Figlio was my first real pet, and by “real,” I mean “not a goldfish.” My dad didn’t want any mammalian pets in the house, and so I never had one as a child. We adopted Figlio a little over six years ago from a lawyer whose fiancé was allergic to cats. She hid under the…
Category: ramblings
What George Lucas can learn from Bruce Campbell (and AAlgar)
Almost a decade ago, I first met Bruce Campbell at his book signing for “If Chins Could Kill” at a bookstore in Arlington, VA that no longer exists. Of course, “meeting” a celebrity at any sort of signing can hardly be said to be a meeting at all. Maybe you get a minute or two…
Pro Applications Update 2010-02
Update to Final Cut Studio applications today on 15 September, including these lovelies (among others): FCP: Closed captioning data is now preserved when outputting to AJA Io HD with Print to Tape/Video. FCP: XML export now retains the carriage return when working with text and third-party applications. FCP: Several memory fragmentation issues have been resolved….
iTunes AppleScripts to Clean TV Episode Metadata
This weekend, I dumped a bunch of TV episodes I ripped from DVDs into iTunes, and faced a daunting task to clean up all of the titles and other metadata. Thankfully, iTunes has a special […] At this point, I’m not sure what happened, but it seems the rest of this paragraph got lost when…
Apple Pro Keyboard disassembly and cleaning
The Apple Pro Keyboard is mushy and unresponsive, but worst of all, it traps and showcases dirt inside its clear plastic shell as if it were a disgusting work of art. If you want to get back to your pristine-looking APK, it takes a fair amount of effort to take apart and clean. This guide…
Make OS X re-run the initial Setup Assistant
Note: This article has been updated for newer versions of Mac OS X (10.5 or later) that don’t use Netinfo Manager. Read the new article. When I’m prepping an old Mac to resell or give away, I like to install a clean system and apply all of the available updates first. Of course, I need…
Drobo Rev1 Firmware Update Trick
I have an original first generation Drobo (USB only) that was not acting well lately. I was having some hanging and mounting issues, and on top of that, I couldn’t even get the firmware to update, which the Drobo folks were thinking might solve my other problems. I tried updating the firmware automatically from Drobo…