Pictures and Code

On of my HDD’s crashed and my old 10.4.6 install was on that drive. Of course I do create backups of all my data regularly and nothing was lost but time. So I thought I could try Leopard on this occasion. Kalyway 10.5.2 for AMD didn’t boot at all. Next on my list was Leo4Allv3. It booted and installed like charm. But there were still some issues after the installation was done.

I had to fix the graphics driver problems for my old 6600GT. In my case it would be best to install the system without any special nvidia drivers. Because later on I used the Zephyroth NVidia Universal Installer from Zephyroth Utilities. To be on the safe side I repaired the kext permissions right after and rebooted. Worked from scratch with perfect resolution and QE/CI.

Next I had to disable Spotlight because the indexing drove me mad and maybe crashed the system by accessing my windows drives.

Adium 1.2.5 gave me that weird error message for my icq account that my client was "too old". Tried a few other versions including the beta 1.3b5. In the end I gave up and went for Proteus. It looks cleaner but not as sexy as Adium.

Next issue came with installing Skype. Since I’m using Growl I got these nasty notifications when somebody came online or sent a chat message. So I disabled Growl for Skype. System Preferences - Growl - Applications: remove marker in the Skype checkbox.

FrontRow had a few issues with Divx and Xvid movies but it was easy to fix with 2 Quicktime Components. Xvid Component Binary and the Divx Codec. After one reboot everything was working smoothly.

As I remembered from 10.4.6 the little arrows on the alias icons weren’t that sexy. It was quite easy to remove the alias icon arrows.

Last task was to make a little Automater script for hiding and showing hidden files and folders in the finder.

The only bug that is still persistent is caused by my USB Bluetooth dongle. After pairing a device I had to reboot or replug the Bluetooth dongle because it gets deactivated right after pairing. I although had a few issues with Salling Clicker 3.5. I couldn’t connect from my SE K800i because the security blocked the access randomly. So the easiest way around was to "Browse Device …" and connect while browsing. When you connected Salling Clicker you can close the browse window. I’ve read a lot about USB Bluetooth dongle problems in 10.5.2 but somehow I couldn’t find a decent fix, just these workarounds.

As I’m writing this blog entry I’m using Qumana 3.0 and surprisingly I didn’t have any crashes yet from that application. Update: It just crashed as usual on the damn slow spell check.

Worked for me. Leave comments so I can add solutions and fixes.

In one of my earlier posts i was talking about my favorite image viewer for windows. So far i’ve been using PicturePopProCM 2 for viewing pictures instantly fullscreen out of the finder. But there were a few annoyances, like option click for accessing into the context menu plugin or the missing ability for RAW-file previews and by that it was even pretty slow on JPEGs. Recently i stumbled on a new project on my favorite os x freeware site.

Sequential 1.2.1 (latest version to date) is fast, opens by simple double click in finder, displays all images in a folder “sequentially” and has proper RAW-file support. An other cool feature is the quit by escape function just like FastStone’s MaxView in windows. I’m still missing some features, like a simple slideshow script and proper image rotation on RAW-Images. I’d although like an option for hiding the application icon in the dock when the software runs in background because somhow it doesn’t work that well with Dockless and Dock Dodger. But so far this is the best one. Worked for me.

Since Parallels doesn’t like .bin/.cue images, i had to convert it into an .iso image. A few guides pointed out that simple renaming of the files might be enough, but that didn’t work at all. So i was searching for free-ware solutions and couldn’t find anything. Toast Titanium was the last chance.

You simply right click on the .bin file and open it with Toast. Next you click “Save As Disc Image”.

Finally you just rename the file extension from the default .toast to .iso.

After a minute Toast was ready and i was able to boot from the .iso image in Parallels. Worked for me.

Got this error message when I tried to install Parallels Desktop Build 3188 on Mac OS X 10.4.8 .

Parallels Desktop cannot be installed on this Computer.
Make sure your system meets the requirements.

Found this easy guide: HowTo Install Parallels on AMD64.

Worked for me.

I just came to Webkit. At first it looked like a new browser to me like Shiira or OmniWeb. But than somebody told me it is just the "thing" behind the scenes that drives lots of browsers on OS X.

So I downloaded the latest nightly build of Webkit and started using it.

