Category: Documentation

Repairing corrupted iPhoto library

My iPhoto library was corrupted and even the Apple’s build in tools for repairing the database and rebuilding thumbnails did not longer work. Any attempt to use these tools lead to a crash. Working with the photos was also increasingly difficult, since iPhoto would frequently crash. The library contains more than 33.000 photos spanning 12 years. I was not prepared to give them up.

I have been using iPhoto Library Manager for some time for quickly moving between libraries but today it became my true champion. The software has a tool to recover corrupted libraries. But it works differently from Apple’s approach. It starts with a fresh clean library and imports all the photos, including their meta data, such as location, faces, date. It also manages to rebuild albums and folders. After nearly 20 hours of processing, my new library was fully functional. No more crashes or missing thumbs.

The rebuild function

The culprit turned out to be the QuickTime plugin Perian. Once I uninstalled it, iPhoto worked without crashing. It is a pity, since Perian is so useful.

Dutch and Chinese Translation of the Godspeed Questionnaire Series

Thanks to Bram Vanderborght and his team, a Dutch and Chinese translation of the Godspeed Questionnaire Series is now available. With this measurement instrument you can assess the anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety of robots. You can find a detailed description of the instrument in our article.

Taxonomy for LEGO Minifigures

LEGO has produced more than 4000 different Minifigures. Their variety approaches the one of small biological systems. Similar to pre-gentic biologist, we need a taxonomy to order the Minifigures. Several online communities, such as Peeron, Bricklink, Lugnet and Bricksets have created such taxonomies, which are based on the LEGO themes of the sets in which the Minifigure appeared first. If, for example, a new LEGO sets in the theme “SpongeBob SquarePants” contains a new Minifigure, then this figure will be put in the category “SpongeBob SquarePants”. Continue reading “Taxonomy for LEGO Minifigures”

How to create multiple folders with AppleScript

For a project I needed create 5000 folders. Needless to say that I certainly did not want to do this manually. After searching on Google I combined two AppleScripts. This new script creates multiple folders in the front window.

try
tell application “Finder” to set the this_folder ¬
to (folder of the front window) as alias
on error — no open folder windows
set the this_folder to path to desktop folder as alias
end try
repeat with i from 1 to 100
tell application “Finder”
make new folder at this_folder with properties {name:”xyz” & i}
end tell
end repeat