Ruiz-Ade.com

If you’re anything like me, you have a strong dislike for all the stupidity that surrounds the Adobe Reader (formerly known as Acrobat Reader.)

I won’t go into the details here (though this guy can explain it in great detail), but because I very occasionally need features of Adobe Reader, I still keep it installed on my Mac, while I use Preview for all my other PDF needs. I’ve gone so far as to install the Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac for when I use Firefox, just to avoid Adobe Reader. And, really, there’s no point in Adobe Reader for most cases where you just want to be able to view or print PDF files. Doubly so, since Mac OS X lets you print any document to a PDF file as a default feature of the OS.

There are, though, edge cases where having Adobe Reader installed and available are useful. So I have it installed, but I refuse to use their web plugin. Adobe doesn’t care, though, and will periodically, sometimes randomly, and sometimes even without my consent, re-install the plugin. Even though I’ve told it not to. Adobe Updater, I’m looking at you, here.

Sadly, my solution is heavy-handed. I created a launchd task that will forcibly remove the Adobe Reader plugin from /Library/Internet Plugins whenever it’s created. It’s fast, efficient, and works.

And, as soon as I can figure out the new wordpress theme, I’ll post it here in a legible form

UPDATE: Thanks to Lynne and Chad on Twitter for suggesting the Preserve Code Formatting plugin!

And now, the Launchd config. Save this as:
"/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.unnerving.RemoveAdobeReaderPlugin.plist"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>org.unnering.RemoveAdobeReaderPlugin</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>rm</string>
    <string>-rf</string>
    <string>/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin</string>
  </array>
  <key>QueueDirectories</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin</string>
  </array>
  <key>WatchPaths</key>
  <array/>
</dict>
</plist>

Apparently weblogs are not for busy people, who don’t have time to write for them more than once a quarter. It would also help if I perhaps didn’t use a weblog engine that required upgrading every month because of new security holes.

Bleh.

Dear LazyWeb:

My wife and I have something like 4000+ photos that we need to scan (at high resolution) and archive, and be able to logically manage.

My platform choice is Mac. I will likely be purchasing a Mac Mini to dedicate to this task (2GHz model). I do not want to afford a Mac Pro, as awesome as it would be to have such a powerhouse in my home. I already have an Epson 2400 scanner, and would prefer to not have to replace it.

I have no idea what software to use for the resulting photo collection. I’d like something better than simple files on the disk, and am considering either Lightroom or Aperture, even both of those seem aimed more directly at digital photography.

I would like a simple workflow, if possible, that doesn’t rely on me naming the images. Tagging and notes/comments would be required.

Can I get away with Lightroom or Aperture, and whatever scanner software I can install for my scanner? Do I need something different?

Can Lightroom or Aperture store images on an external disk (which may not always be connected?) I’ve got plenty of storage already on my home network.

UPDATE:

Hardware will likely end up being a new 13″ MacBook, instead of a Mac Mini, as my wife needs a replacement for her iBook anyway, and the new MacBook has way more power than the mini. This definitely necessitates the ability to store all the images on external storage, ideally via a network (SMB/CIFS) share.

So, yeah, this is probably old news to everyone else, but I’m late to the party, as usual. I finally tripped over two menu options in the History menu of Safari that I had not previously noticed.

The first is “Reopen Last Closed Window.” This is very useful.

The second is “Reopen All Windows From Last Session.” This takes care of my biggest concern regarding session restore.

So I guess maybe a “Reopen Last Closed Tab” option might be about all I could add to that to be truly complete.

I do still look with great envy at Firefox’s extensions system, particularly for Adblock Plus, FlashBlock and NoScript.

It’s been about a week and a half since Apple release the last batch of updates for OS X, including the latest version of Safari. In the interests of keeping up to date with security updates, I went ahead and updated. I did my research first, though, and uninstalled Saft before the attempt (there were some who had problems with InputManagers installed during the upgrade.)

I was happy to discover, this evening, that Saft had been updated to support the latest version of Safari. Despite my general revulsion for running InputManager-based hacks (let alone other system behavior modification software, like Haxies, that hook in even deeper to the system), Saft offers a subset of functionality that I simply don’t like doing without. A couple of the features, I feel, really should be integrated into Safari proper.

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