• CSS rendering looks much better now
• got rid of the flickering in Safari when scrolling long pages very fast
• can’t use Safari’s extensions anymore

Apart from that, the only difference is the golden symbol in the dock. It loads all of Safari’s settings, just because it loads Safari just with another rendering engine. In the Webkit blog they try to solve the confusions about Webkit really is
So what to do now without Safariblock and without Saft ? Well, you can still use the userContent.css from floppymoose which kills most ads from your screen. Webkit although works with my earlier proposed mouse gestures for OS X. So far I’m quite happy with it.

Color perception is subject to ambient light levels, and the ambient white point. (A red object looks black in blue light.) It is therefore not possible to achieve calibration that will be perceived evenly in different lighting conditions. The computer display and calibration target will have to be considered in controlled predefined lighting conditions. Controlled lighting conditions such as D65 help to suppress the effect of metameric colors which would further complicate the issue.(source)
You don’t need an expensive color calibration tool (spyder, eye-one, or similar tools) in order to detect the white point of your ambient light. You got all you need with your DSLR already.
So lets go through this guide to get a quite nice calibration for your monitor.

At first look for the light sources in at your working place:

• Avoid these old yellow light bulbs for your room with the monitor and replace these with newer energy saving daylight bulbs.
• Try to avoid mixed lights of different color temperatures. Close the curtains or sunblinds of your windows.
• Brighten up the area behind your screen by placing a lamp behind it. This will ease your eyes and even improve the quality of your displayed images in terms of black level quality.

Step-by-Step Tutorial:

• Place some neutral grey objects in the area behind your screen that you would see from the position where you are working. To make it simple: place some color chart on your wall or some medium grey coffee filter paper.
• Photograph your workplace including the color chart or coffee filter at your wall using RAW format. Expose the picture to your calibration object (try to capture it with a good brightness).
• Open your favorite RAW developer (CS2, CS3, C1, lightroom, …) and use the eye dropper tool for white balance detection on your coffee filter or color chart from your wall. Do it several times to average the color temperature. Next write down the color temperature.
• Ok now lets look at your monitor. Look into the OSD (On Screen Display) and for some color temperature settings here there and set the closest value to your inspected value. Some screens may support this feature. For the next step you don’t have to play with your monitor but with your mouse and keyboard again in the software. We need to modify the settings of your monitor profile in your Operation System:

In OS X it is like this. Go to System Preferences > Displays > Color and choose “Calibrate…”, check that “Expert Mode”, click through to “Target White Point” and set your new color temperature here. If that looks too complicated for you, you can use the simple mode and choose what is next to your value out of D50 (5000 Kelvin), D65 (6500 Kelvin) or 9300 (Kelvin). If you think that your screen is too dark (happens with old monitors over time) you may adjust the gamma as well in the wizard, but only go for the monochrome gamma correction here.

In Windows (XP and Vista) you need tools like “Adobe Gamma”, you get this with installing Photoshop, it is in your System Preferences area. Just choose your white point here by inserting the Kelvin value that you inspected before as the “Adjusted Value” and if you were able to select a color temperature in your OSD before you need to set this as the white point of your “Hardware”. If you got some old screen you might adjust the gamma here as well, but not on the single colors, just do it for the monochrome setting.

Ok, now comes the hard work. Open some color calibration chart (for example this one) on your screen with your favorite image viewer.

1. Take your camera and make a picture of your working place with the color chart displayed on your monitor and the background area around your monitor with the coffee filter oder the color chart on the wall.
2. Open the picture in your RAW editor and look for the color chart that was displayed on your monitor. Aim with the eye dropper tool for the grey value in the color chart that is almost as bright as your wall behind the monitor. Write down the inspected color temperature.
3. Now its time to work with your monitor. Open the OSD (On Screen Display) and go to the color settings. Switch from the “normal” setting to the “user preset” and start with all values at factory settings, mostly r:50 g: 50 b:50 . Change one or more values in order to achieve your target white balance. If you need it warmer just add a little red and reduce the blue. But try to keep the average of all 3 values at about the half of your scale. For example if my scale goes from 0…100 i want it like (R + G + B) / 3 = 50. Write these 3 values down and go back to Step 1. to look how close you came to your target value and do it all over again until you reached your target value.

Things that prevent your success:

• Your target is not really neutral grey. (see picture below)
• You go to close to your screen and get weird colored lines on your picture. (see picture below)
• Your backlight is too weak and monitor too bright or vice versa. Just tune your monitor brightness. (see picture below)

It took me like 5-6 tries to come close to my target values. I got daylight bulbs at my working place at a color temperature of 5450 Kelvin.

Now it is your turn. Good luck with this.

