Official Google Blog: Personality goes a long way

Official Google Blog: Personality goes a long way: "Today we're releasing six themes for the personalized homepage that try to solve these challenges: a city, a teahouse (super cute -- this one is my favorite), a winter scene, a sky, a beach and a bus stop. All of our themes are dynamic: they change with your own local time of day, current weather conditions or season."

I'm all about the teahouse. Happy watercolorish animals drinking tea and eating sushi. It's also refreshing to see warmth and friendly aesthetics on a Google page.

Fixing Fotos For Flickr

I heart Connected Flow’s FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto, but one thing it does not handle well is the ICC color profiles that iPhoto adds to photos. The problem is that a photo that goes through this workflow only looks good if the app that displays it (i.e. the browser) understands the embedded color profile.

Firefox does not.

Safari does.

Internet Explorer does not.

There may be hope for Firefox eventually, but until then, things work better if you use ColorSync to convert the image to the Generic RGB profile, then upload to Flickr.

This is fairly straightforward:

1. Run ColorSync Utility (in Applications > Utilities)
2. Open the relevant image
3. In the menus down at the bottom, select “Match to Profile” and “Display > Generic RGB Profile”
4. Click “Apply”
5. Save

I went and made an Automator plug-in for the Finder’s contextual menu. It’s really easy, just two steps:

1. Finder > Get Selected Finder Items
2. Preview > Apply ColorSync Profile to Images

Though now I need to replace the seven images that I recently uploaded directly from iPhoto. Blah.

Gingerbread Carcassonne

PICT1000
Originally uploaded by zendonut.

In the grand tradition of Cupcake Catan, here is a Carcassonne game made from gingerbread.

Grogmobile Now on Grogmaster

My mobile blog is now off of Blog*Spot and available at http://mobile.grogmaster.com/, thanks to new Blogger’s latest feature, custom domains (and the resolution of a certain known issue).

Not much there, but some of it is good for a laugh.

Obligatory promo: Send an MMS to go@blogger.com to instantly make your own mobile blog! It’s easy/free/has its own theme song. Learn more.

Bookworm Adventures on Intel Mac with Parallels

Cait and I had an enjoyable evening with Bookworm Adventures. Penny Arcade’s endorsement and related comic sum up our reactions pretty well (from Tycho’s point of view, of course). Top words so far have been “malevolent,” “whitehead,” and “battening.” The Mastermind-like minigame is great fun on its own; I hope I can find it or some variant separately, because you can only play it once per life in story mode.

PopCap doesn’t have a Mac version, but Bookworm Adventures runs just fine under Parallels (sans hardware acceleration), especially with the Coherence mode from the latest beta.