Lightroom temp files

Lightroom stores its previews in '.lrdata' folders. You can turn on an option telling lightroom to delete previews after 30days. I however use a lightroom catalogue for each shoot which means some catalouge are not opened for a really long time so the previews never get deleted.

to find the files and the space they take you can just run these commands.
$ cd ~/Pictures
$ find . -iname "*.lrdata" | xargs -I{} du -sh {}

To Remove the files
$ cd ~/Pictures
$ find . -iname "*.lrdata" | xargs -I{} rm -r {}

I worte a small ruby script to help me do this:
lightroom_remove_previews.rb.

It has a hradcoded path to my Pictures folder so you would have to modify that. When calling the script it has 2 main options, --report and --remove, which call the the two main commands described above.

Regular Expressions Backreference (Grouping)

One of my favourite features of regular expressions is backreferencing, I always think it is called grouping though.

Simply place () round brackets around part of the expression your interested in and use \1 backslash one to reference the first group. \2 for the second.

For example to strip every thing but the information you want out of a file belonging to a tv series.
Match: (.*)[-. ](S\d\d)-(EP\d\d).*
Replace with : \1-\2-\3

The notation used in the expression:
. :Any Character
* :0 or more of previous character (.* will match anything)
[] :Match any charater in the set (- only works as a literal if it is first)
\d :Match one Decimal number

http://www.regular-expressions.info/brackets.html

Adobe Lightrrom 2.5 Update

The latest Update for lightroom 2 is available (LR2.5):

Lightroom 2.5 Direct Download
Standard download link

New NTFS driver for Mac OS X

There is a recent driver out for Read/Write support of NTFS drives under Mac OS X.
Download

There is now an NTFS-3G item in the system preferences. I would recommending unchecking the "File system Caching enabling". This with disk caching the mutliple read writes to the same data can be much faster but can corrupt the disk if the buffer is not flushed before removal. Ejecting or unmounting the disc is the way you tell the computer you want to flush the buffers and remove the disk. BUT I occasionally forget to do this for external discs and I dont want to lose all my data. On the plus side I do not work (edit data) on external discs just transfer/Archive data or play/read files so I do not see any performance loss.

The new driver also has a force button for when windows did not shut it disc down correctly. So you can force OS X to load the disc any way, this was a real pain in my old version of the driver.

Release Notes Updates can be found here:
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

Find Out Ubuntu Version Name

To find out your Ubuntu version name just run:

$ cat /etc/lsb-release

Drobo & Drobo Share £356

Just saw this on Amazon and think it is a great price for the device.
Drobo + DroboShare (Network Attach) £356

The Drobo is a 4 Drive bay raid system (1 Disk redundancy) that automagically adds new/bigger drives into the system. As long as you only replace one drive at a time. The Drobo Share adds NAS, takes the Drobos usb interface and makes the drive avaliable on the Network.

I still think the Drobo Pro version will be much better investment in the long term as it has 8 bays and can do double disk redundancy but does cost £970 with out drives and is not NAS (Network Attached Storage)

Make Audiobooks

I have recently got some audiobook CDs and have been looking for the best way to convert them for use with iPods. iTunes (Apple) have defined a special format for Audiobooks, it is the *.m4b format. It is really just the m4a format but with last a for audio changed to b for books. This Format uses AAC, quite superior compared to the mp3 codec but not as portable.

When imported the m4b format should automatically be set to book-markable or remember position. When listening to music you normally want to start at the beginning of the song, when listening to a book you normally want to start from exactly the same position you left off.

I found the best method for me is to convert all CDs into Wave files, as the best tool available rencodes into the AAC format and you do not want to do lossy conversion more than once as the audio quality will degrade. Once you have got all your wave files together I recommend using Audiobook Builder ($10 paypal, then auto-email codes to you).

With Audio Book builder I normally change the genre to 'Audiobook', search amazon for an image of the book cover and have to add the year manually in itunes, itunes does then update the file.

[Note added 03/03/2010]
Audiobook Maker does not look like it is compatible with Snow Leopard
[/Note]
If you already have a bunch of MP3s this tool is free Audiobook Maker (only imports MP3s) and then converts to m4b, but you are doing conversion to mp3 then to aac so you get two types of conversion loss, probably do not notice with speech though.

Quicktime X playing avi

I have just installed DivX 7 (thought they were upto 10 but never mind) on OS X Snow Leopard and it seems to have given me all the codecs to play DivX XviD encoded media. This did not work last time I tried. The trim function in the new quicktime even works although have to export to either .mov or .m4v.

http://www.divx.com/en/mac

NB: I still recommend VLC as the best player for Mac OS X

Omni Disk Sweeper

Just tried Omni Disk Sweeper for identifying large files eating up my disk space. It is very easy to use and just spotted 20Gigs of file I do not need and had forgotten all about.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/