I hate it when there starts a hidden process in the background, your hdd’s start spinning and rumbling and you don’t know whats happening. That doesn’t only happen in Linux (amarok http cache cleaner) or in Windows. This time it is Mac OS X and the funny thing is that one hidden process always crashed my system once or twice a day.

At first i thought i had to live with that problem. I looked into my /var/log/system.log and found this line:

cp: error processing extended attributes: Operation not permitted

Regarding this problem i found this neat guide for some completely different problem (last paragraph). In /usr/sbin/periodic you can find all the periodic hidden action that Mac OS X runs to maintain your system. Find the line with

cp /dev/null $tmp_output

and replace it with

> $tmp_output

Thats it, save and reboot. Funny thing is that Qumana crashed like 3 times while writing this post. I guess their spell check is still buggy.

Ok, the most wierd crash is on sudo periodic weekly .

I figured out that the command /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb crashes my system. The first fix was to disable it in the weekly.500 . I hope somebody can tell me why the database building for the locate command crashes on my system … My first guess is that i have too much hdd space to index and some cache is too small to hold the index while building.

So far i found these interesting articles:

Prevent locate’s update from updating certain folders

Make the locate command ignore certain directories

The last link worked. I made the locate-database-update ignore my /Volumes and now everything runs smooth.

After trying so many tutorials and installing so many tools i finally made it. Front Row 1.3 is running smoothly on my 10.4.8 AMD , and no illegal hacks were needed.

At first i tried this Front Row guide bei Andrew Escobar and ofcourse it was not working and ofcourse it crashed my system.

First get Front Row 1.3 from Apple’s update site and drag the FrontRowUpdate1.3.pkg from the .dmg on your Desktop.

Ok, for the next step there are 2 ways:

Download the Front Row Enabler 1.3.5 and just use it to patch the FrontRowUpdate1.3.pkg on your Desktop by clicking "Enable Installation". Never press the "Patch Mac OS X"-button !!! If you already pressed the evil button you have to look at Andrew Escobar’s website for further instructions on how to restore your /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BezelServices.framework and /System/Library/LoginPlugins/BezelServices.loginPlugin

The other way is to get the Pacifist 2.0.1 open the FrontRowUpdate1.3.pkg with it to install the 2 files manually.

Having this done we can proceed to the step where all my previously read tutorials failed.

At first i started with some kind of fake driver, like FrontRowPass.kext from Khadgar’s blog. This didn’t work at all for me.

Next i found this interesting guide for installing Front Row on the Mac Pro and just followed their "Case 2" by just manipulating the IOUSBFamily.kext .

The last step was to copy the Front Row.app from System > Library > CoreServices to my Applications folder and adding it as a Login Item in the Preferences Pane: Accounts (you can use the one in CoreServices as well). Restart and chose a way to start Front Row, for example by using such a little script named openfrontrow.app (you find it on several websites, just google for the name).

I got myself a copy of Wise Weasel’s Romeo Plugins 2.0 and used the Front Row Plugin for my Romeo. Now i can launch and control Front Row with my old Sony T610.

Worked for me.

Well, i wanted to import my .ogg and .flac into iTunes but … you know the story. After 2 days of trying to compile amarok with kde3 and making it run natively with quartz-wm, i gave up.

The next day i found this nice blog post about adding ogg and flac support to iTunes.

Just get xiphQT (0.1.5) and install it ( open the XiphQT-full.mpkg ). Next get the flac import component for iTunes (its the flac_import_0.5b1_p0.1.dmg ) and drag the FLACImport.component into /Library/QuickTime . Last get the set-OggS tool (its the set-OggS-0.1.dmg ) and place the “Set OggS.app” in your dock or somewhere else where you can easily drop files to. Quit iTunes and restart it.

Now, what do you have to do for importing .flac into iTunes …

At first drop the .flac files on the “Set OggS” application (on the icon, not into the window).

Next just drag the .flac files into your iTunes. It takes a while to import and the playback will stop during that import period. Starting the playback of a .flac file although takes a while.

But after all, the .ogg and .flac files are in the library and you can play em as easy as all the other content. Just needs some more work on importing stuffs. Worked for me.

I’ve been using the bitvise Tunnelier for quite some time now in Windows XP and it is a real pleasure to use this easy tool.

For Mac OS X i couln’t find a tool like that until i came to the SSH Tunnel Manager . It is even easier to use than the windows tool and does a great job on tunneling your network traffic through firewalls. So you can have secure access to your non-ssl email accounts or just secure your traffic in a big company network. Ofcourse you still need some server outside your network with some ssh shell running.

