Unknown File

After sitting for a couple hours exporting a QuickTime video in Final Cut Express, this is the final result:



Yay, Apple. At least it didn't crash, right?

Bad %%BoundingBox: comment seen!

You've got to love Adobe PostScript, with all their archaic error codes and messed up printing styles. What do you do when your printer babbles, "Bad %%BoundingBox: comment seen!" on a simple letter-sized print job from Photoshop? Just ignore it, mostly. Apple says it's Adobe's problem, and Adobe just says, "Meh." After all, what are you going to do, use something other than Photoshop?

After some more digging, I eventually discovered that I could save the image as a PDF and print from Acrobat. There's your solution, folks, if you wanted one.

Why I love(d) Google Docs

Google Docs is such a useful tool. You can collaboratively edit documents with other people, track the changes one-by-one, and you can also edit the CSS and HTML of each page directly, making it a snap to format code for web pages.

So, what does Google do to "improve" upon their already great example of cloud-based document editing? They remove those features completely. Dammit, Google! What are you going to do next, remove labels and search functions from Gmail?

Chicken-and-egg command-line programs

I'm not against using the command-line per se. I'm against all the crap that goes along with it. For example, Google recently developed the ability to use Google stuff via the Command Line. This is allegedly available for the Mac. Here are their instructions:

Mac

Someone on reddit says that it's available via macports:

• sudo port install googlecl

If it's not there, run 'sudo port selfupdate', then try again.

bodo.tasche reports: "Brew has removed the googlecl package because it is part of pip. To install googlecl without MacPorts, use:"

brew install pip
pip install googlecl

You have got to be kidding. The first line of your installation instructions is quoting what someone wrote on Digg? Yes, I know this is a user-contributed Wiki, but if this is the extent of your documentation, I'm not at all impressed. Anyway, I clicked over to the thread and found it rather amusing:

mjs says, "Ugh, is there any way to get it without hauling in all of py26-gdata py26-distribute python26 gdbm tk Xft2 xrender xorg-libX11 xorg-bigreqsproto xorg-inputproto xorg-kbproto xorg-libXau xorg-xproto xorg-libXdmcp xorg-util-macros xorg-xcmiscproto xorg-xextproto xorg-xf86bigfontproto xorg-xtrans xorg-renderproto tcl xorg-libXScrnSaver xorg-libXext xorg-scrnsaverproto? (Particularly the xorg stuff--I don't see why that's necessary.)"

This is the kind of techno-babble I'm quite happy to leave in the Linux world. Anyway, the commands shown won't work because I don't have MacPorts installed, and I can't install and run MacPorts because I don't have XCode installed. Xcode is available only to registered Apple Developers, is about 2GB in size, and is currently only available for Mac OS 10.6, which I don't have. Of course, the "brew" option (or Homebrew Package Management system as I discovered after digging through thousands of beer-related programs) was just as useless, since it also required XCode. I didn't even bother with "pip."

You see, this is what using a computer was like before someone came up with the bright idea of making them usable back in the 80s. Apparently some people still haven't figured it out. It's a good thing these guys don't make cars. They would all come in a box with mismatched parts and you'd be expected to build it yourself.

So I'm trying to open a shared drive and the Finder just says, "Connection Failed." Fine. I try dismounting the drive, and I get this lovely gem:


The operation could not be completed. An unexpected error occurred (error code -8072). Very helpful. I try Googling the cryptic message and don't get much help. (The first result is a page from Microsoft's web site with a completely different error code.) The shared drive is just fine, of course, since the machine is a few feet away from me. So what's the solution? Force quit the Finder and try again!

Ah, Macintosh love.

Shareware is a waste of time

I figure I haven't tortured myself enough today and decided to try out a piece of shareware crap called FotoMagico. What a waste of time. You apparently can't even try the program without installing a "license." Excuse me, what exactly is the purpose of shareware, anyway? Aren't you supposed to try this out first and then decide if it's worth paying for? Remember the good old days when you could do that? Yeah. neither do I.

Let's just face it — shareware is an absolute waste of time. It's usually crippled in some way, disabling all the useful features or preventing you from saving files, essentially keeping you from trying out the software before you buy it, which was the whole point of shareware from the beginning. (Actually, no, that wasn't the point. The point of shareware was that some individual developers wanted to write software but didn't want to pay for distribution. But I digress.)

