03.22.08
Tagged as Software, Tech
Last Fall, I found myself in need of a digital camera. I had previously intended to save up for one of those pseudo-DSLRs (my needs rarely extend into true DSLR territory), but I needed one right away, and I needed it to be portable. I ended up with a Canon PowerShot SD850IS, which has served me well. The image quality is pretty good, and it’s portable enough to occasionally forget that I have it with me. The main features I wish it had: RAW image support and exposure bracketing.
As of today, thanks to the CHDK firmware, it has both of those features and a whole lot more (including an always-present battery gauge, rather than an icon that only pops up when the battery is running low—a frequent complaint about the PowerShot line). Other interesting features include automatic focus bracketing (to combine three images into one with infinite depth of field), live histogram, exposure times ranging from 65 seconds to 1/10,000 of a second, a depth of field calculator, and the ability to write scripts for it in uBasic. It can even be set to automatically photograph lightning. The firmware works on most Canon PowerShot cameras, and it makes no modifications to the built-in firmware: reverting to the camera’s stock setup is as simple as deleting a couple of files from your memory card.
I think at this point the only upgrade that would interest me would be a true DSLR, and since there are so many other things for me to spend my money on right now, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. So, I’ll just spend some time exploring CHDK for now. Maybe I’ll get some good shots of Easter Dinner tomorrow.
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06.24.06
Tagged as Software, Spam
In my continuing battle against spam, I’ve now implemented double-pass spam filtering, using Gmail as my first line of defense and DreamHost’s SpamAssassin installation as the second. I got the idea (and most of the implementation) from MBoffin.com, and have added a page to the DreamHost Support Wiki explaining how to do it using the default setup (i.e., no custom-installed applications) on that host.
The way it works is that all incoming email on my DreamHost account is scanned for the presence of a special forwarding-only Gmail address. If the address is not found, the message is forwarded to Gmail. Gmail decides whether the message is spam, in which case it’s held in the Spam folder, or not, in which case it’s sent back to the DreamHost server. DreamHost again checks for the required address, and this time finds it, because Gmail has inserted it into the headers. Next the message goes through SpamAssassin, which assigns a score depending on how “spammy” the message looks. I’ve set SpamAssassin to quarantine anything with a score of 5.0 or greater, and to tag the subject line but pass anything with a score of 3.0-4.9.
Technically, I’m using a triple-pass filtering system, because Apple’s Mail.app has its own filtering rules. So far, however, it looks like Gmail and SpamAssassin won’t need any extra help.
If you’d like to try it yourself, note that you’ll need to dedicate a Gmail address to this purpose—everything going to that address will be forwarded to your DreamHost account, so don’t use an address you’re already using for other things. If you need a Gmail invitation, feel free to ask me for one—email nicholas at acetylene dot net.
UPDATE: It appears that Gmail is somewhat inconsistent in its use or formatting of the X-Forwarded-For: header, leading to infrequent (but annoying) infinite loops. (Actually, procmail is intelligent enough to reject the message rather than forwarding it a second time, but that means it stays in Gmail and never arrives in my IMAP inbox.) I’ve simplified the rule to avoid this problem in the future; now all procmail is looking for is the address of my forwarding-only Gmail account. As long as it finds that somewhere, it’ll send the message to my IMAP inbox.
UPDATE 2: I was wrong: Gmail wasn’t being inconsistent; DreamHost’s procmail was. Seems it sometimes thought the mail was looping when it saw its own Delivered-To: header, so I’ve edited the DreamHost wiki to include a formail pipe that removes that header before forwarding to Gmail.
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05.10.06
Tagged as Apple, Software
I’d been having a problem with Safari lately: when loading certain pages—like parts of the WordPress management interface—I sometimes (but not always) got an error message about a “bad server response (NSURLErrorDomain:-1011).” Refreshing generally cleared it up, but sometimes I had to refresh two or three times before the page loaded. No useful details were included with the error, and Googling the message turned up nothing useful.