Ok, i guess everybody noticed that importing adserver lists from websites like yoyo brings down most input managers for Safari. Even the userContent.css from floppymoose is slowing down the tab creation process in Safari.

After testing a lot with diffrent solutions i made up this final one:

Get the host list for macs from yoyo and edit your /etc/hosts.

Get Saft and delete all the URL match Patterns (and uncheck "Block Ad/Banners"). So you have the nice Fullscreen function for your Safari and more advanced controls about many other things in the browser. You can bind the Fullscreen shortcut to cocoasuite what i use for my global mous egestures in Mac OS X.

Next get SafariBlock v1.14 and delete all preset Filters. The special in SafariBlock is that you have a right-click on images, frames and flash movies to block em and set up filter rules for em. Works pretty well and the performance is still very good, as it would be without all these tools.

Usually i’m used to this tearing effect in all other Operation Systems like Linux and Windows. It is possible to enable vertical synchronisation all over the desktop environment but that slows down the whole system and results synchronisation problems in video playback.

But in Mac OS X i noticed today something wierd. The tearing effect was gone. Totally smooth movement of the windows and the video playback was correct too. I don’t know how they do it, but it works.

I’ll never get behind this apple magic i guess

After dealing with my old 10.4.6 install with the “fake” 10.4.8 update which didn’t have the new 8.8.1 kernel I decided to make a complete new install.

Got the JaS.10.4.8.AMD.Intel.SSE2.SSE3 - DVD and gave it a try. Right after installation I got massive Kernel panics about the Geforce.kext family. Tried to use the old ones from the backup directory, but didn’t have much success.

After that I found the JaS.10.4.8.AMD.Intel.SSe2.SSe3.v1p ppf - patch for my ISO. This time they added Titan drivers instead of Natit. Applied it and burned that disc. First installation stuck on the language selection screen. On the second try i got massive usb driver error warnings but it worked. On the first reboot after the installation i got a black screen but I heard the harddrives were still rumbling, so it was again some graphics driver problem. Rebooted with “Graphics Mode”=”1280×1024x32@60″ and it worked, BUT the image was upside-down. I dismounted my monitor and turned it upside-down

After searching in a few forums and looking for help on macspeak network i decided to play with the boot options. I was able to get a 90 deg rotated display by starting with “Graphics Mode”=”1200×1920x32″. And as if I knew that its all my fault I just started with “Graphics Mode”=”1920×1200″ (without bitdepth or refreshrate) and it worked like charm. CI (Core Image) and QE (Quartz Extreme) seem to work. I can play DVD’s and OpenGL stuff now.

The nforce4 SATA support still isn’t implemented. I tried some mods for the AppleVIAATA.kext but no success yet, just a few system crashes.

The only unsolved problem for me are these random crashes after like 30 mins usual working. Maybe its iTunes or Safari flash bug, no clue.

Update: the random system crashes are gone, but i still don’t know what caused em. The only crashing applications so far were Qumana and the apple’s Preview.

Next Update: you can easily make Qumana crash by just not assigning the blog post to a category. Well, if the glas is half filled, you could see it as a painful reminder and call it a “feature”.

Just downloaded this neat addon from mozillas addon site.

The only problem was the slow cube rotation speed.

You can change the cube rotating speed in the content/javascript.js file of the addon.

Just change

TabEffect.xpcomObj.translateToNextTab(back, 24);

to

TabEffect.xpcomObj.translateToNextTab(back, 12);

and the speed is doubled.

You find the file in (for windows xp users):

Drive:\ Dockuments and Settings\ UserName\ Application Data\ Mozilla\ Firefox\ Profiles\ YourProfile.default\ extensions\ {0784CD66-62FE-4cef-ABF4-F8ED9B654ACC}\ content\ javascript.js

worked for me.

On my search for a new desktop background I stumbled across these Earth-Desktop-Tools like EarthDesk 3.5 (Win and OSX payware), Desktop Earth 2.1 ( Win freeware), OSXplanet (OSX freeware).

EarthDesk 3.5 looks like the screenshot above. If you don’t use Active Desktop in Windows it will just generate a resulting image (map + cloud layer) and update your recent wallpaper. I wonder how long it can draw my attention until it gets boring and will be replaced.

Well, I always complained about the threading problems in Firefox (Windows XP). For example Firefox won’t let you use any mouse gestures (e.g. switch to next tab) while it is loading plugins or just web-content in the recent tab. I guess the plugins just have lower priority than the render engine. But you can still use the keyboard shortcuts to switch the tabs at all times.

