For a couple of years, my work C45C4D3 (Cascade) was hanging in the Makerspace of Noosa Library. It went in before Covid, and it wasn’t until early 2024 that I was able, physically and emotionally to inspect it.

The results are not good. What the hanging system was doing, is bending the main board of the work, and putting a twisting pressure through the corner of the work at its weakest point (where the bolt is drilled through).

Knowing I needed a more robust solution, that would both relieve the board of flexing stress when it was in storage, and provide a better hanging option, I went in to Sketchup and started modelling. I ended up getting in touch with my inner Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The final plan provides a modular structure, that requires only three distinct pieces of 50mm x 5mm angle in mild steel. They’re designed so that they’re symmetrical, and can be flipped end-over-end for left and right side applicability. Once its all affixed to the work, it should be protected when hanging, in storage, and during transport.

Gather ’round children, for a tale of a technological, and chronological trainwreck.

It was a dark, and stormy night…

…I was working on trying to bring some old Aperture Libraries into Capture One, and the imports were failing, with an error:

Catalog import failed. The Library is currently open.

Checking Capture One’s support site yielded only a support article about a lock file, but it was for Capture One catalogues not Aperture libraries.

What I should have done right here is file a support request with Capture One, wait for an answer, and stop work.

That sentence is in the voice of me as the protagonist narrator, over a still frame of me about to do the thing I most definitely should not have done.

What I did, as the footage resumes playing, was to try troubleshooting, so I could provide Capture One’s support people with an isolation of the problem.

My first thought was that the problem may be because the Aperture libraries that were failing were those which I had exported from my main Aperture catalogue running on my Mac Mini, while it was accessing images on a drive shared over the network from my Mac Pro workstation. Ok, so booting up the Mac Mini, enabling File Sharing on the Mac Pro, and then enabling the file Sharing user’s access to the photo drive…

Re-exporting the libraries confirmed the problem wasn’t a one-off.

Eventually, what I realised is I had to export the library to a local folder on the Mac Mini, then copy it to the Mac Pro. From there, the library opens fine in Capture One.

So, the problem is that when Aperture writes the library to a network location, it leaves a lock file in place, which trips up Capture One.

Problem solved; I exported all the particular libraries I wanted to re-process to a local drive on the Mac Mini, then copied them across to the Mac Pro, shut the Mac Mini down, and went to go back to Capture One on the Mac Pro.

I filled in a support ticket with Capture One’s support staff, to see if they’d encountered the problem, as I hadn’t been able to see it described in their support site.

As an aside; If you’re setting up a support site for a piece of software, why not try structuring your knowledge base of answers based upon the menu structure of the program. So if I have a problem with the function File > Import Catalogue > Aperture Library, let me navigate to that and see all the issues related to importing Aperture Libraries.

Knowing I wouldn’t need to continue having file sharing on, I disabled it, and then removed the sharing user from the Photo drive permissions.

Then Time Machine began to run… and continued to run… a lot longer than it usually does. Once it had finished, I noticed that rather than the 1.5TB of free space my Time Machine drive should have, there was now only 80GB of free space. Thinking backwards, the horror of what had happened began to dawn upon me (is this sounding like The Martian where he shorts the probe with the drill?).

By performing a recursive addition, and then removal of a user permission from my photo drive, I’d somehow caused Time Machine to think the entire drive needed to be backed up afresh. That may not have been so bad, except for a decision by Apple engineers; on a 4TB drive, there should be a minimum of 80GB of free space on a Time Machine backup. So despite the entire new backup fitting within the space available on the drive, Time Machine deleted two months of my oldest backups to free up that extra space.

I went into the commandline, and using the tmutil command, removed the new giant snapshot, but unfortunately that didn’t liberate any space on the drive. I ran Time Machine again to see if it would do the same huge backup a second time, and it didn’t, but still no liberation of space. Deciding I was tired of fighting with it, I decided to take the drive (and it’s twin which had avoided the problem) out of service entirely, they’re now stored in split locations having served only 14 months of use.

So, I brought in a new pair of drives, 8TB this time, and we’ll see if Time Machine can behave in a more orderly fashion this time around.

Eventually I heard back from Capture One’s support folks; the Aperture lock file is located in the Library’s package contents in:

Database/apdb/lockfile.pid

Removing that file solves the problem.

Uniforms have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. The primary school uniform; a simple blue collared shirt, and grey shorts. High school; a tie, blazer, and starch-stiffened straw hat. Scouts; a pseudo-militiary green shirt & shorts combination, with a neckerchief held together with the amusingly named “woggle”. Air Training Corps; an airforce-based version of Cadets, compulsory service while in High School, blue slacks, shirt, tie, navy scratchy woollen jumper, and a forage cap.

Post school I landed traumatised in the Goth scene, and subcultural uniforms became the rest of my life – something you never really grow out of if you were in a particular time in which subcultures were a thing.

And pathetically, many dedicated followers of fashion become kinkily attached to their adopted styles, and become Style-Mongers; promoting their narrow range of looking, speaking and thinking, as if all previous modes of being have been erased, and no alternative could possibly supplant the present one.

Tenacious style-mongering is always found among those too young to have experienced the inevitability of stylistic burnout. But in fact, the rise of new titillation, the peaking to saturation, the descent to tiresome, and finally the relegation to a timeless limbo of nostalgia is the fate of all styles.

Except, of course, Cubism.

Crosley Bendix – Style.

So it was when I decided part of de-cluttering life was removing daily pain-points like the way cotton t-shirts always seem to get deodorant marks in the armpits, and they’re never cut right – too boxy, or too short. Prior to travelling to Japan, I bought a few really nice marino-blend thermal shirts. They were expensive, but so much more pleasant, and practical than my normal wardrobe. Seeing the superseding model on sale recently at 50% off, I dropped the equivalent of three weeks rent on buying ten of them. I am living the uniform life. Not only uniform black, but literally the same shirt every day.

The other variable I decided to remove from life was bad sleep.

The fourth most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased – a memory-foam mattress and power-articulated bed frame.

It’s the best sleep I’ve ever had.

So there’s two major variables I’ve just edited out of life, what to wear, and will I get a good night’s sleep… Solved.

I have a new book released today!

This was done as a quickie, while I was stalled on Day And Night, and reminded me of how well I’ve centred on a working production process to make tings like this. Total turnaround, given the images were already done, was about three days.

I recently encountered an interesting glitch with my Finder-based Zero DAM setup. I was looking for photos I knew I had taken, but they weren’t showing up in the timeframe I knew they should be appearing, for the camera I knew they had been captured upon. Eventually I managed to find a couple of the images from the day’s shooting, but it was only two out of ninety-two images. So what was up with the others?

In terms of their EXIF data, and their Finder properties, there was no discernible difference between the images Spotlight could find, versus those which seemed invisible to Spotlight-based Finder searching.

More perplexing, turning off spotlight indexing for the drive made the images reappear in searches based upon the date the images were photographed. Turning indexing back on, made the images disappear from the search results within a minute.

So, something about Spotlight’s indexing process was excluding the images from any sort of spotlight-based search. I tried pretty much every method for deleting the spotlight index for the drive, without success; as soon as the index was re-enabled, the images disappeared.

Then, I started to think about one issue macOS has – Extended File Attributes. These can cause all sorts of problems, so I installed Xattred from Eclectic Light and compared the files which Spotlight could find, with those it could not.

Sure enough, a culprit was found:

com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType

…with the properties:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
 <string>iPhotoPreservedOriginal</string>
</array>
</plist>

Deleting this attribute from the file made it instantly show up in Spotlight searches.

The question; how to do this for any file on my photo drive, when I couldn’t use spotlight to find or identify them. After a bit of searching online I came across the answer using terminal:

xattr -rd com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType (drag the target location here)

Something on the order of a thousand photos which were effectively missing in my Zero DAM system instantly reappeared as I applied this procedure to camera directories (it’s recursive, so will apply to the contents of any subfolder) where I had identified “missing” images.

Problem solved.

Edit: Hello Eclectic Light readers ;)

Written for the character Homolka, as played by Tim Curry in the film.

City of Zinj, city of Zinj.
Wealth without limit! And I will posses it!

This monkey has seen,
this Ape knows the way.
This man with the glove gave it the means to say.

The eye who is watching, the eye who sees all.
My plan is unfolding, for I too hear the call.
Of madness in jungles, of legends and tales,
The treasure is waiting, my plans MUST prevail!

I’ll join in their party, advise as I can.
Wearing the disguise of a philanthropist man.

All those who had mocked me,
And all disbelief.
Paying bribes to that warlord, a secondrate thief!

But this talking monkey, this primate, this ape.
My ticket to riches, it can only be fate,
that this Company scion, his fiancé as well,
and the monkey researcher are all drawn to this hell.

This terror, this darkness, to sanity’s fringe!

Where my destiny leads,

all of my dreams hinge.

On finding my fortune, In the City of Zinj.

One of the issues with the EPUB workflow, is that EPUB documents are .zip compressed. This makes proofing & previewing while you’re working problematic, as some reading apps can’t deal with uncompressed documents. With Apple’s deprecation of EPUB authoring and proofing support:

As documented here.

