Making G'MIC Qt GIMP plug-in work in the 2.10.30 Mac version

If you are using the G'MIC-Qt plug-in for GIMP on Mac OS, especially the one from aferrero2707, you may have encountered this error after upgrading to a recent GIMP build:

GIMP says: “Plug-in crashed: "gmic_gimp_qt",” and warns about the dying plug-in possibly messing up GIMP's internal state.

Running GIMP from the Terminal yields a bit more information:

dyld: Library not loaded: @rpath/libintl.9.dylib

  Referenced from: /Users/username/Library/Application Support/GIMP/2.10/plug-ins/gmic_gimp_qt

  Reason: image not found

The Resynthesizer plug-in build from the same author suffers from the same problem.

It seems that these builds of the plug-ins rely on the presence of a dynamic library file ‘libintl.9.dylib,’ most likely in the GIMP application bundle itself. But, my current build of GIMP only includes libintl.8.dylib. Judging from a related issue report on GitLab, there never has been a true version 9 of this library and the number 9 was due to a mistake in the gettext library, which explains why the version number seemingly decreased.

Until someone creates a new build of the plug-ins, there is a relatively straightforward workaround: shove a copy of the libintl file into the G'MIC and Resynthesizer plug-in library folders, and give it the expected name. This ensures the plug-ins will always find this library regardless of what is in the particular build of GIMP.

There are 2 ways to obtain the dylib file:

1. [Slightly harder for those unfamiliar with low-level workings of Mac OS]
   Open your GIMP application bundle (either by right-clicking the app icon, or by using the Terminal), and find the libintl.8.dylib file, normally in Contents/Resources/lib/.
   Copy this file and rename the copy to libintl.9.dylib.
   This works because there is no significant difference between the version 8 and purported version 9 of the file.
2. [Easier but not that safe]
   Directly download it from wherever you find it on the web, and hope it is trustworthy. (This particular one works for me, it is 77584 bytes in size and has an MD5sum of 2a88ed7a2d8901fd0e75401e761b24d2.)

Place the libintl.9.dylib file inside the GMIC/lib folder where you installed the G'MIC plug-in, most likely ~/Library/Application Support/GIMP/2.10/plug-ins/GMIC/lib/, then restart GIMP and it might work.
Same for ResynthesizerPlugin/lib/.

Apple made system calls horribly slow in the 10.14.6 update. Thank you, Apple!

After installing the Mac OS 10.14.6 update from the end of September 2020, I noticed something wasn't right. A simple Perl script that scanned a directory for all files and that invoked the stat system command for every file, had become way slower than before. I'm not sure if the same would have happened if it had relied on Perl's own stat() call, but this script needed the shell command because it can offer information that Perl's own stat couldn't provide.

Also when running a homebrew update, it seemed way slower than usual. It looks like Apple had messed something up w.r.t. system calls from within scripts, and perhaps other programs as well, although I didn't notice anything in regular apps. I knew this was likely to be reported by a gazillion developers and fixed soon, so I didn't bother. That horribly slow script of mine was annoying though, so I started seeing if it couldn't be improved.

The problem here was that the Perl script did the obvious thing of invoking a new instance of stat through backticks, for every single file it encountered. That's a lot of overhead. Until now the overhead wasn't bad enough for me to be sufficiently annoyed, but Apple's “update” had now pushed this way into the zone of bad words and gnashing teeth. The solution was pretty obvious: reduce the overhead by reducing the number of system commands. Luckily this could be done: the stat command does accept multiple files as argument, and returns the results as multiple lines in the same order as the arguments.

So, all I had to do was postpone the invocation of `stat` and build a queue of file paths, and execute the aggregated system command whenever it reached a certain size. In theory I could wait until the command line was about to exceed 262144 bytes (minus some margin to allow environment handling), which is the maximum system command length as reported by “getconf ARG_MAX.” In practice, I used a lower limit of 16 kBytes because above a certain threshold, the gain becomes pretty negligible anyway.

The result was that for a particular run, the script went from a 120 second runtime to 3 seconds. After Apple fixed the performance issue in a supplemental 10.14.6 update, the runtime became sub-second. So in the end I guess I should thank Apple for forcing me to refactor my script and making it way more efficient. Maybe every operating system should now and then introduce a temporary penalty on certain operations, or a limit on resources, just to force developers to be less lazy and actually improve their software instead of writing sloppy code and letting the machine just brute force it…

True Tone display abruptly changing tint? Try not covering the sensor!

