Advanced SearchUser Name tdibble_dotmac
Member Since 2003-09-28
Total number of Feedback Posts: 8
Total number of comments: 1
Last 10 Feedback Posts by tdibble_dotmac [ Search for All ]
Ovolab Geophoto 2.2 (Mac OS X)
Promising, but needs to get quirks fixed 
First of all, if you have a Canon camera which produces CRW files, this software will NOT geocode your raw images. It's apparently a fault of the CRW format, although a simple read of their FAQ on supported file types would lead you to believe it was able to geocode the format. This, combined with their unconscionably crippled 'demo' version, which doesn't allow you to try the single most important aspect of the application (does it geotag your files) means you're likely going to need to ask for your money back or adop your workflow significantly.
That aside, I keep seeing Google Earth resolution complaints here. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed, but in the Preferences pane there is an "Imagery" tab, and clicking the "Download" button will "upgrade" your satelite resolutions by exactly one step. Its a painful interface, as you need to click the button, wait an hour for the next res to finish downloading, then click the button again. But, it seems to resolve the resolution complaints. Obviously, though, having all of Google Earth satellite images on local disk is a huge waste of disk space. It'd be really nice if there was a better interface to this, and which would allow you to "downgrade" to conserve space.
Still on the topic of possibly incorrect statements in other reviews: you can indeed directly key in the latitude/longitude of a particular image, by using the Item | Set Location ... menu tem (also accessible from the Inspector's "gear menu") then clicking the second tab of the dialog. That gives four ways to geocode an image so far as I can see:
- Match to GPS log files
- Drag/drop in Google Earth interface
- Enter city/country (photo gets placed in geographic center of the city ... it'd be nice if there was an accuracy measure in the EXIF tags)
- Enter lat/long directly
My main gripe is in the match-logs dialog box. Every time it comes up there is a drop-down which contains every major city around the world linked to its time zone to identify the time zone of the camera. This defaults to a GMT location, so I suppose if you were along that meridian you'd be all set. For me, though, getting to Americas/Los Angeles is a painful click, drag, watch scroll, drag back from overscrolling, search, click process. A simple memory of which time zone you'd selected last time would be really useful here!
Some streamlining here would be useful. There are far too many steps required to just match up a bunch of images to a log file. Integration with Aperture more directly would be nice (I have to open up the project location and do a spotlight search for all .CRW files underneath, then drag those in to GeoPhoto; being able to automatically open the master files for selected images in Aperture would be really nice).
Stability? I don't think I've used it enough to say for certain, although the demo crashed on me repeatedly when trying to update from the web (I'm guessing the issue had to do with the no-saving cripple; registered then reran the update process and all went well).
Finally, the OvoLab web site is atrocious. It says for support we should go to their forums ... anyone see such a link anywhere? No, me either. If it's there, I doubt anyone else has shown up. If you want to foster community, you need to make the forums highly visible!!! [alert admin]
Thursday, May 08 2008 @ 10:07 AM PDT
Ovolab Geophoto 2.2 (Mac OS X)
Promising, but needs to get quirks fixed
First of all, if you have a Canon camera which produces CRW files, this software will NOT geocode your raw images. It's apparently a fault of the CRW format, although a simple read of their FAQ on supported file types would lead you to believe it was able to geocode the format. This, combined with their unconscionably crippled 'demo' version, which doesn't allow you to try the single most important aspect of the application (does it geotag your files) means you're likely going to need to ask for your money back or adop your workflow significantly.
That aside, I keep seeing Google Earth resolution complaints here. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed, but in the Preferences pane there is an "Imagery" tab, and clicking the "Download" button will "upgrade" your satelite resolutions by exactly one step. Its a painful interface, as you need to click the button, wait an hour for the next res to finish downloading, then click the button again. But, it seems to resolve the resolution complaints. Obviously, though, having all of Google Earth satellite images on local disk is a huge waste of disk space. It'd be really nice if there was a better interface to this, and which would allow you to "downgrade" to conserve space.
