How to Remove EXIF Data

There are dozens of ways, and AppleSwitcher forum members Mike and Keef were nice enough to provide two.

Strip EXIF Data With Photoshop

The first is using Photoshop CS, CS2 or CS3 and Photoshop Actions:

1. Open an image
2. Go to the Actions tab and click the little right-facing triangle in the upper right and select “New Action…”… read more

Strip EXIF Data Without Photoshop

The other is 100% Photoshop-free, instead using ExifTool and Tierprogramm:

More of a pain in the ass initially than Mike’s method, but once you’re done setting it up, it’s just drag and drop. In addition, it is non-destructive to your images, unlike re-saving as a jpeg… read more

After writing a forum post about Time Machine and how it, well, simply worked for me when I needed it to, I’ve been noticing some downsides.

It’s slow at backing up over WiFi

I have a 500GB Time Capsule and a 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro. It takes forever to back up a couple gigs of data, and it slows my work down because it takes up processor and disk resources. I often do a Stop Backup from the menu. I tried a wired backup (ethernet) and found it to be perhaps 10x faster. But the layout of my home office these days is not conducive to a hardwired situation.

The interface is slow

And a little too dramatic… do we really need to fly through the Andromeda Galaxy when we need to get a document we accidentally deleted a week ago? I don’t know if that’s the speed crusher, but I can wait for a minute for the full complement of backup points to load. The interface is frozen while I wait.

It’s inflexible with backup frequency

You can choose any backup frequency you want, as long as it’s once every hour. This is too often for me (see my slowness complaint about backups over WiFi, above), but yet I’d still like an automatic backup. A week ago I switched it to manual, and I now go to the menu and select Back Up Now.

All in all I like it, but I’m crossing my fingers for fewer OS speed hits, better interface speed, and real choice with backup frequency. C’mon Apple, let’s do this.

Side-to-side or top and bottom?

What’s your layout?

How to Clean Your Canon i960 printer

When your i960 print heads are clogged and don’t respond to cleaning/deep cleaning.

LCD Displays for Designers

How to avoid the 6-bit trap.

New Apple Laptops

Tomorrow Apple hosts one of its 3X yearly product announcements, and for this one its all laptop, top to bottom.

Check back here at the official AppleSwitcher forums thread for minute-by-minute analysis on the announcements. Here’s the rumor summary:

MacBook

aluminum cases, no Firewire, still integrated graphics (but better), large trackpad, DriveCache: uses Flash storage to speed up boot times

MacBook Pro

still aluminum, MacBooks style chiclet keyboard, latchless lid like MacBook, easy RAM and drive access (THANK YOU), large trackpad

From MacRumors:

- The optical drive appears to be on the right side (when facing the laptop)
- All the ports are on the left side (when facing the laptop)
- Case does not appear to be tapered like the MacBook Air
- Power button is in the far top right corner
- Large trackpad like the MacBook Air
- Appears to be “latchless”
- No Firewire port on MacBook?

From Wired:

Both the MacBook and the MacBook Pro will be aluminum. The aluminum MacBook has been rumored since forever, and if we take the leaked shots as real, Apple is finally going all-metal in its Mac lineup.

We can also be pretty certain that the MacBook Pro will gain the chiclet-style keyboard of the Air and the stock MacBook, most likely in backlit black. Ditto the magnetic latch which holds the MacBook Pro closed that little button is so 2001. The other advantage the current MacBook has over the MBP is the easy-to-swap hard drive. Along with the RAM, the HDD is a simple five-minute slot-in replacement. Expect to see this in the Pro.

Internally we can expect some more changes. Mac Cultist Leander Kahney hopes for 4GB RAM as standard in the MBP, and two in the MacBook. He also lists integrated NVIDIA graphics in the MacBook, something that rumor site Apple Insider corroborates, claiming to have confirmed the inclusion of NVIDIAs MCP79. While this still shares the system memory, it is apparently faster and probably more important for Apple smaller than the Intel GMA950 which is currently used.

Thanks to a very helpful Apple representative, we were able to determine that the problem for my situation was with an export plug-in.

This drove me nuts until I found this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1715124

User/Library/Application Support/Aperture/Plug-Ins/Export <- move contents of that to another location, and try creating a Vault. It worked for me. Now my Aperture library can be excluded from the dumber Time Machine backup, saving lots of time. Aperture Vault backups take only the new stuff, not my whole library.