On various forums, one can find complaints about the True Tone display of the more recent MacBook Pro models suddenly changing tint, or the intensity of the screen flickering. Some of those forums will tell you to disable the True Tone or Night Shift feature. If you don't care about those features, it's an effective workaround, but it is kind of stupid to buy a machine with all these advanced features and then disabling them.

I have also experienced this, and found no rhyme or reason behind it—until now.
I'm pretty sure there are some other causes for this problem, including hardware or software faults, but before you go bringing your MacBook Pro to a service center, you might want to check the following first.

Many people cover the camera built into laptop screens with a sticker or something else, for reasons of privacy and/or security. The problem is that the True Tone sensor is very close to the camera. If your sticker is large enough, it will partially or fully cover the sensor. Even if that's not the case, maybe you often do use the camera, and then have to park the sticker somewhere, and a convenient place is right next to the camera—possibly right on top of the sensor.

When covered, the sensor will receive much less light than it should, possibly filtered in some strange way, and this can cause the True Tone system to react wildly to tiny changes in ambient light. I still don't understand why the adaptation algorithm allows such quick changes at all, but one can't really blame the system for starting to act weirdly in a very poorly conditioned situation.

The sensor is very hard to see, which is why most people are unaware that it exists at all, let alone avoid covering it. On my MacBook Pro model (2018 15 inch), the sensor proves to be at 17 mm to the right of the (more visible) camera, as can be seen by shining a strong flashlight across it. You may want to verify on you particular machine where the sensor really is situated.

So the morale of this story is: if you have any thingamajig that covers the camera, make sure it stays well away from the sensor. If you then still have strange variations in the tint of the display, then you may start worrying about a deeper problem. As a matter of fact, in my case the problem still occurs occasionally. It looks like the sensor gets confused in situations where there is little light, or rather weak light coming from a direction mostly parallel with the screen surface. What usually helps in such cases, is to provide a stable source of light closer to the computer, so just turn on a lamp.

Enhancing headphones or earphones with Audio Hijack 3

Long ago there was an awesome audio enhancer for Mac OS X that could improve system-wide audio in various ways. It started out as ‘OSS 3D’ by Subband Technologies, later on it was bought by Joesoft and rebranded to ‘Hear,’ and it eventually migrated to the Prosoft brand name. This program offered various effects like 3D audio, a straightforward equalizer, a virtual subwoofer, and various other things that were both useful and gimmicky. Everything was fine until the program became unable to enhance audio coming from iTunes, arguably its most important target. Prosoft was never able to fix this and eventually the program stopped working altogether with the latest major OS X updates. Rest in peace, Hear.

I have been looking for a way to simulate at least part of Hear's functionality. I especially relied on it to obtain a more natural listening experience with headphones. If you have ever listened to e.g. Beatles songs on headphones, you will have noticed first-hand that headphones do not offer the same listening experience as loudspeakers. With loudspeakers, sound from the left speaker will not only reach your left ear but your right ear as well and vice versa, both directly and indirectly through reflections. With head- or earphones however, the left and right channels are fed strictly to the respective ear only. If the music was mixed with sound coming only from either left or right (as was often the case with the first stereo recordings like from the Beatles), this offers an unnatural experience. Even today a lot of music is mixed with loudspeakers in mind and will not sound ‘right’ when listening with headphones.

A good solution is to preprocess the music before sending it to the headphones, simulating it being played on loudspeakers. The most basic way to do this is to mix a bit of the right channel into the left and vice versa. This already makes Beatles songs less awkward to listen to but it's not quite it. To add more realism, the tiny delay caused by the longer audio path from the left loudspeaker to the right ear and vice versa must also be taken into account. From my DSP courses I remember that a realistic delay is 390µs (this can be derived from the geometry of a typical stereo setup and the shape of a human head). To further increase realism, there must be some low-pass filtering as well because higher frequencies will have a harder time reaching the opposite ear. And finally to get the sensation of listening in a real room, some reverb can be added.

This idea can be implemented with Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba Software. It is not for free but is well worth its price for anyone who needs to do more with audio than merely playing some music. So let's see how we can implement our fancy headphone enhancer with Audio Hijack.

