Odds And Sods

For over 25 years, I have saved various bits of the web on my local computer. Vintage ads, cool graphics, first edition book covers, images of paintings by the old masters and of sculptures, funny cartoons, comic book covers, pulp novel covers, photographs of famous musicians. A version of Pinterest, I guess, but for my own visual education, not the world’s.

For the most part, I have moved all these files into a folder called Odds And Sods, and I use it as the basis for my desktop image on a randomized basis. In the MacOS, one can point the system to a folder full of images, and every 15 minutes (or some other time frame), the desktop image will change to something else in that folder.

However, the files themselves are named haphazardly. Many of them are named something like 2004-1–20-14.38.jpg

Chicago Has Everything

This means the image is hard to search for. On my Family Sunday Zoom™, someone suggested using Reverse Image Search, and while that is an excellent suggestion, I feel it is unpractical for the thousands of images in my Odds and Sods folder.

I wonder if there is an automated solution? A software that does the hard work of uploading and renaming images? Especially since when I tried to reverse image search the above poster from the Fraser Label Company, my browser crashed.

Reverse Image Search crashes my browser

Merits further investigation…

By the way, this is the image that I used on my Family Sunday Zoom™, named on my computer: Screen Shot 2020-09-18 at 5.06.18 PM.png

art history

After I switched browsers1 I was able to use the Google Reverse Image tool on this painting – turns out to be painted by Pieter Bruegel The Elder and is called “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent,” ca 1559. I had read an article in the Smithsonian about him recently, I think because I was looking for images about the plague in the European Middle Ages.

I still want to be able to do this for all the poorly or obscurely named images saved on my computer.

Footnotes:
  1. from Safari to Brave []

iPhone Other Data Suckage

For the third time in the last 2 months, I’ve had to restore my iPhone to factory settings – a long, laborious process – because a sync failed, and left “Other” data behind. This “Other” data is music, but the iOS cannot make sense of it, and just ignores it, except I cannot ever sync the iPhone again because there isn’t enough room. There is no way to get at the file system to delete this crud, other than resetting the iPhone back to as if I just opened it from its box.

A real PITA, in other words, that takes several hours from start to finish. 

IPhone Data Other
iPhone Data Other.PNG

See, the Other Data is so large, that the iPhone sync process fails. Grrr…

 

First, Backup the iPhone. Turn Sync Music Off (click the toggle button), rsync. I’ve found that subsequently turning on use iTunes Match helps make this process actually work without failing. Backup again. Restore iPhone to Factory Setting, wait the 90 minutes or so before this finishes. Enable Location Services, log in to iCloud, etc., Sync. Wait until all the apps and photos,  books, etc. sync. Restore Hipstamatic lens/film combos. Toggle Sync Music back on. Sync again, hopefully for the last time. All told, I started around 4:30 PM, and now it is nearly 11 PM, and the final sync isn’t completed yet (though I had dinner, drank some wine, watched a little television, and so forth, these times might have been slightly less had I sat in front of my computer all night waiting for the various processes to finish) – it has only synced about 10% of my music so far. At least there is an end in sight.1

Lovely.

Oh, and also recreating the TouchID fingerprint scan, another few minutes of time – time that was interesting to do the first time, not that cumbersome the second time, but now, the third time in 60 days? Not ideal…

Footnotes:

  1. 12:33 AM when the phone is finally usable again. Sheesh []

Dropbox app brings iPad support, fantastic external editing

 

Dropbox app brings iPad support, fantastic external editing: “The Dropbox team updated the Dropbox app today with full iPad compatibility and the option to choose which app will open a document. It’s a very welcome refresh “

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

I’ve been using DropBox for a few months now, even though I have my own network, because sometimes certain files are handy to have access to, no matter where I am. An iPad version is welcome news.

Also am testing MarsEdit 3.0, because ecto1 will never again be updated.

Footnotes:

  1. my long time favorite blog editing tool []

Reading Around on December 9th through December 10th

A few interesting links collected December 9th through December 10th:

  • From the Desk of David Pogue – Free Speech (Recognition) – NYTimes.com – Remember the Gmail brouhaha? … At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody’s forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.

