If you can read this…

…then the DNS changes went through. Thanks to the new “Missing Files Host” feature, I can move from FTP to domain hosting without any (significant) problem!

Ponturo: More Obsessable Than Sudoku

I was up late last night blasting through 100 Ponturo puzzles from Mind Candy (this was half obsessive puzzle trance and half me thinking that they would at some point end). There’s numbers and logic and something about Japan, so the obvious comparison must be made to Sudoku:

Ponturo is like Sudoku crossed with NP-complete*

I’m drawn to Ponturo because it’s quick and fresh, and there’s a boardgameish appeal to its archipelago presentation. Also it requires less focused concentration than Sudoku, so it pairs well with television watching.

Play puzzles for free on the Ponturo page of We Love Puzzles. There are also instructions. And the tempting allure of many more Japanese puzzle games.

* = Though Ponturo itself is, I believe, solvable in polynomial time. It just has an NP feel.

Adium Installation Instructions

How to install Adium, the open source chat client for Mac OS X:


The feathers are a nice touch.

Official Google Blog: Personality goes a long way

Official Google Blog: Personality goes a long way: "Today we're releasing six themes for the personalized homepage that try to solve these challenges: a city, a teahouse (super cute -- this one is my favorite), a winter scene, a sky, a beach and a bus stop. All of our themes are dynamic: they change with your own local time of day, current weather conditions or season."

I'm all about the teahouse. Happy watercolorish animals drinking tea and eating sushi. It's also refreshing to see warmth and friendly aesthetics on a Google page.

Fixing Fotos For Flickr

I heart Connected Flow’s FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto, but one thing it does not handle well is the ICC color profiles that iPhoto adds to photos. The problem is that a photo that goes through this workflow only looks good if the app that displays it (i.e. the browser) understands the embedded color profile.

Firefox does not.

Safari does.

Internet Explorer does not.

There may be hope for Firefox eventually, but until then, things work better if you use ColorSync to convert the image to the Generic RGB profile, then upload to Flickr.

This is fairly straightforward:

1. Run ColorSync Utility (in Applications > Utilities)
2. Open the relevant image
3. In the menus down at the bottom, select “Match to Profile” and “Display > Generic RGB Profile”
4. Click “Apply”
5. Save

I went and made an Automator plug-in for the Finder’s contextual menu. It’s really easy, just two steps:

1. Finder > Get Selected Finder Items
2. Preview > Apply ColorSync Profile to Images

Though now I need to replace the seven images that I recently uploaded directly from iPhoto. Blah.