The above image shows the setup. The upper part is the one that simulates a room. A slight reduction in volume is applied to compensate for the fact that we will be adding a cross-mix of the channels later on. A reverb effect makes the sound less ‘dry’ by simulating it bouncing off walls, floors and ceiling. The configuration of the reverb unit is a matter of personal taste. I started out with the defaults of the Matrix Reverb and reduced the ‘large’ parameters to have a faster drop-off.

The lower part is the most important one, it represents the cross-mix between loudspeakers and ears, the extra delay due to the longer audio path, and the attenuation of high frequencies. The 390µs delay cannot be obtained with the standard effects available in Audio Hijack, a custom plug-in is needed. I've found this free sound delay audio unit from Voxengo to be adequate. You need to reboot after installing the AU plugin to make it available in Audio Hijack. Enter a value of 0.39 msec in the effect configuration. People with really fat heads might try a larger value but it should never deviate much from this.

The exact value for the low-pass filter isn't crucial. This filter has two purposes: first, simulate the actual attenuation of higher frequencies that would occur in the situation depicted above, which is difficult to quantify anyway. Second, avoid interference between trebles in the original audio and the delayed copy. Without the low-pass filtering, there would be a comb filter effect that can make some trebles sound weird. If you still notice this, you may want to use a lower frequency than the 6 kHz I used here.

After mixing everything together, there is another volume control and an equalizer. These are optional but unless you have extremely high-end headphones, a little extra EQ can get that bit of extra fidelity out of them. The reason why you may need to precede the EQ with a volume reduction is that if you need a considerable bass boost, you'll need to attenuate the input to avoid sending the audio into overdrive. You may add other effects to your liking, e.g. a dynamic range compressor in case you're listening in a noisy environment (although a lot of modern music has no dynamic range to begin with…)

Entering your EV Nova registration code is still possible

In a nutshell: if you have a registration key for EV Nova and still know the moment when Ambrosia sent you this key (within an accuracy of a few days), you can still register new installs of the game if you set your computer's clock to a time just after that moment. You only need to do this for the registration, after that you can set your clock back to normal. It may be necessary to disconnect all networks to disable additional attempts of the registration app to check the time.

However, given that Ambrosia is now defunct and getting the game to run properly nowadays is a hassle, a better option is to just back the Cosmic Frontier Kickstarter campaign, and wait for the game to be finished. I'm pretty sure there will be a way to load the EVN scenario into this new game engine.

The long story:

Escape Velocity Nova, or EV Nova in short, was one of the most iconic games from the now defunct Ambrosia Software. Their website is still online at the time of this writing but buying anything would be a bad idea because their registration service is dead. Not that you would want to buy much of their catalogue because most of it is too outdated to run on modern systems.

Recently the GPU in my early 2011 MacBook Pro had self-destructed and I decided to buy a new MacBook Pro. While waiting for it to arrive, I could still use my old MBP by forcibly disabling the discrete GPU. Of course this meant I couldn't play any games needing the GPU, hence I started playing EV Nova again. Everything was fine until I finally got my new MacBook Pro and wanted to continue the storyline I was in. Two problems:

1. EV Nova simply does not work anymore in OS X Mojave. It seems some are able to run it, but for me neither copying the binary from my old MBP to the new one, nor reinstalling it and re-applying the RyuKorijo patch helped.
2. Entering my registration code in any newly installed copies was impossible because the code has expired and there is no way to obtain a new one, moreover Ambrosia's licensing server is dead anyway.

Problem 2 proved relatively easy to solve. The registration system will accept codes if they are not older than a certain number of days. This means you can still register the game if you turn back your computer's clock to e.g. 1 day after the buying date. Not sure how many days of margin one gets, but luckily I keep all my mails (and I really mean all) so I knew exactly when I had been issued my old registration code and I set the clock to 1 day after. Normally the game also does an online check of the code but that can of course be easily sabotaged by disconnecting all networks. With the Ambrosia servers offline however, even that is now unnecessary. Still, when trying it in Mac OS 9, the app seemed to somehow check the time online so I had to disconnect the network after all.

I still haven't solved problem 1 however. Others have managed to get EVN running in OS X Mojave but for some reason it keeps failing on my system. I have opened a new issue on the RyuKorijo GitHub in the hopes of getting some help. Given that there are rumours 32-bit application support will be entirely dropped in one of the upcoming major OS X updates though, trying to keep EVN running in OS X feels like a futile exercise anyway. I've tried running the game on two different platforms instead.

