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As long as I've been aware of professional sports teams, I've been a Pittsburgh sports fan: Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers. I watched the Pirates lose in the playoffs three years in a row. I watched the Pens lose in the post-season a few times, including last year, but also watched them snag two Stanley Cups. I've watched the Steelers lose a lot of heart-breaking games, and Super Bowl XXX, but I've been fortunate to watch them win two Super Bowls in the past four seasons, too.

Brad, the other member of Cynical Peak lives in Arizona. The Diamondbacks won a World Series in 2001. The Suns, Cardinals, and Coyotes have yet to win a title - and this year marked the first time the Cardinals would make it to the big dance.

Two weeks ago, when the Super Bowl teams were set, I asked Brad if he'd like to do something special for the Super Bowl. We decided that we'd offer a percentage off equivalent to the total points scored.

So, with the Steelers 27-23 win, I'm pleased to announce that for the next three days we're offering 50% off all our software ((Except our $1.99 iPhone app. Not valid with any other discount.)). Please use the coupon code "SUPERBOWL" when checking out to take 50% off your order.

Drop by http://cynicalpeak.com/ for your software.

Go Steelers! Six-burgh!

I've updated the Desktops page with February's images. Since it's not a leap year, you've got 2-3 less days to get these images than every other month, so grab 'em today.

P.S. We were without power from shortly before 7:00am until just after 3:30pm today. Penelec was digging pretty deep around some electrical boxes in the neighborhood.

I've heard of people using Amazon S3 to backup their home computers, and I've looked into doing this a few times… but isn't it incredibly expensive?

I just checked and I have 1050 GB I'd like to back up to another location (beyond the one on-site and one off-site location I have now).

Storage is 15 cents per gigabyte, so that's $157.50. Data transfer is $0.10 per GB, so that's another $105 for the first backup and, say, $5 any time I want to perform another backup.

So I'm looking at $260 for the first month and another $160+ every month I keep my data on S3?

Or have I brain farted somewhere, somehow?

John Gruber writes up a method for invoking the same AppleScript on Safari and WebKit. That's all well and good, but it reminds me of one of my annoyances.

You see, I wouldn't mind running WebKit nightly builds, but I don't want to run Safari and WebKit at the same time.

It'd be nice if you could download WebKit nightly builds named "Safari" - or change the name after download easily - and run that.

I haven't tested it, but it may be worth while. I could run a cron-launched AppleScript that:

1. Quit "Safari".
2. Downloaded the WebKit nightly build.
3. Renamed "Safari" to "Safari (Orig)" or something ((WebKit doesn't had full nibs or resources - so you'd need to keep Safari around so WebKit could run - see the first comment.)).
4. Renamed the WebKit nightly to "Safari" and moved it to /Applications.
5. Launched "Safari" and chose the "Reopen All Windows From Last Session" item in the "History" menu.

That would work, wouldn't it? The app would be known as Safari, scripts would work, applications that know Safari handles URLs by default would keep working, and life would be grand.

Right?

Today I received two 8 GB SanDisk Extreme IV CompactFlash cards. As has become custom lately, they came with a CD that has some file recovery software on it should you, I dunno, format your card before you import your images or something. I've never had a need for them, but since the apps tend to be small, I install them. I think Lexar gives you ImageRescue - that's the only other one of these types of apps I have installed.

Turns out I really, really shouldn't have bothered with this one, "RescuePRO."

The front of the CD has a big Windows logo, but says "Macintosh OS X v10.1+," so I put the disc in.

The root level of the disk contains three autorun files (.inf, .exe, and .apm), a readme, and a few folders. The "DATA" folder has nothing useful, and "INSTALL" and "RescuePRO" have .exe files in them. The last is named "MAC," so I open it.

The MAC folder contains another readme ((It's the same as the one at the root level, and it just tells you where recovered images will be saved: C:\Documents and Settings\ <your user name> \RescuePRO or, on a Mac, /Users/ <your user name> /RescuePRO. Wonder if it'll put those spaces in there. :-P)) and a .bin file named "RPMAC-Deluxe-Installer.bin".

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From A Photo Editor.

iLife '09 arrived today. I "paid" only for the free FedEx Ground shipping, but Apple nicely upgraded me to overnight shipping.

So far, I've tagged about 1250 photos ((All of our point-and-shoot images go there, as well as a few thousand I took with my Digital Rebel(s).)) with names, and my random observations are:

• iPhoto can't identify dogs. Sorry, Flint - but you'll go un-identified in my iPhoto library. No shocker here, though. More of a humorous observation.
• I attended a Shania Twain concert and downloaded a few hundred photos from that event from Getty Images, as well as from other stops on the same Tour. iPhoto failed to identify her roughly 96% of the time.
• In fact, I'm somewhat unimpressed by iPhoto's abilities at identifying people. If I identify one person in a blue chair wearing a red shirt, and the next six photos contain a person in a blue chair wearing a red shirt and were taken within 60 seconds of the first, why am I seeing "unknown face" so often?
• iPhoto doesn't seem to do very well with different facial expressions, slightly over-exposed images, or even faces that are tilted 30° or more.
• Though iPhoto can't identify dogs (or weimaraners at least), it sometimes identifies bizarre things - jewelry, foliage, a pile of rocks - as faces. Oddly, the PGA (not the PGA Tour) logo was identified as a face in 15 of 16 photos.
• Resizing the "add missing face" box is backwards: it resizes from the middle by default and resizes from the corner only when you hold down the option key. Bug filed.
• Why, when I hit cmd-delete on items in the Trash, does it restore them and remove them from the trash?