At this point, I give up and go hunt for a freeware solution, which is what I should have done to begin with. This isn't always easy, either. Shareware sites usually clutter up the place listing "free downloads," as in you can download it for free and THEN pay for it. I have to filter through these sites and dig my way to the real freeware lurking in the dark out there.

Photoshop batch command

I have a couple hundred gigantic layered TIFF files I'd like to save as JPEGs to make them easier to handle. I thought I could set up Photoshop to do this after I went home last night. No such luck:



"could not complete the batch command because the disk is not available." You've got to hand it to Adobe for the hilariously unhelpful dialog boxes. Of course, that doesn't mean people won't treat you like an idiot for asking "what on earth does THAT mean" in a help forum. One guy says "The message is telling you exactly what's wrong." No it isn't — the disk is mounted just fine. Photoshop just thinks it isn't for some reason.

The same guy later suggests trashing the prefs. When asked which preference files to trash (Adobe like to make dozens of them all over the place), another user dishes out the classic "you idiot" styled line: This is covered in the FAQs. I love it when people tell users to "read the effing manual." Yeah, the gigantic poorly indexed 600 page monstrosity. Read that thing. Buried somewhere in there is what you need to know. Or not. Maybe. Just Google it.

But the guy does tell our user how to trash his prefs. I did the same, and Photoshop gave me an even LESS helpful error message.

So anyway, Photoshop's being stupid. And it's your fault. So shut up. We're coming out with CS5 soon anyway.

Delete Gmail Attachments

I'm a graphic designer, and I wind up sending people loads of fairly large, high-resolution attachments. All these hefty messages sent over the course of a year or two are clogging my mail box, and my Gmail account is just about completely full.

It's be nice if I could just tell Gmail to delete these attachments, but apparently there is no way to do this. Google is well aware of this problem, as its users can attest, but has no interest in solving the problem. Instead, we get delightfully useless features in Google labs like a snake game.

The only solution users have come up with is to send the message to myself. Of course, this won't work for hundreds of e-mails clogging my account, and when I try to search for the message, the date will now be messed up.

Seriously, Google. Either give us the option to delete attachments from old, sent mail, or triple the room we have to store the junk you apparently won't let us delete.

Final cut express can't import video

I almost had to use pen and paper to write this down — the good old Rainbow Spinner was back again.

Final Cut Express is being a pain today. Our Senior VP wanted me to help him make a video for his dad. He already had the video on DVD and just needed me to add some MP3s for Sound. No problem, right? I have a copy of Final Cut Express. I just rip the video with Handbrake and then use QuickTime Pro to turn the resulting MP4 into a plain old Quicktime video. Right?

Wrong. I was able to copy the video from the DVD just fine, and Quicktime Pro turned it into a plain old Quicktime file just fine. Final Cut Express, however, refuses to import it. In fact, it refuses to import ANY video file. It just says, "File error: Unknown file."

Not particularly helpful, right? After digging with Google, I eventually figured out that Final Express doesn't like the "H.264" compression that Quicktime uses by default. Of course, it's not like Quicktime gives you any other options when exporting as a "self-contained file," and it's not easy to figure out what magic format it is that Final Cut Express WILL use. I've dragged and dropped AVI files from my digital camera unaltered and FCE uses them just fine, but it apparently won't touch a Quicktime video "H.264" compression.

Of course, I could export the file as a DV stream. But then guess what? Quicktime makes it crappy. Really crappy. Compare the difference below between the Quicktime Movie it WON'T use (left) and the DV stream that it WILL use (right). Yeah, I think we already have a "crappy video" filter in there somewhere.

So where did I eventually find my solution? Why, with NON-APPLE freeware, of course! MPEG Streamclip is a program recommended on the Apple forums and by employees at the Apple store. It had all the settings I needed to turn the video from the DVD directly into a usable Quicktime format (I used the Apple Intermediate Codec). I'd used this program before with both Perian and the Apple MPEG-2 Component to extract video from a digital video camera, and it comes it quite handy. You've got to wonder why a couple hobbyists who make software for free do a better job at this than Apple does with their own commercial video software.

Of course, this still doesn't solve the sticky little problem of exporting video from Final Cut Express in a format that doesn't suck. Plain Quicktime video is set to widescreen for some reason even though the source video is 4:3, stretching it horribly out of shape. I used MPEG-4 and told it to be 640x480, and then iDVD pixelated the hell out of it when encoding to DVD. I'll probably keep playing with new exports, waiting half an hour at a time, just to see if anything else out there works.