Ever meet two kids who were great by themselves, but became absolute terrors when you put them together?

That’s how I feel about Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Spaces feature. Spaces are awesome, and Office 2008 is far better than the 2004 version, but they both have a lot of growing up to do.

Other apps (such as Firefox) have had trouble adapting to Spaces, but they’re slowly coming around as updates are released. Microsoft had better get us an update, and quick. Here’s why.

I haven’t used PowerPoint enough to know if it’s a problem, and Entourage seems very well-behaved, but Word and Excel documents never seem to stay in the same window.

I have Word set to open in Space 1, and Excel in Space 4 (in a 3×3 grid of 9 Spaces, like this):

I switch between apps using CMD+TAB, which changes spaces if needed to show me the app I select. Without warning, Word or Excel documents will randomly move to another Space, usually #2 or #5. #5 is the center of the Spaces layout, where I keep Firefox and spend most of my time. Oddly, though, only one window will move. Worse, it will hide behind other open windows, even those I haven’t switched to in a long time. Often, just one Word document will find a new place to hide, or my Excel spreadsheet will move to another space, yet all the toolbars will remain in Space 4 (or vice-versa - the toolbars move and the document stays put).

So far, the best way I’ve found to deal with this is to activate hot corners for both Exposé and Spaces. To find my missing window, I activate the Spaces view (shown in the screenshot above), then go to the hot corner for Exposé. This Exposés the windows from within the Spaces view, so you can see every window open in every space (though they’re very small thumbnails if you have a lot open).

(image via Wikimedia Commons)

Click and drag an app into the correct Space, then exit Spaces view, and you’re done. Until it happens again.

Microsoft, it’d be awesome if you fixed this problem so we don’t have to resort to search-and-rescue like this.

I’m shutting down Geektronica.com, so I’ve moved my posts from that blog to this blog. Enjoy!

One of the coolest things Daniel showed me when he got his MacBook Pro last year was how to organize photos using Aperture. When I switched to Mac in August, one of the first programs I bought was Aperture, and I immediately imported all of my old digital photos, which date back to 1998 (thanks, hard drives, for never crashing!).

Aperture is much more sophisticated that iPhoto, Picasa, or a simple tree of nested folders, and as such it was easy for me to make a few beginner’s mistakes when importing my photos. First, I turned a lot of folders into projects, without understanding that projects can’t be nested. Then today, when organizing, I moved a lot of photos from separate projects to one project without maintaining their organization. To explain this, I’ll have to introduce some Aperture-specific terminology.

First, there are two kinds of images: masters and versions. Masters are the originals; versions are, well, versions of masters to which you’ve made adjustments. You don’t make adjustments to the master (this is called non-destructive editing), so everything is reversible. A version is a copy of the master to which you can make changes.

Second, there are two kinds of masters: managed images and referenced images. A managed image is stored within the Aperture database; a referenced image is stored as a flat file. You can access referenced images through Finder and other programs; you can only work with managed images through Aperture. However, it’s faster and easier to use managed images, so that’s what I did.

So those are the four terms for the images (masters and versions; managed and referenced masters). Now let’s talk about organization.

As you might expect, Aperture supports several organizational formats, including:

• Projects
• Folders
• Albums
• Smart Albums

Projects are collections of up to 10,000 photos, and are intended to correspond to a photo shoot or commissioned project (e.g. a wedding a photographer has been hired to shoot). For a non-pro like me, it’s not obvious how to best use projects. I’d prefer to have just one, and use albums and folders for organization, but I have more than 10,000 photos, so that won’t work.

A few other constraints:

• Projects can contain folders, albums, photos, and so forth, but they can’t contain other projects - in other words, projects can’t be nested
• I want to move the projects I don’t use very often onto an external hard drive, to free up disk space on my laptop

My first mistake was to create far too many projects, without a clear way of organizing them. My photos had been in nested folders, e.g. /2006/02-10 Road Trip/
This would correspond to a road trip from February 10, 2006.

I converted all of these folders to projects, but this destroyed the nested structure since projects can’t contain other projects, so many are orphaned or have no obvious date.

On top of that, many of the photos have inaccurate date stamps. The EXIF metadata was either altered by Picasa (or some other photo management tool I used at some point) or was initially wrong because the camera date wasn’t set right. Too bad Aperture 1.5 doesn’t allow you to change the date stamp (I hear 2.0 does, but it’s $199 to upgrade/switch).

That’s only considering the photos. I also have tons of graphics I downloaded or created for various websites along the way, which have little to no usable metadata.

So here’s what I’m doing to clean up this 30,000-photo mess:

• Creating a folder for each year, 1998 to 2008
• Creating a single project for each year, and putting it in the year folder
• Moving all of the photos for a given year into the project for that year (note: this is necessary because master photos can’t be stored in just a folder - they have to be in a project)
• Deleting all of the empty projects left after the previous step
• Creating albums to organize photos by event - for example, I can create a “Christmas 2007″ album in my “2007″ folder that contains photos from both the 2007 and 2008 projects, in case I took any photos on the same trip but after Dec 31.

This was easy for the early years, in which I only had a couple dozen or hundred photos. But for the past few years, we’ve taken several thousand photos a year, and there are dozens of projects containing these photos. However, they’re also better organized as you get closer to the present.

