a generous designer’s blog

We can now watch videos even in 1080p HD, but to link to a specific time in the Youtube video is not so evident.

There are a few, nearly similar ways to do it. The differences between them are only there for our ease. No matter which do you use, put it at the end of the youtube link (without quotes). Here are they:

• to begin the video playback at 14 seconds: “#t=14s”
• to begin the video playback at 1 minute and 10 seconds: “#t=1m10s”

Examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3iLFhYDCy0#at=2m20s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TN3VtWwks4&feature=player_embedded#t=45s

Hope it’s useful! If you know other Youtube deeplink feature, don’t hold it back!

Update: one of them doesn’t work any more. corrected.

Just received a new update via the Software Update. You should really apply this one, even if you’re not a frequent updater.

Since I have a Mac, it has a typical noise when turns on or starts up from sleep: the optical drive’s mounting noise. Even if we doesn’t use, it will make this noise. When I changed to a unibody MacBook, they applied a significant improvement on this, a noise level that I could easily live with without any complaint. (Here I must mention that MacBook Pros had always a “better” and lower noise.)

But from now on, we do not have to “suffer” from this. A new EFI firmware update (with a scary pc-speaker voice during installation), some restarts and a SuperDrive Update arrived that completeley eliminates these startup noise of the optical disk drive.

Tested, it really works! Can’t beleive why the hell took this soooo long to deliver. Here’s how to apply the updates, in case you don’t read the small footer notes

1. Select the EFI firmware update in the Software Update app, and install it
2. After a few seconds, it’s done… almost. Quit every application you’re running, and connect the power cord! Now quit Software Update too, and the EFI firmware update will just start.
3. You will hear some creepy speaker noise when it restarts, see black screen for a while, and see a progress bar sliding up. No need to worry, at the end you are at your login screen.
4. Log in and go to Software Update again. Now install the SuperDrive firmware update.
5. That’s it. No need to restart again. To test your new super-quiet MacBook, go to sleep, and than awaken. Ta-da, no noise !

But anyway, thanks Apple , I really needed this after getting a new mainboard and few month ago, and now a new battery. (Although I still wonder what will be next. Garantuee expires at the end of Deceember. :S )

Notes: Always follow the onscreen instructions and always connect your MacBook to a working power source when installing a firmware update!

A few weeks ago I got back my MacBook from the service (mainboard exchange) and now here’s another problem. To be precise, two other problems, but all of them can be solved at home. No hassle with the distributor.

My MacBook is almost always on power adapter, I use it like a desktop computer, so noticing a battery problem isn’t always easy, and maybe never is on time.

But this was hard to overlook when I unplugged: the battery went dead from fully charged in about an hour. In addition, it completely shut down at 16%. And when I say completely, I mean no reserve battery power warning message, and no saving the computer state and go to sleep: just switch off like I’ve teared out the battery. (Yes, I lost my unsaved work.)

There’s some handy guide at Apple how to treat you lithium-ion batteries like “Lithium-ion Batteries” and “Apple Batteries – notebooks” but none of them are helpful solving our problem.

System Profiles says: Check Battery

Actually you need this guide, hidden in Apple support articles. But before that check your battery status in the System Profiler (Hardware/Power). When it says “Check battery”, you definitely need to do this before thinking about the service (btw you need to do this monthly according to Apple’s advice).

Follow these steps to recalibrate your batteries (and put some endurance in it – once a month ):

1. Plug in your adapter and fully charge your MacBook and rest in the fully charged state for at least 2 hours.
   (The power cord’s plug turns green when it’s fully charged. Don’t care about the percentage shown in menu bar.)
2. Disconnect the power adapter and let it use the battery. When the battery discharges, your MacBook will hopefully save your state and go in sleep mode.
   (Or not. Mine just switched off, so I switched on it again, and used it for a few minutes again.)
3. Allow it to sleep for at least 5 hours…
   (…to discharge all remaining reserve battery power.)
4. Plug in again and leave it until fully charged.

That’s it. While you charging and discharging (step 1 and 2) you can use your computer. I’m not sure you can do this at step 4: Apple explicitly tells this in step 1 and 2, but not in 4. (Maybe you can tell me?)

Note: This calibrating only applies to all MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, PowerBook G4 with lithium-ion batteries.