Make no mistake about it: iPhoto starts off pretty impressively, but the face detection seems to get worse - not better - as it goes on. With 500+ shots of one particular person, it asks me "is this Jane Doe" only about 5-10% of the time - and the 10% is really generous of me.

I really couldn't care less that T-Shirt Hell is closing. In my opinion, their shirts weren't so much funny as they were shocking. While I think an occasional shock is good, on the whole, the shirts did more to encourage negative vibes than positive ones, and it's for that reason that I never bought a shirt from them.

I also didn't care enough one way or the other that the site existed. I sure as heck didn't care enough to write them an email. And, again, I don't care that they're closing. So be it.

So why post if I don't care? Let's just say I'm surprised at the number of people who are dismayed at the closing. Some people seemed to find a lot of the shirts genuinely funny… and that's scary in and of itself.

P.S. Something that will also appeal to geeks, but in an entirely positive way: nerdmeritbadges.com.

On microwaves, I prefer multiples of 9. I'll type "63" seconds instead of 1 minute. If I need to stop something, I try to do so at a multiple of 9.

Golf is a game played over 9 or 18 holes (or multiples thereof), so it's all good - multiples of both 9 and, for 18-hole rounds, 6 too.

When I have to set an alarm clock, I set the minutes to a multiple of 9. :27 is my favorite (for :30, because 36 is too late).

Baseball has nine innings. 27 batters come to the plate in a perfect game. Innings require 6 outs.

In iTunes, with Synergy, there are 16 levels available. I almost always decrease volume to 12/16 or 8/16. Occasionally I use 2/16, but that's because 4/16 is still too loud for background music. I never use odd numbers.

I like multiples of five on my A/V receiver. 45 is the typical volume, but 40 and 35 are acceptable… unless I feel like using 36, which is also a multiple of both 6 and 9. Same with my VW car stereo: the only acceptable volumes are 10, 15, or 20. My Aztek groups volumes into threes with little tick marks, so a partially filled tick mark isn't acceptable.

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Somehow, "25 years of the Mac" isn't anywhere near as surprising as "over eight years of Mac OS X."

I say eight years because, like many people, I was using DP4 as my main OS. I think I kept Classic around for awhile, but resisted the urge to use it for anything but the occasional Photoshop task. I got in on as many betas for Mac OS X software - like BBEdit - or used apps like OmniWeb in place of what had, to that point, been my normal app.

Eight years out of 25. Think of that… fully 1/3 of the Mac's lifetime has been spent with Mac OS X as the operating system.

I'd like to thank Steven Frank for posting the link to ClickToFlash ClickToFlash, a Safari plugin that prevents the loading of Flash content until you click it.

I shared this plugin's location with John Gruber and he noted that he was seeing low single-percentage CPU usage with 30 Safari tabs open. In my own tests, Safari took up 4% CPU when looking at a YouTube page prior to loading the Flash video. After loading it (by clicking the grey gradient that replaces the video), CPU usage rose to 40 to 50%.

It works, and it's pretty great.

Update (2009-01-28): Updated link to the current fork.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Rivet 2.0, a free upgrade to all Rivet 1.0 customers and a product that's holding steady at its $18.95 price despite the doubling of its feature set.

Rivet 2.0 supports both the Xbox 360 and the PS3!

In addition to supporting the PS3, this release has several other features and improvements:

• Displays photos within deeply nested projects/folders in Aperture. Prior versions would fail at about three to four levels.
• Dramatically speeds up load times of media and photo thumbnail loading by as much as 800%.
• Fixed file size info for files larger then 4 GB ((If, of course, the console supports playback of that file and encoding type.)). If you've got a file that big, it'll stream now.
• Fixed folder parsing for items in folders more than six levels deep.
• Fixed an issue that caused problems when folders contained folders and files.
• Fixed an issue that caused the iTunes library parser to abort and list no tracks.
• Removed the filtering of iTunes Plus files because the PS3 plays them.

Unlike some other companies, who would have you spend $40 and run two applications, Rivet is an all-in-one solution for $18.95, and again, a free upgrade to anyone with a license.

Download a demo, upgrade your copy, or buy a license today at http://cynicalpeak.com/rivet/.

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If you can see each of the shades of grey (black/white) to the right, congratulations: your display is at least moderately well calibrated.

Yeah, I've got nothing to say today. Too busy.

I didn't watch the inauguration today, and I was surprised at how many people did.

I love to watch history in the making, but history in this case was made back in November, not today. Today was but a formality.

Florio of PFT objects to the playing of music while players were injured at Heinz Field yesterday.

Call it making something out of nothing. Call it overly PC. I call it "Florio knows how many Steelers fans there are and he's trolling for hits."

The fans were respectfully silent. They wished Willis "good luck" and everything else while he was being carted off the field. They cheered (encouragement) when he was moving around.

The quotes I choose to pull will tell you where I stand on this.

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