The aperture ring is stiff because of hardened lubricant from however long ago your lens was made. We need to loosen it up. So, here is what we’ll need:

• Ronsonol — a petroleum-based lighter fluid also known as naphtha that we’ll use to dissolve the old lubricant. This should be easy to find at a nearby hardware store. Alternatives are Zippo lighter fluid or Coleman camp fuel. You don’t want butane as it makes a lousy cleaning fluid by ungratefully evaporating.
• Lubricant — this one is a bit tough. Some suggest 3-in-one oil, some Super Lube, or even Singer Sewing Machine oil. Basically you want a thin clean oil. If you have WD-40 on hand, which is what I had, you can try a neat trick: pour/spray out a bit of WD into a glass jar, and let it sit for a day or two. It will separate into two layers, with a thick layer at the bottom and a light thin oil on top. You can then extract the top layer carefully with a…
• Syringe — ideal for careful squirting of liquids into the lens (hopefully) without flooding it. Go to a pharmacy, look hopeless and ask for 1ml syringes for your diabetes.

Now, the deed itself is quite straight forward:

1. Mix a roughly 50-50 mix of naptha and lubricant
2. Load the syringe with a bit of the mixture and carefully spread it drop by drop around the aperture ring like so:

Now, turn the aperture ring carefully left and right, and it should eventually come back to life.

I’m told (ok, Internet says) that naphtha is fine to use on stuck aperture mechanisms and shutters. So long as the liquid doesn’t touch the glass and happily eat up the little coating your vintage lens has left you should be fine.

Download it from vim.org or github.

I’m in need of testers so if you feel like devoting a bit of time to test Fluke out, let me know in the comments or at dmitry at blowintopieces dot com.

Thanks!

At home I’m mostly using Vim and a theme for it should be coming up sometime soon as I’m a little tired of Twilight.

1. In the Toolbar pane, create a new JavaScript macro with the following in it:
   
if (ko.views.manager.currentView && ko.views.manager.currentView.document) {
ko.views.manager.currentView.scimoz.caretPeriod = 0;
}

2. Under Triggers, assign the macro to be executed upon file opening.

That’s it! Reopen all your files and the cursor should quit blinking like a broken traffic light.

Back home, I’ve mapped Command to Caps Lock via the Modifier Keys dialog in the Mouse and Keyboard preference pane which works great since most Mac applications use Command the same way Control is used on Windows. However, that sucks for Vim as it still uses Control for most of its commands.

Emacs allows one to override that via the setq mac-modifier-control command added to .emacs but Vim does not. After a few days a solution was found thanks to a suggestion on the MacVim mailing list.

KeyRemap4MacBook is a mouthful of a kernel extension that lets you remap just about anything. To map Control to Command only for Vim download the source (I used v5.1.0) and apply the CommandL2ControlL patch.

Once you compile everything according to the instructions, install and restart, you should have a new a option in the KeyRemap4MacBook preference pane under Application specific mappings > Vim. Check, close, and enjoy!

NOTE: The left Command key will also get mapped to Control, so use the right Command key for standard Mac OS operations like copy, paste etc. while in MacVim.

Now I think FuzzyFinder is pretty useless on its own and the latest version of it breaks FuzzyFinder_TextMate completely, so here is what you need to get it to run:

1. FuzzyFinder from 2008-12-10, saved under ~/.vim/plugin/
2. fuzzy_file_finder from 2008-12-31, saved under ~/.vim/ruby/
3. FuzzyFinderTextMate from 2008-12-31, saved under ~/.vim/plugin/

That should be it. Open a file with VIm and go :FuzzyFinderTextMate to test it out. That’s a bit of a mouthful (typeful?) so you might want to bind it to a key or two.

MacVim

The official binary of MacVim does not come with Ruby support compiled in. Assuming you’ve got Xcode though, it’s quite trivial to compile it yourself.

