January 2008 Archives

File permission setting in Windows and OS X could use a lot of improvements. As it stands, it’s very often unusable and people make many mistakes with it, thinking that they have configured permissions to one setting, whereas in reality the effective settings may be something else.

Today in Usable Privacy and Security class, Rob Reeder presented his research about this. I have always been wondering about that dialog, but I don’t think that I ever figured it out. And finally I think I’m somewhat getting it, after he as a PhD student explained it to me and the rest of the class

Just to make things clear, here’s the dialog I’m talking about.

You can now download Flickr Downloadr. I have posted about it before, but it was “under wraps” while I had it go through some private testing with people who asked for it. Mostly it’s been good. There are some bugs remaining with some particular photosets, which seem to be bugs in the Flickr Java API that I’m using, but I haven’t found the effort to probe it further, since it works fine for most people/sets.

If you’re reading this through RSS, come and click through to my site to see the new layout that I just installed

Yep. I remade my site, both the blog and the “regular” part, to a fully new layout. I’m pretty happy about this project — I haven’t actually made many sites from scratch before, and this was a fun experience. Starting out with paper, I then moved to Photoshop and then some slicing and dicing and CSS.

Content-wise, you may be interested in the works part where I posted info about some of the projects that I have done. This may be of interest to people thinking of hiring me, but it was good to think about this and document these just for my own reference as well.

Credit goes to Priidu, devil and Joonathan who helped me with some layout and CSS hints and tricks. I reused some of the work we’ve done together before, although all code and layout is original creation, i.e I reused the ideas instead of code directly.

Apple released a bunch of new products today, like MacBook Air and some other stuff. MacBook Air is supposed to be a thin notebook and I like how their product naming typography supports that. On their site and product materials, “MacBook Pro” is written with all the same typeface. In case of MacBook Air, “MacBook” is normal font weight, while “Air” is with a lighter version of the same typeface to underline the thin aspect. Just a neat little thing.

My Apple Remote was running low on battery (indicated by an onscreen icon), so I got a new battery for it. Yet when trying to use it, it sometimes still didn’t work. I discovered that it only works if you squeeze the lower part of the remote.

Turns out that the battery contacts were not in a very good contact with the battery any more, so you had to squeeze to put the metal parts in contact with the battery. So I embarked on a mission to fix it. Which was actually a very simple mechanical operation here’s the tool setup. The only tool you really need for this is a precision screwdriver.

When you open the remote, you clearly see the two metal parts that contact the battery to provide the current. So I just inserted the tip of the screwdriver behind each of them and gently bent them inwards for better contact. That’s all there really was to it. You just have to be careful with not bending the contacts too much, as there’s always the risk of breaking or deforming them, just a little bend is enough.