/begin rant/

I think that Apple needs to do some re-evaluating of their software release schedule/quality control. At this point I would rather wait and have them get it right then put out subpar updates and fall into the downward spiral pattern of “the rest of them”. My confidence has been shaken and I’ve been a mac fan since the beginning. I just want Apple to split off the iPod/Phone/TV etc. into its own division and to get back on track with the Mac line starting now. We need this stuff to work to make a living and this takes a higher priority in my mind than new twiddle apps on the iPhone.

I do own two iPods and an iPhone but would chuck them in a river to get Leopard working solidly with the majors like Adobe, Extensis, Epson, as well as stable networking, syncing and backups. Apple really has their hands full at this point with a large list of bugs. I really wish them well but can’t say I’m in the least bit happy as a consumer at this point. For the first time in a long time I feel sheepish when answering whether or not I’d recommend a Mac, and that hurts me deeply for some reason.

/end rant/

Here is a great hurdle accomplished by the “Big Brains“ (Daniel Nocera and Matthew Kanan) at MIT. The article is via Engadget.com

The gist is how to store energy when the sun is not out, and the solution? Look to plants and photosynthesis to get some ideas and eureka, split water into its elemental gases and store them for later using fuel cell technology. This is going to help us all. Check out the video after the jump.

So back in my days of working at SmartHomeOwner magazine (published by Navigator Publishing in Portland, ME) I remember reading something about solar shingles and also printable solar material. Effectively the printable solar material is a thin aluminum substrate with some copper, indium, gallium and selenium nano-ink printed on it and then covered with another conductive layer. This wondrous $1per watt miracle has been branded the Nanosolar Powersheet (read more in this article by PopSci.)Here is a clunky but good illustration of it by Popular Science. (it ends on a magic toaster at that point the illustration is complete.)10 Questions with Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen from Earth2Tech.comInnovaLight is also making a “printable“ thin-film silicon ink solar solution. You can read about them on their site and also on Earth2Tech.com.With all of this goodness happening in the Solar world I am mounting my research campaign to get our current or next house outfitted with both solar electric and solar heat and hot water systems. I would like to combine them with a geothermal heat/cool system as well. I am hoping my stalwart research habits and dogged observance of neo-tech will help bring this to a tangible reality within a year or two’s time. Wish me luck.Here is Maine’s government resource page for Maine Renewable Energy Programs. It is a start.

Open Office 3 - Beta is a free open source Intel only Mac alternative to Microsoft Office. I’ve had good luck so far. Give it a try if you have a newer Mac with an Intel processor.

Update:

Try out NeoOffice as well. It is based on OpenOffice but Sun Microsystems has made it work on PPC as well as Intel machines. It is free but they kindly accept donations if you are pleased with the software. It seems to work great. I’ve yet to have a problem on both PPC and intel Macs. I’m so close to erasing Office on my machines ;0) Yaaaaaaay!!

Made it out to White Island of the Isles of Shoals to visit my brother Dan his wife Melissa and my niece Emily. We arrived in Portsmouth after a quick drive down from Portland. We did some food shopping for the island and then packed our gear on the Shoals lab boat Kingsbury that would take us out. When we arrived at Appledore Island where the Shoals Marine Lab is we helped unload the cargo hold full of supplies. It was packed to the rim with everything from fresh produce to massive logs of cream cheese. A huge group of students and faculty came to help unload and it was quite a sight. There must have been more than 50 people all lined up in a chain gang all the way up from the dock to a small dump-body truck and a few other small utility vehicles. We unloaded hundreds of boxes in no time with each person only having to hand it a few feet to the next person. I felt like I was a worker at the the base of a big ant hill and it the experience was quite calming. No thought, just pass the box, get a box, pass the box. Quite lovely.

We then departed Appledore on the Kingsbury and another member of Shoals Marine Lab followed us in a 12 foot Zodiac boat to help us land on White Island. Last year a landing ramp was installed here which helped our landing tremendously compared to the last time we visited Dan a few years back. That time was a wet landing in decent swells and chop and the shore changes with the weather. Sometimes it is almost like a rough beach and others it is very rocky. We made a much smaller chain gang this time. 3 people. Missy, Nicole and I. Dan went back to the boat that was drifting a few hundred yards off shore to get the rest of our gear. We had just missed Susie an intern for the last 2 years being pecked on the top of the head by a tern. She was bleeding pretty good Missy had said but was doing fine.

We lugged our tubs of clothes, bedding, laptops and cameras up to the house on White Island where they all stay. Since last year, the terns have expanded their habitat from the adjoining Seavy Island to White, encroaching on the house and surrounding areas. In order to walk from shore to the house you had to walk through a flock of dive-bombing terns protecting their nests. Dan’s solution is to carry a stick with bright paint on one end and wave it above you as you walk to avoid being pecked in the head. I chose the rudimentary arm wave. I could hear when they were getting close but I’m sure my method is flawed and I’ll have to have a dent in my cranium before I use the stick method. Nicole took to the preferred method instantly and was quite cute traipsing the board walk through the tern’s turf like a cartoon band leader.

We got unpacked and realized that we left the pump for the air mattress at home. Luckily they had a quite effective boat pump that Nicole mastered and we were running in no time. I debagged all of our gear. I think I was a bit overzealous with the waterproofing. Next time I’ll ease up for sure. Our gear could have taken gale force winds, sideways rain and sea-foam no problem. With the new ramp this was entirely, flat out over-kill. I do tend to err on the side of cautious but at least if something happened our gear would have been fine.