Still on the topic of possibly incorrect statements in other reviews: you can indeed directly key in the latitude/longitude of a particular image, by using the Item | Set Location ... menu tem (also accessible from the Inspector's "gear menu") then clicking the second tab of the dialog. That gives four ways to geocode an image so far as I can see:
- Match to GPS log files
- Drag/drop in Google Earth interface
- Enter city/country (photo gets placed in geographic center of the city ... it'd be nice if there was an accuracy measure in the EXIF tags)
- Enter lat/long directly
My main gripe is in the match-logs dialog box. Every time it comes up there is a drop-down which contains every major city around the world linked to its time zone to identify the time zone of the camera. This defaults to a GMT location, so I suppose if you were along that meridian you'd be all set. For me, though, getting to Americas/Los Angeles is a painful click, drag, watch scroll, drag back from overscrolling, search, click process. A simple memory of which time zone you'd selected last time would be really useful here!
Some streamlining here would be useful. There are far too many steps required to just match up a bunch of images to a log file. Integration with Aperture more directly would be nice (I have to open up the project location and do a spotlight search for all .CRW files underneath, then drag those in to GeoPhoto; being able to automatically open the master files for selected images in Aperture would be really nice).
Stability? I don't think I've used it enough to say for certain, although the demo crashed on me repeatedly when trying to update from the web (I'm guessing the issue had to do with the no-saving cripple; registered then reran the update process and all went well).
Finally, the OvoLab web site is atrocious. It says for support we should go to their forums ... anyone see such a link anywhere? No, me either. If it's there, I doubt anyone else has shown up. If you want to foster community, you need to make the forums highly visible!!! [alert admin]
Thursday, May 08 2008 @ 10:05 AM PDT
Data Rescue II 1.1.1 (Mac OS X)
Yesterday morning I woke up and one of the thoughts which hit my groggy brain was, "I haven't seen my backup program pop up recently".
My groggy mind thought back and confirmed that we hadn't seen the backup app inturrupt our workflow in a few weeks, since about the the time we'd last mucked with cron jobs (the most likely cause). We added "manually trigger backups and fix automated scripts" to the end of our "to do" list for the day. It couldn't go at the beginning because I was under the gun to get a presentation polished up and sent out by the end of the day. Everything not directly involved in presentation production just fell to the back of the list.
I went through my day normally, until at about 1:00 in the afternoon my laptop refused to come up out of sleep. Nothing would wake it up, although the "sleep" light ceased throbbing while I'd tried. I tapped the "sleep" button, and my heart sank when I heard the startup chime come on instead of the screen waking up. It had crashed. That's okay, I thought: I'm quite positive I saved my presentation before putting it to sleep. However, my heart soon sank even lower when the machine refused to progress beyond the gray-apple screen. It just went black, shut down again. I repeated. It repeated right back.
The machine would boot up, at all. I brought it back to my desk and ran Disk Warrior on it. DW churned for a good long time, and seemed to "stick" on an "Overlapping File Extents" message. I did a web search for that message and found that it is not uncommon for DW to get "stuck" on that activity for days or even weeks! One of the blogs which had encountered this problem came back a month later (after having let DW churn for over three weeks) and said Data Rescue pulled their data off the failing hard drive in a few hours. This rang a bell; I'm pretty sure I'd heard one of the This Week in Tech regulars extolling the praises of this rather unimaginatively-named product earlier in the summer. Still, I didn't have it, and a license was more money than I could afford.
I did, however, also have Tech Tool Pro in my toolbelt. So, at 3:30 (DW having churned on rebuilding the volume in memory for about two hours) I canceled DW and started up Tech Tool Pro. TTP calls "Overlapping File Extents" "Allocation Overlap Errors" or somesuch, but in the end gave the same analysis: it can't fix the volume because the same cluster is allocated to more than one file on disk. TTP has a data restoration procedure, so I kicked that off.
TTP churned for three hours then crashed. I rebooted the machine, started TTP again, and "canceled" the process after about an hour. The results it had been able to "scavange" from the drive were depressing, placing folders like "Applications" inside application packages and generally all of what little it could find backwards and/or inside-out. This seemed to be a dead end.
It was now past 8:00 at night. I emailed my boss and let him know I'd try rebuilding the presentation from scratch, but that it was going to be late. I kicked off Disk Warrior again, and braced myself for weeks of waiting for DW to give me back a semi-working hard drive. I spent several more hours trying to put together the presentation I'd been working on, but knew I was missing some vital points. Without my notes and emails to consult, the "reconstruction" task was next to impossible.
So, mostly on a whim, I downloaded and installed Data Rescue II at about 1:00 AM. I stopped DW, it having not progressed in five hours any more than it had previously progressed in two. I started Data Rescue up, got to where it was performing a "quick scan", then went back to working on pounding my head against the wall and hoping that the things I was missing in the presentation would fall out. Needless to say, they did not. No more than fifteen minutes later I glanced over at the machine running Data Rescue and saw that it seemed to have stopped working. Typical, I thought. That's pretty much the nail in the coffin, then.
