Basically, I wanted to grab some screen shots for a tutorial piece on how to capture screen shots on a Mac. So I wanted to shoot some screen shots which would actually capture pictures of the different cursor shapes you get — the cross-hairs, the little camera, and so on — while you’re capturing.

As is often the case on the Mac, this seemingly difficult task turned out to be dead easy. There’s a full command line interface for capturing screenshots that comes with OS X — I guess it may be what the GUI uses “under the hood” — and not only is it easy to use, but you can also capture cursors with it.

The command is “screencapture”, and it comes with many fine options, as you can tell if you run it with screencapture -h. There’s a full manpage available too, i.e. man screencapture.

Here’s the example I used to grab this shot:

screencapture -T5 -C test.png

The -T5 delays for five seconds — giving me time to trigger the GUI’s built-in screen shot facility and get the little camera cursor up on the screen — the -C tells it to capture the cursor as well as the screen, and the file name tells it where to save. If you have two screens and want to capture them both, just provide both file names.

There’s a ton of other options for kicking off different capture methods, changing the output file format, and so on. And this is all delightfully scriptable, of course. I’m sure this’ll come in handy for me at some point in the future, so I figured it was worth blogging in case it gives anyone else some ideas…

If you know me, or are simple feeling particularly charitable, I’d love it if you could nip over to my Just Giving page and sponsor me

Thanks!

Note: The FP8 has now been superseded by the FP1, FP2 and FP3 cameras, which are similar, but with a higher megapixel count, and — more important to me — a sliding lens cover. The FP3 also has a touch-to-focus touchscreen display, which should be interesting…

Introduction

My old Konica-Minolta DiMAGE X60 served me well for years. Recently, though, its soft-edged lens, fading battery life, low pixel count (not that higher is always better, of course) and poor video performance had me looking for a replacement.

When I saw the new DMC-FP8 appear in Panasonic’s Lumix range, it jumped to the top of my list. Despite Panasonic’s claims of a “futuristic design”, it looks very similar to my much-loved DiMAGE. They’re both small, flat-fronted cameras — more on how they manage that later — and the FP8 is even available in the same smart red as my old DiMAGE.

My FP8 arrived on Wednesday, so I thought I’d post an initial review, as FP8 reviews seem few and far between at the moment.

What I Wanted

My main camera is a digital SLR, the Canon EOS 400D (or Digital Rebel XTi if you’re in the US.) SLR owners looking for a compact often buy at the top end of the market. They choose mini-marvels like the Canon G10 or Panasonic’s own LX3, compact cameras that shoot RAW, have full manual control, and big lenses.

But that’s not what I was looking for. Too big, too complicated, and, at around £400, too expensive. As my secondary camera I want a simple, cheap-ish camera that I can slip into a shirt pocket. A camera for when I don’t think I’ll be doing much photography, but where it’d be nice to have something with me if I turn out to be wrong.

First Impressions

As far as look and feel goes, the FP8 seems to fit the bill. The camera looks stunning — although less so from the back than the front. The all-metal, two-texture front looks classy and feels sturdy, but turn the camera over and the black plastic rear lets it down a little. It doesn’t feel quite as strong as my old DiMAGE.

On the other hand, the all-metal DiMAGE had a reputation for strength and build quality, and I don’t think the FP8 is any less well built than most modern compacts. The plastic seems to be of good quality, the battery/card compartment door has a sliding lock with a positive “click”, and the buttons feel okay in operation.

Taking up most of the back is a large, clear LCD screen and a set of well-laid-out controls. The buttons glow in a nice blue colour when active — not useful, really, but it looks cool.

Folding Optics

The striking difference between the FP8 and most compacts is on the front of the camera, though. Sitting quietly in the top right-hand corner of the camera, the Leica-branded lens is small, and virtually flush with the case. Although the camera has 4.6X optical zoom, you won’t see the lens move while you’re zooming.

This is because the FP8 uses “folding optics”. The lens is mounted at 90° to the usual position, entirely inside the camera, along the length or width rather than facing forwards. A prism reflects the light from the external front element of the lens down into the main optics.
So, the FP8 has no protruding “nose”, and it slips into a pocket with supreme ease.

Lens Cover

On the other hand, to me there seems to be one key element missing. My old DiMAGE had a built-in lens cover. A nice, chunky metal sliding cover that protected the lens and acted as the on/off switch for the camera.

