Neat and Cool

1st Post of the New Year

I think the first post of the year should be about gadgets. In the last couple of weeks, I have aquired the following…

1. Apple Watch – Custom made and delivered from China. Sweet. Most sweet. I love it when Apple goes the extra mile for developers and adds something to our hardware order. It has happened a couple of times to me. I ordered an iPod and received an engraved and enhanced version far and above what I originally ordered. The watch was much the same. I ordered a relatively simple model and what I got was immensely better.

2. XBox One S – This one is kind of funny because the only reason I wanted an XBox was for a game called Battlefront. It is a very detailed and intense Star Wars game with add ons for the latest movie…etc. At first, I wasn’t sure what the S stood for and quite frankly, I still don’t. As it turns out after Googling it, the S stands for “supports 4k video.” I only have a 1080P television to play this on. Hmmm….

3. That leads into aquisition#3. A 55″ 4k television which I had to purchase to support the XBox. What is the point of having an XBox that supports 4k if your television doesn’t? Right. The answer couldn’t have been more obvious. A new television was in order.

4. This one was a bit unexpected at least right now. I had planned on purchasing an Apple laptop to backup my main work machine at home. Up until now, the Mac Mini was fulfilling that role but a laptop would give me more freedom if I needed to work from someplace else. You never know. I could find myself in the middle of a beach on St. Thomas and be called upon to process orders. You just never know about these things. A colleauge just so happened to have an extra Apple MacBook Pro and offered to swap out my Mac Mini for the laptop. Gee, let me think. Ok, then!

I wasn’t expecting to get so many gadgets this year but life is short and we don’t know how many more tomorrows we’ll have. I hope everyone has a great gadget year.

…and NO FIRES! I am looking at you Samsung….

January 2, 2017 by Mike Williams Neat and Cool

Photoshop JPG Problem Between Platforms

I recently downloaded a batch of pictures from the internet. The iMac refused to read those files as JPG so I did a little digging (actually Command-I on one of the files) and found that these particular files were saved with Photoshop CS5.1 for Windows. The following graphic shows what the files look like on OS X 10.8

Incorrect JPG Files on OS X 10.8

The next question you're probably asking is “how to I fix this?” The solution is rather simple but will require a 3rd party program unless you like renaming multiple files by hand. Great, if you only have a couple of pictures to fix but if you have a whole bunch then I recommend Name Mangler. I'll explain why.

Simply changing the name of the file to say “waterfall.jpg” won't fix the problem or at least, it didn't for me. What we need to do is change the extension as well. So, instead of JPG we need it to be JPEG. Name Mangler will allow you to make that change. Once, you rename the files with an extension of JPEG..boom! You have your files in a completely readable format by OS X 10.8.

Note - Append file extension is unchecked

How about Adobe Bridge CS6? I've tried converting with Adobe Bridge and it just wouldn't cooperate. Sure, you could actually view the photos and see how they were saved originally but that's it. If anyone knows of a method that works in Adobe Bridge, please let me know (me at smpmike dot com)