UPDATE: since the iOS 4.2 update, Apple has changed the power limit for third party accessories from 100ma to 20ma, rendering the card reader below useless. Thanks, Steve!

I needed a multi-card reader anyway for my iMac because it was getting cumbersome to look for the right cable every time so I got one as well as the iPad CCK.

And it works. Also with RAW files, well at least the NEF my Nikon creates. Just like advertised in the video.

After having upgraded to iPhoto '09 and having the application scan through my photo library of approx. 8000 photos in search of Faces for a while, I sat down to look at the results. At first it seemed to do quite a good job. And after supplying some names to faces it got better. But then I noticed quite a few misfires. It seems the algorithm iPhoto '09 uses for faces looks for circle shapes with 'holes'. I am not a mathematician so I have no idea how it really works but from the results this is the idea I got. Often iPhoto '09 thinks car tyres seen from the side are faces. Fair enough. But then I came across this photo, taken in the catacombs of Paris a few years ago.

iPhoto recognized one of the skulls as a face. Now I kind of feel sorry for all the other skulls around it who remain not only nameless but now also faceless...

So here I am, sitting in a rather artsy fartsy cult cafe in Budapest which promised to have WiFi but even the waiter doesn't know the password. So I'm using some other free connection that seems to be working so far. On to the topic of this post: my experiences with the iPhone after a week of usage. I'll start with the conclusion: it's the best phone I ever had and never want to go back again. Having said that there's always something to complain about. To me it seems Apple got most of it right, certainly all the more advanced stuff: wifi, safari, apps etc. Where it performs less is the basic stuff, the kind of stuff people have become used to after using cell phones for a decade. Here's my list of things that annoy me and could use improvement. - crippled Bluetooth: only works with headset. - addressbook: can't edit groups. - can't send contact cards with SMS. - iCal Birthday calendar doesn't sync with MobileMe. You can sync it through iTunes but then it doesn't transfer the alerts with the birthdays making it virtually useless.  - no copy/paste functionality in apps or between apps.   I'll add more stuff along the way.

I came across this cute little plugin for Apple Mail (on Tiger and Leopard): SignatureProfiler. It adds the "currently being played song in iTunes" to the signature of your e-mail messages. After messing about with it I got it to work. I didn't fully understand the example that the developer put up on his site but in the end this is what I did:

1. Create a signature for a specific emailaddress which contains the placeholder {itunes.display.info}
2. Set this signature as default for this address - so you don't have to select one everytime you write a message.
3. Create the additional signatures for the 4 iTunes states (Playing, Paused, Stopped and Not Running) with the placeholders {itunes.playing.song}, {itunes.playing.artist} and {itunes.playing.album} (only Playing and Paused states would use this I suppose)
4. In the plugin preferences assign the right signature to the right iTunes state.

I think that is it! I might add some screenshots later. I'm not sure whether there are more placeholders than the ones mentioned. {itunes.playing.year} would be nice, album year that is. But then again, that probably is just me.

Update: I noticed it's not really working as it should: when iTunes was stopped (after the end of a playlist) and I created a new message it would just repeat the text of the standard signature, in this case:"best regards, Nils Hendriks" (Twice).

Not too long ago I was developing a website for a client that uses a black background with white text. I noticed the white text appearing rather bold so I assumed my CSS was faulty and somewhere was a font-weight set to bold. The fact that this was only happening in all browsers on the Mac platform should have been a pointer to the issue. However, as always I question my code first but after intensive research on the CSS it turned out it had nothing to do with the code at all.

After Googling on it for a bit, the only article I found discussing this issue was by Jason Patterson on this lengthy forum topic. The forum discusses Mac OS X's sub-pixel AA and Patterson takes the opportunity to claim there's a bug in Mac OS X's sub-pixel AA rendering for white/light text on black/dark backgrounds. He also did a thorough test which you can see here.

I created my own tests, one html file for those who want to check if they experience the same issue and one screenshot of how it looked like before I changed my iMac's default font smoothing style setting.

Update With Snow Leopard you can no longer chose a setting from a list. It has been 'simplified' to a checkbox, on or off. On my iMac this was unchecked by default. Testing my file in Safari, it seems as this looks as it is supposed to: the non bold text doesn't appear to be bold anymore. On my MacBook however this option was checked by default and the test file text still looks more bold than it should. Unchecking the option did not have an immediate effect, but after quitting and restarting Safari it seems to do the trick. Read more about this here:

• http://www.mikeafford.com/blog/2009/01/apple-mac-font-smoothing-styles/
• http://blog.jjgod.org/2009/08/18/snow-leopard-vs-dell-lcd-displays/