On the FP8, though, there’s no lens cover at all. The camera doesn’t come with so much as one of those little cloth bags — so if you’re worried about scratching the lens, or getting fingerprints on it, you’re going to have to invest in a case.

It seems strange to go to the trouble of designing a slimline camera with folding optics, and not add a lens cover. What’s the point of a skinny camera if you have to stuff it in a fattening case to protect its lens?

In Use

But, enough of the bad, and onto the good.

Startup time is excellent. Panasonic quotes a 0.95-second start speed. Slide the “on” switch into position and you’re ready to start shooting by the time you’ve got the FP8 held out in front of you.

Focusing

Focusing is fast and accurate. With the camera off, if I point it at something, hold the shutter button down and turn the camera on, the FP8 starts up, focuses and shoots in less than two seconds. The speed is great for those moments when you see something that you’ve just got to shoot — that always seem to happen when your camera’s in your pocket.

In normal operation, shutter lag is minimal — from pressing the shutter to the shot being taken isn’t DSLR fast, but it is respectably quick for a compact.

I’ve also been impressed with the AF Tracking mode — you can “lock on” to a subject, and the camera will intelligently track it all the time it’s visible, trying to keep it in focus. I first tested it from a moving ferry, focusing on a BMX biker on the harbourside. Locking on to his bike, the focus tracking square followed him along the shoreline, and even moved up to track his head when he was partially obscured by a moored boat, dropping back down to the bike when he emerged from the other side. Spooky.

The FP8 has both face-detection and face-recognition technology. Apparently it doesn’t just find faces in photos to choose focus points — which it does just fine — but it will also “learn” your friend’s faces over time, and give them priority in group shots. I’ve not taken enough photos for this to start kicking in yet, though. Sounds like a bit of a gimmick, if I’m honest.

Picture Quality

This being my first few days with the camera, I spent most of my time in its “Intelligent Auto” mode. And this does what it says on the tin, being quite smart about the choices it makes.

Outdoors

Outdoors, in good light, the FP8 is undeniably a good camera. Taking it for a walk along Bristol’s harbour on an overcast morning, it did well, shooting quickly, exposing correctly, and producing faithful colour. No big over-saturation problems, unlike some compacts, as you can see from the red, green and blue in these shots (click through to view/download the full-size originals.)

Zoom

The FP8’s 4.6x zoom will take you from the 28mm wide up to 128mm (35mm equivalent focal lengths.) In good light, images are clear and crisp across the entire lens, including into the corners. This is pretty impressive for a folding optics system. Folding optics have a reputation for soft edges.

Here are two shots of Bristol’s Colston Tower, one at widest angle, and one fully zoomed, to give you an idea of the range.

Here’s a crop from that last, zoomed image, showing the sharpness of detail at full optical zoom. Not bad.

If you want to check out the detail across the whole lens, here’s a full-zoom shot of a brick building filling most of the frame. You can click through to the full size and check out the detail for yourself.

Personally, I’m very impressed with the cross-frame clarity Panasonic have dragged out of their folding optics, and I can see why Leica were happy enough to stamp their name on this lens.

Macro

At the other extreme, there’s macro mode. Macro results, especially handheld, are pretty creditable. This is a crop of the very first macro shot I took with the FP8. Nice fine detail, pleasant colours, sensible depth of field.

Low light

In lower light, though, results are more mixed. With the FP8 cramming 12 million pixels onto a tiny sensor, there’s a lot of noise visible.
Here’s detail of the Colston Tower at full zoom again, this time at ISO 400, a little later on in the evening. The Leica lens and image stabilisation still give the sensor a nice sharp image, but the sensor noise/JPEG artefacting are quite nasty, making the overall picture look blurred and lacking in contrast. Click through to see what I mean.

Moving indoors and forcing the flash off, I give the FP8 a really tough test — a subject in a dark restaurant in front of a bright bar. Ramping up to 400 ISO again, the FP8 doesn’t do a terrible job, although it could have done better in exposing for Amanda’s face, bearing in mind that the face detection found it without a problem.

If you look at the full-size version, though, you’ll see the noise that’s a direct result of the megapixel war — too many pixels, too few photons, and a low signal-to-noise ratio from the sensor.

Focusing performance, at least, remains excellent in low light. A focus-assist lamp kicks in if the FP8 is having trouble seeing what you’re aiming at.

I’ve not had a chance yet to try out the High Sensitivity mode, which reduces resolution while allowing the ISO to bump up all the way to 6400.

