Painted Lady butterfly timelapse

Snowboarding… Guernsey style

Snowboarding in Guernsey. Weird.

GoBoat HD

Strapping a GoPro HD to a remote controlled boat

Simplified deleting in OSX Finder

I finally got around to solving a longstanding irritation I’ve had with Finder. Well, when I say that, what I mean is, I posted the irritation to a forum, and some helpful folks there gave me the inspiration for the solution.

The irritation:

Quite often I copy a bunch of images off my phone on to my laptop. In Finder I open them up and use the quickview (using spacebar) to quickly view and delete items [using the keyboard only]

However, when I delete an item, Finder loses focus. If I press UP or DOWN I start at the top or bottom of the list. Is there a way to delete an item from the list and it to stay at the same place in the list?

Your workflow is completely ruined when every time you delete, Finder loses focus and you have to use the mouse to get back to where you were. The solution? Labels. This is some simple functionality that allows you to set the backgorund color/label of a Finder item. It’s been in the OS for donkey’s years… but I’ve never got in to it. Little need, maybe. After this, I might use it more.

You can see above how to set the label/colour of a finder item and the effect. The trick though is being able to do this via the keyboard only which is not possible out of the box. Step up cute application of the year: Spark. Completely free (unlike your Butler/Quiksilver) it lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to a bunch of activities, including executing Applescript. Nice guide to it is here.

Which rather alludes to how we’ll do this: with some simple Applescript:

property file_color : 2
– replace ‘2′ above with the number for the color you’d like to use:
– 0=none, 1=orange, 2=red, 3=yellow, 4=blue, 5=purple, 6=green, 7=grey

tell application “Finder”
activate
set selected to selection
repeat with n_file in every item in selected
set label index of n_file to file_color
end repeat
end tell

So in Spark, create a new Applescript hotkey, paste in the script and away you go. Open the image in quickview, and if it needs to be flagged for deletion, hit your new hotkey. Then when you’re done, sort by label and you can quickly find all the flagged images and delete in bulk.

Note: you may need to enable labels in the finder view. Hit Apple + J and check against label

Job done.

(Freebie: in researching this I “found” a neat little keyboard shortcut: CTRL + Apple + 4 = rearrange desktop icons!)

New Apple TV sized doorstop

My Apple-powered home continues to grow – to go with the medley of Apple powered computers, screens and wireless kit, I’ve just added an Apple TV. I previously had no interest in them since as I really only use iTunes for music, and still haven’t bought in to the whole downloading and renting TV over the wires.

But when I learned that AirPlay – a feature of iOS 4.2 – would support streaming video over the air, it instantly had new appeal – I have an old TV that has no digital box so is essentially useless but AirPlay in theory meant that I could stream iPlayer from my iPad to the AppleTV and watch it on the TV.

Any H.264 content from the web can be broadcast over Airplay to your HDTV.

I’ve used AirPlay extensively in the house (with three Airport Express…) so figured this was a good solution, and reason enough to invest in an AppleTV. Apple’s marketing confirms this:

If it’s on iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, it’s on Apple TV. Coming Soon.

You can already stream music and video from your computer to Apple TV. With AirPlay, you can stream music and video from your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch too. So if you feel like watching a film you have on one of your devices, you don’t need to rent or buy it again. Just tap to start playing content on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, then tap again to instantly stream whatever you’re watching — or listening to — directly to Apple TV. AirPlay is coming soon to an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch near you.

Simple right? Except, it doesn’t work like that. Now that it’s hooked up, the only video that can be streamed to AppleTV from my iPad is from Apple apps, like the Video app. But since the video needs to be synced to the iPad (via iTunes) and then streamed, this is of little value. Embedded videos (e.g., YouTube) can stream their audio to the TV, but that’s of no value. Most pertinently, I can’t watch iPlayer off the iPad on the AppleTV. It’s unclear whether this is something the BBC could fix by creating a dedicated iPlayer App.

So for the first time in a long while, I’m left disappointed by a piece of Apple kit and the promises I’d heard. Maybe things will improve in time, but until then, it’s just going to be an albeit good looking but nevertheless very expensive dust catcher.

Growlmail and Letterbox dance again – OSX 10.6.5

Anyone who installed Apple’s latest security release – OSX 10.6.5 – and uses Growlmail and/or Letterbox, will have been greeted by the “Mail 4.4 has eaten your plugins message”, again. A tiresome thing that happens everytime Apple updates Mail – they change the UUIDs and everything starts breaking.

There are two ways to fix and either works 1) The links above reveal an updated version of each or 2) you can upgrade manually by following these instructions. To fix Letterbox in the same way, simply run the defaults write… replacing GrowlMail with Letterbox.

Job done.

Allalinhorn (the easy way)

After our fairly epic 12 hour ascent of the Weismies, we took a rest day. Not surprising really – all four of us were in varying stages of pieces. It meant we had to abandon an ascent of the Lagginhorn – that looked like a full on day. In reality, I felt I might have made it up, but must admit I wasn’t too upset to find myself on a cable car going down the valley from the Weismies Hut. We were back in Saas Almagell by mid morning.

The following day we made our way up to the Britannia Hut via the Felskinn lifts. Dad was still in a bad way and ultimately decided he couldn’t manage it, which was a huge shame. Although, he dodged a bullet because the traverse from the lift to the hut, which was described as nothing more than than 30m odd ascent on a path across, is actually a godawful arrangement of scree and erratics and was the most hideous part of the whole trip. Thank God there was no snow! The potential for slipping off a rock and doing yourself some serious damage was immeasurable. We got to the hut, did a quick recce about and settled in for the night – ready for a 3am start the next day to ascend the Allalinhorn up the tricky route.

The route itself is an ascent of a huge glacier, and then a snow ridge and the summit. The only tricky bit, we were told, was a 30m ‘rock step’ at the top which would scare the shit out of most people. Well, after the Weismies, I figured anything was possible, and wasn’t too perturbed by this news.

But then the weather set in. By 7pm it was grey. By 9pm it was dark and overcast and the beginnings of snow. By 3am when we got up to inspect, we knew immediately that we weren’t going anywhere. Snow had fallen solidly throughout the night and it made the difficult ridge far too dangerous.

After some discussion we figured the best bet was to go back to the lift, get a different lift even further up, and go up the Allalinhorn via the route normale. So that meant crossing that fucking scree slope… now in snow. Great.

Yet another testament to Swiss engineering. The lift up to the foot of the range is… underground. Yes, it literally goes through a mountain. Albeit very expensive, but nonetheless impressive. Out of the lift, straight on to snow and ready to go up.

Half way up and you meet a snow ridge with a impressive view of the Zermatt region – engulfed by the Matterhorn.

The route normale up the Allalinhorn is nothing more than a trudge up, and you just keep going. It’s not technical at all and other than a ridge and some sizeable seracs, it’s fairly easy going. Compared to the ascent and traverse of the Weismies, this was a veritable conveyor belt. We were up and down within 3 hours. In fact, you could do from the valley bottom to top – i.e., 1800m to 4000m and back in an afternoon with some ease – thanks to the lift systems. Perhaps not your stereotypical alpinism, but very accessible.

So that was two 4,000m peaks with a few other smaller things thrown in for good measure. All in all a very enjoyable time… and certainly a nice intro in to alpine stuff for the future.