Come fly with me lets fly, lets fly away

11/01/09 – 4:56 pm
Jet Engine

Jet Engine

The boy and I visited the Australian National Aviation Museum today. They have a considerable amount of aviation history packed into a fairly small amount of space. I tend to whip round things like this taking photos but it still took me two hours. If aviation is your thing its worth the price of entry.

The title for this post of course comes from a Frank Sinatra song. Franky always had a way with lyrics but what we’re they on when they wrote:

“Fly with me lets float down to peru
in lamaland theres a one man band and he’ll toot his flute for you
fly with me lets take off in the blue.”

By PSDC | Posted in Exhibition, Travel | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

AstroBoy, AstroBoy, He is brave and gentle and wise and CGIed!

10/30/09 – 10:50 pm

After the Wachowski Brothers frightful anemic technicolor yawn version of Speed Racer I’ve been wary of move versions of classic kids anime action series. Thankfully the brothers had nothing to do with Astro Boy. The latest movie of the classic series I watched as a kid has stayed true to the style and spirit of the original kids series. The whole package comes together nicely animation, plot, style etc. Some python-esk touches provided by the Robot Revolutionary Front (RRF) will keep any accompanying grown-ups amused. And you cant go passed lines like “I got machine guns…in my butt”, to keep young boys amused. My only criticism would be that I was not 100% convinced by some of the voice talent, too use to the original I guess.

By PSDC | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Star Wars Where Science Meets Imagination

10/30/09 – 10:15 pm
Stormtrooper costume - Star Wars exhibition

Stormtrooper costume - Star Wars exhibition

Developed at the Museum of Science, Boston, U.S.A. and currently touring Australia; his lordship and I visited this enthralling exhibition today at Scienceworks in Spotswood (Melbourne) today. The way this exhibition is put together is excellent. A great mix of educational scientific theory, behind the scenes making of info and a large collection of costumes, props and especially robots from the George Lucas group of companies and associates. If you’ve got kids, whether your a fan or not, its a fun and educational day out.

By PSDC | Posted in Exhibition | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

iMug Presents, Well Me, on Snow Leopard Services

10/28/09 – 10:50 pm

Last night the good people from iMug had me over to talk about Snow Leopard and in particular the improved services menu. There a good mob the guys and gals of iMug mostly older professionals who use Macs as part of their every day work / life.

Basically I demonstrated for them the improvements (under the hood) that Apple have made in the latest version of OS X (10.6). By my count Snow Leopard contains over 100 significant modifications and improvements, but more than enough people have already covered most of these on other blogs so I’ll not add to the noise on this. If you are interested to find out more then check out Apple’s enhancements and refinements page. Read More »

By PSDC | Posted in OS X | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Play it safe when upgrading your OS to Snow Leopard

09/22/09 – 9:10 am

When I was young and beautiful and was heading off overseas for my European tour my Father and Stepmother both individually gave me sage advise that I’ve always felt may have been related in some way. My Father said “Always wear a Prophylactic.” He was a pharmacists and my Stepmother said “Always drill a pilot hole first.”

To some degree I’ve have always tried to live by this creed. It works we’ll for intimate relationships such as the ones many of us have with our computers these days. We all like bright shiny objects and desire is a very strong emotion but we should all stop and think before diving into a new relationship be they Human or Digital and this is especially true of computer operating systems. Read More »

By PSDC | Posted in OS X | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

iTunes 9 Mini Player Zoom Button Changes

09/19/09 – 10:15 pm

This has been reported all over the web but… Apple have changed the function of the Zoom button (third round button in the top left of the window, usually green with a plus symbol on it). In previous versions of iTunes clicking the zoom button when iTunes’ window is maximized would shrink iTunes to mini player mode and vice versa. I’m guessing they change this function to make iTunes consistent with other apps but there are many who are not happy with this change. Anyway, now if you want the mini player you have the following options.

  • Hold down the option (alt) key when clicking the zoom button
  • Use the menu option – View > Switch to / from Mini Player
  • or use its short-cut key combination of shift+command+M

As I said this is all over the web, so why am I adding to the noise. Well being a bit of an Apple Automation nut I’ve come up with a silly little app for those who want the one-click mini player option back. Download Zoom iTunes*, open the disk image and drag the app into your applications folder, drag it onto the dock (next to iTunes say) and you have a quick convenient (some might argue pointless) way of zooming to and from the mini player with one click.

N.B. It can take a mo to get going sometimes.

* All care but no responsibility taken.

By PSDC | Posted in OS X, Software | Comments (2)

We’rrrre Baack

09/11/09 – 2:26 pm

There is a long and frustrating story about PSDC’s recent absence from the interweb which I’ll post very soon (if you know me that means maybe never) but for now “We’rrre Baack!”

By PSDC | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Update to Nowhere

06/27/09 – 12:50 am

Some of you may have noticed the site was down for a while from about 4pm on Thursday till about 2pm Friday. In the tradition of mice, men and plans here’s a brief explanation of what when wrong.

Having logged into the WordPress back-end I noticed a minor upgrade was available for WP (2.7-2.8) so I set off the in-built automatic upgrade script. BOOM! The site died and then it took out my hosts server. Am I in the bad books or what? The attempted upgrade had crashed out and left the MySql database back end corrupted. Attempts to load the front page of the site sent PHP into a loop as WordPress could not decide if it was installed or not. Loop, loop, chew, chew through the servers memory it went so my host cut me off – rightly so.

Panic stations, placted host, host reinstated a month old back-up of the site (see moral below), found problem, fixed problem and the host graciously let my site back on the Interwebs.

The moral of the story:

  • As the service guy from my host pointed out: “Its a very good idea to backup your account before making major changes like an upgrade.” I had a severe talk to myself and was very contrite.
  • If you can; test any upgrades on a test server befor applying them to a live host.
  • Don’t trust the automatic upgrade in WordPress.
  • Be very nice to the people who host your web site.
By PSDC | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Creating outlines for Keynote in Pages and TextEdit

06/22/09 – 4:24 am

Like many Mac users who produce presentations I fell in love with Keynote from day one (well almost; I have to admit to being a born cynic). It allows you to create sleek, highly polished presentations that have a filmic quality and the program’s interface is elegant and simple to use.

Waiting for me to bag-out powerpoint aren’t you? Not today. I was a Windows user for more than a decade before my conversion. I produced many high quality presentations with Powerpoint and as I was brought up to believe that its a poor tradesperson who blames his tools I’ll give fare dues to PPT. Microsoft’s presentation software has been around longer than Apple’s and it bristles, in a dull chrome-plated plastic kind of way, with features that are in some cases sadly and in others thankfully absent from Keynote. One of the features I’ve missed, which was an integral part of my presentation creation workflow, is the ability to create a presentation outline in a word processor application and import it into Powerpoint.

Being able to create outlines away from the presentation tool allows you to focus on dialogue: a bit like writing a screen play. It’s also a great way to cheat if your running late with your presentation or working from someone else’s document, because you can markup an existing document and then quickly produce a presentation from it.

Thankfully, it is possible to do this in Keynote but its not very apparent how. I’m not sure how long this feature has existed, some blog posts suggest it was only introduced in the latest version (Keynote ‘09 – Version 5) but given the secluded nature of this feature it may have been around longer. Anyway, here’s how to create outlines for Keynote in Pages and, believe it or not, TextEdit. Read More »

By PSDC | Posted in OS X, Software | Tagged , , | Comments (0)