In Mac OS X I had the problem that some browsers don’t support mouse gestures at all.

So I had to find some application for Global Mouse Gestures on both systems.

Lets start with Windows XP.

StrokeIt (0.9.5) is some great Freeware tool that lets you define global and local (for individual window classes)  mouse gestures for all your needs. It even offers gesture feedbacks like line-drawings in individual colors. Since the global keyboard and mouse events have almost the highest priority in Windows XP it is much faster than any plugin for Firefox like Mouse Gestures 1.5.1 or All-in-One Gestures 0.17.4.

Now for Mac OS X ( PPC and Intel Mac).

CocoaSuite (universal binary), formerly know as CocoaGestures, was originally Freeware but the project was integrated into the new Payware CocoaSuite. You can still download the old CocoaGestures 1.2 from MacUpdate but I guess it only works on PPC. So CocoaSuite works only on for Cocoa apps and costs like “US$14.95” recently. It works pretty well and 30–day trial is OK for AppZapper if you know what I mean.

My first try was going to pimpmysafari.com and look for Adblock plugins. I decided to use SafariBlock and got the list of blocked URL’s from yoyo. But than I started Safari and everything was awesome laggy. I couldn’t even scroll the engadget site while it was loading. So I guess the filter list was too much for that little plugin.

Next I tried BFilter which was pretty fast but had no nice GUI for the filter lists and that’s a no-go in OS X

Finally I found this weblink describing how to modify the "etc/hosts" file in Mac OS X.

1. So just go to yoyo and get the list in host file format (copy to clipboard).
2. Open some Terminal.app and enter this command:
   sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts
3. Paste the filter list right under all the existing entries into the TextEdit window and save the changes.
4. Relog or reboot and you are done !

Additionally I used the userContent.css from floppymouse and used it both with Safari and OmniWeb by just setting the "Style Sheet" option in both browsers preferences.

Well, I tried to install Flip4Mac in order to play Windows Media Videos in my browsers on Mac OS X and got this nice error message.

Flip4Mac WMV cannot be installed on this computer. QuickTime version 6.5.1 or later is required to run Flip4Mac WMV Player.

The solution to this problem is the following.

1. Download Flip4Mac and copy the "Flip4Mac WMV.mpkg" to your desktop or somewhere else.
2. "Show Package Contents" with right mouse button and open the /Contents/Info.plist with TextEdit
3. Find "IFRequirementDicts" and delete the complete key tree like this . Save the changes (overwrite) and you are done.
4. Now install Flip4Mac by just double-clicking the "Flip4Mac WMV.mpkg".

Worked for me.

Finally ! Unsanity released the Beta 1 of its famous desktop theme modding software as universal binary. In this weblog post you can read the recent discussions and get the download link.

I had problems with themes like Mes, Muku and Pulsar (ShapeShifter crashed). But others had the same problems and Jason Harris promised to “release a 2.4b2 tomorrow that includes the fix”. So lets hope it will work. So far I’m using Metal Milk 1.0 . I’d prefer MaxThemes’s Milk 3.2 but somehow they don’t care that much for their stuff to update it with applications like iTunes.

update: Well, as Jason Harris promised the new 2.4b2 is out and fixed the crashes on Pulsar and co. But somehow I couldn’t find some active community about theme creation. MacThemes is a little silent as well in the last months. I hope the theme communities from the PC users will slowly come over to OS X and reanimate the Mac communities. I’ve tried now about 25 recent themes and found like 2-3 that were halfway useable and got wide application support.

Just after the iLife 06 installation (on Mac OS X 10.4.7)  I discovered a few problems with iTunes. After like 5 minutes of playback the sound was muted, but not via the menu or by system settings. So I rummaged in a few forums and found out that installing iLife 06 changes some audio settings in OS X.

All you have to do is changing the "Applications - Utilities - Audio MIDI Setup - Audio Output" configuration back to a "2ch" 2 Channel output. This fixed it for me.

Just found this nice tool. After trying to find some Senergy freeware alternative for iTunes I stumbled across various stuff like iTunes Companion for Yahoo! Widget Engine, or Clutter .

GimmeSomeTune 1.6 even offers the little mini-controller I was used from Senergy, but without its buggy fade-out effect on the floater. So far it works nicely, got to check out the Amazon artwork fetch feature a little more.

