Jacken's Blog » Jacken

Disk that refuses to sleep in Mac OS X – how to fix it

Jacken — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:29:28 +0000

Image by DigaoSPBR

I replace my internal disk on my MacBook Pro with a SSD disk, which made a huge difference in speed. At the same time I removed the DVD unit and installed a new 500gb disk instead. The extra disk went to sleep when not in use, but then started within a couple of minutes or less. Here’s what I did to fix that problem.

Finding out the culprit

First of all I needed to change the time before the disk went to sleep. I set the value before sleep to one minute, so I don’t have to wait long between tests.

sudo pmset -a disksleep 1

This will set the time until sleep to one minute when using an AC adapter. Replace -a with -b for changing the setting when on battery power.

To find the applications that was accessing the volume, I opened the terminal application and started to observe the output of the following terminal command. To narrow the output I use grep to just show events and access to the extra disk. Otherwise your going to get a LOT of unnecessary output.

sudo fsusage | grep nameofvolume

Replace nameofvolume with the name of your disk. Enter your login password. The first thing I noticed was that fseventsd was logging information to the external disk. To deactivate the logging, just enter the following:
cd /Volumes/name
ofdisk sudo touch .fseventsd/nolog

Interfering software

I continued to look for applications or processes that accessed my disk, and one of them was iStat Menu. I checked the settings for iStat Menu, and the disk info part was disabled, but it still accessed the disk. So I had to disabled it. I love iStat Menu, so that felt a bit sad, but until they fix this it will be turned off.

I have a lot of links for stuff like the download folder, Final Cut Pro settings, buffers for applications and all my photos on the extra disk so naturally the extra disk will start when using applications using these files. But now when I surf the web or write, I no longer have to listen to the sound of the disk. Blissful silence.

You can now change the time before the disk goes to sleep. My 7200rpm disk starts very quickly so I kept mine on a couple of minutes. Added benefit? Much better battery life!

I hope this helps you if you have the same problem.

Force Syncing Mac OS X Address Book with Gmail Contacts

Jacken — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:42:05 +0000

If you setup your iPhone and iPad to connect to Google as an Exchange server, you get instant push notifications of mail and sync your calendars and address book. And in my experience it works great. But syncing under Mac OS X can sometimes be slow to update. So I wrote this little program to force an update immediately. It’s been useful to me, so I thought I put it here if someone else needed it.

Download Address Book sync with Google Contacts

Prepare images for blogging on iPad

Jacken — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:36:21 +0000

Image editing for blogging on iPad

When I first got my iPad I thought it was great for consuming media, but not for creating it. But after a year I do most of my writing and blogging from my iPad. With a connected Bluetooth keyboard it’s an excellent tool for writing. No spinning hard drive, no fan, just comfortable silence. And with apps like Writing Kit and Blogsy, I can do all the things I need for blogging. But handling images isn’t that easy. Here’s my tips on getting your images in shape directly on your iPad.

Color correction

My favorite image editor is Snapseed, who got Apples iPad app of the year award 2011. I’m not so interested in the filters, but the image editing features. To adjust brightness, ambience, contrast, saturation and color balance, you use the Tune Image feature. You select what you want to adjust by dragging up and down, then you set the amount to adjust with a left and right swipe.

Crop

Snapseed has a crop feature that is equally easy to use. There’s also an excellent sharpening feature.

Change size

Here’s the snag. There is no resize function in Snapseed. So you need to save your corrected image to the photo library and use another app for that. There are some free apps available, but I like to use Photoforge2 for that task. It also have some great features for advanced image editing, but I think that for most of the editing, Snapseed is faster and easier to use. The apps aren’t expensive, and you do remember what you paid for Photoshop, don’t you?

Upload the image to the blog

When the image is finished, I use Blogsy to upload the image. I then export my markdown file to HTML from Writing Kit and paste it into Blogsy.Now all you have to do is to post it, and feel happy about doing it all on your iPad.

Geotag your DSLR images using your iPhone GPS and a Mac

Jacken — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:44:52 +0000

Geotag images using an iPhone

One of the nice things about modern camera phones and even some regular cameras uses GPS to tag photos and embed the coordinates in the pictures EXIF data. But wouldn’t it be great if you could do that with your fancy DSLR camera photos as well? Programs like iPhoto, Aperture and the upcoming Adobe Lightroom 4 can show you your pictures on a map. Many online photo sites like Flickr also uses the GPS data in the pictures to display them on a map.