We spent time with Emily, cute as the dickens and had some wonderful stir fry for dinner. Dan showed me around a bit and everyone was preparing for the next day’s tern census. I’ll have more later but here is a quick shot I got with the lighthouse to my back of Seavy Island, the the terns and the sunset. Now to see if we can sleep through the foghorn that sounds every 30 seconds, 24/7/365. One tends to forget its existence after the first day we’ve been told and experienced but it will be interesting to see if that happens every time you visit or if you only don’t sleep well the first time out. Wish us luck!

High tide covering the land bridge between White and Seavy Island at sunset with the New Hampshire coast way off in the distance.

• Apple - Support - Discussions - 10.5.3 Photoshop CS 3 issues …

• Adobe Forums - CS3 and Leopard

• http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/leopardsupport.pdf

• Tim Cole’s InDesign BackChannel: Leopard Alert: 10.5.3 contains first Nav Services fix

• Adobe Forums - Leopard 10.5.3 is out

• Adobe Forums - InDesign CS3 Crash: How to Avoid

• Adobe Creative Suite 3 products crash when you save, open, or place a file, after installing the Version Cue CS3 3.1.0 update (Mac OS X v10.4.x - 10.5)

• Adobe Forums - CS2 and Leopard. Place image crashes program

• Adobe Forums - 10.5.3 Update causes problems saving to networked servers

• Adobe Forums - InDesign CS3 & OSX Leopard – cannot type into palettes

I’d hold off on Mac OS 10.5.3 Leopard if you need to use your computer as a production machine. I have had pretty good luck with 10.5.2 and CS3 but there are still some “issues”. (See above)

It appears as though there are some big minds working on things behind the scenes but “man o man” I wish Adobe and Apple would at least adopt an open-source bug-fix timeline scenario. This would help mission critical workflows from being sabotaged. Both Apple and Adobe have put out documents saying they are compliant with each other but alas there are show stopping issues that still need to be ironed out. As always, finger pointing from Adobe and Apple. Who on our end can tell (or care) who is at fault. Just get it done, hit some deadlines and make the grade. You are embarrassing yourselves and us.

David Blatner from IndesignSecrets.com has a great post about a problem that a lot of people are experiencing with Inkjet printers and Adobe Indesign CS3. He writes, “There does appear to be a problem with printing from InDesign CS3 to non-PostScript printers (such as inkjets) on the Mac. This is a significant problem for people using inkjet printers for proofing, and especially for photographers, who often use inkjets for their final output.”

David sources Chris Murhpy a color management expert with the following solution: “The workaround is to enable “Print as Bitmap” in the Advanced pane of the Print dialog in InDesign. This causes IDCS3 to do the conversion and generate a bitmap prior to submitting to the OS (the default behavior with IDCS2), rather than depending on the OS to do color conversion or rasterizing. Thus you can use the same ICC profiles and print driver settings as with all other Adobe applications if you choose this option.”

Make sure to check out their great blog IndesignSecrets.com. Please click through on their ads to help support such a great bunch of folks who have helped me many times.

To avoid stalls and crashes of InDesign and Extensis Suitcase X1 you can use a little font cache cleaning application called FontNuke (google it). This guy saved me when we were stuck in the loop of endless IDCS2-3 shutdowns using the auto-activation plugin. Use this right after and at least once in awhile even if after you turn off the Extensis plugin. It searches out all of the font cache locations deletes the contents and reboots your computer.

We have not used the Auto-Activation Plugin for many months now and the Indesign stability issue has all but gone away completely. I spoke with our regional sales fellow from Extensis and by reading between the lines it SEEMS as though they will be releasing the Universal Type Server at WWDC. Let us hope that they finally resolved the auto-activation issue. Also for some incredibly tedious reading look into the Apple’s ATSServer (serves out font info to applications etc.) which Extensis says is at fault for the instability.

Also, if you use MS Office… Trash the “Do Fonts” devil spawn in the MS Office -> Office folder in your applications folder. You can make and archive out of it and toss the uncompressed original if you are worried. It just disables the automatic propagation of the cursed MS fonts to your fonts folder. This also was a blessing. Trying to reach deadlines and dealing with the above issues was Sisyphean task. What I wouldn’t have done for a few moments with the coders of the involved players.

We can only hope that the major players in this industry start working better together behind the scenes. If Apple, Adobe, Extensis, and Epson etc. had a quarterly BBQ together and actually just communicated about what challenges their users are experiencing we would all be able to actually do our jobs without wasting clients’ time, our collective money and precious years off of our lives from stress. This recent flap of “it wasn’t me” stances that the aforementioned companies have taken is shameful.

I could sooooo wake up to one of these in my garage.This machine hurts me in all the right places. I officially love NONOBJECT.The beautiful irony of a rectangle being aerodynamic is partially an exercise in cubist theory. The artists deconstructed the form and function of an existing bulbous design and analyzed it envisioned it as its almost “bizarro” self. In doing so have created a knifelike blade form that “cuts through the air.” The perspective of this form from differing viewpoints veils and unveils its true nature. Although there may be issues with side-winds that most likely would be problematic, it is still an awe-inspiring sculpture. A true work of art.

Looks like the Brain Cloud™ (not to be confused with The Human Brain Cloud) from Joe vs. The Volcano wasn’t so far-fetched—or have to be terminal.

It is put forth by russian scientist Oleg Shumilov of the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems that during periods of heightened geomagnetism people commit experience higher rates of depression and commit suicide more frequently. It sounds reasonable enough.

If what he and other studies have noticed holds up to the scrutiny of the scientific method, the knowledge that human’s internal clocks etc. could be affected by magnetic fluctuations from solar flares could be the difference between being depressed with hope that a change is in sight versus becoming progressively more depressed and eventually suicidal. It is definitely reason enough to warrant more study.