Dear Lazyweb, how do I get rid of the "new tab" plus-box on the title bar of Safari 4? I never use tabs and it's in the way. This thing:

Answer: defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

No, I'm not interested in discussing the merits of tabs with you. At all. Shut up.

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there some kind of face-recognition plugin for Lightroom? Failing that, some software that will make it easy for me to auto-tag the people in my photos into their EXIF data, which I can then re-import into Lightroom?

Importing everything into iPhoto is not an option, since it copies and/or renames everything, and doesn't write data back to the original files. (Also iPhoto is generally crap.)

I tried "ilovephotos" and it's useless. It does an ok job of spotting faces, but makes no attempt to learn who's face is whose.

Are there any options that don't suck?

Options that involve "upload all your photos" or that do not provide any way to put the data into EXIF tags will not be considered.

Dear Lazyweb,

How the hell do I get SpamAssassin to work properly with Postfix? I've been through this several times before, but as far as I can tell, it's never worked right. Here is what I want:

• Postfix feeds all locally-delivered mail through SpamAssassin;
• Each recipient user on the system can have a .spamassassin/user_prefs file that uses directives like "required_score" and "blacklist_from" and "score". (Note that I said that I want this to be per user, not global. His blacklist is not her blacklist.)

Sounds simple, right? Sounds like the setup everyone in the world must have, right?

I can't get it to ever read the user_prefs files. And my mail log is full of errors about not being able to write lock files in ~user/.spamassassin/.

( What I've tried... --More--(31%)  )

A bunch of bug fixes, but most notably this time, I finally retired a bunch of screen savers that suck. Also I rewrote Jigsaw and Sonar as OpenGL programs, and they are a lot slicker now. The pieces in Jigsaw come in many more varieties, and it rotates the pieces as well.

Dear Lazyweb,

How do you load an NSImage with proper EXIF rotation applied? I can't figure out how to determine the correct rotation. The following doesn't work. I get a dictionary containing a bunch of EXIF keys like exposure and shutter speed, but the "Orientation" tag is notably missing, and the image is displayed sideways. Preview and Finder display it properly, and exiftool says the field is there.

  NSImage *img = [[NSImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:filename];
  NSArray *reps = [img representations];
  NSBitmapImageRep *rep = reps ? [reps objectAtIndex:0] : 0;
  if (rep) {
    NSDictionary *exif = [rep valueForProperty: @"NSImageEXIFData"];
    if (exif) {
      NSString *rot = [exif objectForKey:@"Orientation"];
      NSLog (@"rot = %@", rot);
      NSEnumerator *e = [exif keyEnumerator];
      id key;
      while ((key = [e nextObject])) {
        NSLog (@"%@ = %@", key, [exif objectForKey:key]);
      }
    }
  }

Dear Lazyweb,

How do I normalize the audio volume of a bunch of MOV and MP4 files?

The "Sound Check" option in iTunes works passably well for MP3 files, but doesn't do anything for videos. This makes it annoying to use a playlist full of music videos as a source of ambient entertainment, since the volume fluctuates wildly.

(Only slightly surprisingly, iTunes doesn't use the RVA2 ID3 tag used by normalize, but instead uses a COMM/iTunNORM tag.)

I think that a solution involving manually pulling the audio out of the movie files, normalizing it as a WAV, and re-inserting it into the movie is probably doomed to synchronization errors. So let's not.

Dear Lazyweb, I'm trying to get the postfix, dovecot, and spamd logs out of /var/log/system.log and into their own files on MacOS 10.5.5. (  --More--(13%)  )

Update: The answer is, "redirect spamd's stderr to /dev/null or launchd will log it a second time." Apparently spamd spams stderr with all its logs as well as whatever the -s option says.

A few hundred dollars later, my ongoing attempt to have my second monitor cloned onto my video projector is still made of fail. What am I doing wrong here?

My plan was this:

2008 iMac mini-DVI-D output
→ Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
→ DVI-D-male-to-2x-DVI-D-female splitter
1→ DVI LCD monitor (1600×1200).
2→ 30' DVI-D-male-to-HDMI cable
→ HDMI-to-component converter
→ HD15M-to-3xRCA cable
→ Projector (component input).

My plan fails in two ways:

1. If I just do this:
   iMac
   → Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
   → DVI-D-male-to-2x-DVI-D-female splitter
   1→ DVI monitor.
   2→ (second output of splittter unconnected)

   then the monitor just sits there and flickers, trying to display a message about input being out of range. So clearly that splitter confuses the hell out of either the Mac or the monitor. I don't know which.

2. And if I just do the second part:
   iMac
   → Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
   → 30' DVI-D-male-to-HDMI cable
   → HDMI-to-component converter
   → HD15M-to-3xRCA cable
   → Projector.

   I again get no signal on the projector. Sometimes I saw the projector displaying snow-crash; sometimes it appeared to be trying to lock on to various resolutions that were changing every 5 seconds; briefly, I saw something that appeared to contain the right colors in the static; and now it's decided to just always be black. Anyway, no worky. I tried all permutations of the various switches on the device, and all permutations of the 3 RCA cables.

