FoodBrowser 1.3 beta released

Change log:

• Monthly graph - work in progress


• Calorie estimation box based on Mifflin and St Jeor


• Copying foods in the history (copy, paste, drag and drop)


• Editing time in the history


• Fixed bug that caused some missing dates in the Energy Calculator window


• Fixed bug in drag and drop of some foods

A failing disk and the first time I see S.M.A.R.T. actually working

One of the disks that are part of the software RAID powering loudhush.ro has developed a bad sector.
The bad news arrived via email, thanks to smartmontools:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
Device: /dev/hdc, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

The good news is you can tell the disk to re-allocate the bad sector somewhere else.
I've followed the instructions here: BadBlockHowTo.txt, almost to the letter (I did some additional work removing the disk from RAID), and now the disk looks better.

I still have to replace it, since a bad block is likely to be followed by others but it's somewhat reassuring to know that smartmontools is smart enough to help.

Demo screencast: configuring an IAX account with LoudHush

Text to speech in LoudHush

I've included a text to speech translator with the current development version of LoudHush. The feature will requires Leopard, otherwise the menu item leading to the text to speech window will remain disabled.

It's using the default voice as selected in the system preferences - i.e. the Alex voice on Leopard.

At this point I'm not sure about real use cases behind this feature so if you're willing to try a beta version please leave a comment or contact us at info at loudhush dot ro.

FoodBrowser released as beta

I didn't find the time to work on FoodBrowser lately so I've decided to go ahead and release it as beta.

I've started writing it out of sheer frustration over the lack of a native OS X application that counts calories in various foods. Found a bunch, hated them. I've hated them because they record data in proprietary formats, locking data analysis into their own GUIs. Core Data is nice because you can always get to the data using sqlite.

So did my attempt fare any better?
Well, no. FoodBrowser is the point where most of my Cocoa projects get - usable but screaming "the devil is in the details". The devil is in the details and details take time and patience, none of which are cheap.