote Whiteboard program for the Mac. The only problems we’ve had are making the IR light pen and finding something simple for the kids to do.

In a quick demonstration last week, using a DVD player remote control since the IR light pen I made ran out of batteries, I set the kids up drawing in Appleworks. This was fun, and the ENTIRE class immediately jumped out of their seats and lined up at the chance to draw themselves. This was certainly one of the most excited and engaged audiences I’ve ever presented to.

Even so, Appleworks isn’t a really great program to be using for this type of thing. It’s obviously not designed for a pen interface, and it can’t use the Wiimote’s multitouch capabilities. This is why I was so excited to see Adrien Mondot’s effort to hook up eMotion to the Wiimote set up:

eMotion+Wiimote in IR mode from Adrien Mondot on Vimeo via [Hack A Day]

The video shows all kinds of wonders that sixth graders would lose their minds over. Drawing is cool enough, but I think we’d have to resuscitate some of them once we got them moving letters around, using multiple pens, affecting particles and giving them 3D graphics.

I’m going to try to make some little kids pass out after winter break. Have you tried the Wiimote whiteboard project?

Five Creative Apple Shirts

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A good Apple t shirt is hard to find. You want to be unique, to be different. You want your shirt to be like your Birkenstocks and Uggs before they were cool. Some companies will mail these things out to you for free if you beg them enough (my friend got a Digikey shirt after a week of calling), but for Apple you’ve got to go out and get them from third party vendors. These are for the long time Mac users, and the nerds who want to look good.

This shirt lurks in its awesome. Most would think that it’s just another “power button” shirt. Those in the know recognize it from other places. There’s also a bandana for the truly serious.

Mac t shirts are all well and good, but when it really comes down to it, you probably don’t want to wear them to work. You want something with a little more sophistication, even if you’re locked in the server closet all day. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death polo shirt is the way to go for casual Fridays.

Insanely Great Tees could easily fill this entire list, but I’m just going to include two of their shirts. The Bomb is definitely a must-have for me, as I can’t remember how many times I saw that little popup window. It’s ingrained in my mind. This shirt says “Yes, I was around before OS X”, “Yes, this is a metaphor for my coolness” and “No, I don’t belong in airports”.

The second Insanely Great Tees shirt is also one of my favorites. The Campground Command symbol is a subtle nod towards your Mac side, but the general concept is there for Windows and Linux users as well. This shirt was even featured in the nerd-shirt gold mine of a television show The IT Crowd.

Finally, a parody of the most sold t shirt ever. There’s too much Mac nerdiness going on here to even try to get into it all.

For those of you looking beyond this list, I recommend that you click around the sites that these shirts are from. Blue Collar Distro and Insanely Great Tees have a great selection of Mac and otherwise geeky shirts. I recognize that there are lots of great Mac shirts on Cafepress, but I tried to steer clear of them because of some issues with quality they’ve been known to have. There are also lots of great expo and out of stock shirts to be had, but that’s no good for your wardrobe is it?

Carnegie Mellon Design Student’s Pedestal Response

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This iPod speaker dock has been on display in Carnegie Mellon University’s design department for quite some time now. After weeks of trying to remember my camera when I’d be near the building, Lonnie’s post helped put the camera in my hands and my body in front of the display case.

It seems as though iPod docks are in vogue for design students. How many of you have made iPod “pedestals”?

Made on a Mac – Facebook

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I met some Facebook developers at a campus recruiting event recently, and we had a long discussion about computers and Facebook’s development. Apparently, the majority of Facebook’s developers use Macs, both at home and at work.

This is interesting on its own, but when I found this video of Facebook hitting 100 million users, I’ve got to say I got excited. Every desk in the whole office has a Cinema display and the new keyboard! It looks like most of the displays are hooked up to MacBook Pros, but I like to imagine that there’s a hefty Mac Pro hidden under those desks, happily chugging away, a secret perfected Facebook interface hidden on its hard disks.