Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Ranting about new iPhoto '11 ? You're not alone

From Reddit

Edit: Sorry for the bad language but this deserves to be screamed at.
I just upgraded to iLife 11, only interested in iPhoto. I use it to store and display photos I edited in Lightroom and PS and so far up to this fateful day I have been perfectly happy with the flickr export, the slick look, the fullscreen, the easy mail and the other features.
So I was pretty happy when Apple touted the new iPhoto. Now I'm stuck with it and boy does it suck! Seriously I can't believe how bad it is. It's all in the details, the things you only see once it's on your system. Here's just a starter of shit:
  • No fullscreen viewing. That's right, you cannot view your pictures without toolbars on top and bottom all the fucking time. Fullscreen, the main feature they advertise about iPhoto 11 is actually taken away. And no, i will not use the obnoxious diashow that throws music at me every time I open it!
  • Mailing pictures. Before it was easy and fast. Click on whatever you want to send, Mail.app opens and you choose the size of the pictures and you're good to go. Not anymore, no sir, because there are templates now and Apple will make sure you goddamn use them. They all look ugly as fuck and most if not all of them will crop your pictures to match the template. And WHAT THE FUCK you can only mail 10 pictures max! What is wrong with the people who developed this? This is unusable even for my mom. Oh and when you actually send your less than ten pictures in a shitty cropped template of your very limited choice you can't do anything while it's sending. I was in fullscreen mode and it blocked the computer for several minutes. Well, you can do one thing and that is editing the mail while it's being sent. Why, Apple?
  • When viewing albums all the flickr exports are displayed as albums as well. Because I exported most events to flickr it's like mixing the events with the albums. When I click albums I want albums. And stop using this cheesy photo pile look, Apple!
  • EDIT: No zooming in anymore! I don't even...
  • EDIT: Oh, and one more thing: Exporting now crashes my iPhoto because it's stuck trying to log on to Flickr. Everytime, without a chance do disable the Flickr issue.
  • 2nd EDIT: Just adding a few things that came up in the thread because some of them are affecting a lot more than just the interface. Like "You now can't remove a mistagged face without there being new possible matches." "Fails to install at all." and "Destroyed the whole library by resizing the photos to 300x200." No more fullscreen "places" editing"
I can't invest more time into this rant for health reasons but basically Apple has ruined iPhoto so utterly I can hardly believe it. And yeah, downgrading is nearly impossible without using a backed up version of the library. I just have the impression that the whole thing was rushed so Steve Jobs can present it himself. I hope he at least knows how bad it is.
It's shit like that Steve, shit like that!

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Changi Airport welcomes 2 new airlines

SINGAPORE: Two new airlines will commence operations at Changi airport in the next two weeks.

Changi Airport Group said Philippines' Airphil Express and Malaysia's Berjaya Air are the sixth and seventh new airlines at the airport this year.

Singapore is Airphil's first international destination.

Starting October 27, Airphil will operate 14 weekly flights between Singapore and Manila from Changi's Terminal 2. From December 1, it will mount 14 weekly flights between Singapore and Cebu.

Airphil will join five other carriers currently flying to the Philippines.

Meanwhile, Berjaya will operate scheduled flights at the Budget terminal from November 1.

The services will start with 10 flights a week to Tioman in Malaysia.

From March next year after the monsoon season, the Malaysian carrier will increase frequencies to 28 weekly flights, 14 each to the resort islands of Tioman and Redang.

Both islands are new links for Changi.

-CNA/wk

Monday, October 18, 2010

Ants can farm

We've already made it extensively clear that the world will not end in fire or ice, but covered in ants.
But besides their colonies -- which oh by the way are ridiculously extensive underground labyrinths...

... what's so special about these insects?
Well, humans, with our big, fancy brains, have been around for 250,000 years or so but it took us until very recently (15,000 or so years ago) to "invent" the idea of growing our own food rather than just finding berries and nuts out in the wild. And while people like to say that art, or fire, or "love" is man's greatest invention, the Statue of David can suck it, because agriculture is the most important thing man has done. Farming allowed man to stay in one place, inadvertently giving rise to towns, cities, states -- shaping civilization as we know it.

Somewhere along the line, we replaced crude huts with 3D pornography and Bugles.
But if we'd been watching ants, we'd have figured it out a lot sooner. Long before we were even chasing wooly mammoths with spears or riding around in our crude, foot-powered cars, ants had mastered the art of sustainable agriculture.

And the art of buttsex.
Leaf cutter ants will take cut up bits of plant into their ant-hills. Then, instead of just eating them, they'll lay the bits down and shit on them so that a certain fungus will grow. They then cultivate the fungus, feeding it new plant material when necessary. They even have developed techniques to protect their fungus from other, non-edible molds -- so not only are they farming, they've made themselves a safe and effective pesticide.
And they did all of this 50 million years before we came along..

In another 50 million years, they could have Pong.

Creepy Ways Animal Societies Are Organizing

You'd think "Chimpanzee Researcher" would be the most hilarious job in the world, what with the subjects always putting on people clothes and pretending to smoke pipes. But during a 10-year study of a community of chimps in Uganda, scientists found something terrifying.

More terrifying than the Congo chimp's alliance with the Clown People.
Every once in a while groups of strong chimp males would form up and head north, toward the border between their territory and the land of the neighboring tribe. They'd move through the jungle silently and in a single-file line, with practically no eating, socializing, or masturbating allowed. They'd stealthily scavenge for signs of individuals from the other tribe, such as feces, abandoned termite-fishing tools, etc. When they found a member of the northern tribe off on his own, then they'd gang up on his ass and murder him, goddamn Sam Fisher-style.
Then they did it again. And again. It wasn't just random animal-on-animal savagery; when the scientists studied the pattern of the attacks, they found the chimps were at war.

You expect this kind of bullshit from apes.
During the decade they watched the area, scientists saw 18 of these attacks, mostly all along the northern border, wiping out more than 13 rival chimps from a tribe of 100 (you don't get kill ratios like than in most human wars). And each time, they moved the border north. They were fighting over land, and doing it in a very organized way.
This isn't some freak occurrence, either. In Tanzania, researchers witnessed a chilling civil war when one tribe of chimps got angry and split off from a larger tribe. Over the next five years, the group of heretics destroyed the original tribe with a series of covert attacks.
Previously it was thought that invasive human behavior was behind chimpanzee tribal violence, but now scientists are relieved to find out that chimps are just naturally prone to lethal, Splinter Cell-like military operations.

Ooh-ooh-ah-ah!

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Sony NEX-3 goes pink on November 19

We weren't shy about telling Sony that it ought to bring some of those NEX-3/5 color concepts from Photokina out on the market, and the Japanese manufacturer has clearly taken note. To be fair, our pining was more concerned with the white variant than this pink number, but whatever, a new hue is a new hue. Japanese lovers of small cameras with big sensors and rosé color schemes will be able to enjoy their slice of nirvana on November 19 for around ¥80,000 ($975), while the rest of the world sits and ponders the crazy price. It's no higher than the standard NEX-3 kit, mind you, which can currently be had in silver, black, or red. And if Sony Japan's scheme to conquer the female market with a lick of new paint pays off, we might see the pink camera -- along with the litany of matching accessories also introduced today -- sailing out to new shores as well. One can only hope.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Wicked Aura Batucada @ Blujaz on 23/10

Wicked Aura Batucada
Swing by Blujaz come 23rd October from 9.30pm onwards and get your freak on with The Wickedboys once more before they play the Stompin Sabah Festival in East Malaysia. Expect a full tilt sonic attack as the boys bring the animal out for another frolic in the park.

Be social. Be animal. Get wicked.