However, upon closer examination, Data Rescue had not, in fact, failed. Instead, it had completed in less than a quarter hour what Disk Warrior and Tech Tool Pro had failed at over several hours! All my data was listed in tree form, perfect.
The "demo" version only allowed me to pull one file. So, still a little skeptical that it would be able to get the data as easily as it had apparently found the directory structure, I navigated about six folders deep, to my presentation, and told it to recover it.
A few minutes later, the presentation was on my desktop, bit-for-bit perfect!
Now, here is the one bad point about Data Rescue. It has a shareware hook apparently devised by satan himself: you can see your whole hard drive, and you can pick one (just one) of your little children to rescue from annihilation. But, to get the rest, you need to fork over money. It is pure evil. Of course, no more evil really than just losing everything with no hope of recovery at all, but still. Such conflicts are not healthy.
I thought of all my email messages. I thought of my project plans. I thought of the months I'd spend trying to reconstruct - and poorly - even just a fraction of all this. Then I sighed and paid the "ransom". Truly, though: even that one document I'd gotten "free" was enough to justify the $99 cost.
The next morning, the entire contents of the PowerBook's drive were sitting, intact, on my large desktop drive. The presentation was off my desk, and my nerves were soothed enough that I actually might be able to get through the preso without bursting into tears over my lost documents.
Lessons Learned:
Of course, the most important lesson is: when the little voice in the back of your head says something about backups not working, that needs to go to the front of your "to-do" list, not the back. Secondarily, though, is that while each tool mentioned above does indeed work in certain situations, when push comes to shove and all seems lost, Data Rescue does what it says: rescues your data. After all, that is what is most important here.
Minor Gripes:
- "dot" files all lost their dots in the process. For instance, the ".MacOSX" folder in my home folder (holds environment settings) came out as "MacOSX".
- Some files lost ownership. I didn't have identical user names on the two machines (the one used to recover and the original machine), which I believe was the root issue. When recovered, many files and folders ended up owned by "System" and inaccessible to me (a "chown -R *" fixed that, although I'm not sure if anything below my home folder was *intentionally* owned by other than the current user so I don't know if this will cause other issues).
Thursday, October 04 2007 @ 02:10 PM PDT
Scrivener 1.03 (Mac OS X)
Based on 2 days' usage ... this is great!
This is EXACTLY what my writing workflow needed. I was, literally, in the process of setting up an index card system for my story (seems too presumptuous to call it a novel). One stack for character notes. Another stack for settings. Five top-level story arc cards, each with 4-5 chapter cards underneath, each with some number of scene cards underneath. I was dreading the book-keeping involved in keeping these cards synced with the actual document (which I had been keeping as a single massive document in Word, as clumsy as that is). Instead, I found Scrivener. Instead of index cards on a massive cork board in my office, Scrivener puts all that next to my chapters and scenes. So, instead of rearranging scenes on a corkboard to make it work, then translating those changes back into the main document, I just do it all directly in Scrivener. Plus, unlike the cork board, I can attach keywords (which characters are talked about or in a scene, which settings are described in a scene, etc) to scenes, so I can do a search for any of my characters, select the scenes found, and read through that character's development to watch for any inconsistencies or unexplained changes. Like I said, I've only been using this for two days, so it's still a bit early to really "review" it. Still, I am seriously impressed with what I see, and, assuming no a major flaw crops up in the next week or so, would easily pay twice the asking price for it! Finally, a few notes about my process and how Scrivener fits in: I'm a "casual" writer, writing in small snippets of an hour here, a half-hour there, primarily for my own enjoyment. As such, I tend to forget more of what I write down than I remember. Organization is key to allowing me to produce something semi-coherent to show for this. I use DevonThink as well, to collect interesting facts and ideas which might eventually make it into my writings. I might eventually transfer the pertinent ones over to the Scrivener Research Binder for easier access while writing, though I think right now they'll be staying in DT. I don't see any need to have my particular "research materials" and notes up on screen while working in Scrivener; they're more idea-sparkers than referenced sources. Your mileage may indeed vary. I also use OmniGraffle to jot down floorplans and such for various scenes. I'd like it if those diagrams could go into Scrivener (ie, subsume the graffle package into its own package structure, and launch OmniGraffle when I double-click that file in the binder) but they can't (yet?). In Scrivener, I have keywords for settings, characters, and themes. For each of these I also have a file in the "Research" section which describes that setting/character/theme, which gets the keyword attached as well as related keywords. So, if I want to see everything that's happened in the "Gymnasium", I search for that keyword, and at the end of the story snippets I have a synopsis of what the Gymnasium setting looks like and how it is important, etc. This should make it easy for my "synopsis" to be kept close to reality. The next time I come across the Gymnasium, then, I just refer to the synopsis to refresh my memory of how things are laid out, etc. Once I'm done with the "writing" part in Scrivener, I'll export it out (to Word or Mellel) and print out the format-fixed copy. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 3 users found this helpful
Friday, July 13 2007 @ 11:37 AM PDT
Disk Inventory X 1.0 Beta (Mac OS X)
Awesome tool! Part of my "Must Install Pack" for new Macs!