First in SheepShaver, because that would be the most convenient. I got the game to launch but the menu buttons lack their labels and do not work. Luckily the functions of the buttons can also be accessed by pressing certain keys: N for new pilot, O to open one, E to enter the game, P for preferences, Q to quit, and A for about (there's also an easter egg key by the way). There are some other minor problems like EVN sometimes crashing at startup and the target cursor not being visible which makes it difficult to select planets or ships. A plus however is that pilot files are interchangeable with the OS X version.

Next, in Windows 10 under Boot camp. Slightly annoying but I reboot for other games anyhow. I used all the tweaks found here and the game works, but it is only really playable in windowed mode. In full-screen the graphics are extremely jittery. I had to use these values in the resolution patcher to get the window take up almost the entire screen of my 15" MacBook Pro: 1600, 992, 1600, 800, 1280 (only the first two matter probably). A big drawback is that I can't port any pilot files from the Mac to the Windows version and there are some things off about the Windows version, like sound quality, readability of text, and the graphics are still jittery at times. And obviously it feels wrong to have to resort to Windows in order to play one of the most iconic Mac games!

In the end I prefer SheepShaver in spite of the issues it has, and I now play EVN inside it because the game just feels much smoother than in Windows and I can continue with my existing pilots. If the remaining issues in SheepShaver can be solved, I think it will end up the best long-term solution to keep playing EVN.

Update 2020/05: Cosmic Frontier: Override

A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to remake the Escape Velocity: Override game engine for modern operating systems. Although it isn't clear yet whether it will be possible to run the EV Nova scenario in this engine, playing the previous EV instalments with improved graphics and UI will become considerably easier. The kickstarter ends on Tue, May 26 2020 7:23 PM UTC, so head over to the campaign page and contribute if you want this to succeed!

Making Prosoft Hear work again with iTunes 12.6

The only reason why I stick with iTunes is that I have been suckered into it from the start when it still was a pretty good application for managing an offline collection of music files. Lately, the app has shifted towards cloud-based stuff and artificial stupidity algorithms that try to suck all the joy out of being your own virtual DJ. It is still usable for its original intent however so I haven't tried to move to an alternative… yet.

Lately, Apple has done two more stabs at endlessly annoying me and making me regret that even my alarm clock is tightly coupled to iTunes by means of Koingo's Alarm Clock Pro. The first thing they did was break the visualizer plug-ins, in the typical Apple fashion that has since many years made me shy away from developing anything specific for OS X. This fashion is of course doing it in total silence, without warning anyone or even mentioning it in the release notes. Starting with iTunes 12.6 the visualizer menu simply only shows the two built-in visualisers, ignoring any installed plugins. I am pretty glad I never took the effort to polish up my now obsolete Spectrograph plug-in. Maybe I unconsciously saw it coming.

The second thing they did, and what this post really is about, is that they also broke the Hear audio enhancer from Prosoft. I heavily rely on Hear to make listening with headphones more enjoyable. When properly set up, Hear can make even the cheapest headphones sound like expensive Sennheisers. Or in my case, make mid-priced Sennheisers sound like an explosion of aural bliss. It can also squeeze extra fidelity out of simple Bluetooth speakers or other sound systems. Great was my frustration when I noticed the controls had no effect anymore after iTunes had sneakily upgraded itself to 12.6.1, and it was even greater when I saw on the Hear product page that Prosoft officially does not support iTunes anymore. That's right, they admit that their product primarily geared towards enhancing your music experience, does not work with the de facto standard for music playback in Mac OS. I commend them for that, but it doesn't make the fact less annoying.

My guess is that iTunes has become yet another application in the row of ‘sandboxed’ apps like Safari, which are nailed shut to avoid exploits from malware and the like. After all, iTunes is linked to a store and the store is linked to credit card details. Why this also has to break the ability to manipulate the audio stream, beats me. I contacted Prosoft and they are looking if the problem can be fixed, but I'm not sure if they'll be able to circumvent the sandbox restriction.

However, I noticed that applications like Nicecast still work fine with iTunes. This made me pretty confident that I can still make the audio go through Hear after all, albeit by means of a pretty clumsy roundabout. And indeed, after the necessary cursing and kludging I made it work as follows.

Making it work

The strategy is quite simple: re-route iTunes' audio output through another non-sandboxed program that plays the stream on standard output. We can do this by means of two different free, open source projects: SoundFlower and Audacity.

