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Adobe’s latest version of its Creative Suite is set to be unveiled on 12 April. CS5 will provide updates to the popular software. For Mac users, the new release will be Intel-only, Cocoa and 64-bit native.

Exactly what features the new CS5 will contain remains to be seen. For most of us, it’ll mean one thing: upgrade time…

With the arrival of the Squeezebox I’ve taken on a task I should have completed ages ago: cleaning up the mess that is my music collection. There is more than one – tons of MP3 files are sitting around on external drives waiting to be added to iTunes. Multiple copies of the same file have been placed in my initially carefully considered hierarchical directory structure, resulting in many duplicate titles.

Whilst there are various ways of trying to identify duplicate files, I wasn’t in the mood to rely on iTunes‘ ability to display duplicate tracks. There are command line utilities for checking and identifying duplicate files. Once again, that isn’t something I’m interested in: quick identification and easy deletion or archival where at the top of my list of priorities. A quick Google search resulted in me downloading the first program I came across on a legitimate link: Araxis FInd Duplicate Files. The application appeals because of a very simple user interface and an ability to check each file for its size and checksum, amongst other attributes. The fully-featured application is free to use for a couple of days. After a quick test, I purchased it at USD 15, a very reasonable price.

Find Duplicate Files provides a simple user interface: select the folders or locations to scan, then start the scan an walk away. Various preferences can be set that allow only certain file types to be identified and the action to take once duplicate files are processed.

One improvement I would suggest is that the list of found duplicates be populated in real-time. My current music library was roughly 340GB in size, requiring a fair bit of searching to run through – during the entire time, the results section of the application stayed empty, until the search operation had concluded. A minor gripe, but something that would alert the user to the fact that something is busy happening.

Once the identification of duplicate files has been completed, a list of all attributes is presented, with various colours being used to separate individual groups of duplicates. In the case of the music tracks, cover art is displayed if available.

I performed a few rudimentary checks to ensure the application had indeed found five or so examples of where I knew duplicates to exist. Instead of deleting the duplicates, I decided to archive them to another location just in case. Over 10000 duplicates existed, freeing up over 50GB of disk space. Not bad going, and certainly a great way to rid the iTunes library of additional burden.

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Whenever I install all my collection of favourite software on a Mac, I have the same  conundrum to solve: connecting an iPhone results in the following notification:

Regardless how often I’ve managed to find out what is happening, I seem never to remember for too long… The issue with CameraWindow appearing has to do with the installation of the Canon EOS Digital Solutions software. That CD contains EOS Utility and Digital Photo Professional, amongst others. Since certain cameras don’t trigger the automatic launch of iPhoto or similar software on the host machine, Canon provides this utility to assist. Unfortunately, the software is installed without question and is not immediately easy to disable. Instead of living in the System Preferences, CameraWindow can be disabled only once iPhoto has been launched and its preferences examined.

Selecting a different action to occur when a camera is connected gets rid of the annoying CameraWindow notification. Now I remember. Again…

Apple today released the latest version of their photo management application, Aperture. Aperture 3 closes the gap that made many users, myself included, very keen to move to Adobe Lightroom. With the new release, Apple has crammed over 200 enhancements and features into the existing product. Most significantly, face recognition is now built-in, working in a similar fashion to the same feature in iPhoto. Geotagging of photos is also supported, as is digital video importing directly from capable DSLR‘s.

By far the most important technical reason to upgrade is the fact that Aperture 3 is a native 64-bit application. A huge number of photo adjustment options are available in the application, too. Taking a hint from Lightroom 3, the new Aperture integrates very nicely with photo sharing sites like Flickr.

I’ve cut down my printed magazine consumption quite drastically over the past year or so. Magazines are still a big drawcard for me, though the fact that imported publications cost an absolute fortune and are generally at least one month late in arriving at the local newsagent makes the Internet a far better source of information. Nonetheless, magazines still provide a fair bit of information. To continue my addiction, I’ve been purchasing subscriptions to select magazines online. Zinio is a good service with a reader available for both Windows and Mac. Prices for annual subscriptions are insanely affordable. A single issue (at least one month old once it’s actually for sale in South Africa) of a certain photography magazine costs almost ZAR 100.

The same magazine in digital format costs USD 10. That’s about ZAR 70. For an annual subscription – twelve issues in all. Even with DRM and the inability to print more than a page at a time that’s a fantastic proposition. The drawback? Magazines can be read only on a Windows or Mac, and that’s hardly convenient. Until now, that is.

The biggest hope I have had for the iPadCanvasTabletSlate that Jobs will hopefully unveil tomorrow is that it will provide an application for reading magazines. For a long time, I was hoping that an application would be available for the iPhone. Two weeks ago, I was ecstatic upon discovering that Zinio has ported a reader to the iPhone. Without doubt that means a similar application will be available to run on the new Apple device all and sundry are eagerly awaiting. The iPhone‘s screen is small, but the small selection of magazines formatted for that platform are easily readable. More and more content is being prepared for the iPhone.

Similar to the desktop reader, a library of purchased content is displayed.

Downloading an entire issue is fast and easily possible over an EDGE connection. The files seem rather compact and are added to the library once downloaded. Once downloaded, the magazine can be read without requiring further network connectivity.

