Scratching my head is what I've been doing for a couple of days now (also cursing, a lot of cursing) because viewing images stored in my Aperture library looked strange; slightly desaturated, overexposed, etc.

I thought something was wrong with my library or with Aperture itself. I tried many things to get this working again, because no matter what others say, to me there's still no alternative to Aperture's image database features.

So, if you're having the same issue, or if you find that you don't see guides when trying to crop an image, make sure that 'View > Onscreen proofing' is disabled.

John Martellaro on The Mac Observer:

When the TMO team was in Breckenridge, CO last week for a writer's camp, I wrote the entire Particle Debris column, published on June 26, on the MacBook. That article was over 1,200 words, and I found the keyboard to be natural and precise. I now prefer it over any keyboard I have ever used.

I'm in the market for a new machine and when Apple announced the new MacBook in March, the new keyboard drew my interest. While I don't like typing on a touchscreen very much, I have no problems with flat but good keyboards. When I finally had the opportunity to try the keyboard, a few days after the MacBook was available in stores, it took me about 20 minutes of typing to realise that I wanted this keyboard in my Mac, yesterday.

Unfortunately for me, Apple seems to be using the new MacBook as a testbed not only for the concept of an ultra light laptop with just one port but also for this particular type of keyboard. Therefore, while a bit disappointing, it's not surprising that Apple didn't add the new keyboard to the MacBook Pro with Retina Display at the same time.

I hope that Apple will soon equip the rest of its line-up with this new type of keyboard.

As much as the U.S. Surpreme Court's decision to declare gay marriage legal everywhere in the U.S. is a deserved and long overdue win for the LGBT community, critics have rightfully pointed out that we as a people still have a long way to go to accept the 'B' and 'T' parts of that community (Bi-sexual, Transgender).

Brianna Wu posted some very good tweets summarising the situation transgender people are still in:

With all respect to LGB people, historically they’ve been lukewarm ally at best for transgender people. They’ve always put themselves first.

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) June 26, 2015

While #MarriageEquaility deserves celebrating, @cathexing has thoughts on what transgender people face. It’s not over pic.twitter.com/SXMh5tHVZp

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) June 26, 2015

Gay and lesbian allies need to step up their information and efforts to include bisexual and transgender people pic.twitter.com/W3EoudqPrR

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) July 3, 2015

John Oliver had a segment on Transgender Rights on the latest Last Week Tonight and I encourage everybody to watch it to get an inkling of the hardships these people face daily and to understand that we still have a long way to go.

I just read about this on heise.de. Apple is going to allow content-blocking extensions in mobile Safari. Android has had this for a while and I was wondering how long it would take Apple to add/allow this kind of technology in iOS. There are many interesting connections to be made here:

One is Apple making clear that iOS can be a viable work platform and Apple is allowing users to remove unwanted distractions. This isn't something only consumers will be interested in but also corporations that deploy iOS devices, when factoring in the potential bandwidth savings when using adblockers on mobile devices. I think it makes a lot of sense in light of Apple's recently established cooperation with IBM and it might convince even more companies to deploy iOS devices (especially because these content-blocking extensions don't have to be limited to ads).

I would also say that Apple sees the potential to improve users' browsing experience and privacy on iOS devices and it says something about Apple's regard, or lack thereof, for the state of advertisments on websites today.

With that in mind, Apple allowing ads in iOS 9's new News app sends a mixed message to content publishers. I'm sure more than one media and ad agency executive will interpret this as, "If you want your readers to see ads and make money off of them, you should really take a look at our News app." or depending on your mindset even, "That's a nice ad business you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

From my perspective as a consumer, I don't have much against what Apple is doing here, especially given Apple's history of trying—with an emphasis on trying—to improve ads on mobile devices with their iAds product. The few times I saw iAds in apps and on sites, I found them a lot less annoying than everything else that is out there.
Of course, this will only hold true, if Apple not only mandates design standards for content in the upcoming News app but also for the way ads are presented to a reader.

Vor einigen Tagen haben die Redakteure von aptgetupdate.de das untenstehende Video auf ihrer Seite eingestellt. Es zeigt unverblümt, wie Internetprovider versuchen mit Lügen die öffentliche Meinung zur Diskriminierung von Daten in ihren Datennetzen zu ändern. Datennetze, deren Aufbau in großen Teilen mit Steuergeldern von uns allen finanziert wurde.

Wenn nicht an der Netzneutralität festgehalten wird und stärkere Gesetze für ihren Schutz geschaffen werden, zahlen bald nicht nur Inhalteanbieter mehr für die Distribution jeglicher Daten im Internet sondern auch wir Nutzer.

Aber vor allem ist die Netzneutralität wichtig um die Meinungsfreiheit im Internet weiterhin garantieren zu können.

I've known about Cards Against Humanity since the crowdfunding campaign started. The first time I actually played it was in 2014, during an evening of pizza, beer, and wine with colleagues/friends in Toronto prior to a company conference (where we played some more).

