Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Three-day word count: 2,500

My printer arrived ahead of the as-yet-unshipped mac, so I’ve been printing away merrily. Printers are evil incarnate. The PDF looks perfect in Acrobat Reader, but by the time it comes out of the printer, the margins are too big.

The first munge was page margins. My initial searches turned up several suggestions to uncheck the “fit to page” checkbox. However, there was no “fit to page” checkbox for me to uncheck. Extensive google research led me to upgrade to a newer version of Acrobat Reader (5.1) which did have the checkbox.

Acrobat Reader is huge, by the way, and takes an hour to download over dialup. But I did, and I unchecked the checkbox and printed my PDF. The margins came out too .

I suspected my homegrown PDF files, so I followed the instructions on the otherwise useless Adobe troubleshooting page. I tried printing an entirely different PDF, namely, the $99 rebate form for my printer. The margins were too . I’m still going to use it to get my rebate, for that you should be paying me for using this plastic paperweight of a printer effect.

Somewhere in google groups I’d read that the native OSX Preview program did this same margin munging, so I hadn’t bothered trying it. Now I was desperate, though, with a backlog of PDFs and no way to print them. So I ran one through Preview and presto–perfect margins!

Preview did have its own peculiarities, however. The font came out darker (perhaps because Adobe wasn’t shrinking the text down to increase the margins), and it was also missing all superscript numbers above 3. In some cases a little smudge showed up where the number was supposed to be. I figured this was a font problem, so I changed the font of all my superscripts. At long last, my file printed properly.

My little HP inkjet doesn’t compare to the big HP laser printer at school that required the user to sacrifice a text file before it would print a PS file. It’s more of a print imp than a print daemon, but I foresee hours of amusement in my printing future.

Dyslexic link of the day: ctue

Seema says I should be writing, so this is going to be a very short entry about some nice Terminal utilities I found at MacOSX Hints. The long story is at Improving Unix-Finder Interactions in OS X. I installed the fink version and then saved a new terminal .term file as directed, and now I can open the current Finder directory in the Terminal with just one click.

Some of the tricks at that site (like iTerm customization) won’t work for OS 10.1, but one commenter mentioned that anyone can type open . to open the local Terminal directory in the Finder. That alone, without any of the downloads, is a very useful hint.

The rumors were true for once; there are new PowerBooks out today. I couldn’t resist - I ordered the 12″ Combo drive model. It’s supposed to ship by the 25th - the 15″ and 17″ PowerBooks are shipping sooner if you’re after immediate gratification.

Are you new to the Joy of OSX? You might want to look into MacMentors for switcher support. Concerned about shipping delays? Apple has a new spokesman to reassure you.

I was having trouble with an educational video kindly provided by Jerie. Nothing could get the sound to play until I stumbled across this QuickTime AC3 codec. It required a newer version of DivX than I had, so I downloaded DivX 5.0.7. The latter claims I won’t need to validate avi’s anymore before playing them. If true, it would be cool.

For more about playing avi’s on a mac, see my blog entry on DivX for OSX.

The iTunes store sold its ten-millionth song. It could have been me - I bought a song last week, too - but it wasn’t. There are also new iMacs and new iPods out, but no new PowerBooks.

In other news, Mars is still hanging around and four new Stargate drabbles have been added to my Stargate fic page.

Word count: 625

According to MacRumors, new G4 PowerBooks will be delayed at least another month, and G5 PowerBooks will be out around April 2004.

My poor G3 is over four years old now. Today it had one of its little speaker shorts, where the music turns to static. Battery life is just a memory and the CD drive is getting a little picky, but with luck I could make it till April 2004. We’ll see.

Word count: 1050

Today’s Quest for Life was far more successful. The best Life out there by far is LifeLab for Mac OS 8.6 through X. It’s worth downloading for the Persian Rug pattern alone. (I stared at it for 1,000 generations.) You can use any RLE format file with LifeLab, but I found that it wouldn’t open foreign files unless I converted from DOS format to unix (where necessary), and changed the file type and creator to match the sample text patterns (not the PATT patterns). That was more work than I expected from a friendly mac app, but it comes with enough pattern samples that I didn’t need to do it. I was just obsessed. I even read up on the current status of Life research.

If you are sadly macless, you can play Life online or take the couch potato approach and watch animated Life gifs. Life32 is supposed to be a good Windows Life program, but I can’t vouch for serfware.

While browsing around, I found some other interesting toys, such as an The Brain Automata [sic] on-line, and a page of Mac Classic ALife programs. I spent yet more time in Classic mode fiddling with Tresvita, a 3D automata-generator. It’s a very cool program, considering its advanced age. I downloaded a few others from that page and wasn’t nearly as impressed. The Hexagonal CA wasn’t adjustable enough, for example.

Word count: 100

Another day, another drabble… Since I’m on vacation from Colony, I’ve been doing research for an original story or two. In the process, I stumbled across some weird sites, like this Virtual Pet Rock for Mac OS X (10.2), and other cool Mac software that I can’t run, like Avida. The Fractal Trees work fine, though.

I’m still dreaming. You can see the new, 64-bit, faster-than-a-speeding-PC PowerMacs at Apple, but new G5 PowerBooks have yet to be announced. I can’t buy a PowerMac - I’m just not the boxy type - so this could be a long wait for me unless my old G3 dies of shame.

[An aside to Veronica…] Never, ever let mom talk me into doing that again. It was a nightmare of kitsch and cattle, and I don’t mean the milk-producing kind.

Rumors are flying fast and furious about WWDC 2003, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference next week. Rumormongers expect announcements of new PowerMacs and possibly PowerBooks based on the long-awaited 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip from IBM.

New hardware looks like a sure thing - a German shop is already advertising it. (See the Mac in brown wrapping on the right side.) 3cmug is hosting a countdown timer until Steve Job’s keynote address at WWDC Monday afternoon at 1pm (Boston time). You can catch the keynote at the Apple Store at the Cambridgeside Galleria, though not at the new store in Chestnut Hill.

You won’t see me there, unfortunately - I have a day job. I may run down there afterwards if they really have PPC970 PowerBooks in. I think the guy from As the Apple Turns will be there updating by wireless. I’ll be away this weekend, so if all goes well, my next entry will be Monday night from a new PowerBook.

A girl can dream…