I’m playing with some new themes off and on — don’t panic.

Tonight, I arrived home to find an e-mail from Amy Judd at NowPublic. I’d never heard of Amy or NowPublic, so I was a little surprised at her request. She was writing a story about the PRODUCT (RED) branding concept, and asked if she could use one of my photos of my iPod Shuffle that she found on Flickr.

I did a little poking around at the NowPublic site, and from all appearances, it appears to be grass-roots journalism, aimed at mobilizing the average Joe into reporting on just about anything, from local to national to international stories. I liked the feel of the site, their expressed respect of my copyright wishes for my image, and the fact that they asked before just using one of my images. All good marks in my book, so I said “yes”, added a comment, and now have my first published photo in a journalistic context. Definitely a different stroke for me.

You can see the article here. Look for the slideshow, and you’ll see my image, as well as plenty by other folks. Enjoy!

One of the challenges with relying on my Macs for almost everything has been the lack of support for my GPS — not by Apple, but by Garmin. I have a Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx, and had planned to pick up Windows XP and VMWare’s Fusion in order to use my GPS on my MacBook.

As it ends up, Garmin may have caught up with the Mac wave.

After having bought the North American map suite, I started looking around to see what the state of the Garmin-Apple relationship was, and was surprised to find that there was some kind of big announcement at the last MacWorld. I started poking around and found the Garmin and the Mac page off Garmin’s site. On it, I found a utility to convert my maps from the PC to the Mac, and a new software project called Bobcat. From what I can tell from a few days of playing with it, it sure looks like it’s able to pull everything I’ve been using on my GPS to my Mac. Way cool.

And, since the only thing I was gonna buy XP/Fusion for was my GPS, that means I saved about $140!!!

Last night, I was working through some images, and Genuine Fractals dropped a tickler indicating that there was an update available. I’m pretty gullable, so I almost always update as soon as something tells me it wants to. I left the code downloading all night — it’s only 50MB (plus or minus), but their download site is (and has always been) very slow.

Today, I go to install the new code, and it tells me there’s no previous version. Since this sounded very familiar, I looked around the Deauxmayne, and found how I’d tackled this before. Sure ’nuff, the same problem with Leopard still exists, and the same workaround still works.

One nice thing about writing all this stuff down — even if no one else is reading it — is that it saves me time and trouble in the future!

When I launched Lightroom tonight, I got a tickler for the LR 1.4.1 upgrade. I wonder how long this upgrade will last?

Ya know, there’s nothing like instant gratification. A close second is almost instant gratification. This afternoon, I had three doses of almost instant gratification.

Yesterday, I pulled the trigger on ordering a 320GB harddrive for The Little MacBook That Could. With that upgrade, there’s really nothing else I need to do that little beastie. I got the drive from OWC, who specializes in all kinds of Mac upgrades and goodies. Along with the drive, I ordered an inexpensive external housing for use in transferring data around from the old 120GB drive to the new 320GB drive.

The cool thing about ordering from OWC is that I am close enough to them (as UPS drives) that I can order something before 6pm, use regular shipping and always have it waiting for me when I get home from the work the following day. Cool.

I opened the box, and set to installing the 320GB in the external enclosure, attaching it the MacBook after installation. The MacBook had no problem seeing the drive. So far so good.

Then I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner to do the drive copy from old to new hardware. This piece of software flat rocks. The author distributes in a non-crippled fashion — which is great if you suddenly hear a drive clicking or have some other harddrive disaster-in-the-wings. CCC did a dandy job of duplicating the data onto the new drive, even making it bootable. Now it was time to take the MacBook apart and swap drives.

This is the point where I have to tip my hat to OWC. They have terrific installation videos and manuals for doing everything I’ve needed to do to all my Macs. Really top notch.

So I begin to take the MacBook apart, and get the drive into my hands…. only to discover that the screws are torx. A big fat “D’oh” eminates from the congregation. I don’t have a torx set anywhere (I checked). As it was already 8pm, I frantically checked Best Buy’s website to see if they carry anything like that. Surprisingly, they don’t. That was a shocker. Becky suggested calling Home Depot. I figured if they would talk with me, they wouldn’t have a clue what I was looking for. However, they did talk, they did know what I wanted, and I went to buy it. I picked up a Husky 8-in-1 torx set, and decided to pick up the matching 8-in-1 phillips/slotted set. The torx went down to a T4, and the phillips went down to a #000 — good sizes for working on the little stuff, and seemed to be solidly built.

