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I not that recently upgraded to iLife ‘08, mainly for iPhoto. I had previously been using version 5 (‘05), and there is a significent improvement. (Ed: this post has been sitting in my drafts for almost 6 months now :/)

The new events based view is a joy to use. Photos are by default grouped into “events” which last a day, although they can easily be split and merged. Each event is represented by a key photo, and skimming though the photos in an event is as simple as moving the mouse from one side of the event’s key photo to the other. Press space at any point to change the key photo, or double click to view the photos in the event in the more traditional grid view.

This UI is very easy to use, and quickly makes previous versions of iPhoto look clunky and obsolete. It is also much faster at browsing through the 9000 odd photos in my library. So much so that I have re-added most of the photos that I had removed from iPhoto 5 to speed things up. It does take 10-20 seconds to start up, but ot long enough to be noticeable

I probably don’t get the most out of the tagging/rating functionality – as I only use it for some of the photos, but I find it infinitely better than trying to find photos in a Windows Explorer or finder type environment, which I have to do at work.

I also use FlickrExporter, which lets me directly upload photos to my Flickr account—including resizing on the fly, submitting to groups and using the comments/keywords I have added in iPhoto, which is rather neat.

Nothing new in this review really, just another satisfied customer. From what I have heard the free Picassa from Google lets you do similar management, but I have not used it—as I have a mac.

While out cycling today, as I went up yet another hill, I started humming “losing my momentum” to the tune of R.E.M.’s ‘Losing my Religion’. Here’s the full set of lyrics:

Thiiiis hill, is bigger,
Is bigger than you,
Than you, had told me.
The lengths I have to go to,
The distance up the side.
Oh no, my legs are [...]

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Only a day or so late, but POP over to seemikedraw.com to see the mystery of the resurrection explained (scientifically)

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My old hard drive had been making alarming clunking noises (more than is usual) and causing the system to hang, therefore I thought it best to replace the drive.

So after making sure the Time Machine backup was up to date, I replaced the HDD, and booted the computer with the OS X DVD. I was [...]

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Courtesy of xkcd.com the definitive guide to kilobytes and kilobits…

There’s been a lot of confusion over 1024 vs 1000, kbyte vs kbit, and the capitalisation of each.

Here, at last, is a single, definitive standard:

xkcd 394 – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe

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