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Fairmount is a fairly reliable way of generating an exact copy of a DVD. In certain instances, the software is bamboozled by certain DVD‘s, however. For example, the 8GB Wall-E generates a whopping 63GB VIDEO_TS folder on disk, whilst District 9 seems to have decent copy protection, typical of Sony. After many, many hours that DVD had scarcely dropped 125MB to the hard drive with no indication of how long the remaining 7GB would take to arrive.

Clearly, the modern DVD backer-upper requires other tools to transfer DVD content to a hard disk for use on a home theatre computer. I found a reliable and fast alternative to Fairmount in Ripit.

Ripit is priced very reasonably at USD 20 and permits ten DVD‘s to be ripped before the trial version expires. I fed it District 9, simply because other means of transferring my copy of that movie to the Mac Mini had failed. I plugged the disk into the MacBook and waited.

Correctly identified is halfway there…

The transfer worked flawlessly and Ripit had the entire DVD copied to the hard disk into a dedicated VIDEO_TS folder without breaking into a sweat. A nice feature is the progress indicator on the dock icon, providing an instant view of the ripping progress.

Like any other software, Ripit may not be able to copy all DVD‘s, but is certainly worthwhile keeping around if other copy methods fail. Ripit‘s success in copying the District 9 DVD made me purchase a license for my machines straight away – the application is now the first one I’ll turn to when converting content to the Mac Mini HTPC.

I don’t often rely on scheduled posts, but had some spare time and last week and set up two posts to be published on schedule. In the past, this feature in WordPress worked without a hitch. After the upgrade to 2.9, it seems that the scheduling of post publication may cease to function under certain conditions.

Exactly what the cause of the issue is is not clear, though it’s most likely due to incompatibilities with certain hosts. The WordPress team has released version 2.9.1 in an attempt to fix the issue.

If you see this post, the scheduling bug has been fixed for me In that case, I recommend you upgrade to 2.9.1 if you’ve been experiencing a similar problem.

Updating a version of WordPress is a simple matter of clicking a button – the currently installed version even indicates whether or not a newer version has been made available. I tried the update once or twice but was stumped by an error that indicated a lack of memory.

The error relates to the PHP processor and has nothing to do with WordPress itself. There are a couple of possible fixes, but which one to apply depends very much on the type of access one has to the WordPress installation one is attempting to upgrade. In most hosted setups, there is no chance of editing the .htaccess file to add a memory parameter in the form php_value memory_limit 256MB, or to modify an entry in the PHP.ini file to change the memory limit by way of the parameter memory_limit = 256M;

The easiest means of fixing the upgrade procedure in my case was to ssh to my blog’s hosted system and to add a parameter to the wp-config.php. I added the following: define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’);. That provides 256MB to the PHP processor and should hopefully cater for future upgrades to WordPress whenever those come along.

The change to the file is all that is required – after that, the update to 2.9 worked without a hitch.

Once again, the update to WordPress is highly recommended – the amount of time the update takes is negligible and will ensure that all the latest security patches are present.

The latest version of the popular blogging and content management platform, WordPress has been released. Version 2.9 is a significant update that introduces a fair number of interesting and useful features. Whilst much has been made of recent attacks against WordPress-based blogs, I’m still firmly of the opinion that WordPress is a great piece of software that performs incredibly well – not caring to update software should not be the basis of an argument against deficiencies that have been eradicated in newer versions. There’s little sympathy for those users of operating systems running afoul of virus attacks and bugs that have been sorted out in service packs or updates. The same should be true of all software. If a platform is important to you, you’ll make sure you keep it up to date for performance and accessibility reasons. That’s my point of view. As a last argument, the update procedure for WordPress is as simple as a single click in the newer versions – hardly requiring a huge amount of work or effort…

Back to Carmen. WordPress 2.9 introduces the following features that should make posting entries a bit easier and more convenient:

• global undo to provide a way of retrieving entries deleted by mistake
• a built-in image editor to crop, rotate and manipulate images directly in WordPress without the requirement for a desktop solution
• update of plugins by way of batch instead of individually

The software is available for download here, or should already be flagged as an update in your existing WordPress installation. I’ll need to back things up around here, then get going with the update. For a full list of fhe 500+ fixes and enhancements, see the WordPress blog.

The Google team has finally released a version of the Chrome browser for Mac and Linux. Chrome is lightweight and fast – that experience was previously the sole privilege of Windows users. With Chrome available on both Macintosh and Linux platforms, an addition to the existing fanbase may occur.

The greatest advantage of Chrome is its speed and its isolation of individual web pages to prevent a crash in one of them taking down content opened in other tabs.

In contrast to Firefox, Chrome is not yet burdened by users loading tons of extensions to perform a variety of tasks not necessarily related directly to web browsing. Extensions are available, but the primary reason for using Chrome is simply to enjoy fast, trouble-free browsing. Excellent support for Ajax, CSS 3 and HTML 5 mean good stability and, should I say it again, high speed. The import of bookmarks and assorted other settings is easy and quick – just be sure to shut down Firefox before attempting the import.

Get Google Chrome for the Mac here. The DMG file is roughly 19MB in size. If you’re running Linux, the installer may be downloaded here. Default support is provided for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE.