Extracting pages from PDFs on OS X

XCode screenshot

I need to slice and dice a lot of images from a number of multi-page PDF files, but I don't happen to have the right bit of ImageMagick installed on my MacBook Pro. Instead, I took the slightly longer route of writing a utility to do it.

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Leaving Three after a year-and-a-half for iPhone 3G

my-thoughts-exactly

Back in December 2006, I wrote a post about cancelling my decade-old Orange UK phone contract, in favour of Three. Now I'm off again. I finally gave into the lure of iPhone. As a Mac (power?) user for eight years, and owner (and destroyer) of many of their products, the absence of iPhone in my life is fairly conspicuous. I always swore that I wouldn't buy the iPhone 2G, though.

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EyeTV 3

EyeTV 3 Icon

I've been a dedicated user of EyeTV for almost two years, to the point that I no longer watch TV on the big screen in the living room. Instead, I watch almost exclusively on my iBook. Back in May 2006, I wrote a post about EyeTV 2.2 and its shortcomings. Today, Elgato have released EyeTV 3.

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Replacing the backlight on an iBook G4

IMG_2040.JPG

For a while I've been noticing significant degradation of the backlight on my dilapidated iBook G4. So, yesterday, my dad and I spent a few hours replacing the CCFL backlight bulb.

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iPhoto, Flickr and EXIF munging using Perl

EXIF/IPTC/XMP tagging of GPS coordinates, folksonomy tags, and other goodness is a nice idea, but unfortunately, iPhoto and Flickr don't play too well together. Couple this with the fact that any decent support those products now have is not included for photos already imported into them. So, here are some notes resulting from some experimentation, along with the Perl code I wrote along the way.

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Mac Flight Tracker widget timezone bug

The Flight Tracker dashboard widget that comes with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) seems to have a fairly major bug. However, this bug seems to be the result of something quite obscure to do with timezones, and it only seems to manifest itself in the UK during the summer.

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