Flash

Happily, though, the FP8’s flash works better than I expected. With the flash sitting right next to the lens, I’d expected a lot of redeye with every shot. However, the FP8 has both a pre-flash for iris contraction, and a digital red-eye reduction system, presumably helped out by the face recognition.

Turning the flash on and re-taking the shot, the results improve. It’s by no means perfect — there’s the “whited out” look of most onboard flash shots — but Amanda’s face is well-exposed, and while you can detect a hint of red-eye, it’s not one of the awful demon stares foisted on us by some cameras.

Fundamentally, if you want to take fantastic photos in a dark restaurant, then go spend a lot of money on a DSLR with a nice fast lens, or a good external flash. No cheap, tiny compact will be great in light this low.

Shooting Modes

It’s not all bad news in low light, though, as I found when I moved out of Intelligent Auto mode and started start playing with some of the FP8’s scene shooting modes.

The FP8 has rather more shooting modes than you could shake a stick at — in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a specific mode for taking photos of someone shaking a stick.

Night scenery

Lacking a party, two babies, snow, or a pet, I started out with what I had available — “Night Scenery”. The Night Scenery mode assumes you’re using a tripod, or at least resting the camera on something, and keeps the ISO down to minimise noise, while extending the shutter speed. This photo is of the A4 Portway in Bristol, looking out toward the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It’s come pretty much straight out of the camera.

I was impressed at the combination of sharpness and lack of noise. Again, click through for the full-res image.

The camera’s two-second timer mode comes in handy for night shots — just enough time to get your hands off and leave the camera to settle down before it shoots. The two-second mode is in addition to the standard ten-second mode for self-portraits.

Panorama Assist

Next I tried Panorama Assist. The FP8 can’t create panoramas in camera, but Panorama Assist gives you the best chance of taking photos that will stitch together in the camera’s supplied software when you get back home.

Panorama Assist gives you a choice of how you want to shoot your scene — left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, or bottom-to-top. It then locks the white balance and exposure settings for the duration of your shooting, and gives you a handy reference for each shot. One edge of your last shot is overlayed on the viewfinder for your next shot, so you can accurately line up and overlap each photo of the panorama.

Using Panorama Assist to take three shots of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, I used the Mac software that came with the camera (PC version also supplied) to stitch them together. It did a one-click job of auto-stitching the shots together into this panorama of the bridge, with no obvious artefacts.

Film Grain

There are a few “artistic” modes, too. While I’d rather capture a standard shot with the camera and post-process to get my effects, I did at least have some fun playing with the Film Grain mode. It won’t instantly turn you into a Cartier-Bresson, but it could be good for someone who wants to do a bit of playing without dragging out image editing software.

Features and Interface

In use, the camera is friendly, with its limited number of buttons intelligently laid out and fairly intuitive in use.

There’s a single button, near the shutter button, to invoke Intelligent Auto mode, meaning that you can be playing with the settings to your heart’s content, and still quickly drop back into full auto.

You can also pre-select a particular scene mode to make “your” scene mode, giving quick access without digging through the menus.

In “Normal Picture” mode, you get quite a lot of control of the camera features, shooting mode, focus mode, white balance, ISO, etc. In this mode the four “joystick” buttons give you quick access to flash control, exposure compensation (up to +/-2EV), exposure bracketing (nice to see on a compact), self-timer settings and macro mode.

Putting the exposure compensation and flash override on such easy access buttons is a smart move; these are the settings you end up using most often.

In “Intelligent auto” mode, the joystick buttons give you quick access to the AF tracking facility, allowing you to lock onto moving objects quickly and easily.

I like the “quick menu” button, too — it sits in the bottom right-hand corner of the button cluster, and accesses a host of settings, depending on the mode you’re in. It does just what it claims; it’s quick to use, and the menu it brings up is well laid out, with the features in a sensible order.

The way the FP8 remembers its settings seems thoughtfully designed, too. If you force the flash off in Normal Picture mode, it associates that choice with that setting — you can drop back into Intelligent Auto mode at the touch of the iA button, to take a picture in full auto with the flash on, then drop back into Normal exactly as you were before, with the flash off.

The other control settings are mode-sensitive too, and this works well, allowing you to build up a couple of different sets of settings and switch between them with ease.

Video

Increasingly common on compacts is the ability to shoot HD video, and the FP8 is no exception. It’ll shoot 720p at 30fps. I’ve not explored this much, but I’ve shot a couple of quick videos and the quality is good.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP8 Test from Matt Gibson on Vimeo.

