Monthly Archive for February, 2007

Big Daddy’s Pizza Fuel Surcharge?

Published
by
Jared Ferguson
on 2/26/2007
in Complain and Food
. 0 Comments

Okay, so it’s been a long day and I thought I’d end the night with a little treat: pizza. I called my favorite local delivery place, placed my order, and then was told my order would be $3.00 MORE than what the price is listed as on their website. What? I asked the girl on the phone and she said “it’s a surcharge that helps pay for [the delivery person's] fuel.” WHAT? Uh, isn’t that why I tip the guy or gal? So, as I get thinking about this, it seems that everyone is charging a fuel surcharge lately. My uncle’s business relies very heavily on freight. Now he gets dinged with a charge. He also relies very heavily on his trash pickup. Guess what? They’re getting him too.

What am I missing here? I mean, we are still at $2.00/gal. gasoline last I checked. What’s that you say? Oh, it’s in anticipation for when OPEC bottle-necks fuel distribution this next summer so its members can again make record profits? I call bull-honkey. A quick Google tells me that many chains (most notably, the “Big 3″) are now instituting this fee. As a matter of fact, some schmoe from Papa John’s said people order more often because they perceive the $1.00 or so fee to be a value? Now wait, how do people perceive value in paying for something that used to be free? I’m confused.

So, my 18-month love affair with their pizza comes to an end. As much as I love Big Daddy’s and their all-night deliveries throughout the Salt Lake Valley, I will no longer be ordering from them and, if I may be so bold as to suggest, you should not either.

Mason’s Milestones

Published
by
Corinne
on 2/24/2007
in Mason
. 0 Comments

Just wanted to enter a little piece about all of the new things Mason is doing. He is learning so quickly!! He just figured out how to get turned around at the top of the stairs so that he can crawl down backwards. (I’ve been waiting for a long time for him to figure that one out!)

Just yesterday when his Grandpa Jim was leaving for work and everyone was saying bye to him, Mason started saying “Bye bye, bye bye”, it was so cute. He then started waving after seeing everyone else who was also waving. Since we’ve been in St. George Mason has also done the sign for more and hurt. He doesn’t do them spontaneously, but only after I do it. He was mimicking me, but hey, that’s how it starts.

He has really been fighting switching from baby food to solids, and I’ve been struggling with what to feed him. He does eat: chicken nuggets, bananas, carrots (sometimes), peaches (sometimes), scrambles eggs (sometimes), cheerios, fruit snacks and of course any type of sweets. Needless to say, that’s not a lot to choose from. I’m going crazy trying to be creative with what to feed him.

CSS Changes (Proper Vertical Alignment of <sup> Tags)

Published
by
Jared Ferguson
on 2/23/2007
in Site Updates
. 0 Comments

I recently decided that my reference style on this site was quite lacking. As a result of this, I decided that I was going to start referencing things in a more “official” manner. Of course, this means that some posts will require a lot more work, but I think it my readers will have a better experience.

The first thing I did was actually add citation numbers to references in the page. This was simply accomlished by adding <sup></sup> tags. The result is: Test1. After that, I saw that the line spacing was off because of the new suptags. The browser adjusts the line-spacing to (in my case) 1.8em ABOVE the highest point in the line. Since the sup’ed text is higher than the line text, the line-height is dynamically adjusted. This is not a big deal, but was visually annoying to me. This was fixed with simple CSS code. What I added into my stylesheet is as follows:


sup, sub { /* Zero height spacing for sup & sub elements */
line-height: 0;
}

Lucky for me, K2 allows me to store all of my “custom” CSS in a file separate from the core K2 stylesheet so I don’t have to worry about re-adding the change every time I update K2. So, simple CSS took care of the spacing issue.

Next, I needed a way to get you from the article, to the referenced link, and back to the article. Really, I just had to figure out an anchor-naming scheme to use. Since I sometimes post more than one article per day, I settled on txt1_02232007_1 for the anchor names in the text and ref1_02232007_1 for the reference itself. txt1/ref1 indicates the type of anchor it is (in the text, or in the reference section). Then we have an 8-digit date and finally, the trailing numeral indicates the order of the reference (i.e. the first, second, third, etc. reference in the article). After that was decided upon, I just needed to link it all up.

Finally, I needed a simple symbol to indicate that you could go back to an article from a citation. Thank goodness for ASCII HTML characters. &#8617; gives us a nice little ↩. Simple, no? (Thanks to John Gruber for the clue on this one).

Hopefully, though it will add a little authoring work for me (I author all posts in straight HTML), it will add a little more to your reading experience. Let me know if you have suggestions about this change.

Reclaiming Disk Space In Mac OS X

Published
by
Jared Ferguson
on 2/22/2007
in Apple, Software and Tips & Tricks
. 2 Comments

So, recently I have been running low on disk space. I guess I found this odd since I have an 80 GB drive on my laptop and used to have a 40 GB drive which did fine for me. Then I realized that I have a 40 GB iTunes directory, so I guess it all makes sense now. Using Disk Inventory X1. I started doing a little digging around and have come up with some tricks that I’d like to list here.