1. First install SoundFlower, the current 2.0b2 release from mattingalls' GitHub seems to work fine, at least in El Capitan. Don't bother with trying to get the Soundflowerbed application to work, you don't need it.
2. In your Sound system preferences, set the ‘Soundflower (2ch)’ device as output device.
3. Open Audacity and select the ‘Soundflower (2ch)’ device as the microphone device. Select the ‘Built-in Output’ as your output device.
   
4. In Audacity's preferences, Recording, enable ‘Software Playthrough’.
   
5. Drag both the input and output volume sliders in the top-right corner of Audacity's main window to maximum. Now press ‘Click to Start Monitoring’ and start playing some music. You should see Audacity's VU meter start to move, and hear the sound as usual. You may need to give the Hear control panel a kick by toggling the on/off button or nudging a slider to make it hook itself to the audio output, but it should work.
   

Of course this has some disadvantages, like needing to keep Audacity open, and a noticeable extra delay on the audio as well. You will have no sound at all if you break any component in the whole chain. This can be pretty annoying if like me, you use your Mac as an alarm clock (it will be trying to wake you with silence which results in you being late for work). Moreover, when you switch back to direct playback through internal speakers, two things require attention. First, your volume will be at 100%, which can lead to unpleasant surprises if you forget to turn it down. Next, when you have switched back to internal speakers in the Sound control panel and plug or unplug something from the headphone jack, OS X will once more switch back to Soundflower output, and you must again select internal speakers.
In other words, not only do you need a whole ritual to set up this workaround, you also need to do a little dance to tear it down. For all these reasons I hope Prosoft manages to find a solution. I wouldn't mind if it would simply implement this workaround under the hood and have some extra delay, if only it is reliable.

This hack does have some extra advantages however, for instance Hear will also work with Safari or any other sandboxed application's audio. And, if at any time you would want to record what's playing, all you have to do is hit the record button in Audacity.

iTunes 12: hacking the playlist font sizes

In iTunes 11, there were only two options for the font size in list views. The ‘small’ size corresponded to a font size of 12, the ‘large’ size was 15. It was possible to change these font sizes by editing the TextStyles.plist file (for your specific language) inside the iTunes app bundle. The two relevant keys were 9002 and 9003.

In iTunes 12, the old choice between three list sizes was reintroduced. However, the font sizes associated with ‘small’, ‘medium’, and ‘large’ have been assigned dubious values: they are 11, 12, and 13 respectively. There is even less difference between smallest and largest than in iTunes 11. The row heights do change quite drastically, resulting in an overly spacious display for the large size.

Editing the same keys in the plist as before has no effect. After looking around a bit, I found the keys that are currently used: they are respectively #17920, named “Label” (this is actually the large size), #18688, named “Label_Medium”, and #18944, named “Label_Small”. It may be necessary to edit the other keys with similar names to get a consistent result. For instance, to revert the ‘large’ size back to its former 15 point size, you would need to ensure the Label, Label_Emphasized, etc. entries look like this:

        <key>17920</key>
        <dict>
                <key>- loc hint -</key>
                <string>Label</string>
                <key>font</key>
                <string>_HelveticaNeueSystem</string>
                <key>size</key>
                <integer>15</integer>
        </dict>

Of course, this hack needs to be re-applied after every iTunes update. You may want to keep a backup of the edited plist file so you can simply copy it (although you should check whether no other values have changed in the update).

Movie genres in Plex media center: huh?

This post is not so much about a quirk in a particular program. Read through to the end and you'll see that it exposes a problem with crowd-sourced internet databases in general.
A few updates ago, Plex switched to a a new database for movie genres. According to what I can find from a cursory scan, it is Freebase). Previously it used IMDb, which only had a very limited set of genres. So it was supposed to be an improvement. However, when I browse through movies in Plex I now see things like this:

If someone would pick REC or The Fly for a romantic evening with their girlfriend, things would not end well. And in what way is “black-and-white” a genre? And don't get me started about “airplanes and airports”. Apparently I misunderstood the whole point of Indiana Jones. They should have made it more obvious that it was all about Indy hopping from one airport terminal to another.
When browsing through the films in Plex Media Manager, they prove to have multiple genres and the second genre often makes a lot more sense than the first (e.g. Thriller for Sin City, Horror for REC).
I can guess how this database came into existence even by only taking a glance at the Google results page for the “freebase” thing I did not know until now. It probably works in a similar way as the good old Google Image labeler, where random people are encouraged to slap as many labels onto random images as possible. The people who have the most time for doing this are children and teenagers, whose first impression of a film like Sin City is “it's black-and-white!” (Which is wrong by the way, there is quite a bit of colour in it.) Therefore the labels that get the most weight, are the ones that these age groups consider relevant. Maybe it would be helpful if the database would keep track of what labels were assigned by what age groups. Any user of the database could then re-weight the entries according to an age group of interest.