Image stabilisation works in video mode, too, which is almost an essential feature on a handheld HD camera — they tend to pick up every little tremor.

Zooming while shooting works fine, although you don’t get to choose the speed of zoom. I haven’t noticed any focusing problems, either.

Conclusion

This is a camera capable of taking excellent photos. Within four days of owning the camera, this shot of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, taking during my morning jog, had ended up on the front page of Flickr’s Explore, which is a rare accolade for a photo. While Explore isn’t based on technical image quality, a picture has to get through some tough pictorial competition, often from high-end DSLR shots, to make the grade.

The point here, though, is that I would never take my SLR out with me for a jog. The FP8 is small and light enough to shove in a pocket and forget about until I see a nice view. In the words of Chase Jarvis, the best camera is the one you have with you.

All in all, the Lumix DMC-FP8 is a good camera in a small, elegant package, available for below £200 in the UK. I have few reservations in recommending it. If you’re looking for an exceptionally portable compact that can produce great photos with little fuss, especially if you shoot more outdoors than in, then put this camera on your shortlist.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Crisp Leica-branded lens
• Small size with folding optics
• Very fast startup and focusing
• Fine results in good light
• Exposure bracketing (+/-1EV)
• Good image stabilisation
• Excellent colour reproduction
• Easy to use, with well-thought out modes and menus
• HD video

Cons

• No lens cover makes it less pocketable
• Mediocre, noisy low-light performance
• No RAW shooting mode

So, according to the marketing hype, Snow Leopard should be a no-brainer for me. It’s better, it’s faster, and it’s cheap! It’s not as cheap in the UK, of course, as it is in the US; these things never bloody are, but that’s beside the point.

Until you start doing a little bit of research that goes beyond the marketing hype, that is. The handy wikidot-hosted Snow Leopard Compatibility page points out a lot of flies in my potential ointment.

I generally keep fairly up-to-date with my apps, especially those that offer in-app automatic updates, or anything I use regularly. Nevertheless, a quick scout through the list tells me that I’m likely to have problems with Parallels, Quicksilver, Perian, Flip4Mac, Caffeine, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Gears, Growl, Lightroom, Magical, RapidWeaver, XMarks for Safari, and Google Sketchup.

And that’s just the applications I’ve used within the last couple of weeks. I use many of these daily.

And when I say “problems”, this ranges from “minor issues” to “Just Plain Won’t Work”. And it looks like the issues can be pretty severe, if Merlin Mann’s recent experiences are anything to go by. (More on Merlin’s irritations here).

Looking deeper into compatibility, it seems that Parallels don’t have any plans to fix Parallels 3 so it works in Snow Leopard. They’ve got a “special offer” on this month to encourage upgrades, but that’s still £24.99, plus an extra £5.62 for the “Extended Download for Parallels Desktop 4.0″ that they kindly auto-add to your shopping cart (including 19% sales tax for UK customers buying in pounds from their UK site, for some unknown reason.) So that’s £30.61, more than the cost of Snow Leopard itself. For something I use about once every two months, when I need to test a web page in Internet Explorer. Looks like I’ll have to ditch that and go dual-boot instead.

Add to this the new annoyances that I can see creeping in — I see that useful things in QuickTime Pro have been disappeared from QuickTime X (I used the “Open Image Sequence” feature to create an animation just the other day), meaning you’ve got to have them both around. This reminds me of the irritating days of the new iMovie, where you’d have to do half your work in one and the other half in the other, depending on what feature you wanted to use at the time. Plus I’ve seen people disliking what they’ve done with Exposé (I don’t think I’ll like it all neatly aligned to a grid, either) and a few additional pointless animations.

And what’s on the plus side? Erm. Well, I’m not quite sure. There’s lots of things on the feature list, but none of them are particularly impressive. Okay, having 7Gb of disk space back will be nice, but only when I’ve used up the other few hundred gigabytes I’ve got spare. Exchange support? Sounds like an extra quarter gigabyte they could have shaved off for me. Safari 4? Already got it. And 64 bits? Something tells me my Core Duo iMac won’t be taking much advantage of that…

It looks like Rogue Amoeba’s venerable SoundSource menubar app has been replaced by built-in functionality (those with Snow Leopard, try Option-clicking on the speaker icon in the menubar!), but that’s the only plus I can see, and it doesn’t actually gain me anything. SoundSource is free.