Use your iPhone to geotag pictures

There’s an easy way of adding the GPS coordinates to your RAW or jpg images using your iPhone as a GPS logger. To get it to work correctly, make sure that the clock on your digital camera is the same as your iPhone. This will help when adding the coordinates later. There are some free alternative apps for iPhone like Gps Stone GPX, but I’m using an app called MotionX-GPS for logging when I walk around taking pictures. All you have to do is to start the app and create a new track. Turn off the display and put it in your pocket. Just have the app running while you photograph. After you are finished, use the share function in MotionX-GPS to send the track data by email to your Mac. You get some statistics in the email, but also two included files. One .kmz file for Google Earth, but it’s the .gpx file your interested in. Just save the file to your hard disk. Download your images to your computer. I usually use Image Capture, a very underrated program, and download the images to a folder on the desktop. Start up GPSPhotoLinker, a free program for Macintosh. Import your .gpx track data and photos and use the automatic batch function in the program to save the GPS data into the image. Now you are ready to import your images to your favorite image handling program like iPhoto, Aperture or Adobe Lightroom. So now when you upload pictures to Flickr, the GPS location is embedded in the image.

Use ifttt to automate your online tasks

Jacken — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:23:41 +0000

Automating my internet life with ifttt. if this then that

ifttt is a free internet service for automating a lot of stuff you do online. There’s often things that you do repeatedly, and ifttt is there to help. For example, when you write a new blog post, you want to post a link to Twitter and Facebook, and this is something that’s perfect for ifttt to do automatically.

To get started, just sign up to the free service. Then you have to add the channels; Facebook, twitter, Dropbox, Youtube and other services you would use.

Currently these channels are available, with new ones added quite often.

Receipts

There is receipts for Tasks that other users have done that you can add to your workflow. So you don’t even have to know how to set up a Task. Just pick one already made by someone else.

Make your own Tasks

It’s really easy to make your own Tasks. Let’s make a task that automatically saves any tagged pictures of you on Facebook. Here’s the steps you need. 1. Choose Facebook as your trigger channel. 2. Select “You are tagged in an image” 3. Choose a action channel. In this case Dropbox. 4. Add file from URL 5. Select where you want to save your pictures in Dropbox. 6. Finished! Now every time someone tags you in a picture, a copy of the image will be saved to your Dropbox folder.

Here are the things I have set up.

Post new blog post at www.jackenhack.com to Facebook.
If blogpost on www.jackenhack.com posted, put tweet in buffer
If RSS article starred, retweet via buffer
Retweet starred tweets
Tumblr post to bufferapp
Email me when a new ifttt channel is announced
Every time you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, it will be sent to Dropbox
Post YouTube favorites to Tumblr
When posting to Vimeo, put it on tumblr blog
Published flickr photos posted to my blog
Archive my tweets to a Google Calender
Save a timeline of facebook statuses to Google Calendar
Save my instagram pictures to dropbox

All of this is done automatically. Very handy.

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor review

Jacken — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:07:18 +0000

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor

To be able to really get the most out of your images, you need a color accurate monitor. You usually have to pay a lot of money to get a good monitor that’s factory calibrated and uses a IPS panel, a panel type that is better at showing correct colors than the more common (and cheaper) TN panels. But there are some reasonably priced monitors. One of them is the Asus PA246Q ProArt monitor. It’s factory calibrated and even ships with a printout of the calibration result from the factory. You can set the monitor to sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998 color space directly on the front controls of the monitor. It’s also has fairly high resolution with 24″ size 1920×1200 pixels.After using my Spyder Color calibrator there wasn’t that much of a difference between the built-in calibration and the Spyder created one, but calibrating the monitor is always a good thing to do.The monitor is thick, so you need ample of desk space to accommodate it, but the monitor stand is sturdy and there is a lot of adjustments available including height. Very handy.When comparing the Asus PA246Q monitor to the monitor on my Macbook Pro mid 2010, you really see the difference in image quality. I wouldn’t edit images using Lightroom or Photoshop on the Macbook anymore. You get spoiled fast when seeing the difference you get from a good monitor.There is a built-in USB hub and connectors for HDMI, D-Sub, DisplayPort and DVI-D. It also includes all the cables, except for the mini-DisplayPort cable for my Mac, which is a nice touch. There is an audio-in port but the build in amplifier has way to low gain to be usable. It’s essentially useless. But for me that’s not a problem. I bought the monitor for it’s image quality.When buying a monitor, one thing to look out for are dead pixels. A dead pixel in the middle of the screen can really be annoying when doing editing. Different manufacturer has a minimum of dead pixels the monitor has to have for a replacement. Mine has one dead pixel fairly low on the screen, so I can live with that.There’s a built in 7-1 card reader, but considering that the monitor is aimed for the professional market, the absence of CF-card capability seems a bit stupid.Would I recommend this monitor? Yes, even though there are some problems, the price and image quality makes up for the faults.Here’s the manufactures description:

The Most User-friendly P-IPS ProArt Series Professional Monitor

P-IPS panel with 98% Adobe RGB coverage and 178° wide viewing angleQuickFit Function instantly boost design efficiency by providing real-size document, photo, and grid on screenBuilt-in USB hubs and 7-in-1 card reader for instant connection

Panel Size: Wide Screen 24.1″(61.13cm) 16:10

Color Saturation : 98%(Adobe RGB), 100%(sRGB), 102%(NTSC)

Panel Type : P-IPS

Resolution : 1920×1200

Display Colors : 1073.7M (10bit)

Good

Factory color calibrated.