Assassin's Creed II & Brotherhood on Mac OS X: avoiding the keyboard bug

Anyone who has tried to play the Mac OS X version of Assassin's Creed II or Assassin's Creed Brotherhood on a machine with more than one keyboard or with a fancy gaming mouse, will have encountered the annoying bug that causes the keyboard not to work. The game must be started multiple times before it reacts to the desired keyboard.

The reason for this is that the game can only handle one keyboard. When it starts, it will pick a keyboard at random. Gaming mice like the ones from Razer or SteelSeries also present themselves to the OS as a keyboard, therefore it is possible that the game will pick your mouse as the keyboard device and you have no keyboard input at all.

The workaround is simple in theory: make sure that only the keyboard you want to use is plugged in while starting the game (from the UPlay interface). In practice this is problematic in case you want to play with an external USB keyboard on a MacBook: you cannot unplug the internal keyboard. Luckily there is a way to disable the built-in keyboard on a MacBook Pro as reported on the MacRumors forums. The following console command will unload the kernel extension that drives the keyboard:

sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBTopCase.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBTCKeyboard.kext

(Ignore any errors that may appear.) The following command will re-enable it:

sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBTopCase.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBTCKeyboard.kext

Obviously you will want to put these commands into scripts to make your life easier.

In case you have a gaming mouse and a Mac with no built-in trackpad, you will need to either launch the game by navigating the UPlay game launcher by keyboard, or you can quickly unplug the mouse right after having clicked the “Play!” button. It suffices that the keyboard you want to use must be the only keyboard-like device at the moment the game is booting. After the menu screen has appeared, you can plug in anything at leisure. One consequence of all this, is that you will not be able to use fancy keyboard macros with a gaming mouse.

By the way, the only way to play AC II in OS X without getting horribly frustrated by the mouse controls, is to use a high DPI gaming mouse, disabling all acceleration, and setting the X&Y sensitivity in the game's setting to minimum. Let's all thank Ubisoft for adding a bit of extra challenge to their games! (not)

Approximating iTunes DJ in iTunes 11

iTunes 11 has generated both praise and revolt in the online community because it is a mix of both improvements and regressions. One of the most annoying things for me and many others is the omission of the iTunes DJ feature. Apple's idea was to replace it with the “Up Next” feature, but it is not the same. What I liked a lot about iTunes DJ is that it was a regular playlist that I could easily tweak and I could see all the desired information about upcoming songs at a glance. The Up Next feature requires a click on a button to temporarily view a severely limited list of what is coming next, and manipulating it is a hassle.
It is possible however to create a smart playlist that more or less behaves like the good old iTunes DJ.

The screenshot is pretty straightforward, it shows the most basic setup but you can tailor it to your needs with additional rules. The only essential things are the fixed limit “selected by random”, the “Live updating”, and the “Last played not in the last …”. All these things combined will automatically remove a played song and cause a new one to be added to the queue, just like in iTunes DJ. The time span for the “last played” rule is not essential, anything starting from 5 seconds should work. You can use a larger value if you want to avoid hearing the same song twice within a certain time span.

Next, make sure the playlist is sorted on the very first column (the one with the numbers and no header title), and disable shuffle. Then you can arrange the songs to your liking, and start playing. You will notice that whenever you remove songs, new ones will be added at the bottom just like in iTunes DJ. The only aspects in which this differs are:

• The biggest drawback is that it is impossible to add specific songs to the playlist. If you want to play one or more specific songs that were not randomly picked, your best option is to use “Up Next” after all.
• There is no practical way I know of to increase the chance that higher rated songs are played more often. Not a big deal for me since I never used this.
• One cannot see the played songs, you will need to use a separate “recently played” smart playlist for this.
• Of course the feature to let people vote for upcoming songs is still missing.