It seems to be all flies and no ointment. So, unlike last time, I’ve managed to resist pushing the “One-Day 1-Click” button on Amazon for several days after an OS X release. And I think I’m going to keep on resisting for some time.

It’s been a while since I blogged properly here. I’ve mostly been concentrating on less geeky areas in my life, like photography and getting a bit fitter. In fact, most of my recent blogging has been about my attempt to get fit using my friend Ben’s iPhone App, Get Running, and I’m doing that over on Matt Gets Running.

I’m going to make an effort to post a bit more here, though, maybe random posts of some of the design work I’m doing, maybe a bit about all the tools and habits I use in my personal approach to Getting Things Done, which someone mentioned might be interesting. Or maybe just a bit about how I use Adobe’s Lightroom, which might be interesting to anyone interested in my workflow. Not that I claim that my workflow’s particularly good, but it’s interesting to see how different people use Lightroom in different ways.

So, yes, just to let you know I’m still alive, and that there may be a bit more blogging coming your way. Any suggestions for subjects welcome!

I got a hint of trouble when my normal overnight email of my task “hotlist” wasn’t waiting in my Inbox this morning, and a quick visit to Toodledo’s site confirmed that there was indeed a problem.

Instead of the normal, pleasant Toodledo interface, there was a single paragraph of stark text (and I mean text; it wasn’t even HTML!):

So, here's the story. A big storm went through the city where our datacenter is located. The datacenter decided to proactively switch to generators. During the switch, something got screwed up, and the power went off for a few minutes. As (bad) luck would have it, this caused our database to get corrupted. We are currently working to bring it back online and restored from the live backup. The crack team at Rackspace is on the job. Thanks Rackspace! Unfortunately, the database is so large, that it will take some time to transfer and verify all the data. Hopefully not more than a few hours. We know that this is very bad, and we apologize for any inconvenience that this will cause. Please check the forums when we are back online for a full report.

Ouch. So, my 600+ item to-do list was unavailable, and who knew when it would be back? Slightly annoying, but it didn’t trouble me greatly, because I chose Toodledo with this kind of thing in mind, and took responsibility for my data.

When I moved to Toodledo at the beginning of the year, I migrated from a previous to-do list service that had lost my confidence. I won’t mention who they were, but they were clearly very small — I often got the feeling that I was their only customer, often the first to spot things that were broken. They had occasional episodes of downtime, too.

Also, because I moved at the beginning of the year, the sticky fate of ma.gnolia.com, the social bookmarking website, was in my head.

With ma.gnolia, you could store all your bookmarks in “the cloud”. Unfortunately, in ma.gnolia’s case, one day their fluffy cloud got stuck through a wringer of database corruption and faulty backup strategies, and was never seen again. It was all gone; every bookmark in ma.gnolia’s database was utterly lost (see this episode of Citizen Garden podcast for more details.)

So, when I was looking to move my to-do list, I didn’t just look at Toodledo’s shiny features, like its graphing or its AJAX-y interface or its web application that was actually simple enough to work even on my useless Nokia N73. No, I looked for the geekier features.

First was the import and export. Toodledo supports several different import and export methods. I could dump text files into it, or a variety of different flavours of XML — all sorts. And I could get my data back out easily.

Also, Toodledo has an open API for doing stuff with. So if I wanted to roll my own solution to some problem or other, I’d be covered.

Now, I never got around to really playing with the API. But the first thing I did after I’d shoved all my data into Toodledo was to write a very small shell script (one single wget line, for the geeky) that would grab all of my data in a nice, portable, human– and machine-readable XML format from Toodledo, and shove it in a safe place.

And then I set it up to run every day from one of my machines.

And that’s why I didn’t panic when I saw Toodledo was down, and why — although I was relieved to read in their later updates that they had successfully restored their database and would be coming back up — it wouldn’t have been a total disaster for me if they’d disappeared completely with no explanation at all.

Because here’s the thing: backups are your responsibility too. If you lose your data, it’s your own damn fault. If it’s so important that it’ll sting you to lose it, then you should make very, very sure that you don’t rely on any one single other person or organisation to keep it safe.

Back it up, copy it, sync it, manage it how you will, from online backups like mozy to an Excel spreadsheet that you email to your Dad. But back it up.

Don’t get ma.gnoliad.