This is an absolute, must-have tool for today's large disks. Intuitive display of file weightings really makes finding the "greedy" documents brain-dead easy, and also yields a great deal of understanding as to what exactly is on your disk! A few things I'd like to see added: * "Ignore this folder" (the opposite of "Zoom In" ... ie, "Okay, I've pruned this folder as much as I can; move it out of the way so the others show up bigger"). * Do the same thing for memory/cpu usage! (Okay, probably in a different app :) * Click on a "kind" to somehow show a list of all files of that kind. Bonus points for being able to double-click items in that list to select them in the original display. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Monday, April 18 2005 @ 01:55 PM PDT
Puzzles Forever 1.0.1 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)
Very nice ... lacking in a few features, but nice
I enjoy putting puzzles together, and this is a close match to the "real thing". My kids, aged 4-8, all are able to put puzzles together as well, and have a great time doing it. My top-X list of missing features are: 1) Ability to configure the background. The details of the pieces can get lost in the lines of the background. 2) Pull images from iPhoto library instead of just from disk. 3) Different zooming levels. On a large-piece-count puzzle you need to zoom in to see the piece details, but when zoomed in you can lose track of where you are in the overall puzzle. 3) Image preview: two suggestions, one for me and one for the kids. For me, allow the preview image to be turned off. When I put together a puzzle, I've seen the box outside, then dump all the pieces out, and put the box face-down. It's much more of a challenge trying to put it together without the reference right there in front of you! Second suggestion is just the opposite, for the kids: allow the preview to be "overlaid" on the work area, perhaps mostly-transparent, to give a better idea of how things are shaping up and where the pieces go. 4) "Clicking" in of unconnected pieces. Often a pice will "click" into the work area, even when it is not anywhere near any other piece. This seems to indicate that it is in the "right" spot, but not always. Please don't do this, or let me turn it off! 5) Allow a "sides-only" toggle. 6) Add "scratch work areas" ... places where I can take a handful of pieces that all go together somehow, and work them out, then bring the finished product back to the main work area. That's how I usuall work real puzzles; it'd be nice to be able to do that here too. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 3 users found this helpful
Sunday, December 12 2004 @ 03:20 AM PST
Solitaire Forever 1.0.2 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)
Note that the trial includes unlimited playing with a handful of games (including Klondike, what most people think of when they say Solitaire thanks to Windows), and one-minute snapshots of the various other games. I'd also like more customizability to the rules, but the UI is very slick, the effects game-enhancing instead of distracting, and the breadth of games (I registered it and am very happy I did!) promises thousands of hours of enjoyment! [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Sunday, December 12 2004 @ 01:25 AM PST
MidiKeys 1.6b3 (Mac OS X)
Very nice. Works great with GarageBand!
To the other commenters: Look in preferences. There are "on top" and "global keys" options (the latter requires you to hold down the "Ctrl" or other modifier key while playing in GarageBand, but still ... it works!) Very nice way to play around with GarageBand while I don't have a keyboard hooked up to my Mac ... [alert admin]
Saturday, January 31 2004 @ 12:07 AM PST
Last 10 Comments by tdibble_dotmac [ Search for All ]
Also, the native file format is rtfd, although it also keeps other files in the package. Right-click on the ".vjentry" package for a date, click "Show Contents", and note the *.rtfd files there. The first entry for a date gets a nice name on the file, while any subsequent sessions get hashcode names. If you wanted to retrieve the titles for the secondary sessions, you'd look in the _vj_sessions_info.plist file right there in the…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Friday, September 22 2006 @ 12:12 PM PDT
