Calibrating one screen is fairly straight forward with the right tools. Just follow the software wizard and you’re done in about 10 minutes. Calibrating two screens can be a little bit more tricky—especially if one of those screens is a laptop display.

I use the latest version of Eye-One Match (v3.6.3 as of this writing). Once figured out how to make the magic happen, it’s really a breeze. Follow these steps and you should be fine…

My Set Up

• 15” MacBook Pro (late 2010) runs OS X (Snow Leopard, v10.6.6)
• 20” XL20 Samsung SyncMaster external display
• laptop screen has been arranged to be the secondary display whenever the XL20 is plugged in
• XL20 contains my menu bar

Let’s Calibrate!

These steps work for me. I’m not saying it’s the only way to accomplish this, but it sure works for me.

Calibrate the laptop display first

• ensure you DO NOT have your external display plugged into your laptop
• start Eye-One Match and follow the steps to calibrate your screen
• save your profile with a meaningful name (such as “MPB-24-03-2011”)

Calibrate the external display next

• plug the secondary display into your laptop
• you may need to ensure that it is set as your main display (not sure about this step)
• start Eye-One Match and follow the steps to calibrate your screen
• save your profile with a meaningful name (such as “XL20-24-03-2011”)

Ensure that you now have two displays with their own ICC profile

• go into “System Preferences” > “Displays”
• click on “Color” tab
• ensure the “Show profiles for this display only” option is checked
• click on “Gather Windows”
• compare the settings

If all is well, you should now have two displays with their own profiles, and your profile settings should look similar to this:

Note the two different profiles.

Issues with larger libraries

While having been very happy with Songbird overall, I have been concerned about Songbird’s slow performance with larger libraries.

For this project to survive this issue absolutely had to be addressed in upcoming versions. I realised that it would only be a matter of time before we’d see improvements—after all, Songbird is being built by a group of designers and developers that have previously worked on projects such as Winamp, Netscape, and Firefox, so I have quite a bit of confidence in its dev team.

Time is now

It looks like the time is finally here: after reading the developer’s blog on the subject I installed their nightly build to check for myself. I’m happy to be able to report that performance has been greatly improved in the latest nightly build. So, as things stand, all will be well in the next stable version of the software (v1.9).

I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to all the Songbird devs who make the magic possible—keep up the good work everyone.

Further Reading

• Songbird Blog entry on Performance Improvements
• Top 5 Reasons why iTunes sucks

I’m afraid that this sounds like database corruption. The cause of this is unknown to us at this point. Vienna’s database is located at “~/Library/Application Support/Vienna.messages.db”. If you backup your home folder frequently (which everyone should), then you can quit Vienna, delete “messages.db”, and replace it with a recent backup. If you don’t have a backup, there may also be a file “messages.db.bak” in the same folder; check the last modification date on that, and if it’s recent enough, then you can quit Vienna, delete messages.db, and remove the “.bak” extension to use your old database.

If you don’t have either of those things, then you still should be able to export your subscriptions and re-import them. Export all of your subscriptions, quit Vienna, move “messages.db” to a different folder, and re-launch Vienna. That will create a fresh database, and then you can import your subscriptions again.

Jeff Johnson, Vienna Developer on the cocoa|forge forum

Oh bother… Guess my Vienna database is corrupted. And I’m not one of those smart people making regular back ups of their home directory either.

This could be a blessing in disguise since I was not being able to keep up with my reading. I’ll take some time to clean out my messy RSS repository and start over. No doubt there will be a number of gems to links to…

The project hasn’t been updated for nearly a year now. There are some forum posts on the subject: Bartek the developer has gone through a rough patch and has been unable to work on the project.

I don’t want to speculate much about the nature of his woes, but I have always wondered about the incredible speed of the updates & upgrades of the application. I deemed it unsustainable for a single person to update an application several times a month. Guess it all became too much for him.

Perhaps it is time to set the project free and allow others to take over? In any case, I wish you well Bartek. You’ve delivered wonderful free software, but it came at a price…

Hard To Synchronize

Is it so hard to sync feeds across computers? One should think not. I found NewsGator’s online version plain ridiculous. Just like Snappy the Clam back in July 2007, I could not get this to work: my attempts at deleting a folder were unsuccessful, despite the fact that I tried six different browsers on two different platforms.

My NetNewsWire install (v3.1.1; the latest version) started throwing non-stop newsgator syncing errors. These were temporarily resolved by deleting the Web Cache.

On top of everything else, it appears there are inconsistencies in the way NewsGators’ applications sync: NetNewsWire sends the status of feeds before it downloads them while FeedDemon appears to be doing exactly the opposite. This is how I lost my 6,000+ feed items.

Beta Bait

It looks like NewsGator has released a half baked product on the market. It’s disappointing stuff: if you can’t fully support a product, please don’t release it—I’d rather not bite the beta bait. If you want to run public beta programs, please do like Opera and many others: release beta previews to whoever is daring & patient enough to help debug it. Thoroughly test the product before releasing it to the public as final, and when you do beat your drum, make sure it works the way you advertise it.

Bye NetNewsWire, Welcome Back Vienna

I’ll go back to my old system now. Two computers. Two different feed streams: one for work related feeds, the other for all else.

I will keep using FeedDemon (just like TopStyle, it’s a great Nick Bradbury application). But until others are reporting positive results after biting the beta bait, I’ll dump NetNewsWire and go back to using Vienna.

• FeedDemon
  
• NetNewsWire
• NewsGator Online

This might be one of the only ways to easily and continously synchronise feeds between a Mac and a Windows machine. I certainly shall be looking into this option (despite the fact that it would mean I’d no longer use the excellent Vienna RSS reader for the Mac).

This release sports a large number of improvements and functional additions. Based on my tests with v3 beta installations personal favourites include:

• general usability enhancements
• improvements to default forum style
• creation of subforums
• password protected forums
• admin can now set global moderators
• multiple group leaders for usergroups
• banning by IP address (previously possible by applying a hack)
• active topics search
• disallow non-registered user memberlist viewing (previously possible by applying a hack)

Further Reading

• press announcement
• feature comparison

It would have been much better to place it right underneath “Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS3…” in both modules.

Library module

Develop module

I also do not understand the logic behind calling it “Settings” in develop module, and “Develop Settings” in library module: the context menu for both of these are the same (Reset, Copy Settings, Paste Settings, etc). Hopefully, these inconsistencies will be addressed in the next Lightroom release.

To fix this, select the incorrectly labeled photos and remove them from Lightroom’s library.

After that, you can simply import them again (Import photos at their current location), and Lightroom will no longer label them as missing.

Please note that you’ll need to double check that these photos are indeed where they are supposed to be before removing them from Lightroom library. If they are truly missing, they may need to be retrieved from back up.

Also note, that if these images were previously part of a collection, they may have been deleted from these collections.

Microsoft does not easily allow multiple versions of Internet Explorer to run simultaneously on Windows, but it is possible with Manfred Staudinger’s work around. I have been using that solution for years now, but recently came across a resource that makes running them side by side a little easier.

My first impression is that the installation process is smooth and quick, even though some of the older versions do not run as well as they should. But that is fine because these days there’s little point in supporting IE3 still (other than to check whether it degrades gracefully).

For instructions on manual installation, and some background information, check out Manfred Staudinger’s article on Postiton is Everything.