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)

Watch Phones, Smartwatches, and the iWatch

Recently some rumours about an Apple “iWatch” have popped up, and many people thought the idea of an internet-enabled communication device on one's wrist is something novel. Not really: so-called watch phones have existed for more than ten years. Of course, the first ones were clunky and barely went beyond prototype stage, but there have been widely available and quite usable watch phones for more than five years. Most of them originate from China, and can be bought in various places for reasonable prices. My main cell phone has been a watch phone since June 2008.

The main problem with pretty much every watch phone that currently exists however, is that it severely lacks in a certain way. And for some reason, whenever a manufacturer produces a new model that improves upon certain features, it gets worse in other features — I dubbed this “the law of conservation of suckiness”.

In a new article on my site, I shortly discuss the history of watch phones, what is good and bad about past and current models, why the concept of smartwatches that need a smartphone makes no sense from an economical point-of-view, and last but not least: a concept of a watch phone which I believe could become popular, and which I would really like to see manufactured in the near future.

One of the biggest problems is that whenever I tell someone that my watch is also a phone, they will immediately ask if it isn't uncomfortable to make calls with it and if I need to hold my arm in silly poses. The answer is: no. Yet, most current models do effectively suffer from this problem. My proposal contains a solution to get rid of this misconception. Watch phones will not become a commercial success as long as people have this Knight Rider-inspired mental image about them.

Uurwerktelefoons, Smartwatches en de iWatch

Recent zijn er geruchten over een Apple “iWatch” opgedoken, en velen dachten dat het idee van een communicatietoestel met internetverbinding dat op de pols gedragen kan worden baanbrekend was. Niet echt: zogenaamde watch phones of uurwerktelefoons bestaan al langer dan tien jaar. Natuurlijk waren de eerste modellen lomp en kwamen nauwelijks voorbij het prototypestadium, maar sinds vijf jaar zijn er wijd verspreide en behoorlijk bruikbare uurwerktelefoons. De meeste hiervan komen uit China, en kunnen op verschillende websites gekocht worden aan democratische prijzen. Sinds mei 2008 was mijn GSM voor dagelijks gebruik een uurwerktelefoon.

Het grootste probleem met elk model uurwerktelefoon dat nu bestaat is echter dat het zwaar tekortschiet op een of meerdere gebieden. En om een of andere reden vinden fabrikanten het nodig om telkens ze iets verbeteren aan een nieuw model, het te verslechteren op andere gebieden. Ik heb dit “de wet van behoud van onbruikbaarheid” gedoopt.

In een nieuw artikel op mijn website geef ik een korte geschiedenis van uurwerktelefoons, beschrijf ik de goede en slechte punten van vroegere en huidige modellen, waarom het idee van smartwatches die een smartphone nodig hebben om te werken op niets slaat, en tenslotte: een concept voor een uurwerktelefoon waarvan ik geloof dat hij wél populair zou kunnen worden, en waarvan ik hoop dat iemand hem kan produceren in de nabije toekomst.

Een van de grootste problemen is dat telkens ik iemand vertel dat mijn uurwerk ook een telefoon is, zij ogenblikkelijk vragen of het niet oncomfortabel is om te bellen en of ik mijn arm niet in een idiote pose moet houden. Het antwoord is: nee. Desondanks lijden de meeste huidige modellen effectief onder dit probleem. Mijn voorstel bevat een oplossing om dit misverstand uit de weg te ruimen. Uurwerktelefoons zullen nooit een commercieel succes worden zolang mensen er dit door Knight Rider geïnspireerde idee over hebben.

