iBook saves the day (my freshwater crab talk)

I moaned and groaned (internally) about my freshwater crab talk for some reason, probably because my engine was running low after the activity of the past two weeks. By 10.30am (last Saturday morning) I finally dragged my self out of bed to get going and raced to create a Keynote out my outline.

I hammered out a text draft of the talk painfully amidst a blazing headache the previous day - that outline was enough for a two hour talk. So that Saturday morning I trimmed and revised some content, added images, section headings and transitions. I also did some reading up to confirm certain ideas.

My museum kakis Swee Hee and Heok Hui had dug out some fine looking images which clearly illustrated the six freshwater crab species from Singapore. A second batch from Choy Heng Wah was relayed by Swee Hee that same morning and I even printed out some photos. I was looking forward to sharing the gorgeous photos with an audience that had dragged themselves to the Botanic Gardens on a Saturday afternoon.

In the last 15 mins before I left, Keynote refused to accept the images! Huh? I decided to cut my losses and Graphic Converter’s slideshow. Then the video adaptor for the MacBook Pro went MIA [I later found it artfully hanging from my wall, right under my nose!] So I fired up my 14.1″ iBook - with its five hour battery, I used my 8GB Imation thumbdrive to transfer all the files from the MacBook Pro to the iBook in the taxi on the way to the venue. This even as coordinator Wei Ling calls to check if I am “on the way”.

In the theatrette, it took mere seconds to plug and play in the incomparable style of an iBook - and what you see is what you get, none of that mirroring nonsense! Some dramatic transitions were unable to render on an iBook, but otherwise things were okay - the Keyspan wireless was accepted without complaint and no power cables would get in the way either.

I struggled with the start of the talk but picked up after the early bird Urban Legend I offered them with. The few whom I later asked said it was okay and that’s usually means it was good enough. Dinesh then gave me a lift to Hup Leong to recover my bicycle and gave me a ride home. I was grateful for the lift and wondered aloud at my tiredness. An hour later in bed I realise I had caught the flu once again from that miserable student (ORY) of mine! Fever, body aches and raspy throat - how could I miss the symptoms?! No wonder I had been so reluctant to do the talk and was sleeping instead of working on the keynote on Saturday morning!

I pulled out of a 80km Sunday bike ride on Sunday and had to miss SAJC’s valiant efforts against a much better ACS (I) rugby team in the ‘A’ Division Police Cup finals at the Padang on Monday. I hate the flu!

After three additional hours of work the previous night and one the next morning, I presented a trimmed-down and more geographical version of the talk to the Freshwater Crab Symposium in NUS on Thursday morning. This time it was a much smoother talk and Keynote accepted all images once again - even threw in an an old map I had just photographed.

So why had Keynote been sulking?

What I want to do in a week or two

TechZone: How to clean your keyboard. Essentially this means popping the keys for a thorough job.

Macbook VGA adaptors at co-op

I bought a couple of mini DVI to VGA adaptors that MacBooks need for the laboratory projectors. Some student groups with MacBooks in my Animal Behaviour class turned up all eager to project their presentations but learnt that they needed an adaptor for the MacBooks. These are not issued with MacBooks but only with MacBook Pros.

The MacBook Pro adaptors are not mini-DVI so one group had to use my MacBookPro - I quickly setup a new user account as Yezdi suggested at the last meetup. Unfortunately the other group was presenting at almost the same time so when i went over, I found out they had opted to export their presentation to powerpoint for use on the lab pc.

Sacrilegious and all, so I bought two adaptors just now at lunch when I popped in to the pc co-op at YIH. Staff price was $36.10 a piece. Should have ordered from Apple Store instead ($32), rats.

Now to keep it in a safe place.

Crab photo from Qatar makes thesis defense

Our man in Qatar, besides responding to ICCS mail, has been to a market to take photos of crabs for Joelle. One even made it to her thesis defense. Just the few of us enjoyed the connections behind that photo.

And here it is on the trusty iBook I lent Joelle because her 5-year old powerbook is hanging on by just a single hinge now. She realises even the “old” iBooks are faster than her treasured, battered, mac. Her next buy is going to feel like magic.

A folder of pdfs

While wondering why the YEP site was down (its a pdf-manageement software) I recalled smart folders which I use quite often in Mail. The I stumbled on planetmike’s suggestion:

1. On the Mac, in the Finder, create a new “Smart Folder” [File menu, New Smart Folder]).
2. Set the “Kind” to be “PDF”
3. Remove the second rule by clicking the minus on the left.
4. In the top of the window, choose where to search, by default it will search your entire computer.
   • E.g. For desktop files only hit “Others” and added my desktop to the list, then I unchecked the “Computer” option. I hit “OK.”
5. Then hit the “Save” button” and name the search something makes sense.
6. Choose the option to save the search in the Sidebar.

In future searches, you can restrict the search to this pdf folder so it is useful for frenzied, repeated searches (i.e. during lecture preparation):

There was some chatter about using iTunes but I did not get it to work for me. I also have iView. YEP is a neat package designed for pdf but they do charge US$35 - enough to make you twitch. And if you are going interested in bibliographic management software, well, those are more costly. However, I tackle another round of lectures in August, and that means revisiting last year’s literature compilation and finding new (and old) ones. So YEP looks to be worth it, in combination with a sychronised folder.

Give twhirl a whirl

I saw this in VanTan’s furious Magnolia updates, and now three others are on it as well. For good reason too.

Multiple-platform, multiple accounts, groovy themes, free, and a whole bunch of features I had wished were in Twitterific, which mainly bugged me because of it’s frequent choking.

Go on, give twhirl a whirl. There, I said it!

Camino 1.6

C’mon, go fetch!

Mac Meetup

See the Mac Meetup Singapore Blog; I will update that post tomorrow. It was really wonderful to meet so many of my old friends and yet, still meet new ones! Well, new to physical interaction at least; we’d been conversing on and off through blogs, so it was good to make progress at the meetup!

Next one in July.

Two tools for Photo Booth

FlickrBooth works on OS X 10.5 and enables photo upload to Flickr/YouTube from Photo Booth.

iGlasses 2 provides a variety of camera controls for the inbuilt or external webcam.

So the next time one of those cats crawl over my keyboard at night, I can brighten the PhotoBooth photos using iGlasses and upload the photo of the miscreant directly to Flickr with FlickrBooth.

Firefox 3.0beta5

It seems pretty fast, and looks Leopard-ish! The release notes summarise the major changes. Go on, take it for a spin and see…