Some lessons for using ecto with Drupal.

As promised, the parts of Drupal that I changed to get CP working the way I like it.

A quickie.

To make Hollywood-style credits in Final Cut Pro, create two “Scrolling Text” generators. Left-align one, put the part names in that one, then set the indent to 51%. Put the actors’ names into the second one, set it to right-align, and set the indent to 51% (they measure from opposite sides). If you change font metrics in one, change it in both, of course.

To get sections (cast, crew, locations, etc.) create a third generator, set the font metrics to be the same, and set it to center. Put in one blank line for every line in the others. Put blank lines in the others where there is text here.

It’s a hack, yes, and until Apple creates a real credits generator it’s what we have, but it beats keyframing a Photoshop file by a significant margin.

I cannot be the only person with a music library on an external drive. I simply cannot be. However, almost every time I start iTunes 4.7 it decides I really didn’t want my library on the external drive and wanted it in my home folder instead (On my 4GB-free drive. Right.). So every time I add music it gets added locally. Every time. Then I have to change the library path over and wait for the update and copy process. Then make sure they were copied. Then delete the local copies.

And I still lose music, somehow.

So I looked into it and it seems that if you start iTunes without your source drive connected it friggin resets to the default path, without warning and adds any new music there. No warning. None. No errors, no notice, no warning.

Stupid.

So, the solution: remove the ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder and replace it with a symlink to the path on your external drive with the library and let iTunes keep the original path. Yes, it rather defeats the purpose of being able to actually set the path, but if Apple wants to play this game badly then you just have to work around the idiocy.

iTunes 4.6 didn’t do this. No other version did. I can only presume they thought they fixed a bug but all they did was break it for me. Core feature: adding music. Broken. hissss

Of course, this breaks something else. I used to be able to add music when away from my larger external drive and then consolidate when I got near it again. No longer. If I have the symlink in place then iTunes shows nothing as the chosen library folder if the drive is disconnected. And it won’t add music. Not entirely unexpected, but enough to piss me off when it worked before the update.

I’d been writing this up for codepoetry but with the inadvertent launch of Mac Geekery I went ahead and put it in its rightful place. Have fun and go read CLI Disk Management.

There’s a blog entry on MG that has some important concepts behind MG in it so I encourage you to take a look and, if you like, participate.

Oh, and spread the word.

If you go into Mail’s preferences for your account (this was done in Panther’s mail, no idea if this works for you slackards ) and add addresses delimited with commas (and perhaps a space) you’ll get these new addresses in your pop-up menu for when you compose a mail message.

That’s just plain handy.

Text-shadow can be used for a bit more than just drop shadows, you can create inset and outset effects with it as well. The trick to out/inset is simply adding lighter or darker areas with a similar shape to the text somewhere near it. That is, coincidentally, exactly what a text shadow does.

color:black; text-shadow: 2px 2px 0px white;

color:black; text-shadow: -2px -2px 0px white;

Yep, you’ll need Safari/WebKit to see that. Unsure if KHTML on the Linux side can even show it.

No, this isn’t about using Disk Utility to partition it and break it, this is about partitioning it and keeping the iPod’s functionality intact. Useful for those with 40GB of iPod and 25GB of music…

It goes without saying this is not something Apple intended a music player for, so if you break your toy you’re on your own. Apple’s iPod Firmware Updater program can usually restore the iPod back to its former self but reader beware: you may kill your little friend in the process. You have been warned, and since this is merely an educational guide I will take absolutely no responsibility if this fails to work for you even if you follow the directions perfectly.

So we’re in about the third year of Mac OS X now and there’s one thing I’ve not done in this entire time: actually looked at that “other” standard palette: the color palette. I’ve used it to pick colors for various things and gone through the tabs to use the different methods, but I’ve not actually looked at the panel (like I did the font panel) since it came out. Big mistake. Huge. This thing is awesome.

One more thing to do with an iPod: enhance your clock radio.

I got my iPod for music during times I’m away from my computer and for storage for times I’m running out, but there’s always new uses. I picked up an iTrip at the Apple Store in town recently and it works great in the car, but it also makes my clock radio worth using again; I stopped listening to the radio because of commercials, but since I own about 300 hours of my own music I decided to use it.

• I first synched the clock radio to that of the iPod (which is set by the computer, which is set by an NTP server) and then I set the radio to the iTrip frequency.