journal

22.01.04 | Creating an MT portfolio

Screenshot of the individual page

As promised last November, I’ve finally got around to writing up how I created a database driven portfolio section with Movable Type and a smidgen of php. I hope it’s of use to someone!

19.01.04 | CSS Vault v2

Paul Scrivens, officially the busiest man on the web, has redesigned and improved the CSS Vault, and it looks better than ever. The new layout has an air of sophistication and the darker colours separate it from his blog whitespace.

His commitment to upkeeping the CSS Vault is to be applauded. Barely a day goes by without new sites and resources being added, and it’s through the vault that I discovered sites like Dunstans and You Grow Girl, for which I’m eternally grateful. This is a valuable resource that the standards design community badly needed.

15.01.04 | Digital Camera recommendations?

I need a new camera

The time has finally come to replace the Hicks family digital camera - a toaster-sized 1mp beast that weighs a tonne and waits a fortnight inbetween photos. After trying my brother-in-law’s Canon Ixus recently, my mind was made up. The quality was incomparable.

So, before I head out, does anyone have any recommendations? I’m ideally looking for around 4 Megapixels and it must work with OS X (although I think most do anyway). Can’t decide whether I should bite the bullet and make it an SLR (such as the Canon 300D) or go compact (like the Ixus). I must find one that is has little (or no?) ‘downtime’ between photos. It will be used for anything from snaps of offspring in various pointy hats to close ups of nature.

Let me know your wisdom.

08.01.04 | Playing iPods via iTunes

My ‘working away from home’ kit consists of just 2 things. My worn but trusty G4 Powerbook and my iPod. The iPod means I can play music in the car, as well as backup work to it. I’ve been trying to find a way of playing the music on my iPod through the Powerbook, without losing the link to my G5 where the music library is kept. There are plenty of apps that enable you to copy the iPod library onto your computer (such as PodWorks) - but I just don’t have the HD space for such a task. It also seems a little overboard - why copy everything when I should be able to just playback from the iPod?

I tried an app called iPodRip, but was less than satisfied with its ramshackle, ugly-relative-of-iTunes interface, tendency to crash regularly, and inability to display tracks in the right order. A better solution, was a free little app called Music Publisher which shares your iPods music library, allowing it to be played through iTunes. This also works across networks.

Even better however is an undocumented feature that I found after prompting by Shaun Inman. When you plug in your iPod you’ll be asked whether you want to break the existing link with the other iTunes database, and sync with the powerbook’s. Select no, and click the iPod icon at the bottom of the iTunes window. Click ‘Enable for Firewire use’ if you haven’t already, and change updating to manual (deselecting all automatic options), and lo! The tracks and playlists from your iPod show up in iTunes!

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