OS X Lion: fixing stuck wallpaper

One of the many small annoying bugs in OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’ that seem of too low priority to get fixed by Apple is that sometimes the desktop wallpaper gets stuck at the same image. When changing it in System Preferences, everything indicates that it has changed but still the same image stays on the desktop. A reboot fixes this and for some people (I suppose especially those used to working with Windows) this seems a satisfactory solution, but the more seasoned Mac users frown upon rebooting for something as trivial as this.

There is a more elegant solution, being only restarting the process that is responsible for the desktop wallpaper. This process is the Dock, and it can be restarted by either typing “killall Dock” in a terminal, or by using Activity Monitor. Mind that this could have some side effects. Eventually you will probably end up rebooting anyway to get everything right, but this fix will work if for some reason you badly need to change the wallpaper.

OS X Lion: oplossing voor vastgelopen bureaubladafbeelding

Een van de vervelende kleine bugs in OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’ dat blijkbaar van te lage prioriteit is om door Apple opgelost te worden, is dat de bureaubladafbeelding soms blijft steken. Als deze veranderd wordt in de systeemvoorkeuren wijst alles erop dat er een andere afbeelding moet verschijnen, maar de oude blijft staan op het bureaublad. Het ganse systeem herstarten is een ‘oplossing’ maar voor wie dit niet gewend is vanuit Windows lijkt het overkill voor zo'n triviaal probleem.

Er is een elegantere oplossing, namelijk enkel het proces herstarten dat verantwoordelijk is voor de bureaubladafbeelding. Dit process is Dock, en het kan herstart worden door ofwel “killall Dock” te typen in een terminal, ofwel door Activiteitenweergave (Activity Monitor) te gebruiken. Het is mogelijk dat dit wat neveneffecten geeft, maar deze oplossing is bruikbaar als u om een of andere reden dringend de afbeelding wil veranderen.

Windows Vista/7 in Boot Camp + Parallels: no go

Een korte post om mensen in dezelfde situatie tijdverspilling en valse hoop te besparen:

1. Eén, de nieuwe MacBook Pro's (van maart 2011) ondersteunen enkel Windows 7 in Boot Camp. De installatie-CD van Windows XP loopt vast bij het booten.
2. Twee: het is niet mogelijk om een Boot Camp-partitie met Windows Vista of Windows 7 ook in Parallels te gebruiken, wat de reclame van Parallels ook zegt. U moet kiezen om ofwel enkel te werken onder Boot Camp, ofwel onder Parallels, of effectief betalen voor twee licenties van Windows en ook twee onafhankelijke schijfverspillende installaties te maken, bijzonder onpraktisch.
3. Drie = één + twee: het is onmogelijk om dezelfde Windows zowel onder Boot Camp als in Parallels te gebruiken op de nieuwste MacBook Pro's.

Theoretisch gezien is punt 2 wel mogelijk en Parallels ondersteunt het, en met Windows XP is het perfect te doen dankzij de “Hardware Profiles” feature. Helaas is die verdwenen sinds Vista. Gevolg: als u bv. Windows 7 activeert onder Boot Camp, en daarna diezelfde Windows probeert te booten onder Parallels, gaat die klagen over activatie. Als u dan activeert onder Parallels, krijgt u hetzelfde liedje eenmaal u terug in BC boot, tot in het oneindige.

A short post to save people in the same situation from wasting time or getting false hopes:

1. One, the new MacBook Pros (March 2011) only support Windows 7 in Boot Camp. The Windows XP installation CD hangs at the first step during boot.
2. Two: it is impossible to use a Boot Camp partition with Windows Vista or Windows 7 both in Boot Camp and under Parallels, whatever Parallel's advertising may say. You must choose to either work in Boot Camp only or in Parallels only, or effectively pay for two Windows licenses and also make two independent diskspace-wasting installations, which is impractical as well.
3. Three = one + two: it is impossible to use the same Windows installation in Boot Camp as well as in Parallels on the newest MacBook Pros.

Theoretically, point 2 is possible and Parallels does support it, and it is perfectly workable with Windows XP thanks to the “Hardware Profiles” feature. However, that has vanished since Vista. The result: if you activate e.g. Windows 7 in Boot Camp, and then try to boot the same Windows in Parallels, it will complain about activation. If you then activate it again under Parallels, you will again get back to the starting point once you boot in BC, ad infinitum.