Transmission-daemon: never set peer limit to 0

In older versions of Transmission(-daemon), it was possible to set ‘peer-limit-per-torrent’ to 0 in settings.json, which would supposedly mean “unlimited number of peers”. A few versions ago however an industrious programmer found it necessary to make the limit literal and suddenly the “0” really meant “zero peers”. This caused Transmission to sit there, doing nothing, without giving any hints. It took me quite a while to figure this out. Even just a small warning in a log would have saved me a lot of precious time, dear developers…

Transmission-daemon: zet de connectielimiet nooit op 0

In oudere versies van Transmission(-daemon) was het mogelijk om ‘peer-limit-per-torrent’ op 0 te zetten in settings.json, wat dan zogezegd “onbegrensd aantal connecties” zou betekenen. Een paar versies geleden echter vond een ijverige programmeur het nodig om de limiet letterlijk te nemen en “0” betekende plots echt “nul connecties”. Dit zorgde dat Transmission op zijn gat bleef zitten niksen zonder een hint te geven waarom. Het heeft mij behoorlijk wat tijd gekost om hierachter te komen. Zelfs maar een simpele waarschuwing in een log had wat van mijn kostbare tijd kunnen redden, beste programmeurs…

robots.txt retroactively removes content from Wayback Machine

There is a fun experiment anyone can try: create some unique information and store it on two kinds of media: print it on a sheet of paper and store it in a file on a USB pen drive. Then, put both these objects on a hard solid surface, like a concrete floor. Take a hammer and hit the paper hard once. Then, hit the body of the USB pen drive with the same force. Next, try to recover the information from both media. The paper may have a hole in it, and perhaps it is impossible to read a few words. The pen drive however, is likely to be a total loss. If the silicon chip is cracked, your only chance would be to bring it to a specialized laboratory which will charge you a fee you cannot even imagine just to have a tiny chance of recovering perhaps a few words from the text.
What I am saying with this whole story is that I laugh at every advert that claims “save your old photos by scanning them with our digital photo scanner!” The easier it is to create and replicate information, the easier it also is generally to lose it. I am certain that at some point in history, there will be something like a super-sized version of that hammer, hitting our fragile digital archives. If it is bad enough, humanity will be catapulted back to medieval times and history will be a black hole starting from around the year 2000. Maybe they will believe the world really went to hell at the end of 2012. If you have something you really want to preserve, make a hard copy of it. No, make as many copies of it as possible, on all kinds of media.
Now, this whole introduction serves to illustrate how grave a certain issue is with the Internet Archive's “Wayback Machine”. The Wayback Machine is a great initiative. Its goal is to create digital archives of old websites. I once believed that once a website was archived, it would stay accessible until either the whole Wayback Machine were destroyed, or someone explicitly asked the information to be deleted. Now however I have discovered that information can disappear also in a very trivial and dumb way.
If someone places a ‘robots.txt’ file on a domain that prohibits crawlers from retrieving the domain, the Internet Archive will retroactively apply this prohibition. There is logic behind this: if someone noticed that a confidential website has leaked and has been archived in past months, this system allows to remove the archive without much fuss. The mechanism however is dumb as a brick and if a domain expires and is subsequently bought by someone who has no rights whatsoever to the original content, they can still put anything in the robots.txt to retroactively remove anything from the archive.
Proves that there are many domain name squatters who buy old domains and place a prohibitive robots.txt on the empty “for sale” page because they do not want it to litter search engines, which is actually a good thing. What is bad however is that this instantly hides the entire archive in the Wayback Machine. There is no justification for this aside from laziness of the programmers and excessive prudence. The squatter has no rights whatsoever to influence the information that was stored on the old website, he only has bought a domain name. Therefore I would greatly appreciate it if the people responsible for the Wayback Machine would implement a better way to provide a balance between legal concerns and the completeness of their valuable archive.

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.

More HDR

Since my previous post about HDR, I bought a more professional camera with both a larger, less noisy sensor, and a more advanced bracketing function. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1 with the standard ‘pancake’ powered zoom lens. I still mostly follow the steps explained in my article about Luminance HDR, but with this camera the preprocessing step is almost always unnecessary. Here are some results, enjoy…

Sinds mijn vorige post over HDR heb ik een meer professionele camera gekocht met een grotere, minder ruizige sensor, en een meer geavanceerde bracketing-functie. De camera is een Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1 met de standaard ‘pannenkoek’ power-zoomlens. Ik gebruik nog steeds grotendeels de workflow die ik uitgelegd heb in mijn artikel over Luminance HDR, maar met deze camera is de preprocessing-stap bijna altijd overbodig. Hier zijn een paar resultaten, geniet ervan…

Photography 101: avoid taking a photo with the sun shining into the lens. Puh!

