Tommy Peters' Bicycles

Tommy's iMac drive cluster (Click on image for larger view) Following an earlier post , allow me to explain the cluster of icons, which represent the drives, on my iMac's desktop (if necessary, click on the image for a larger view):- The Guitar icon is a Western Digital Studio holding a terabyte of iTunes data through a FireWire 800. iTunes is the 'brain' of the Mac Experience and therefore, the icon is appropriately placed at the centre of the apple. The Umbrella is a Western Digital Home and a clone of the Studio, wired through a FireWire 400 running a SmartUpdate schedule in real-time by SuperDuper. Being a backup drive, the U mbrella was purposefully chosen and placed, suggesting support, at the bottom of the Guitar. The Leopard is the iMac’s hardrive, chosen to represent the operating system and appropriately placed as if the animal is entering into the apple through its bitten part . The wireless Time Capsule appears behind the Leopard from ti...

Fatimid 'Hubal' pendant Preamble: Civilians have no business, let alone capacity, debating a programmed Juramentado. None. They have capacity for reason, commonsense and perhaps, points of law. The Allah issue in Malaysia is simmering and Juramentado is poised at the blocks. Stage 1 - A period (of centuries apparently) when the term was not an issue. Stage 2 - The Executive Order banning the term. Stage 3 - The Judicial Application to set aside the Executive Order. Stage 4 - The Judicial Order upholding the Executive Order. Stage 5 - The Appeal setting aside the Judicial Order, allowing use of the term. At what stage did Juramentado go postal? Five stages are in the equation but on hindsight, identifying the stage it charged is now academic. It gunned off the blocks at Stage 2 while most believe Stage 5 invoked its frenzy. To identify triggers, one must study its environment, ideology and text suffused in its tabula rasa . Embracing...

Finished workflow (click on image for larger view) Automator is a Mac application. As the name implies, it ‘automates’ a given task via pre-set workflows. There are enough workflows in the Automator Library to piece a given task. Text To Audio is one. It involves four individual workflows that starts with ‘Get Contents of Clipboard’ and ends with ‘Add Songs To (iTunes) Playlist’. A fifth action saves the program as a Script or Application. A student asked me to piece a Text To Audio workflow to deal with her ‘dead time’ in traffic. Her objective was to ‘hear’ her assignments rather than ‘read’ them. The screen-cast depicts the evolution of the workflow saved as a Script, which runs from the Finder bar. A workflow saved as an Application runs just as effectively from the dock. The second part of the screen-cast is the Speech converted from this blog post. Alex, the Mac’s digital commentator, is the presenter. Cheers, Tommy Credits: Ben Waldie is the author of...