Author: Anders Monsen (Page 54 of 82)

In my quest to present the entire run of Prometheus online in PDF format, I need to find a tool that allows merging of PDF single PDF files into one document. Today I found a link to a solution on Max OS X hints. This involves using Image Capture (which comes with every new Mac), plus loading a freeware app called Combine PDFs. Simple enough. I install the new app, and open Image Capture. Hmm, no scanner drivers on my Mac. I move onto Vuescan, an application I bought a few years ago to scan images. I proceed to scan three pages of an old issue as a test. Scanning these as B/W images involves adjusting the page on the flatbed scanner just so a few times. After a few minutes of clicking through each step and saving the files, I have three .jpg files to merge. Hmm, will those convert into a PDF? I drop the files, each around 500-600k, into Combine PDFs, and click on Merge. The process seems to work, but the resulting file is 4.2 Mb, quite massive considering it is only three pages. I must have done something wrong.

Back to the instructions from Mac OS X hints. They suggest installing SANE, and so off to that web page, locate the files, and download them. Install three elements (in proper order, if you please), and open Image Capture again. Browse for devices, and SANE appears. Cool. Follow the directions in the hint, but wait, the Scan button is grayed out. At this point take a deep breath and walk away. After a while to cool down, I will try Google for other options to reduce the size of the end product. I can’t see anyone downloading 12-15 Mb files at this point.

This is a conference I’d almost like to attend. Well, probably more than almost.

Apple debuted Safari 3 beta today. The big news: it runs on Windows Vista and XP. I believe it’s the second Apple application to run on Windows (after iTunes), and a bold move in trying to extend market share in the browser wars. Is it just a matter of time before the full-blown Leopard (or the cat after that) runs on any Intel computer, and not just an Apple controlled Intel machine? What then will happen to the more expensive hardware line Apple produces? How far will Apple have extended into the consumer market by that time (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, er, scratch that last one)? Lots of questions, as the former computer company continues to slowly re-invent itself. In the meantime, I had bemoaned Safari 2’s lack of compatibility with Blogger, and while it seems the Ctrl-keystrokes still don’t work, at least the new version does display icons for the shortcuts. A small step forward, I suppose.

Update: I neglected to mention QuickTime, which has been around for Windows for probably a decade or so, and still going strong.

Now this is an interesting article in LA Weekly. Ray Bradbury revisionism from Bradbury himself.

Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

Hmm, the trailer for the next installment in the Star Wars franchise hits the web. More toys buy now, we must.

The animation has a rough feel to it, especially for the humans. The droids and ships look great, but faces have to yet to make the seamless leap into realistic animation. I still prefer this over the previous Clone Wars animated episodes from a couple of years ago. Let’s hope the story also improves.

Releasing a first draft into the wild is never a sane idea, but I’m playing around with publishing some older issues of Prometheus online as PDFs. I’m open to any and all suggestions about the pages, keeping in mind I’m still formatting much of the text.

The PDFs can be found here which also is my first attempt at Apple’s (not always simple) iWeb software. I’m used to coding html in BBEdit, which is all source code virtually all the time, so again, not perfect. This is more of a proof of concept design.

The content index is identical to the one over at http://www.lfs.org that I compiled over the years. I sent over the index of contributors in 2005, but it has not yet been posted there. Obviously, I need to update both pages at some point.

The url probably will change at some point, and I’ll probably move away from the constraints of iWeb towards something more flexible.

The real reason I logged on was to mention Charles Stross’s novel, Glasshouse, a Prometheus Award finalist. I finished the novel today, and am now 3/5 of the way through the finalists. Until reading this novel I did not see a strong candidate, but now I have one, and it probably will take a lot for the next two novels on the list to change my mind. Next up, John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades. I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about Scalzi, but this is his first novel I’ve had the opportunity to read, so I’m looking forward to it. My only complaint about Glasshouse is that Stross seems to have spent a lot of time inside the head of his Merchant Princes series’ main character, and she sort of jumped into another novel. The protagonist of Glasshouse is female for most of the novel, and acts and talks exactly like a Miriam Beckstein template. I feel like my head needs a cool plunge into The Jennifer Morgue next to shake off that feeling. I stopped reading The Clan Corporate 22 pages into that novel because I just could not take Miriam’s voice any longer. Aside from that small (and probably isolated to my own views) issue, I think Glasshouse comes across as a superb science fiction novel, and contains hugely interesting political speculations and implications, and very much driven by libertarian (or classical liberal) ideas.

As a Mac user I know what it’s like to be kicked around and forced to eat the table scraps in the internet wars. I have tried virtually every browser that runs on the Mac, but always fall back on Safari because a) it has all my bookmarks and b) it’s the most elegant and visually pleasing browser to my eye. But Blogger no longer lets me spell-check on Safari, and now Preview stopped working. At the bottom of each posting window I see the shortcuts taunting me, as none of them work in Safari. I open the same Blogger posting page in Firefox, and everything works. I guess I should switch everything over to Firefox, though my new LiveJournal page works fine in Safari, and Firefox has just such a hideous interface. Ideally I should dump blogger altogether and figure out how to move the localhost version of my blog on Movable Type that I created as a lark in October 2005. It still works fine, and is loaded with far more features I like than either LJ or Blogger.

As a non-voting voluntaryist, I haven’t paid much attention to the Libertarian Party. For some reason it manages to limp along, sucking in libertarians and spitting out their burnt-out husks every few years. Still, the LP core usually has remained pro-liberty, though vapidly ineffectual. In 2006, a new group took power in a coup against principles, and gutted long-standing articles of freedom. In 2007, the LP officially died when Ron Paul declared for president as a Republican. His candidacy acted like a neutron star, pulling in libertarians left and right who saw Paul as their great new hope. Over at Reason’s Hit and Run, Brian Doherty links to one of the current LP’ers bemoaning the former party of principle. I wonder when libertarians will realize that the LP now has no future, through the combination of this coup and Ron Paul. What I don’t wonder about is why a Republican candidate enraptures so many libertarians. Politics seduces people, and Paul’s candidacy is the most prominent ‘libertarian’ political candidate in many years, if not all time. I expect to see many libertarian sites cozying up to the new Republican dream (in fact, I think Lew Rockwell’s site already is hard at work waving the pom-poms for Paul. I believe former LP presidential candidate Badnarik is working hard inside the Paul republican machine, which shows the pure expediency of politics.) Paul certainly shares many libertarian ideals, and is the only anti-war candidate on the right (but why do so many libertarians ally themselves with just the right?), but I do not believe liberty will be achieved through this political process, nor will the media connect the dots between liberty and Paul. This is a great delusion, and when Paul falls to Rudy McMittney, those libertarians who supported Paul will moan about the great anti-liberty conspiracy. But these are just my curmudgeonly thoughts on a Monday.

Via Roderick Long’s blog, news that a new, original B5 movie is mere weeks away from release. I’ve aleady added this to my wish-list at Amazon, along with a bunch of other things I plan to purchase soon.