    As for the names in your Contacts: they’re sent to Nuance so that the app will recognize the names when you dictate them. No other information (phone numbers, e-mail, addresses, etc.) is transmitted.

    What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits? How do they know Microsoft and Apple aren’t slurping down private documents off the hard drive and laughing their heads off?

    I mean, if you’re gonna be paranoid, at least be rational about it.

  • Jon22 » today’s grammar lesson: rob enderle – Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin of the technology world, minus all the fun jokes about the front-door view of Russia.
  • Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Electronic Frontier Foundation – privacy option telling Facebook to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API.”

    That option has disappeared, and now apps can get all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an app.

    Facebook defends this change by arguing that very few users actually ever selected that option — in the same breath that they talk about how complicated and hard to find the previous privacy settings were. Rather than eliminating the option, Facebook should have made it more prominent and done a better job of publicizing it. Instead, the company has sent a clear message: if you don’t want to share your personal data with hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless Facebook app developers — some of whom are obviously far from honest — then you shouldn’t use Facebook.

Reading Around on September 11th through September 14th

A few interesting links collected September 11th through September 14th:

  • Sprouting 101: How do you sprout seeds, nuts and grains? – Sprouting seeds, nuts and grains is a way of greatly increasing their nutritional value and makes them easier to digest. For example, most sprouts double their protein content and have highly increased levels of vitamins! Sprouting seeds is simple and you don't need a lot of fancy equipment. Here's how:
  • Mac OS X Automation: Services Downloads – These services and Automator actions are provided as examples of the design and use of Mac OS X automation technologies. All service workflows are fully editable and can be customized as need requires.
  • Daily Photo Archive – Photo taken by Seth Anderson

    Featured as our daily photo on 9/11/2009.

Reading Around on February 19th

A few interesting links collected February 17th through February 19th:

  • CBS Falsely Portrays Stanford as Democratic Scandal – But as Public Citizen, Huffington Post, ABC News and Talking Points Memo all reported, Stanford and his Stanford Financial Group PAC contributed to politicians and political action committees of both parties (including $448,000 in soft money contributions from 2000 to 2001 alone) to advance his agenda of banking and money-laundering deregulation. Many others journeyed on Stanford's junkets to Antigua and elsewhere, prompting TPM to brand his company "a travel agent for Congress." (TPM has a slide show of one of those of Stanford getaways.)

    As it turns out, the list of Stanford beneficiaries is long – and bipartisan.

  • Remembering Gene – Roger Ebert's Journal – Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."
  • TidBITS iPod & iPhone: iPhone to Add Location Logging? – Could the iPhone soon be able to track your location in the background as you walk around? A hint that such a capability is in the works at Apple comes from a programmer friend who spent some time spelunking around inside iPhoto '09, which shows traces of being able to associate such GPS log data with photos.
  • Daily Kos: Chocolate Covered Cotton – billmon – The fatal innovation…was the rise of so-called collateralized obligations, in which the payment streams from supposedly uniform pools of assets (say, for example, 30-year fixed prime mortgages issued in the first six months of 2006 to California borrowers) could be sliced and diced into different securities (known as tranches) each with different payment characteristics.

    This began as a tool for managing (or speculating on) changes in interest rates, which are a particular problem for mortgage lenders, since homeowners usually have the right to repay (i.e. refinance) their loan when rates fall, forcing lenders to put the money back out on the street at the new, lower rates. This means mortgage-backed securities can go down in value when rates fall as well as when they rise. By shielding some tranches from prepayments (in other words, by directing them to other tranches) the favored tranches are made less volatile and thus can be sold at a higher price and a lower yield.

  • An old habit dies… hard. « chuck.goolsbee.org – "I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

    I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period."

    I'm still using Eudora on three of our most used Macs (since 1995 probably -only 14 years), but the writing is on the wall. Have to check out Gyazmail.

