busybee General Articles

So, Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will be using base-10 file sizes. There has been a lot of nerd outcry over this, but frankly, I think it’s about freaking time.

There is absolutely no reason to use base-2 file sizes. Yes, computers deal with things in terms of base 2, but nobody else does. When you look at a file that is 104768926 bytes big, you think, “oh, 105 megabytes,” not “100 megabytes.” As files get bigger and bigger, the disparity between MB and MiB gets worse and worse.

The classic (pre-Touch) iPods from Apple are pretty good portable jukeboxes, but they have a critical flaw in how they handle certain database problems; rather than try to fix the error, they just reboot immediately, getting stuck in a boot loop. I have seen this happen on several generation of iPod, including the 5G, the 6G/Classic, and several revisions of the iPod Nano.

There are a number of things that can cause this problem, such as the COMM (comment) field exceeding the iTunes hard limit of 254 characters, or due to invalid UTF-8 byte sequences in ID3 tags (which are pretty common in the wild since ID3’s encoding standard is a bit ad-hoc and nobody can even agree on what it’s supposed to be).

Sometimes you can find the culprit by exporting your iTunes library as XML and then running an XML validator on it – this will find the most egregious encoding issues – but often you simply have to search through your library to find the files which are causing your iPod to reboot constantly. Here is a simple procedure for that.

Every digital artist knows the pain; you’re trying to do a quick flood-fill into some line art and then suddenly you’re playing everyone’s favorite game, “spot the pixel gap.” Well, as fun as this activity is, there is a shortcut you can use to fill the gaps so that you can get along with making your art! This approach works in most current graphics applications which support layers and selection modification operations; I use it in Photoshop.

How to calibrate your monitor to the sRGB color space (more or less) without any special tools.

Note: This article was written way back in 2003, and things have changed quite a lot. The calibration charts are still useful for roughly calibrating TVs and projectors and the like, but there are better approaches to monitor calibration these days, and most decent monitors come pre-calibrated from the factory.

Also, these images only work correctly if they are displayed at a 1:1 pixel scale. Many combinations of newer monitors/operating systems/etc. — notably “high-DPI” or “Retina” displays — end up resampling images to display at a different pixel scale. This is fine for displaying most images, but these images will not work correctly when resampled. If you want to use these images for calibrating a display, please make sure they are displayed at 100% scale and that your monitor is set to a 1:1 pixel scale!

Nowadays my preferred method for calibrating a monitor is with a ColorMunki Smile (affiliate link). For a software-only approach on macOS you can try SuperCal, which is much more comprehensive than the built-in display calibrator.