Some general reflections on organizing pictures:

• Organizing into folders strictly by date is pretty much useless, since a single trip can be split across multiple folders if it spans the end of one year and the start of the next. We always take tons of pictures over Christmas/New Year’s, so this happens a lot.
• Our trips often have multiple phases, and we don’t want the pictures together. For example, we visited family on the way back from San Francisco. Baby pictures and sightseeing pictures don’t go together.
• I want a big timeline view so I can scroll through all my pictures by date and find the ones I want. I can then create an album of just these pictures - not all the ones taken around the same time - for easy reference later.
• I’d prefer not to have to use projects in Aperture, but it’s a nice way to chunk the photos for backup and archiving purposes. And it’s the price of using a professional tool for non-pro purposes.

I think I’ll avoid creating excess projects from now on, and just use one per year (unless I get over 10,000 pictures in one year). Albums and smart albums can do the rest.

Smart albums are cool because they allow you to search based on metadata, and they’re updated any time new photos match the criteria set for that smart album.

I may edit the above as I get more clarity on what I’m doing. Feel free to chime in if you have thoughts on organizing your growing collection of photos.

This blog is five years old this month. It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been keeping this blog for nearly my entire adult life, and I have no intention of ever shutting it down. It’s also been a pleasure to have friends (Aaron, Daniel) join me in posting here as they are able.

Blog Stats

According to my WordPress dashboard, there are currently 1,837 posts and 6,599 comments, contained within 46 categories (some of which I don’t really use much). Akismet has protected this site from 208,670 spam comments, though it’s only been active since late 2005, so I’ve probably received quite a bit more than that. Comment IDs are in the 178000 range now, and I think that’s because previous anti-spam plugins I used gave an ID to potential spam comments, but Akismet does not (or else the IDs would be well over 215,000). Also keep in mind that this site has only been powered by WordPress since mid-2004; before that, I used Blogger Pro (and have the hoodie from when Google bought them to prove it) and Movable Type 2.x.

I don’t like “best of” posts, so I won’t do one, but I’d just like to thank you for being a part of this journey.

As you may have noticed, I don’t update this site anywhere close to daily, so you might want to subscribe to the email updates (see sidebar widget thing) or the RSS feed. There are also category RSS feeds if you’d prefer to follow only some of my topics.

Here’s to five more years.

David Pogue of the New York Times got his hands on the “$100 laptop,” now known as the XO (which I recently blogged about when I found out they go on sale in the US in November), and has his review video up on YouTube.

Link to YouTube video

Among the awesomenesses:

• Mesh networking
• Six-hour battery life
• Designed to be hackable, with a system restore button
• Waterproof, dustproof, and shock-resistant

You have to see Pogue drop the XO on a rock, then pick it right back up and keep using it. Not a scratch.

Will this change the world? I think so.

My school had an assembly on Friday featuring Sister Schools, a local organization that takes clothing and school supplies to students in Africa. The presentation made it clear that there are plenty of schools around the world where the students do not get even one book each - in many schools, they don’t have any materials at all. Students learn by watching and listening, not by reading or doing. In many schools, the teachers paint illustrations from their books on the walls of the school so students can see.

As I commented to someone recently, schools in the US are still paying a fortune every year for information and paper (aka textbooks) when the former is now free and the latter is obsolete. An open platform like the XO could change everything.

XOGiving.org

The “$100 Laptop Project,” formally known as One Laptop Per Child, has long been the holy grail of educational technology for the developing world. Led by Nicholas Negroponte, the project aims to get a laptop into the hands of every child in the developing world.

As specs for these rugged machines became public - hand-crank power, self-networking wifi - people in the developed world started to drool at the $100 price tag; alas, you had to be a government and buy a million of them to qualify. Until now.

OLPC just announced that, starting November 12, you will be able to purchase one of the green machines for yourself for $399. This also pays for a 2nd laptop, to be given to a child in the developing world. The price is, obviously, not at the $100 mark yet, but they’re working on it.

This strategy is incalculably brilliant. We can have something we want (and hey, Americans want a lot of stuff) while paying for someone in the third world to have something they need. It’s not unlike my proposal for the 100% self-tax.

You can sign up for an email reminder now at xogiving.org, and buy two laptops this Christmas. Along with Kiva, this might be the way to give this holiday season.

If you haven’t signed up for Twitter, and you are my friend, I’m putting you on notice. Sign up!

What is Twitter, you say? It’s like LiveJournal, only shorter, and with less melodrama. Officially, Twitter is:

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web! Twitter.com

You can post from your phone via TXT (and receive updates from friends that way, too). Posts are limited to 160 characters, so you can say what you’re doing without elaborating.

Right now, I’m getting updates from Pat, Amy, and H.

Twitter is not really a social networking site; in fact, it’s very hard to find people you know; you generally need to know their username in order to find them, so it’s more like social blogging in short form (as I said, like a very condensed LiveJournal). Mine is, predictably, justinbaeder, and my updates are friends-only, for privacy reasons.

If you don’t believe me that it’s interesting, check out this article on Twitter in Wired Magazine, which should convince you to try it.

From your phone, you can go to m.twitter.com instead of using text messages if you prefer. Be prepared to pay for text messages or data if you access it via phone - it will become addictive. But you can just as easily post from the web, so no cell required (I’m looking at you, Lukas and Daniel).

And it’s not Facebook or MySpace. Really. You can be a grown-up and use Twitter :).

I’m planning to shut down EmergentNo.com. Any objections? I’m shutting down my servers (this site has already been migrated to MediaTemple) and don’t really feel like keeping E-No.

Any objections? Bob?