…proofing on an iPad became a pain point that made the work simply not fun to do.

I’ve been thinking about a solution to this on and off for a while now, and a solution hit me that has obviously been percolating up for a while.

Use iFrames.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, but the solution is at once clever, and so straightforward it makes me feel stupid for having not seen it earlier.

What you do, is set up the entire document of facing pages using an iFrame for each page, and then set the iFrame sources to the xhtml files inside your EPUB development directory.

Thus the HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
 <title>The Title</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
</head>
<body>
 <div id="the_container">
  <div class="spread rightonly">
   <iframe src="path-to-your-dev.epub/OEBPS/cover.xhtml"></iframe>
  </div>
  <div class="spread doublepage">
   <iframe src="path-to-your-dev.epub/OEBPS/inside_front-cover.xhtml"></iframe>
   <iframe src="path-to-your-dev.epub/OEBPS/page_001.xhtml"></iframe>
  </div>
 
  ...
  
  <div class="spread doublepage">
   <iframe src="path-to-your-dev.epub/OEBPS/page_120.xhtml"></iframe>
   <iframe src="path-to-your-dev.epub/OEBPS/inside_back-cover.xhtml"></iframe>
  </div>
  <div class="spread leftonly">
   <iframe src="path-to-your-dev.epub/OEBPS/back-cover.xhtml"></iframe>
  </div>
 </div>
</body>
</html>

And then the CSS:

html, body {
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
}

body {
 background-color: gray;
 transform: scale(0.5); /* set the zoom degree to view */
 transform-origin: 50% 0; /* centres the zoom in the middle of the browser */
}

iframe { /* the width and height of the EPUB's declared viewport */
 border: 0;
 width: 1200px;
 height: 800px;
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
}

#the_container {
 width: 2400px; /* double your EPUB's viewport width */
 min-width: 2400px;
 margin-right: auto;
 margin-left: auto;
}

#the_container div {
 margin-top: 10px;
 margin-bottom: 10px;
}

.spread {
 width: 100%;
 display: flex;
}

.rightonly {
 flex-direction: row-reverse;
}

.doublepage, .leftonly {
 flex-direction: row;
}

The nifty thing is the transform scale and origin in the body tag’s CSS, so you can scale the whole thing down if the spread won’t fit in your display’s available space, or if you want a more document-wide overview.

Enjoy.

If this article was of use, a donation or buying something would help support my projects.

I welcomed a new piece of kit into my metal fabrication setup this week – a Michigan heavy duty welding trolley. This one, specifically.

I have some very specific concerns with my gear, which this trolley had to address. For starters, my welder is very heavy; 20+ KG, as it’s both a welder and a plasma cutter. I bought the combined machine as I was space constrained, and couldn’t fit separate machines for each task. A good idea, but it has this downside – the one machine is heavy, and deep. It’s so deep, that it doesn’t fit on the shelf of most welding trolleys.

Secondly, the welder’s shield gas input is dead-centre on the machine. This means when it’s pushed as far back as possible, so it fits on the trolley’s shelf, there isn’t room for the gas fitting and hose between the machine, and the gas bottle.

The alternatives are to extend the shelf, or, to push the gas bottle back. I went with the latter, given there’s room for a bigger bottle than mine.

The solution, potentially temporary, depending on how it holds up, was to make standoffs to move the cradle (which secures the bottle) back. Thankfully the cradle parts are bolted on to the frame, so it was just a matter of using longer bolts, with nylock nuts and washers, to cantilever the cradle parts out. The added bonus is the threading means it’s very adjustable to the size of the cylinder.

Finder in macOS has a behaviour that when you switch to it from another application, and there are no other Finder windows open in your current space, it should automatically open a new window to the user’s chosen default location.

Unfortunately, this behaviour isn’t reliable – it will do it once, but then not do it the next time. The problem being that if it fails to spawn the new Finder window when you switch to Finder, pressing the dock icon a second time will transport you to a different space that does have an open finder window.

Thankfully, Keyboard Maestro is here to save the day. To be clear, what really saved the day, was the Keyboard Maestro user forums, whose helpful denizens supplied the solution to this. Here’s the workflow, with documenting commentary included within.

This macro activates when switching to Finder from either the Dock, or by clicking on the desktop, and ensures you always have a file browser window ready to go when you switch to Finder.

From now on, I’m only selling books direct.

I should have done this earlier, but procrastination won out. What turned things around now, was Apple’s insistence on the requirement that I sell via EU-specific stores to reach EU customers, and those stores were about to require me to publish my home address and phone number.

Also the whole “Apple takes 30% of the cover price” thing, and the “Apple publisher tools have become garbage” thing.

So, we out.