a view from afar

I just bought a CanoScan LiDE 25. Apparently I'm not the only person that thinks Canon's scanner software is a crime against humanity. I now use Yep for scanning, so I just need the TWAIN driver provided by the Canon installer. But the closest I got to making it work was seeing it install the files, then delete them immediately after. Yes, that's right. I WATCHED THE FILES DISAPPEAR from /Library.

I think Bart Simpson has the best phrase to describe this software - it sucks and blows at the same time.

My installation guide follows...

Just stumbled across iusethis - well actually, I was pointed to it by someone who knows a little more about Mac desktop apps than me.

To think of the hours I slaved over my list of useful desktop apps, when I could've signed up on there and just clicked "i use this" 30-odd times. Of course, then you wouldn't get all my insightful comments in one easily-digested article.

Also, +1 to the site for supporting OpenID!

Don't know how widely know this is, but I was amazed by this video on YouTube of Image Resizing by Seam Carving. I searched and found a Mac OS X implementation called Seamus by Wim Lewis. (There's a few of my own notes about compiling if you read the rest of this article.)

UPDATE: I e-mailed Wim, and while he has no plans to update Seamus (although he has added the ability to save the shrunk image if you grab the latest source), he did point me at rsizr which is a great implementation in Flash (wow, never thought I would say that).

Here's a sample of what seam-carving does (using Seamus, photo is somewhere on the Dorset coast):

Before

After

WARNING: the following post is not suitable for anyone who has left high school, unless (like me maybe) your sense of humour didn't

I'm working my way through From Bash to the Z Shell. I thought it was time I became a command-line guru because I'm sure I'm missing valuable tricks.

If you haven't seen GetBundle, I recommend you give it a look. It makes it easier to browse and install the available bundles (based on what's in the MacroMates repo).

I noticed a couple of issues. If you have bundles checked out from another repo, or you have any bundles checked out with a recent version of Subversion (GetBundle includes its own svn binary), you may have issues.

Here is a modified version of the Update Installed Bundles command that (I think) plays nice in both these situations. I've posted to textmate-dev so hopefully will find out soon enough if it works as I think it does.

Just got myself a shiny new 24" iMac. (Seriously - they are VERY shiny - I can see my face in it, which is not a good thing.) I transferred my user account across but decided to leave the apps - I wanted to install them by hand to see what I actually use. Well, this is what I can't live without...

(Note: I keep updating this from time to time as I add and remove programs)