From the further updates I can see on their front page, I’m sure Toodledo will be back soon. And I’m going to carry on using them. Because everyone makes mistakes. Everyone loses data, or has unpredictable things happen. And if it hadn’t been a storm combined with a cockup at their datacentre, it probably would have been something else.

Toodledo’s actions , before and during this event, have been exemplary:

• They provided several ways to sync and backup your data yourself, in useful formats.
• When unexpected disaster struck, they kept people informed
• Not only did they keep people informed, they did it in a clearly honest, apologetic and human tone.
• They had a working backup strategy

And, of course, the fact that their basic service is free helps a lot! Now, I upgraded to a paid account last week, but I had nearly half a year of free service from them up to that point, so I’m not going to grumble about a day’s downtime.

Now that I pay, I’d grumble if Toodledo died frequently, or for more trivial reasons, but if I’d rolled my own solution from scratch it would have cost me a lot of time and I’m sure it would still be down for a day every now and again. My Mac was in the shop for three days the last time I needed to swap my hard drive, and it wasn’t even broken!

Anyway. The moral of this story, kids, is that if your data gets lost in the cloud, it’s your responsibility to have a safe copy. Sync things, copy things, put a reminder in your calendar to grab a file down every week. Whatever. And when you’re choosing a cloud computing provider, choose one who provides easy ways of doing your own backup, however you do it. Like Toodledo.

EDIT 11 June 2009 22:37GMT: And Toodledo is back, with a full explanation of the terrifying details.

This made me want to mention a couple of very nice interactions that the Finder has with applications at the kind of “should this be done by the app or by the Finder” interface. These are neat tricks that most users aren’t aware of, and one Safari tip that even serious Mac “power users” rarely seem to have come across.

It’s to do with interactions between the “mini Finder” that pops up when you’re in an application and you Save or Open a file, and its big brother, the Finder proper.

So, let’s get practical. I guess you’re reading this in a Mac web browser of some description. Choose File->Save As. You’ll get the little mini Finder window. Open a real Finder window as well. Now try dragging a folder from the normal Finder window to the little mini Finder.

Cool, huh? The little mini Finder takes this as a hint that you’ll want to save your file in that directory, and immediately changes its view to be that directory.

This also works with files, but do be careful if you want to try this out right now — if you drag a file onto this Save As mini-Finder, then your browser will use that path and file name as the one to save to, so if you actually click “Save” you’ll have overwritten whatever you dragged in!

This works with opening files, too, although there may seem to be less useful application to this at first — because if you’re looking at a file in the Finder, why would you want to go to the bother of opening its application, choosing File->Open and then dragging it to the mini-Finder, when you could just double-click it?

Well, it’s useful if you’re not using the default application to open the file, say, or for things like upload dialogs from web browsers.

Which brings to my final hint, which is the lovely shortcut method that many people don’t know about when it comes to uploads. I’m afraid this one only works in Safari, for all your Firefox fans, but surprising numbers of people with Macs (including me) do still use the default browser!

Using Safari (I’m using Safari 4), find a web upload page anywhere on the web. Or just use this one, here (don’t worry, your file won’t go anywhere; and there’s no “submit” button to push anyway!):

Now, just drag a file right onto it, straight onto the form! No need to click the button, no need to go through the mini-Finder, no nothing. The filename will be shoved directly into the page, without any bothersome dialog boxes.

You see, it’s attention to detail like that that keeps me coming back to Safari for my home use, no matter how tempting the extensions are in Firefox, or that I have to remember two sets of keyboard shortcuts because I use Firefox at work…

I finally tracked the problem down to the delicious.com toolbar. As soon as I disabled the toolbar and restarted IE, the problem disappeared. Turn the toolbar back on, and my problems came back.

I was on the latest version, but I tried a couple of different versions and neither of them made any difference. I’ll probably just do without this toolbar (it’s only in one browser at work, anyway, I generally use either Safari or Firefox for my browsing) for a few months, then install the latest version and see if my problem’s gone away…

So, if you’re swearing at Microsoft a lot because of IE8 crashes, try disabling your delicious.com toolbar and see if that changes anything…

Compatible with Mac, Windows and Linux. Soon to be available in a Java version, which has an uglier font, is more difficult to print out, and requires you to sellotape the pad to a large brick to make it work.

Credits: Most of the work for this was done in Lineform, but I grabbed it into the Gimp to bump-map the buttons into a 3D look at the end.

Remote From Reality by Matt Gibson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at gothick.org.uk.