I will be teaching my final polymer photogravure workshop in Asheville this January. Bookworks will be closing as a public-facing entity at the end of March 2019, and this is the last photogravure class I will be teaching there.
The workshop will use a modern polymer coated plate to create an intaglio-etched surface, which will then produce the photographic gradation of tones making the photogravure one of the most beautiful continuous tone photographic printing process. The process presents a fantastic opportunity to expand the range of visual content that can be included in books and other similar projects.
This is a two and a half day workshop that will introduce you to the basics of making polymer photogravure plates. Bring your digital files on Friday evening and walk away with some beautiful photogravures by Sunday afternoon. Sign up at the Asheville Bookworks website.
Check the downloads section for a new downloadable pdf file that covers the process of creating a linearized calibration workflow for positives used in making polymer photogravure plates. This new piece of software from BWMastery.com allows the use of QTR to create perfectly calibrated positives from which to make polymer intaglio plates.
Here is a direct link to that download page:
Panic Inc. has a well-deserved reputation for creating a very speedy, robust and easy-to-use ftp client app for the Mac. I have used the Transmit app for many years and it is everything a Mac app should be: intuitive, elegant, and fast.
Recently, Panic released an iOS version of Transmit that can be used on iPhones and iPads. This is a great thing for users that want to easily add content or edit a website while away from their primary ‘serious’ computer. As evidenced by some of my previous posts, I am now hosting my website on an Amazon EC2 instance, and getting sFTP service up and running can be a little bit of a twitchy process. The following is a very brief outline of the approach to take to enable the Transmit iOS app to access an Amazon EC2-based website.
This step is optional, but I assume that most users who are interested in downloading the Transmit iOS app will likely have the OSX version running on their computer.
Start the Transmit app, and click on Favorites->Export.. in the menu. You will be presented with an export dialog box. Create a folder in your Dropbox account and name it something like ‘EC2’, and then save the file TransmitFavorites.exportedFavorites to this folder.
On your iOS device, open the dropbox app and navigate to the file you just saved, and then tap the ‘upload’ icon, and a window will pop up with some options. Choose the Open in.. option:
Another window will appear, and in this one, tap on the Transmit icon:
The iOS device will then switch to Transmit, and here you will select the file that appears and then tap on the Import… selection:
Transmit will then ask if you want to import Favorites, and then you should respond affirmatively.
This is the part that feels a little more involved to me. Essentially, the .pem SSL certificate needs to be available inside the Transmit app. The approach recommended on the Panic website is to use iTunes to transfer this file to the ‘keys’ area of the app.
Using a USB connector, connect the iOS device to your computer (iTunes should be running). The iOS device should appear in iTunes. Click on the device name at the top of the iTunes app windows (iPad, iPhone or whatever), and then click on the Apps tab. Scroll down to the File Sharing section on the left-hand pane and locate the Transmit app. Select the Transmit app, and then click the Add.. button at the right hand bottom part of the right-side pane. Navigate to the .pem file and then import it into the Transmit app.
Note: This assumes you have not imported your EC2 server setup in Step 1. If you have, skip down to step 3
/var/www/html
if you have your site configured in a typical fashion. If the iOS app will be used for poking around on your server, for instance, editing unix configuration files, you may want to set the root path to /
. A quick note on a discovery I had this morning. I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my old Quicken for Mac 2007 installation to the newish Quicken for Mac 2015. Paid for it, downloaded and installed it per the instructions. But as soon as I clicked on it, it would crash with an error message indicating that I did not have permission to create a folder in the Application Support directory.
Hmmm. This is strange. This is part of my user directory. Why the heck would I not have permission?
I’ll backtrack here. Early in the year, I migrated my whole system from a Retina MacBook Pro to my current MacPro 2015 desktop. I used Apple’s Migration Assistant to move all my applications and user files from the old system to the new. And I noticed that there were a handful of applications that no longer worked. One of them was CodeRunner, which is a great little program to try out little code snippets in a variety of programming languages. Anyhoo - it was annoying, but not something I had time to really track down and figure out.
So this morning’s experience with the new Quicken 2015 provided the impetus to figure out what the hell is going on.
The average Mac OSX user probably is not familiar with a lot of the directory structure of OSX. One confusing aspect of this is that there are multiple Library directories (folders). There is the system Library directory and the user Library folder. And the error message I was getting from Quicken seemed to indicate a problem with the user Library folder.
I opened a terminal window, and typed the following command:
cd ~/Library
The tilde (~) is a shorthand for the user’s home directory.
I then typed in
ls -ald App*
And to my surprise, this unix command listed the owner of my Application Support directory as wheel! The owner of this directory should have been my user id, not wheel.
The fix at this point was obvious - I needed to establish my user id as the correct owner of the Application Support directory.
I was already in the ~/Library directory, so all I had to do was use the unix chown command to change the owner of this directory to my user id.
sudo chown -R myuserid Application\ Support
And Quicken 2015 would finally launch. The side benefit to this was that now all my other balky apps began to work as well!
I guess the moral of this tale is that Migration Assistant can occasionally do some stupid things to ownerships and permissions during the migration process. If problems arise, the ~/Library directory a good place to begin looking for problems.