  • Hands on: Drop.io's private, easy file sharing with a twist – Ars Technica – Sharing information online is getting more complex than it sometimes should be. If you want to share pictures, files, plain ideas, or even faxes with friends or businesses, you can try the old e-mail standby, but you may end up joining a social network, agree to a dense privacy policy, and then track down an app made by who-knows-who to get the job done. Even starting a simple blog usually involves more time than most users can afford‚ and more features than they'll ever need. Drop.io is an intriguing, but simple, new service that is part wiki, part file sharing, and part personal secretary, with an emphasis on privacy and ubiquitous access, requiring no signup or account activation.

    Upon visiting Drop.io—pronounced as a seamless single word: "drop-ee-o"—the site presents a basic elevator pitch about its services and a short form with which to get started uploading files.

  • Fat Tire Ale Downed Near Load Of Burgers – A Good Beer Blog – Motorists on Interstate 15 were impeded by a piles of hamburgers after a truck spilled a load of the patties, blocking the northbound lanes for four hours. The driver of a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties dozed off around 5 a.m., said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Cameron Roden. The truck driver's rig drifted to the left side of the freeway near 2300 North and crashed into a wall and an overhead sign, which ripped open his trailer, spilling hamburger over the north and southbound lanes of the interstate…A second truck spill east of Morgan caused minor delays. Before 7:30 a.m., a truck was heading westbound on Interstate 84 about a half-mile east of Morgan… The truck slipped off to the left, hit a guardrail, and flipped over on its side. The impact split the truck open, spilling Fat Tire Beer being shipped from Colorado, Roden said.
  • The Associated Press: Chimp owner begs police in 911 call to stop attack – Police said that the chimp was agitated earlier Monday and that Herold had given him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Police said the drug had not been prescribed for the 14-year-old chimp.

    In humans, Xanax can cause memory loss, lack of coordination, reduced sex drive and other side effects. It can also lead to aggression in people who were unstable to begin with, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

    "Xanax could have made him worse," if human studies are any indication, Coccaro said.

  • Facebook | Home – Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

    If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

  • Big Tuna – Chicago — Anthony 'Big Tuna' Accardo, reputed crime syndicate figure, and his wife are shown as they arrive at the St. Vincent Ferrer Church in suburban River Forest to attend wedding of their son Anthony Jr, who was married to the former Janet Hawley, 1961 Miss Utah. Many top gangland bosses and other underworld figures attended the wedding under the watchful eye of law enforcement agencies
  • Home | Recovery.gov – Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
  • George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking | The Loom | Discover Magazine – In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

    We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

    It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

  • Wonk Room » George Will Believes In Recycling – Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.

    But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word. Take a look:

Hard Drive Analysis Tools

I’m always running out of disk space on whatever computer I am using, so Baseline sounds interesting:

Baseline

another good option is Baseline, which offers both graphical and columnar views, along with a unique twist. Like GrandPerspective and WhatSize, you can scan a volume at any time and view the results. In List View, you can sort by name, kind, modification date, size, or size difference (more on the last option in a bit). Column view gives you a hierarchical view of your drive’s contents. As with WhatSize, in both of these views, file and folder sizes are colored based on size; for example, the sizes for items over 1GB in size are displayed in red, and the sizes of items over 1MB but under 1GB are purple. Baseline can even scan Time Machine volumes. (As with any of these space-surveying programs, you’ll need to run Baseline with root privileges to scan private directories; for example, the home folders of other users.)

[From Baseline 1.4.2 | Mac Gems | Macworld]

but doesn’t sound like it is useful enough to pay $20 for. Especially since I’ve been using the freeware application WhatSize for many years which basically performs the same task, and occasionally have used the freeware applications GrandDesign or Disk Inventory for visual representation of my overstuffed hard drive.

and yes, I have many many mp3 files on my hard drive.

GrandPerspective by extension
GrandPerspective by extension

GrandPerspective by file type
GrandPerspective by File Type

GrandPerspective color options
GrandPerspective color options

GrandPerpective default
GrandPerpective default

a quickr pickr post