Today I learned, via this Ask Metafilter thread, that nightly builds of WebKit are available via OpenDarwin. I’ve had no errors so far since switching to the nightly build. Hooray for open source!
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05.08.06
Tagged as Blogging, Software, Web Building, WordPress
No, I’m not moving, but this blog is. Actually, it’s already moved.
For the past several years I’ve had a dedicated server to play with—I’ve gone through three different companies, run a small (read: unprofitable) hosting business, and learned a lot about server administration. Now it’s time to downsize.
There are some major changes happening in my life right now—most of my readers already know about them, I think, so I won’t go into them here—and I’ve decided to move to a shared server to save both time and money. I decided on DreamHost because, for the money, they come closest to what I and my friends, family, and clients have become accustomed to. In fact, for a fifth of what I was paying before, we’ll get the same amount of disk space and twice as much bandwidth—and still get all the useful software installs like SpamAssassin, MySQL, and WordPress. Most importantly, the whole thing will involve a lot less work for me. No longer will I need to deal with keeping software up-to-date, for example—a chore on which I’ve consistently fallen behind of late.
The site may not always respond quite as quickly, since we’re now sharing CPU time with whoever else happens to be on our shared server, instead of about a dozen relatively sleepy domains on a ridiculously overpowered server for our meager needs. So far, however, I’ve been pleased with the responsive and intuitive account control panel, and have had no major problems with the transition of my domain from the old host to the new one.
If your site is hosted with me, expect to get an email soon detailing when your domain’s transition will take place and what configuration changes, if any, you’ll need to make. I think in the long run we’ll all be better off in our new home.
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09.29.05
Tagged as Software
Recently I decided to switch from a POP3 email setup to IMAP. Fortunately, most of the pieces were already in place: when setting up my server I followed the Gentoo Linux Virtual Mailhosting System with Postfix Guide, which includes both POP3 and IMAP servers, and I knew the IMAP server was working because SquirrelMail worked. What I wanted was for SquirrelMail to contain all of my old email, rather than just the new stuff. This was partly because I’m planning on upgrading to Tiger soon and want the transition to be as quick and easy as possible, and partly because every time I tell someone who’s using my server for email how to access the webmail client, I have to explain again that they won’t be able to access email they downloaded a month ago. Before I suggested that anyone else use IMAP, I had to try it myself.
For the most part, the switch was completely unremarkable. I set up a new account for the IMAP server in Apple Mail, using the same settings as the POP3 version, and then disabled the POP3 account. I also clicked a few boxes in the settings of the IMAP account to save Drafts, Sent Items, Junk Mail, and Trash on the server (and to delete the latter two categories after a week). I hit send and receive, and got no errors. I sent a test message to myself, and received it. I logged into SquirrelMail and saw the message. I deleted the message in Apple Mail, refreshed SquirrelMail, and saw that the message was gone. Next I dragged all my folders of archived mail on top of the IMAP server entry in the Apple Mail mailboxes drawer and watched Mail copy all my old messages to the server. I refreshed again in SquirrelMail and saw that all my folders were there, and the messages within them were accessible.
The only problem was that my sent test message wasn’t showing up in the Sent Messages folder of the IMAP account, and deleted messages weren’t showing up in the IMAP Trash. In fact, I couldn’t find them anywhere at all. A little digging revealed that once you’ve chosen to store these items on an IMAP server, you have to tell Mail where to store them—it won’t just use a pre-existing folder with a correct-sounding name. In the Mailboxes drawer, I selected each appropriate folder and chose the appropriate category from the Mailbox -> Use this mailbox for… menu. Now my Trash, Sent Items, Junk Mail, and even Drafts are saved on the server for me so I can use them from anywhere via webmail.
If you have an email account on my server, you can do the same—feel free to ask if you need help.
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08.30.05
Tagged as Apple, Software
I’d been annoyed lately by slow performance in my web browser of choice, Safari. It still loaded quickly enough and all, but had developed the habit of freezing for a few seconds shortly after bringing up a page. See? Annoying.