GarageBand Goes
GarageBand is a cool program that I have never used. So, a while ago I removed it. You can do the same or move it to an external drive. That immediately saved me 1.9 GB of space. Of course, the program isn’t all that is required for GarageBand and I realized this last night. GarageBand makes extensive use of loops. Disk Inventory X helped me find them and remove them from: /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple/Apple Loops for GarageBand. There went another 1.5 GB of space.

Safe Sleep (Hibernation)
A while ago I posted on enabling Safe Sleep on your late-model Mac. I had the feature enabled, but never did make good use of it. If you’re not using Safe Sleep (Hibernation), open terminal, run “sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0″ and then proceed to remove /var/vm/sleepimage. MacWorld2 has a great article/overview on SafeSleep. Another 1.25 GB of space freed up.

iPhoto Syncing To The iPod
I once synced my iPhoto library to my iPod and then realized that I have no use for such functionality. I discovered3 that iPhoto makes a cache of everything it syncs to your iPod. So I removed ~/Music/<itunes Library Directory>/iPod Photo Cache and saved another 2.25 GB of space.

From just these space-saving tips, I saved 5.04 GB of space from being needlessly wasted. I also have some other suggestions and things I have used in the past:

Removing Language Localizations and Architecture Code
MonoLingual4 is a great too that will remove language localizations that you don’t use. Very few of us ever use our computers for anything other than our native language and what I did was remove all but the “Major” languages (English, Spanish, French, German, etc.). MonoLingual can also remove code from architectures your processor can’t use. On my kids’ G3 PowerBook Pismo, I have used MonoLingual to remove X86 architecture. I have used this on my own computer once before, but decided against it this time seeing as how I could be upgrading to an MacIntel machine sometime in the future. If you have a bunch of Universal programs, this could save a good bit of space. Additionally, ay languages removed cannot be reinstalled without re-installing OS X, so be careful and RTFM before you do anything to drastic.

iLife and iWork Apps
Like many of the iLife applications, iWeb is HUGE. I recently relocated it to an external drive and saved 322 MB of space. Keynote and Pages are other offenders. I use Keynote and NOT PowerPoint, so this will not be an option for me, but for dedicated Office users, Keynote takes up 1.1 GB of space. Pages sizes up to 890 MB.

Other Apps
Of course, there are MANY other huge applications out there and I would suggest you take a peek into your drive to see what may be taking up extra space. Disk Inventory X is a great tool to get a visual idea of what is happening. Hopefully you can put it to use like I did. Please remember though, to search the Internet for anything you may be unsure of removing. For instance, on my computer, /Library/Receipts is 500 MB in size and I thought of removing it. A quick search revealed it is most definitely necessary to a well-functioning OS X system and therefore should not be removed. Good luck.

References:
1 Disk Inventory X ↩
2 Set newer portable Macs sleep mode ↩
3 Photo Sync creates iPod photo cache ↩
4 MonoLingual ↩

Aperture 1.5.2 On My 12″ PowerBook

Published
by
Jared Ferguson
on 2/21/2007
in Apple, Hacks and Software
. 0 Comments

So, I have recently decided to look at using Apple’s Aperture for my photo editing/management instead of Apple’s iPhoto. Of course, the fact that I have a 12″ PowerBook makes that a bit difficult its system requirements don’t fit Apple’s standard for Aperture (never-mind that older, slower, 15″ PowerBooks are okay). Never being one to let those things get to me though, I thought I’d see what could be done about that little problem. Thanks to Google, a solution was quick to find1. Here’s what to do:

  1. Download and Install Aperture2 (using Software Update if you have 1.1 or Pacifist3 for trial versions)
  2. Download and install 0xED4
  3. Open /Applications/Aperture/Contents/MacOS/Aperture in 0xED
  4. Locate offset 0xBD38 and replace 40 9E 00 88 with 48 00 00 88
  5. Locate offset 0xBDD4 and replace 40 9E 00 88 with 48 00 00 88
  6. Save the file, load Aperture

Keep in mind, this particular hack works on my 12″ PPC 1.5 GHZ G4 PowerBook with 1.25 GB of RAM. I have not tested this hack on other systems (and don’t intend to) nor do I claim it will work on any other system. The program is a bit slow, but from what I can see so far, it will do just fine.

So far, my only frustration is Aperture 1.5.2 doesn’t support the RAW (NEF) format of my new Nikon D40. Of course, with Apple’s new Digital RAW support system, I won’t have to update Aperture (just RAW support) to get the new functionality when it is released.

Something that makes me happy though is that I found a plugin5 for exporting images from Aperture directly to my photo gallery. I have become quite used to this functionality within iPhoto because of a similar plugin and, frankly, would find photo management difficult without it.

This is by no means a comprehensive review of Aperture, but more just an archived how-to for my own future reference. Stay tuned for a review of my new camera.

References:
1 Original Hack Source ↩
2 Aperture Trial ↩
3 Pacifist 2.0.1 ↩
4 0xED ↩
5 ApertureToGallery ↩