Great image quality

Able to display 98% of the Adobe RGB color space.

Bad

Built-in audio interface has too low gain, making it practically useless.

No CF card support in card reader.

IPad first gen crashing – updated

Jacken — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:57:56 +0000

Update

It looks like I finally found a solution to my iPad gen 1 crashing problem. I found it on a forum and I’ve been running my iPad all day without one crash. Haven’t been able to do that since upgrading to iOS 5.01.

All you need to do is to reset all settings. Open the Settings app and under General and choose Reset. Press Reset All Settings. This sounds dangerous, but you won’t lose any data, only your settings. The machine will show a progress bar, which is normal. After the machine is reset, you should now hopefully have an iPad gen 1 that doesn’t crash all the time. All the settings for mail etc wasn’t affected by the reset by the way.

I’ve had problems with my iPad since I upgraded to iOS 5. Apps would constantly crash, usually when opening a built in browser or showing video. I tried to backup and restore, but the problem remained. Looking at the crash logs it’s always memory full errors. But after searching iPad forums I finally found a solution that at least makes the iPad crash less. I turned off most of the iCloud functions. My guess is the photo sharing that causes some of the problems. Anyway, I have had zero problems with my iPhone 4, which has twice the ram amount.

Hopefully Apple will fix this in the 5.1 update, because it’s really handy to have automatic photo sync between my iPhone and iPad.

Update: After a day my iPad is back to crashing often. This is getting annoying.

Great video for learning strobist Canon EOS flash photography

Jacken — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:03:17 +0000

People who use Canon cameras know the EF flashes can be a bit overwhelming trying to understand ETTL II, and how to compensate for background and foreground exposure. Setting up multiple flashes isn’t always easy either. Here’s a great video, explaining all the ins and outs of Canon EF flash photography.

Retina display on Mac

Jacken — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:09:14 +0000

Retina display on Mac

After working with the iPad and iPhone and then sitting down at my computer working with InDesign, you quickly realize that the resolution of computer screens need to improve. I have a factory calibrated 1920×1200 pixel 24″ monitor and to see how the fonts are going to look, you need to zoom in. With twice the resolution that would not be a problem. Let’s face it, the iPhone 4/4s have higher resolution than the first couple of generations of laser printers. It’s unfortunate that Apple hasn’t put more effort into making OS X resolution independent. Doubling the resolution is a quick fix, but in the long run they have to step up to the plate and implement resolution independence.

Blogging with Byword and Marked with WordPress

Jacken — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:55:26 +0000

Byword and Marked

I just got Byword and Marked from the Mac App Store because I’m totally addicted to writing in Markdown. I didn’t like the predefined fonts, but found a great typeface called Droid Sans that you can download here.

Byword

This is a really simple and nice text editor that handles Markdown like a charm. I really like the way it dims down the markup, making the text easier to read.

Marked

This is a nifty little application for previewing the live HTML output from your Markdown text. Great for catching mistakes.

Images

I’m using a WordPress blog and I have found that it’s easiest just to upload the images using the WordPress Dashboard and then copy the link. There are shortcuts for most of the Markdown commands, so all I have to do is to press alt-command-i and paste the link to the image. Thanks to Marked I know that the images will look ok. This looks like a great way of writing blog posts.

iPad/iPhone

I store all my blog posts in a directory in Dropbox, so If I want to I can edit the post with my favorite iPad/iPhone Markdown editor Writing Kit. For me that’s an enormous bonus. Bored on the subway? Write on your blog posts.

Finishing

So when you are finished writing, you just need to export HTML to clipboard and paste it into WordPress.

Jacken's Blog » Jacken

Disk that refuses to sleep in Mac OS X – how to fix it

Finding out the culprit

Interfering software

Force Syncing Mac OS X Address Book with Gmail Contacts

Prepare images for blogging on iPad

Image editing for blogging on iPad

Color correction

Crop

Change size

Upload the image to the blog

Geotag your DSLR images using your iPhone GPS and a Mac

Geotag images using an iPhone

Use your iPhone to geotag pictures

Use ifttt to automate your online tasks

Automating my internet life with ifttt. if this then that

Channels

Receipts

Make your own Tasks

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor review

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor

Good

Bad

IPad first gen crashing – updated

Great video for learning strobist Canon EOS flash photography

Retina display on Mac

Retina display on Mac

Blogging with Byword and Marked with WordPress

Byword and Marked

Byword

Marked

Images

iPad/iPhone

Finishing