24 February 2006 11:39 pm
Pismo Tribute
This past Tuesday, my Pismo, which I've used for the last six years, was replaced by a MacBook Pro. So far, I love the MacBook and will try and write something about it later, but, first, I want to pay tribute to the Pismo. The Pismo is perhaps the best laptop Apple's ever made. Despite being over six years old, it runs the latest version of Mac OS X and has all the connectivity that I need. There's a lot of speculation about battery life of the MacBook Pro. How does ten hours sound? No problem on the Pismo with two batteries.
The Pismo held up remarkably. I abused it too much last June when I spilled tea on it right before WWDC. (Yeah, I was the guy with the Pismo using the USB mouse and keyboard.) In exchange for helping a friend configure TCP/IP on Mac OS, I acquired his damaged Pismo and managed to combine the two into a working system.
The Pismo isn't being relegated to the basement with all the other ancient Macs. It stays in the kitchen to play music, connect to the printer, and hold recipes and grocery lists. All of which it continues to do well.
Now if I can just stop trying to open the wrong end of the MacBook Pro due to the Apple logo being upside down....
30 May 2005 8:17 am
Writable Dates in iPhoto
Over a year ago, I wrote "A Wish for Writable Dates in iPhoto." iPhoto 5 still marks the date of a photo as read only through AppleScript. Fortunately, Kirill Levchenko, passed along a link via e-mail to Joe's iPhoto AppleScripts which solves this problem. Joe Maller's web site has an entire page which documents how these scripts work. He uses GUI scripting to work around the AppleScript limitation. I once again forgot to change the time on my camera this Spring, but, at least this time, I won't have to adjust the time by hand.
22 February 2004 9:23 pm
A Wish for Writable Dates in iPhoto
brian d foy started an iPhoto AppleScript Wish List. What's on my list? Make the date property of the photo class writable.
The last time the time changed, I forgot to change the time on my camera. As a result, a number of pictures that I took had the wrong time before I realized my oversight. I was hoping that iPhoto 4 with its ability to make changes to multiple photos at once would help me address this problem. It didn't because it would only allow me to change multiple photos to the same date; not to subtract an hour from each photo. Given the number of photos involved, I tried to write an AppleScript to automate this process. Unfortunately, the date property of the photo class is read-only. If this property was writable, I could have automated what was a very tedious and error-prone manual process. In hindsight, I should have done what I usually due when I'm faced with a tedious and error-prone task on my computer. Use Perl.
Oh, yes, I did submit this feature request to Apple using the "Provide iPhoto Feedback" menu item in the "iPhoto" menu.