Fotografie voor beginners: vermijd het nemen van foto's waarbij de zon in de lens schijnt. Puh!

The Arenberg castle near Leuven. Mind the crane, soon it will be impossible to take a photo like this without the new IMEC aquarium office building sticking out behind it like a sore thumb, courtesy of the great Flemish spatial planning and a certain mayor's delusions of grandeur.

Het Arenbergkasteel nabij Leuven. Let op de kraan, dankzij de fantastische ruimtelijke planning in Vlaanderen, en de grootheidswaanzin van een zekere burgemeester, zal het binnenkort onmogelijk zijn om een foto zoals deze te nemen zonder het nieuwe IMEC kantooraquarium dat de achtergrond verpest.

 I predict that if I will be taking a photo at this exact same location in ten years, it will be filled with asphalt roads and multiple specimens of the typical fake rustic villas that are prevalent in Belgium, as well as some of the newer-style shoeboxes.

Mijn voorspelling is dat als ik over tien jaar een foto neem op exact deze zelfde plek, hij gevuld zal zijn met asfaltwegen en meerdere specimens van de typisch Belgische faux-rustieke villa's en de recentere stijl van bewoonbare schoendozen.

 This was a royal pain due to the animated ‘raindrop’ lights hanging from the trees, which caused significant differences between the three differently exposed photos. These differences became ugly artifacts when creating the HDR image the straightforward way. The only solution was to manually erase all differences such that the lights were consistent between the three different exposures. I shortly tried Luminance's “Anti-ghosting” tool for this, but I could not get it to work, so I used the good old GIMP.

Dit liep niet van een leien dakje door de geanimeerde ‘regendruppel’-lichten in de bomen. Deze veroorzaakten grote verschillen tussen de drie foto's met verschillende belichting, wat dan tot lelijke artefacten leidde in de HDR-foto. De enige oplossing was deze verschillen manueel uit te vegen zodat de lichten consistent waren tussen de drie belichtingen. Ik had even geprobeerd de “Anti-ghosting” functie van Luminance hiervoor te gebruiken, maar ik kreeg het niet aan de praat dus ik heb de goeie oude GIMP gebruikt.

GIMP 2.8 gripes

I have used Photoshop since one of the early versions when it came as a freebie with a UMAX flatbed scanner (yes, a time when Photoshop was given away for free, I am that old). When the price of Photoshop started rising to astronomical levels and when I started using Linux more often, I tried GIMP and gradually became accustomed to its unusual interface. It did most of what I required, except higher bit-depth editing. Eventually I almost completely ditched Photoshop and do pretty much everything in GIMP.

Now I have been using GIMP for years, and I have seen it evolve. This evolution was always gradual and most of the time it was subtle between versions. With version 2.8 however, there are some not so subtle changes and some of those rub me in a pretty wrong way:

1. The sliders: there are many, many people complaining about these. They are completely non-intuitive. Apparently the sliders are invisibly divided in different regions that cause different behaviour, which has to be guessed from the cryptic changing arrow cursors. I refuse to follow a tutorial or read a manual just to use something essential as a slider. And what's up with stuffing the text display inside the slider? These things violate the KISS principle in a way that makes me hurl and would make Steve Jobs cry. I simply gave up and now always enter the numbers manually, which also requires quite a bit of skill because of the risk of grabbing the sliders instead of clicking the editable text.
2. Brush size: previously, absolute brush size depended on two factors: their actual size (radius or bitmap size) in the preset, and a scale factor in the brush settings. The upside of this was that it was possible to create presets for commonly used brush sizes. Simply click a brush and off you go, if you wanted a custom size then adjust with the scale slider. What they now did is decouple the radius from the presets: each brush shape is normalised to one-pixel radius. Defining three circles at radii of 5, 10, and 20, is almost pointless because those three brushes will behave identically. The size must be set manually with — yes indeed — the awkward sliders, each and every time a different brush size is required. What used to be as simple as clicking one preset in the palette has now become: a) clicking the desired shape in the palette, b) having a go at the horrible sliders and giving up, c) trying the up/down buttons and giving up because they use ridiculous 0.01 size increments, c) having a fight with the slider to obtain access to the size edit field, d) typing the desired size. After some experimenting I found out that for brush shapes that do not fit in a square, the radius is determined by their largest dimension. For instance, to paint a brush shape defined at 24×35 pixels at its original size, the size must be set to 35. Now, the radius or bitmap size in the preset has not become entirely useless. There is a small obscure button to the right of the size field that will set the brush to its ‘native’ radius. Hence the old behaviour can be mimicked with two clicks. This may not seem like a big deal but I heavily rely on pixel-accurate brush presets for a lot of my editing. I am already annoyed by the amount of clicking around I need to do in GIMP, therefore every additional click is an added nuisance. My suggestion: clicking a brush preset while holding some modifier key (shift, alt, …) should both select the brush and set it to its native size.
3. The default brush is the clipboard brush: I almost never use the clipboard brush and if nothing was copied, nothing is brushed. And of course, if something is in the clipboard it is rescaled to the default size of 20 pixels thanks to what I described above! Doesn't it make a lot more sense to select the plain circular brush upon starting GIMP?
4. Separate save and export: the ‘save’ dialog now only allows to save in GIMP-specific formats. For all the rest, a different dialog called ‘export’ is needed. The point is, this dialog is identical in design and function to the save dialog, only it needs to be accessed from a different menu item. What is the point of this? Hidden propaganda for the XCF format?
5. Brush dynamics: to replicate the old “fade out” feature, I had to take a journey through many unintuitive windows. Eventually I arrived at something that behaves like the old fade, only it felt like I had to configure things backwards to make it work. I guess the new dynamics controls are an improvement if I would actually have something with pressure sensitive input, but was it too much asked to add a simple ready-to-use preset that mimics the simple old “fade out”?
6. Weird tool behaviour: sometimes the ‘move’ tool suddenly switches to path mode, which makes me wonder why I cannot move anything until I look at the tool window, or the ‘select’ tool switches to subtract mode for reasons unknown. There are other weird things like the arrow keys suddenly acting as “zoom in/out” even when the move tool is active. It seems like there are hidden key bindings and hidden states. One of the things I dislike about GIMP compared to Photoshop is that I often have to mash my keyboard and mouse just to do a few simple things that required one keypress and one mouse click in Photoshop, because in GIMP keys behave differently depending on what window in the interface has focus. With this version, this dependency on contexts only seems to have got worse.
7. Fuzzy select: I have always found the ability to adjust the threshold on-the-fly of the magic wand (fuzzy select) or similar colour tools to be one of the greatest features that sets GIMP apart from other editors. The way in which the selected regions are highlighted has now changed however, with two consequences: one, unless when zoomed in single-pixel regions are not visible in the selection. This is very annoying because I often use these tools to detect and remove single-pixel noise. Second, the updating of the selected area when changing the threshold has become horribly slow. I cannot tell whether this is inherent to the new system or due to the slow display update bug in the OS X version, but it has made working with these tools a hassle.

The whole redesign gives me the impression that a few newcomers have joined the project and imposed their specific ideas of image editing upon everyone. My impression is corroborated by reports from other people who say that the developers, apparently in a bout of arrogance, feel that GIMP 2.8 is perfect and everyone who dislikes the new design is a noobish amateur. I guess I must also be a n00b with my more than eighteen years of graphics editing experience.

Of course there are some plus points as well to the new version, like a native Mac OS X build, the text editing system, and layer groups. If only there was an option to switch back to plain sliders, and to instantly set brush size to the native radius when choosing a preset, then I would happily adapt to the few other minor things that bug me — if the obvious bugs would get solved too.

I also experience very slow canvas redraws for large images and when using the magic wand tool, but I suspect this to be a bug in the OS X build.