It's one of the funniest and tummy-ache inducing games I know of and I can't wait for the opportunity to play it again.

A friend told me that there's a 'Cards Against Humanity' episode of Tabletop — a show hosted by Wil Wheaton, where he and various guests play various tabletop games. I watched it a few days ago and it's glorious.

If you want to get a sense of the game and see just what a filthy mouth old Ensign Crusher has, I encourage your to watch the video below :)

TextWrangler is a very good text editor by Bare Bones Software. It's—as the developers call it—the "little brother" to their flagship product BBEdit.
It has always been more than sufficient for any of my HTML/CSS coding needs and I'm very grateful to Bare Bones Software for making this product free.

This site is hosted on ghost.org and in order to make it look as I want it to, I sometimes have to edit the themes I use slightly. Since I'm mucking around in the code of the theme, whenever the original theme author makes a siginificant change/improvement to it, I have to manually re-add my modifications to the code.

This was usually a very tiresome job, because I kept going through each file (like the styles.css) line-by-line, looking for comments I made.
Today I found an easier way to compare two versions of a file in TextWrangler:

1. Open the old and the new version of a file with TextWrangler.
2. Highlight both files in Textwrangler's sidebar.
3. Right-click, and select 'Compare'.

This will open both files in windows next to each other and another window at the bottom of the screen, highlighting the differences between both.

A few months ago I commented on Charlie Rose's interview of Tim Cook and specifically what was said about Apple as a company.

Every now and then you will hear Tim Cook or some other c-level employee say that Steve Jobs and what he stood for is part of Apple's DNA. Watching the video above while keeping in mind the company that Apple has become, it's not hard to imagine that this is true.

Found on: the Mac Observer

… having to work with an old HDD-equipped MacBook Pro (MB133LL/A) again, while my current workhorse, a late-2013 13" MacBook Pro with Retina Display (ME865LL/A), was getting its display unit replaced.

I've had really bad luck with my Macs over the years, which is why I resorted to always having a backup machine at hand, should the main device need fail on me. I also back up my machine using Time Machine for my documents and SuperDuper! for bootable images on two separate external HDDs.

Too bad that the SSD that usually does its job in the old MacBook Pro—a Crucial M4 with 256 GB—decided to have a nice little firmware failure right at the same time, forcing me to put the original 250 GB HDD back into the old Mac.

Over the next two days I was forcefully reminded how incredibly great SSDs are. Not only did the process of restoring a 192 GB backup to the old Mac take an entire night but every task that would take my current Mac a couple of seconds to perform, caused my old MacBook Pro to crawl down to a slow.

I really don't want to have to work with a HDD-only PC ever again.

I love shooting with my Fujifilm cameras.

Of course, I'm neither a professional photographer nor an amateur with professional ambitions; I just enjoy it immensely. A big part of this are the cameras I use. I have a Fujifilm X-E1 and a X-T1 and it's a pleasure taking pictures with them.

I started out with the 18-55 mm (27–82.5 mm equiv.) kit zoom, which is really good. Shooting with the XF18-55, I found out quickly that my preferred focal length was somewhere around 23 mm (35 mm equiv.), which caused me to shell out the money for the XF23mmF1.4 R only a couple of months after I bought the X-E1 and it's the lens that I shoot with most of the time.

Recently, I became interested in experimenting with different focal lengths but didn't want to shell out the € 700 it costs to get a 15 mm equiv. lens on the Fujifilms, so I did a bit of research and quickly stumbled across a good number of old lenses that, while not as objectively great as many of Fujifilm's current offerings, would allow me to try and find out which focal lengths I really like using.

The X-series cameras use an APS-sized sensor and thus have a crop factor of about 1.5, meaning that I have to multiply the focal length of any lens I put on the camera with 1.5 to find out the 35 mm equivalent focal length.
This isn't much of a matter when it comes to optics like those used for portraits, but it makes it really hard to get the super-wide-angle feel.

The solution was to use a focal length reducer, which can almost negate the crop factor of the sensor (meaning that a 20 mm lens won't be a 30 mm lens on an APS-sized sensor, but somewhere along the lines of a 21.6 mm focal length). I heard about this kind of piece of kit on Jonas Rask's site and the same article made me want to buy a Helios 44 lens. My last holiday took me to Hong Kong and one of the points on my agenda was to get the recently announced successor to the focal length reducer Jonas is using.

Now, I can't say a lot about the optical quality of the Mitakon Lens Turbo II and I suspect that it's still not as good as the original Metabones Speed Booster (the product it is based on) but you know what? It's a ton of fun! I haven't noticed any major shortcomings and the build quality is really good, much better than I'd have expected for the price.

The two lenses I use with the Lens Turbo II right now are a Helios 44M-4 2/58, an old Soviet lens with a very particular bokeh—as seen in the photo at the top of this article—and a Tokina RMC II 17 mm ƒ/3.5 ultra wide-angle lens from Japan.

I haven't had a proper chance to really put the Tokina lens through its paces, but the Helios has already seen some good use. Below are some more pictures I recently took with it during a walk.