This is my first blog entry using Mac OS x86 10.4.60 on my AMD (A8N-SLI with 6600GT connected with DVI). I tried using Blog Thing but somehow it was too simple or i was too stupid, right now I’m using ecto . Too sad its not freeware, maybe ill find some nice tool later on.

Just stumbled across Qumana . Its freeware, looks a bit ugly but seems to work smooth.

So how did the whole mac thing start ?

After reading this HowTo install Mac OSX on a Standard Laptop i was ready to install it. Next i got the "NVDriverBeta1.zip" from MacVidia and followed basicly this guide to install NVidia drivers for Mac OSx86 . The best suiteable resolution for me was 1680×1050 so far. I wish for 1920×1200 in the next release. So the DVI connector and resolution problems were solved and i could work on the little iTunes preferences page bug. With Maxxuss’s AMD_Enabler 1.0a this was fixed pretty easily. Last thing was to install Firefox, some ICQ client called Adium , Tinker Tool , VLC with xvid and divx codecs and a few other neat things.

A few more things:

A8N-SLI restart fix (you can now reboot properly with the osx menu buttons)

nForce4 Network driver Hack for the A8N-SLI (now you can use the onboard network card)

Gimp (if you dont have iphoto and osx’s preview tool wont let you edit pics …)

HowTo Switch to Mac (very useful article for former windows users)

At first, there is no equivalent like Adblock + Filterset.G in Mozilla Firefox for Opera 9 that is as comfortable and efficient.

Opera 9 (beta 2) offers the “Block content…” option in its content menu. After pressing it you get some nice preview of what is being blocked from the site.

Basicly they use the filter.ini file in Opera’s profile folders. Its a simple list of urls that specify excludes and includes. There have been external tools like OperaAdFilter(link died) and FlashBlock . You can although use external proxy tools that control your whole web traffic for all applications so you could block icq ads and opera ads with one tool. But these tools all suffer from very basic problems. If you block some ads on a web-site the place on the web-site is simply left empty and web-sites look a bit chaotic and unfinished. Adblock in Firefox handles this a lot better. The fact that opera integrated this feature in its gui shows that the developers listened to user requests. Lets hope Opera’s “Block content…” will be as good as Firefox’s Adblock in the final version.

Update: Final Version of Opera 9 is out and i found this neat link with some up-to-date Filterset in Opera 9 format . It works pretty well so far. But you still cant edit the color of  the nasty yellow “special effect”. By the way, if you can’t find the urlfilter.ini in Mac OS X:
/Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences
if its not there just go back to opera and use ‘tools - advanced - block content’ and create a sampe block. Than the file will be created.

Just downloaded the Opera 9 beta 2. …. gawd Opera looks pretty ugly. Went to their skin site, but there is no decent one. All i found was this grubby forged one, with its suited name fantastic . After that i noticed that customizing Opera is not as easy as i’m used to in Firefox. For example moving the tab-bar below the address bar, which doesn’t sound hard but you got to work around a bit. On this thread i found some lil guide to solve this mystery.

- turn of the Opera default address bar with “CTRL+F8″
- right click on the main toolbar -> “customize”
- choose “Buttons” -> “Browser view”
- then you can drag the “address bar button” and drop it into the main bar at any place you like
- press “ok” to close the app. window

Maybe there are good Opera themes but hard to find.

Update: I found some sweet skin.

1. Go to this website and select the “Odyssey” skin.
2. in the “Skin selection” drop-down-menus select “All” in the left one and than “Browser skin” in the right one
3. Now set all Paddings to “0”, press “save” and “download” on bottom right

So there is a last “feature” to get rid of, the nasty yellow special effects glow. I’ve read that it is a system color (windows tool-tip color) but somehow thats not right. In the official opera forum they created some “Opera Standard modified” skin without the yellow glowing in the scrollbars and buttons. nontroppo has modified his Breeze skin as well to fix this “feature”. I guess in the final Opera 9 this wont be a problem anymore and you can select the special effects color within opera.

nik multimedia released their new sharpening tool nik Sharpener Pro 2.0.

Did you ever have a sharpening tool with just a single slider and still have good results ? In the advanced mode there are 5 different base colors ( black, grey, white, yellow, blue ) for sharpening. Color Frequency based sharpening makes sense. For example you have a sunset sea picture with some shadow shape of a palm tree. Other tools would give you nasty highlights at the high contrast edges but with this tool you can suppress the black sharpening easily and push the red of the sunset or the blue of the water. It is easy to use tool with nice results but the interface design is not my taste.