After getting the old drive removed from the drive tray, I installed the 320GB into it, slide it in, and put it all back together. I hooked up the juice, hit the power button, and crossed my fingers. After a small heart attack moment — it sat on a gray screen a loooong time before the Apple logo popped up — the thing booted, and looked normal. The only weird thing was that the drive wasn’t named the same as it was. I didn’t know if the apps would care, so I changed it to the default “Macintosh HD” name. I hit a couple of apps to ensure that things were working, and all was well. As I write, I’m scanning slides again, and from all appearances, it appears that the MacBook has no idea that it’s had it’s brain swapped.

My second impulse buy yesterday was the Garmin City Navigator NT North America map set for my GPS-60CSx. I’d never bought maps for the old GPS-60CS (stolen a while back), but had always wanted to play with them. However, the old unit didn’t have a lot of storage — 56MB, I think — and that really seemed to limit the usability of the add-on maps. However, the new unit has a card slot, and I’d already dropped a 2GB Micro-SD card into the thing in preparation for one day buying these maps. With that size card, I knew I could put the whole set on the unit.

The maps require a Windows machine for installation, and that meant using Becky’s machine to get them on my GPS. I started the installation, and finally hooked up the GPS via USB. On the old unit, you had to really make sure you had good batteries in it, or you hooked it up to power, as connectivity off the unit was serial, I believe, and that sucked the juice. The new one seems to be able to draw juice from the USB connection, letting you leave it connected as long as the USB port is hot, with no drain on the batteries. That’s cool.

I’ve got to admit that the process for getting the maps on the unit was not well-defined. I had to define a map set, and then start the transfer that to the GPS. After about 90 minutes of work, the maps were on the GPS, and all was well with the world.

And lastly, in the not-so-immediate-gratification department, my copy of Office:Mac 2008 arrived. I ordered it last week, and had been led to believe that it would be another month or so before I’d see it arrive. I guess the slow boat from Redmond to St. Louis got a little boost, and I was the beneficiary of a little surprise. I’ve installed it, but haven’t really started playing with it yet. I do notice that the icons look different than the old version — nice touch, I suppose. For me, the biggest thing I wanna play with is Entourage, and to enjoy the Universal Binary version, rather than having to always run Office under Rosetta.

When I first switched to the Mac, I picked up Office:Mac 2004 and had used Entourage quite a bit for my mail functions. My perception at the time was that it seemed to handle spam better, and was more versatile with rule-based mail activities. It’s been about two years since I’ve used it regularly, so it probably deserves another look after the rewrite.

So big doin’s at the ol’ Deauxmayne tonight, and probably more goodies in the offing. Stay tuned!

OK, so this maintenance page from MacWorld cracked me up:

I can always tell when something is happening out in the wastelands of the tech world. NewsFire will be screaming at me with multitudes of new feed-matter. Tonight, NewsFire was definitely screaming, and Adobe figured prominently in two threads of thought and chatter.

The first was the Good News. Adobe released the first public beta of Lightroom 2.0. This is claimed to be 64-bit ready code, and chocked full of new features. I haven’t had a chance to load it yet — I wanna see if there’s any caveats about keeping a separate library, etc. You can bet I’ll be playing with it this weekend, and seeing what I can do with it. Currently, I only use Lightroom for DAM, and really don’t use it for quick touches, printing, web site building, and all that other good stuff it does well. Casey keeps nudging toward using it for more than just that. His site is mostly built with Lightroom, and it looks pretty dang good. That’s a pretty good endorsement.

And then came the Bad News. Adobe released some word on the Next Big Thing: Photoshop CS4. (And the crowd goes wild…) And it’ll be 64-bit…. (wait for it)… if you’re on Windows. Yep, the big ol’ Macs like mine will still have to contend with 4GB of memory for the beastliest images we can put together, with our Windows-based brethren able to address vast amounts of memory. From this interview, the guess is that the performance boost would be in the neighborhood of 10 percent, unless of course you’re loaded gigapixel sized images where, with enough memory, the 64-bit version could be 10 times faster!

One path to get around this is to dual boot the Octoputer, running 64-bit Vista (Adobe says that’ll be the supported platform). That would be just like a native Windows machine, but would require me to purchase a new Photoshop license. Currently, I don’t believe Adobe allows you to upgrade version and change platforms in the same fell swoop. The other path to get tasty 64-bit goodness would be to virtualize a 64-bit Vista environment through VMWare (Parallels doesn’t currently support this), and run CS4 in that environment. The big question there is whether you’d burn up the benefit of the 64-bit code by virtualizing it.

So in one day, Adobe delivers both Good stuff and Bad stuff. I’m not sure whether I should be happy or mad. Or both. Or neither.

Wait for it… and the crowd goes “boooooo”…