Mark Jones

Wallpaper of the month – September 2011

Mark — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:44:41 +0000

After a long hiatus, here’s a new wallpaper. Lots of autumnal crabapples, blackberries, hawthorn and elderberries.

Another new layout!

Mark — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:27:16 +0000

I spend a lot of time finding interesting WordPress themes for my clients. So it’s no surprise that when I see a new one I really like, I want to put it on my own site. This one is swatch, from WooThemes, and for a free, almost-uncustomised theme, it’s amazing!

Point Zero

Mark — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:30:17 +0000

If I’d been busier this week I might not have done this, but OS X Lion was released yesterday and like a sheep I upgraded. So far so not-too-problematic, but here are some annoyances I’ve found, with solutions where available:

Pointless animations when composing and sending e-mail

Solution: in Terminal, type:
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES
and
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool YES

Pointless animations when opening and closing windows

Solution: in Terminal, type:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

Hugely annoying autocorrect, which I didn’t ask for, in Mail

Solution: System Preferences / Language & Text / Text tab / uncheck “Correct spelling automatically”. You still get the semi-helpful red underlines, but lose the hopelessly inaccurate autocorrect.

No doubt there will be more to follow …

Loads of annoying glitchiness

Airport dropping out, and failing to reconnect when waking from sleep (turning-it-off-and-on-again works, slowly, but is annoying; 10.7.1 update no help)
Finder crashing randomly and regularly
Backups to my (non-Apple) NAS drive taking forever
etc

Solution: Do what I should probably have done in the first place: clean install of Lion. Yawn.

MacBook / External Monitor fix!

Mark — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:17:29 +0000

I recently bought a nice Dell monitor – the U2311H if you’re interested (it’s great). Unfortunately, when I connected my MacBook I could see subtle but annoying pinstriping on solid blocks of colour. Not really what I had in mind when I paid a bit of a premium for a good-quality panel.

Anyway, thanks to Cloudane, whoever you are, on the Dell forums, it’s fixed! If you’ve got an external display attached to a Mac with NVidia graphics, try this:

Download NVinject
Unzip it to your Desktop (or wherever)
In a Terminal window, type sudo cp -R ~/Desktop/NVinject.kext /System/Library/Extensions/ (all on one line!)
Reboot
Smile

More instructions are here (see Possible Solution 5)

Brand Me Video

Mark — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:07:05 +0000

Here’s my promotional video, shot by John Scotland under his Brand You Video campaign. It gives you an introduction to what I can offer, and showcases John’s video production and editing skills.

Grabbing thumbnails from YouTube & Vimeo

Mark — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:32:48 +0000

It’s really easy to grab thumbnail images from these two popular video sharing services.

For Vimeo, first take the video ID number from the URL, and copy it over xxxxxx in the following:

http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/xxxxxx.xml

This gives you a whole raft of information about the video, including the URLs for the 3 different sizes of thumbnail image. Simply copy-and-paste to get the size you want.

YouTube is slightly easier, and you get a choice of thumbnails (though 3 of them are tiny). Again, you need the video’s ID from the YouTube URL – it’s the eleven characters after “watch?v=”. Now simply copy it on top of yyyyyy in each of the following:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/yyyyyy/0.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/yyyyyy/1.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/yyyyyy/2.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/yyyyyy/3.jpg

Update
I got bored of all of that copy-type-select-paste-enter-copy-paste-enter-right-click-download-as-ing, so made simple thumbnail grabbers for vimeo and YouTube.

Wallpaper of the month – August 2010

Mark — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:35:40 +0000

Here are some steps from the National Wildflower Centre. Makes a change from pictures of flowers, I reckon.

Wallpaper of the month – July 2010

Mark — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:15:47 +0000

Not, perhaps, everyone’s cup of tea, but here is a closeup of my little boy’s hair.

Wallpaper of the month – June 2010

Mark — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:15:39 +0000

A bit boring this one, but I’ve been looking at this bit of sky a lot over the last few days. So I’m going to take it home with me.

Wallpaper of the month – May 2010

Mark — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:53:23 +0000

Flowers are opening in the garden. Here is one.