Suggestions?

How much am I gonna hate the new iTunes? From what I've read so far, I have The Fear.

(Please keep in mind that I don't have an iPhone or iPod or use the Apple store, so anything that causes those to be more in-my-face than before counts as a minus.)

Dear Lazyweb, I have a 2008 iMac, and I have an external monitor attached to it via the Mini-DVI port (for a total of two screens). Let's say I would like to attach a second external monitor (for a total of three screens). Is there some Firewire or USB dingus that will let me do that?

Really, I'd be happy just splitting the Mini-DVI output, but I think it's been established that that isn't possible.

I was trying out the RSS reader built into Mail.app. Does anyone find it to be anything but completely useless? It reposts items all the time -- even when they haven't changed. E.g., using it with the various Facebook feeds means you see the same things as "new" over and over and over and over.

So, I've been trying out Adobe Lightroom 1.4.1. It's an amazingly good piece of software, and I really want to use it all the time... but the god damned thing uses all available memory. I'll import a few hundred photos, start tagging them, and within minutes it's using 4GB of RAM, locks up on me with a hypnowheel, and I have to force quit. Restart it, and the same thing happens again ten minutes later. WTF, Lightroom? Is there any way to make it have less insane memory consumption?

(The Lightroom catalog contains all of my photos -- 75,000 of them -- but if the answer is, "you can't have that many photos in your catalog" then I don't understand why I would use Lightroom in the first place, because being able to search on photos by metadata seems like at least half of the reason this program exists. Without access to the whole catalog, Lightroom is just Bridge.)

But anyway, memory usage goes through the roof if I'm just tagging newly-added photos, without touching old files at all.

Any tips?

XScreenSaver 5.07 out now. Mostly a bug fix release, fixing up a few lingering Xinerama/RANDR bugs, and a bunch of UI tweaks to the preferences dialogs. But most notably, I'm really happy with how the new cartoony cel-shading option to SkyTentacles came out.

And now, a poll!

Screen Savers That Suck, Second Try.

Two years ago I asked you all which screen savers, if any, you thought I should remove from the xscreensaver distribution. That didn't work out so well. A lot of it went like this: "I hate XYZ." "You're crazy, XYZ is my favorite!"

Several people suggested partitioning them into categories (e.g., "Retro", "Math", etc.) but nobody came up with a set of categories that really made sense.

So let's try it another way: please vote in this poll for the screen savers you think I should delete. BUT, please only vote for TEN. The poll will let you select hundreds, but please don't do that. Only select your ten most hated. The ones that make you say, "this screen saver is completely without merit, and anyone who says they like it is lying."

( The "Screen Savers That Suck" Poll   --More--(20%) )

XScreenSaver 5.06 out now. Only one new hack this time, but it's a fine one, if I do say so myself. Also this includes a bunch of fixes related to adding, removing and resizing monitors (RANDR/Xinerama) on X11 systems, as I mentioned earlier. So please stress-test that junk. Or be devoured.

Dear Lazyweb,

How do I mute the "Line In" audio input on MacOS 10.4 (a G4 tower) without physically unplugging a cable? Doing this:

osascript -e 'set volume input volume 0'

has the effect of moving the "Input Volume" slider in Preferences/Sound all the way to the left. However, that does not silence the audio, it only reduces it slightly.

Oh look, /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles is zero length with a write date of 1970. Oh look, so is /etc/named.conf. This is going to be a long day.

Dear Lazyweb,

I suspect the answer to this is also "Apple horked it in a recent security update", but I still desire to know how to fix it. Lately, when I'm doing rsync+ssh backups of various machines, ssh craps out partway through. Ssh is running on MacOS 10.4 PPC (OpenSSH 4.7p1) with the latest updates, and is aimed at at various Linuxen that haven't been upgraded since, say, 2005 (OpenSSH 4.3). It dies like so:

rsync [...]
building file list ... done
...dozens of files get transferred successfully...
Disconnecting: Bad packet length 787964.

It's dying after transferring a bunch of data, not during connection setup. Both side are most assuredly speaking SSH2.

Googling this error message only results in very old threads where people say, "Oh, that's because you're using SSH2! You should use SSH1 instead." This answer is clearly bullshit. What's the real fix?

Dear Lazyweb, lately (this month-ish) I'm seeing that "A script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 9 to run slowly" dialog all the time. Safari will go all hypnowheel for 5-10 seconds, and then that dialog appears, giving me the options of "break the web page" or "go back to the hypnowheel for another ten seconds, then everything's fine." Who broke what? No scratch that, just tell me how to fix it.

Adium's ability to search IM logs is comically bad. It's so bad, I usually resort to grep. Which is almost enough to drive me back to iChat. But I like having OTR (crypto) built in, and iChat's multi-protocol UI is stupid (I want one list of contacts, not one list per server).