The solution, as it turns out, was right in front of me—in the Safari menu. “Reset Safari…” clears the history, Google search history, cache, cookies, and form field entries all in one go. Doing this took about two minutes on my system (after two years of particularly heavy web browsing). Now I have to log back in to all my favorite online services, but the benefit is a much faster web browsing experience.
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07.05.05
Tagged as Art, Software
I have frittered away the bulk of the morning playing with Context Free. I highly recommend trying it out, unless you have something important to do today.
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06.30.05
Tagged as Apple, iPod, Podcasts, Software
Apple now has an Official FAQ on the podcast support in iTunes 4.9 with, among other things, a little bit of detail on the bookmark feature I mention in my AppleScript page. An interesting point is that the play count tracking works differently in the podcast library than it does in the regular music library: although the play count number isn’t incremented until you reach the end of a track, a podcast episode is no longer considered “unplayed” the moment you hit the play button. This is visually represented by the disappearance of the blue dot to the left of the episode title. What it means, though, is that if you use the built-in play count-based management (“Keep all unplayed episodes” in the settings panel), episodes you’ve started but not finished won’t be synced to a clickwheel-equipped iPod. Just one more reason to use my script instead.
Daring Fireball today features the best explanation I’ve ever read of the iPod’s commanding market share. I particularly like the bit about the font change—I personally am not a typography geek (though my limited desktop publishing experience has left me with a deep and burning hatred for Comic Sans and Matisse ITC and the people who use them), but I love reading analyses by people who really know and love this stuff.
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06.29.05
Tagged as Apple, iPod, Podcasts, Software
As I mentioned yesterday, the new version of iTunes with podcast support rendered the most popular post on this blog obsolete. Since iTunes has an option to automatically delete podcast episodes you’ve already listened to, the main reason for using the script is now built-in.
But not the only reason. There still isn’t a way to mark tracks for removal or retention while away from the computer, listening to tracks on an iPod. I’ve updated the script to work with iTunes 4.9’s built-in podcast support, and I’ve created a special page just for both versions of the script. Enjoy.
Also on that page is a little bit of technical information on some of the interesting features included in the new iTunes. Executive summary: Apple now has the premiere platform for listening to podcasts, at home and on the go. If you’re listening on anything else, you’re missing out.
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06.28.05
Tagged as Apple, iPod, Podcasts, Software
A while back I created an AppleScript to manage podcasts in iTunes. That script, which has brought more traffic to this blog than all my other posts combined, just became obsolete. Today Apple released iTunes 4.9, which includes support for podcasts.
Rather than putting enclosures into a separate playlist or genre, iTunes 4.9 keeps them separate from the rest of your Library. Clicking “Podcasts” in the “Source” window brings up a list of all your podcast subscriptions, each of which can be expanded to view all the individual files that have been downloaded or are available to be downloaded. The iTunes Music Store now has a Podcasts genre, and the directory contained all the podcasts I currently subscribe to except one (the exception was My Silver Mount Zion, a post-rock music podcast, which I’ve submitted for inclusion). Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a way to subscribe to podcasts that aren’t already in the directory. This is incorrect—see update below.
The part that makes my script redundant is in the settings for the podcast source: you can tell iTunes to keep all episodes, just the most recent episode, all unplayed episodes, or the most recent 2, 3, 4, 5, or 10 episodes of each podcast. I’ve set mine to “all unplayed episodes.” Unfortunately, there’s no way to use ratings to save or keep episodes regardless of play count, so my script still has some functionality that isn’t duplicated in iTunes—but I could probably script a way to manipulate play count based on ratings. I’ll look into it.
Update: You can add podcasts that aren’t in the directory, simply by dragging a link to the RSS feed into iTunes. I’d tried this before and it didn’t work, but I was trying to drag the URL from NetNewsWire. Dragging a link from Safari works just fine.
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