MacBook1,1 OS X Leopard 10.5.5 slow WiFi

Thanks to this post http://blog.davenicoll.com/2008/12/04/fixed-slow-wifi-on-mac-os-x-1055/, I can now fix my slow WiFi problem in my MacBook (version 1,1--the very first intel MacBook). The problem is so annoying. Sometimes, even if I got maximum signal strength, it seemed to me that I have no WiFi connection at all (I could not even reach my WiFi configuration page in my Router).

Here's a solution I found. It is working well :)

1. Shutdown.

2. Start your MacBook and hold the "shift" key. This will result in "Safe Mode" boot in Leopard.

3. Once booted, login with your username/password.

4. Reboot, and done :)

White balance (or grey balance) correction in iPhoto 6

Point-and-click white balance correction is one of the great features in Aperture and I really want it in iPhoto. However, I did not buy Apple Aperture (whether 1 or 2) as it costs me $199 to do so.

Lucky me, today I found a blog entry at menyheard.net about white balance in iPhoto 6. He (or she) found this function accenditally. It is so simple: just hold command key while you are eiditing a photo and click any point you want to make it white. Actually, after I read the help in iPhoto 6, this function (command + click any point in the editing photo) is called "grey balance". The point that we click will be determined as "grey" (my guess is 18% grey as being used in many DSLR exposure evaluation) and then the program will adjust the picture to match your evaluation point automatically.

And that is it :)

iPhoto 6 export & its color profile problem

Whoever using iPhoto 6 in OS X may have the same problem as mine: exported pictures from iPhoto look pale in the web browser, even they're so vivid in iPhoto or Preview.

This kind of problem upset me for a while -\/-

After google around, I found that iPhoto will only export pictures with Adobe RGB profiles. Even your original images are sRGB or whatever, iPhoto (v.6) will convert and change the color profile of the images (and it will look almost exactly the same--I can't find the difference, actually). And the Adobe RGB profile is the problem for most of the web browsers.

Most web browsers, like Fire Fox and IE, image display will ignore the image's color profile, and assume that the image profile is sRGB or Generic RGB. Because of this misinterpretation of color information in the images, they'll look pale, comparing to the original images.

Holy Crap!!!

However, by googling around (again), I'd found out that an application called "ColorSync Utility" can help you out. This program can convert and change image color profile.

Woo Hoo. The problem is solved.

But (I hate this word "but"), manually changing images' profile one by one is not a good idea (tedious, kind of). New problem, again.

Fortunately, Apple's Automator has ColorSync actions :)
, and we can use this mechanism to help us automatically batch converting the image profiles.

Here's how.

I. Open the Automator application (Applications/Automator)
II. Drag these action from the left panel to the right panel (in the exact order)

1. Get Selected Finder Items
   
2. Copy Finder Items
3. Get Folder Contents
4. Apply ColorSync profile to Images

The objective of this workflow is to convert the iPhoto exported images' profile to sRGB. Then, I decided to use this work flow as a Finder plugin. The first action is to get the finder items, could be files or folders. The second action, copy finder items, is to work safely ('coz I don't want to modify the exported image directly--just in case something happened. I don't want to re-export everything again). The third one is to repeatedly obtain the content of the folders, or multiple files, one-by-one. If you work with one file, this step won't hurt you though. Finally, apply ColorSync profile to the output file from previous step.

And we're done :) The copied images in the step 2 will have sRGB profile (or other profile, depending on you to assign it).

The step 2 and step 4 has an option named "Show Action When Run". If the option was enable, you'll be able to choose the destination location and the image profile respectively.

Hope this would help :)