Update: I recalibrated twice, but had no luck. I went to the service where they can diagnose the problem in five minutes. If they get the appropriate error code (or something), they’ll renew the battery for you, like they did it for me.

I’ve recently ran into a problem with my VMWare Fusion virtual machine: our favourite operating system, Windows XP Professional had outgrown it’s space. I use it for testing the HTML and CSS in different browsers, like (our favourite ) Explorer 6 and 7, Opera, Firefox, etc., but sometimes I also must provide some help to my friends and family, who stucked on Windows, with other applications. That’s why 6 gigabytes isn’t just enough.

I think it should be a common problem, but the solution is not so simple. VMWare doesn’t provide an option for extending the disk’s size in the virtual disk’s settings. (In addition you have to read three help support pages on VMWare’s site.) Maybe they’re afraid of dataloss. That’s not gratuitous, partitioning and formatting never was a safe procedure, so I also recommend a backup, and do this only on your own responsibility. Important: do not try to use this if you are using your Boot Camp partition inside WMVare Fusion.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some background story:

I’ve outgrown my 200 Gb backup disk very soon, so I had to find a solution. In my old PC I had a few bigger sized disk. One 200 Gb with two partitions, an installed XP with lot of installed games on the first, and films and softwares on the second partition. Another one with 300 Gb SATA and two partitions; an installed Vista on the first, and films and softwares on the second. And at last one 120 Gb, old backups of my works and music library on it. The first two disk was almost full, but I didn’t use the Vista, and the old backups could go to the trash.

It wasn’t easy to allocate the data to the other disks and free up the 300 Gb disk for the time machine. It took me two nights and a lot of thinking . So I plugged in both, this and the time machine backup disk into my MacBook.

The problem:

First I tried to simply copy the backups.backupsdb time machine folder to the new, bigger drive, but it didn’t work. It prepared for a while (2,5 million files :S ) and ended up with an error code -50. I also tried to copy the folders manually (one-by-one) but it also failed. (ok, just started to try… )

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently on the official Google Webmaster blog, they wrote an intriguing post about url rewriting and how it affects the Google crawler.

If you read the post, you would be also upset about the fact that they prefer dynamic urls because it contains additional informations about the generated page. Like “language=it” obviusly means that the page has italian content and the parameters like “sid=123456789” could be ignored by the crawler. However clean URLs like “/it/pages/3” for example, or something that contain many keywords doesn’t help the crawler to clearly identify the content and it even hard to maintain if some new parameter comes in.

I think that clean URLs are not just for SEO. Clean URLs are for people who use the web and want to navigate easily, bookmark esily, or remember the link they’ve visited.

I think internet is for us, not for bots. If they crawler is so smart to “clean up” dynamic urls, then they should go for a more smarter one which can read clean URLs and compare with the content on the page.

I won’t use dynamic URLs just beacuse the Google maybe(!) has a hard time with crawling them. I use their search engine, their web analyzer, their instant messenger, and their new browser. Now I should make content like they want to? Beceause URLs are part of the content.

Maybe the whole post is a bad presentation of a good advice, and Google wanted to say: don’t overuse URL rewriting, don’t stuff it with fucking keywords because it’s worse than a dynamic one with the clear meaning of the parameters. From now on there’s only clean URLs and no search engine friendly URLs you SEO expert bastards!

One small step for us, but one giant leap from Apple. iTunes Store Hungary is ready (only) for iPhone.

Japan’s got the winner vendor. It’s the Softbank and the iPhone will be ¥23,040. (via Szaku Magazin)

Today i needed to show an email that i’ve recently viewed in one of my mailboxes. I was completely unable to find it, and it was really annoying. I hoped there is a smart mailbox rule for this situation. And the good news is, there is one! How could i live without this before?

So here it is, how can you create a mailbox for the recently viewed emails:

It’s pretty easy. Just create a new Smart Mailbox from the “Mailbox” menu, give a name like Recently Viewed, and choose the condition “Date Last Viewed”. The rest is up to you. I chose “is in the last 3 Days”, it should  be enough for me, but of course you can select whatever you want, or add some plus condition like specifing a mailbox or something.

That’s why we love the mac.

Yesterday registered on Twitter. I sometimes or often have small thoughts or find quotes in movies, that are not enough for a blog post. They are almost enough for a title. I hate titles.