Michael Kratz

Apple are really good at building new and innovative products, with new and innovative features!

But somehow, with everything they do, they always miss out on some of the simplest, most logical features or tools. This goes right across their product line: OS X, hardware, Apple TV, etc. Read more

I shoot photos on my Nikon D50 camera in the Adobe RGB colour space. This colour space has a wider gamut than sRGB, which is what all Digital cameras tend to default to these days. Using Adobe RGB allows my camera to record more colour than it ordinarily would if I were using sRGB.

The only annoying issue with using Adobe RGB, is that anyone looking at or using my photos in a non-colour space aware browser, program or printer will see a ‘pastey’, flat photo, becuase these ‘dumb’ programs simply assume that the image is sRGB. So whenever I upload photos to the web or send them off to other people, I need to convert them to sRGB. Read more

Discovery is yet again on-orbit (STS-120). Space walks are happening, and bits and pieces are getting shuffled around and added to the International Space Station. I’ve always enjoyed watching bits and pieces of the various shuttle missions on NASA TV, but the thing that has become annoying lately is the lack of a decent high resolution/bit rate NASA TV stream.

The streams from the NASA TV site are rather dismal and don’t come anywhere near the kind of quality one could potentially obtain over a broadband connection. It annoyed me so much, I went hunting for better quality…. Read more

I’ve been quite annoyed for a while that Apple haven’t added full support for most of the recent Nokia phones, including the E70 that I currently use.

I got even more annoyed not long ago, when, with the release of OS 10.4.9, Apple added support for the E61, yet overlooked support for the E70! These two phones are extremely similar, and both run the same version and configuration of Symbian. I was very disappointed. Until now… Read more

When Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released, it came along with a whole raft of ‘security’ enhancements. One of these was Security Center (I’m tempted to spell ‘center’ as ‘centre’ because I’m Australian. But, it’s called “Security Center” so that’s what I’ll call it).

Security Center was implemented to assist in encouraging general users into being conscious about the security of Windows and their computer. Security Center basically monitors whether Windows Automatic Updates and Windows Firewall are turned on; and whether an appropriate virus scanner with up-to-date virus definitions is installed and running.

This is a good thing, for the general masses. But for us technical folk, who know how to run Windows without Microsoft holding our collective hands, it’s a royal pain in the arse. Why? because it constantly nags you with those little Windows pop-ups (which don’t go away till you click on them) to “check your virus definitions” or “enable the Windows Firewall”, etc.

So… if you fall into this category where it has become a hindrance rather than a handy tool, here’s how to disable it. Read more

I recently upgraded the traceroute package on one of my CentOS 4.4 boxes to 1.4a12-24, along with it came an annoying bug. It was picking up the MPLS hops inside the Internode network as ICMP checksum errors.

This annoyed me, so I went hunting for a fix. Turns out that the slightly later version from Fedora Core 4 (1.4a12-26) has ICMP checksum errors disabled by default which then stops the annoying errors and allows traceroute to correctly report that it is infact a hop inside an MPLS tunnel.

So, if you’re running CentOS 4.4, and you grab the traceroute package from the fasttrack for CentOS 4.5, and this annoys you too… just grab the slightly later revision from Fedora Core 4, which can be found on RPMfind right here (x86_64 binary):

http://www.rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/fedora/4/x86_64/traceroute-1.4a12-26.x86_64.html

Are you in Sydney on Australia Day? If so, be outside! It’s highly likely you’ll get your photo taken for Google Maps!

Google Australia has organised to have an aircraft fly around part of Sydney during Australia day, taking aerial photographs of people enjoying the day.

You can find out more information, including, when the aircraft is likely to be in your area, on the information page on the Google website. Check it out here