The archive of Macsingularity
Well, I’m way late to the game on this, but our long national nightmare is over – Xquartz for Leopard support full screen!
Check out the latest version – 2.3.1 – at MacosForge.
Tags: full screen, x11 — .iLounge has a good review of all the various iPhone programs that allow you to upload and view supported file types. These are typically PDF, images, Office and iWork documents. One could upload a PDF of a journal article or preprint to read on the plane or train (assuming you don’t prefer paper.)
Of course, none of these will be Papers for viewing journal PDFs, but still could be useful. It seems that File Magnet and Datacase both get A- scores for Macs. FileMagnet doesn’t work on Windows, and Datacase gets a B+ on Windows. However, since Mac users are the ones reading this site, the Windows score or compatibility shouldn’t matter too much.
Tags: apple, files, iPhone, PDF — .So, I do have an iPhone, and I can’t wait for the App store. If you have iTunes 7.7, then you can browse the store. I found this neat looking program, called Starmap. Looks pretty handy – you can read more about it at its web site
Hmm, this is disappointing. The author of star-map says, in regards to controlling telescopes,
Do you plan to control telescopes with Starmap? This is technically possible to control telescope mounts with Starmap. I have made some successful tests through wifi (Skywatcher EQ6). However, following the agreement with Apple, no public application controlling mechanical devices will be released.
This is a tad surprising, since according to the NY Times this morning:
Instead, [the iFund venture capital fund] is backing, among others, iControl Networks, which is creating an application to let homeowners turn off their lights and alarms at home, as well as monitor security cameras, via their iPhones.
Indeed, iControl is listed in the App store. Perhaps turning off a light is different than moving around telescopes? I can’t say I quite get it.
Update There is at least one other similar program – iAstronomica. This one is $20, rather than $12 for Starmap. Be advised that apparently once you click “buy” that’s it – no warning, no shopping cart – so click carefully.
Update 2 The popular Clear Sky Clock also has an iPhone App version. It occurs to me that, astronomy being something that occurs in remote parts of the country, it may be hard to get online out there. the aforementioned programs carry their data with them, but the Clear Sky Clock will clearly need either EDGE/3G/WiFi to be of use.
Update 3 Indeed, as my commenter notes, there are other apps in this category as well. Uranus (iTunes Link), and GoSkyWatch Planetarium (iTunes Link). I think the app store needs some sort of demo/shareware option, where the program will work for a week or so at least. Hopefully someone will review all of these.
Tags: apple, iPhone — .The PDF tracking software Papers is now up to version 1.8. It includes support for NASA ADS and other search engines and I have mentioned it in the past now and then.
This update to 1.8 may have happened some time ago, but the program continues to be improved and I think becomes more useful with each update.
Tags: ADS, papers, pdfs — .Papers now looks to be the killer app for finding and organizing PDFs of journal papers in astronomy. I’ll need to check out the bibtex export ability and such of it, but it was already quite handy and with ADS and arXiv now bulit-in; it’s even better.
Via a comment from the authors on the old Paper post.
As an aside, Macbooks and Macbook Pros dominated the AAS convention in Austin, perhaps even more so than usual. One of these years I should just do an entrance poll into the exhibit hall at AAS and ask people what platform they use. What do you all think, 60-70% Macs now? Surely something like that among laptop usage, but I would imagine there is still plenty of Linux on desktop machines.
Tags: ADS, arxiv, bibtex, journal articles, papers, pdfs — .So, those of you who are running Leopard’s X11 may be interested to check out the download page at MacOS Forge which contains all the new changes made to Xquartz/X11, etc. since the release that made it into Leopard. They even have nice .pkg installers for people who want to install the latest versions before they become available in OS X Software Update.
Grab the 2.1.0.1 release and see the changes that have been made over the version in Leopard.
Tags: installers, Leopard, x11, xquartz — .Via Daring Fireball, Tidbits has an interesting article on the new Airport Menu in Leopard. While I noticed the new “lock” icon that shows if a network is encrypted or not, the holding-down-option-key trick I did not know about. I like that it shows the transmission rate so you can tell if the connected station is 802.11g/b/n, etc.
Tags: airport, Leopard, networking, wireless — .So, I spent a lot of time googling on this. I had a pdf of my thesis I wanted to get printed into book form – and the site I was using to publish needed all the used fonts embedded in the PDF file. It claimed that one was not, in fact, embedded. I use TexShop and pdftex and I have to use pdftex at this point because all my figures were PDFS.
So, I searched for “pdftex embed fonts” or “texshop latex embed fonts” and countless variations. I found a lot of interesting links.
But none worked – the options in udmap.cfg or whatever were already set to embed fonts, but the one Times-Roman just wouldn’t embed. I was looking for some other option to flip and not finding anything when one of these links inspired me to try this:
Open the PDF in OS X Preview. Save as PDF. Boom. Done. The font became embedded. I don’t know if this would work for any PDF but it worked for me. I was then able to upload it with success. (I’m using lulu.com, incidentally. UMI-ordered thesis reprints are a scam. Overpriced and poor quality.)
Update Eh, so that didn’t really work. Lulu didn’t reject the PDF outright but was yet unable to print it as they said in an email later. So, I’m back to the drawing board somewhat. It seems to create embedded fonts but “embedded subsets” which may be a problem. I tried saving to postscript and letting Lulu do the PDF conversion, but the new PDF still has subsets rather than entire fonts. I’ll see if it works.
Tags: fonts, latex, PDF, pdftex — .The excellent Papers has been updated to 1.5 and includes additional search engines as well as the ability to use search engine plug-ins. New search engines include Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. No ADS yet but Google Scholar does an okay job finding ADS and ApJ papers.
It also boasts improved Leopard compatibility and is still 29 Euros (I think there are some student discounts.)
(via MacResearch)
Tags: ADS, bibtex, journals, Leopard, papers, PDF — .You can subscribe and look at the archives to Apple’s X11 User’s mailing list here. Ben Byer has been doing some heroic all hours work to try and fix some problems in X11 in Leopard, mostly from switching code bases and other issues. It’s pretty impressive to see Apple’s staff interacting directly with users like this – I can’t think of any other aspect of OS X where people who work on it are talking directly to people who use it.
Also this forum at macosxhints contains a summary of a lot of recent developments that have been peculating on the mailing list.
Tags: apple, Leopard, unix, x11 — .Bad Behavior has blocked 48 access attempts in the last 7 days.