Update on Kindlegen and PNG Rendering

As an example of the classic “always ensure your software is updated” mantra, I had the latest kindlegen installed, but Scrivener was pointing to an older version of kindlegen I’d installed Somewhere Else.

The specific PNG rendering bug I showed was fixed in between those two versions.

All other points remain valid, though.

So, feel free to include PNGs in your Scrivener projects. You’ll get a nasty ugly background, but at least it’ll be one that doesn’t look like a bad frame freeze of a logo from an early episode of Soul Train.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

More on the Leaked MacBook Air Rumors

Chuq von Rospach has an interesting post about the leaked MBA rumors. I’ll address this in a bit.

Additionally, someone (sorry, can’t find a link to it right now) suggested I try a 13″ Retina MacBook Pro and use it in the scaled mode to get my current resolution.

First, Someone Thought I Was Trolling When I Mentioned a Thunderbolt RAID Array on a MacBook Air

Nope, not trolling. Really have one.

(Note to self: dust the Dyson fan off before taking a pic.)

Think about it: It’s a great thing to back up to. I can wander around and use my MBA anywhere, then, when I’m ready to be at home base, I plug in the RAID array and back up.

I also use a separate Thunderbolt drive for graphics storage. This 2 Tb drive holds my photo library (~1/2Tb), my graphics library (~1/2 Tb), and larger items out of my iTunes library (e.g., movies and TV seasons).

When I just go out with my MBA, I can’t do heavy graphics work, but I still have Photoshop and my fonts. I keep current graphics projects in a directory on my MBA. When I’m done with those, they get shuffled off to a directory on the smaller Thunderbolt drive, and the changes get reflected in my RAID backup.

Chuq Asks an Interesting Question

By the way, are we really sure that’s a USB hub? Maybe Apple’s going to announce a new, thin format thunderbolt port standard instead that would allow for a smaller, thinner connector to allow for a smaller, thinner computer?

That would change everything for me.

Granted, I still think not having MagSafe power’s a problem. Chuq has some interesting commentary. Link again.

13″ Retina MBP Running at 1440×900

That’s a really great idea. It would allow me to keep the form factor I really like, but would also allow me to upgrade to 16Gb RAM and 1TB flash drive. That would solve some problems. In short, it’d be HUGE.

2.8/16/512 is $1999, a pleasant $250 more than the 13″ similarly-configured (save for CPU clock speed) of the MBA.

Sadly, I can’t figure out where this suggestion was made, possibly because I’m bleary-eyed at this hour.

Photo credit: © 2010 Rick Moen.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

A Few Tweaks on the Blog

Ice Flowers, by Thom Bouman

For people who read on deirdre.net (as opposed to tumblr, dreamwidth, livejournal, or Google+), I’ve finally made some long-overdue changes.

1. Lists (ol and li) in comments now show the list style. Because I allow Markdown in comments, you can just start bullet lists with a * on the left of each line in the list. Or 1. etc. for a numbered list.

2. Tightened up the white space in the comment area.

3. Added a thin border on the left of comments so it’s easier to track nesting of comments.

4. The Leave a Reply and other comment-related items were still black text on navy. Not very readable. Now fixed and with better padding.

I’d like to thank my former colleagues’ work on the Web Inspector as being extremely helpful to getting this done quickly.

The Comment Notification Issue

I believe I’ve addressed the outstanding comments (though, as always, sometimes I’ll respond to a comment and a reply to that comment together). If not, I really can’t spend the time to dig further on it. It’s better to spend it addressing future notifications. Hence, if I owe you a reply on a comment, I’m declaring comment bankruptcy. Sorry.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.