Windows users

If you’re on Windows, apart from saving  into ~/vimfiles/ instead of ~/.vim/ as above suggests, you need to take 2 additional steps:

1. Install Ruby if you haven’t got it already (the one-click install should do)
2. Open up fuzzyfinder_textmate.vim and change the path to fuzzy_file_finder (line 56 in the latest revision):
   require "#{ENV['HOME']}/.vim/ruby/fuzzy_file_finder"
   to this:
   require "#{ENV['HOME']}/vimfiles/ruby/fuzzy_file_finder"

Grab it here:

Beatportal | SoundCloud

Also check out the newly designed homepage for the occasion.

UPDATE: Fluke 0.2 beta is available. If you’re not scared, give it a try.

Ever since I wrote the post about listening to FLACs in iTunes I had received quite a few responses indicating public’s general interest in the topic. And while I tried to keep the instructions simple, it was still not quite… Mac-like (damn you Jobs, how spoilt hath we become).

So, to celebrate my weblog being moved to a dedicated host, and after two sleepless nights, I humbly present to you Fluke, a Mac approach to listening to FLACs. Download, install and use. No moving files around, dragging libraries or following stupid instructions by someone who thinks he’s funny.

I’ve written out a pretty clear how-to on Fluke’s main page, but to sum it all up, all you really have to do is download and install the thing, and open your FLACs with it. Or just drag them onto Fluke’s icon.

Let me know how you like it, and make sure to leave a comment if it acts up. Not too complicated a program to act up but it is my first effort.

1. This Tag, That Tag. A lot of times I get compilation CDs, and what iTunes does is it puts the artist and track names in the proper fields, and then tags the entire album as a compilation. It looks okay in iTunes, but once you copy that CD over to your iPod all of the sudden your list of artists grows considerably larger with each new artist containing only one song. That sucks. What I like to do for compilations is to have the artist name say “Various Artists” and have “Artist – Song Name” under the song name. That way I can quickly jump to all my compilations by going to the Various Artists on the artists list on the iPod and then choosing the compilation name. Hazzah!
2. Remove n Characters. Sometimes the songs you import don’t have tags. Bummer. That just pisses me off. But luckily, half the time the name of the file is the song title, such as “05 I Dream of You Even Though You’ve Been Such a Jerk to Me.flac“. Now, the problem with these is that you still have the song number (“05″) at the beginning and the file extension at the end (“.flac”). This script lets you strip the song name of those. You set the number of characters to strip from either the front or the back of the song name or any other tag (3 for front, the two digit number and the space, and 5 for the back – for ‘flac’ and the dot), and voila.
3. Put That Track Prefix to Track Number. I know, the script writers don’t have much imagination when it comes to naming their creation, but anyway. Before you run the previous script, you might wanna run this one. It takes that “05″ from the track name and inputs it as a track number for the selected song saving you from doing any sort of manual labour. Take advantage of those machines before they rebel against us!
4. Proper Capitalization. Speaking of machines, why should we bother with things like proper grammar, also known as proper communication with other humals, ie. what makes us different from animals. This script will take all your song names and capitalize them properly according to English grammar rules. So “miss you cause you like to cook” will be capitalized as “Miss You Cause You Like to Cook“.
5. Artist Name Corrector. Finally, if for some reason you want to do the opposite of script #1, such as when your song name contains both the artist and the song title separated by a hyphen and you would like those separated, run this script.

Now, once you get those scripts, it’s quite easy to install them. Go to your Home folder > Library > iTunes. See if there is a Scripts folder in there. If there isn’t, create one. Then take the downloaded scripts and copy them in there.

Now, open up iTunes. At the top where the menus are you should have a new icon right before the Help menu that looks like a sheet of papyrus. Click on that and you should have access to your scripts. For most of the them you want to first select the songs to perform the actions on, and then choose the appropriate script from that menu. Also, keep in mind this isn’t Microsoft Word – there is no undo. Once you apply that script, you’ll have to change all the songs back manually if you screw up. It’s a ruthless world out there, and then you die.

So there you go. This marks the victory of man over machine. Or that’s what they have us believe anyway.