• Why don't you kiss me? I am a princess.
• They Called Her An Angel

Both are obviously in English.

Well for one, I'm rather busy, and usually away from my main Mac. Currently I'm attending a one year training for bling (non-visual) use of PCs. This is intended as a basis to a two year job training as certified software developer. Not the I'd need the developmet skills or that they will be teaxhing me anything 'new'... this is all about doing it non-visually. Why? As you may or may not know, I count as legally bling, meaning my vision is - and has been - getting worse. So what I am learning now is how to do computer work completely without vison. The goal is to continue in my career (or rather restart) as software developer.

Needless to say that all this brings several big shifts in my outlook, approach and general way of life. Never has my handicap been so present in my conscious thoughts... now is a big time of working through all the fears and ending all the denials that accompany dealing with a disability.

I'm doing very well as far as school is concerned, also in terms of non-visual computing (reading Braille, using text-to-speech etc)...

It still takes a lot of energy, and leaves little spare cycles for the things I used to do so much.

It's a transitional phase of my life, so much is for sure.

This has happened for me with beloved Stanza eBook reader. I love Stanza and use it all the tome. But my iOS device is slightly on the dated side of fresh (it's an iPod touch 2nd Gen. and that means I'm stuck with iOS 4.2.1 for ever). The latest update for Stanza that will install on my device is version 3.2... and that crashes on startup each tome, while the previous versin (3.1) worked just fine.

So the solutions seems clear: go back to the version that is known to work, yeah? Yeah right, but HOW? There's two stumbling blocks here:

• where does one GET older versions of iOS apps?
• how does one actually install them once obtained?

Rest your nerves, no jailbreacking required here, promise.

Where: if you are lucky, and haven't synced since you upgraded via the App Store on your device, you will still have the older version on your Mac. You can check in iTunes in the Apps section: find the app in question, select it, right-click and choose Show in Finder. Copy the file to a save place.

If you can't it this way, you might want to try two things: Time Machine backups (yeah right, you do have those), or, as im my case, the Trash! This an often overlooked place to check.

Note the the file you are looking for will have the app name plus a version number in it's name and have the suffix of .ipa

How to put the older version back:

this is the fun part, hahaha.

• make sure you backup ALL the files/date your app will have saved on your device. In case of Stanza, you can use the iTunes option to copy down all the books you have in Stanza... Otherwise, make sure you don't need any of what's in the app, as this process will reset everything to deault, as if you installed the app for the first time.
• On your device, choose the app and *delete* it. Jupp, poof, gone.
• In iTunes, make sure you delete the newer version from your apps section (the older version we want to reinstall is in a safe place, remember?)
• Now we re-add the app to iTunes: Select the older version .ipa file in Finder, right click and choose Open With > iTunes. This will re-add it to your apps section in iTunes.
• now you can use iTunes as per normal to re-install the app. This is just the same as if you had downloaded the app on your Mac via iTunes and then installed it on the device.

Important: Do NOT ever choose to update the app again - if you are not sure that there now is a version that will not crash as the one you just backed out of. Avoid using 'update all' from now on.

This trick worked just fine for me, I'm happy back to reading in Stanza 3.1, only hitch was that I lost all the stored books I had on there, lucky me I have them all on my Mac anyway ;)

Some issues I had with my dev tools (some paths changed, so they needed to be edited for things like Git and CMake to work again)... A bit of a pain was the installation of XCocde4 from the App Store... but after a bit of poking around I have it all up and running again (actually, I use a side-by-side installation of XCode 3.2.5 and 4.1, mainly working in 3.2.5 for now). The integration of Git into XCode 4 is cool to say the least, and it seems to work just fine with GitHub.

Some pointers:

• Restoring PPC, SDK 10.4/10.5 and GCC 4.0 Support to Xcode4 - Mac OS X Hints
• SoundFlower for Lion (if you don't know what SoundFlower is, chances are you won't need it)

One thing that can break this deadlock is often overlooked. It is called Limitation.

What's that? you say. Limiting myself? I don't have anything to start with! I am limited already!

Here I would like to disagree. You may perceive the blank page as a void, a nothingness that needs to be filled. But I believe the opposite is true. A blank page is a vast open space. Everything is possible. The whole universe, the real one and also a multitude of fictional ones, sleeps in a blank page. The opportunities are so vast that our problem is not one of lack but of overabundance. We could write about anything at all. So where do we start? What do we pick?

Here's where voluntary self-limitation can help. Given an overwhelming number of possibilities, we let chance choose for us. We roll dice on a list of concepts, draw a Tarot card, choose some images from magazines at random, or pick three words by flipping through a novel or dictionary.

How does this random technique work, and why? First, the actual method matters little. The idea is to collect a limited number of ideas (what I call seeds). These seeds can be single words, images on a card, or objects in our surroundings. It doesnԴ matter whether these things are related to each other.

Then we take these seeds and try to connect them, by creating a story that incorporates all of them. Working with things not normally connected can be a great boost to creativity, and makes for interesting reading later. Tinkering around with these seeds will likely lead to some kind of inspiration, and might even open the floodgates of creativity. If not, at least we got started into the writing and thinking process.

What happens in this limitation process? Given a number of concepts, words, and objects without context, our mind will try to supply that context. Our mind is very good at storytelling. Putting things into context is the basic act of storytelling. And where there is no story or context supplied, our mind will make one up. But we first need to supply something for the mind to wrap around, which is what weԲe doing with our random draw of seeds.

So the next time you find yourself staring at a blank page, try giving your mind something to wrap around. Limit the choices and watch the magic happen.

I will be writing more about actual things you can try in this space soon. Stay tuned!

{This article was originally posted 15th May of 2006 on Alison Gresik's blog 'Wrestling the Angel' wich sadly is no longer online. Alison acted as my editor in the process of creating this article, and I learned a lot from reading her comments and editorial advice! I recently noticed that I had never posted this on my own space, so here it is now.}

So what is this “right time” anyway? What does it mean for a time to be right for your writing? You can either think of it as an external factor, one you can not directly influence - you can’t change the time afer all. All you can do is try to be writing when it is the right time. So you limit your creativity to only those times of day you (or someone else) declare as right for you?

When you look at it from another perspecive, the “right time” is not really about time, as in time of day, at all. What it really is about you being in the right frame of mind for writing. Now wait a minute! What if you are not in the right frame of mind when it is the right time? Or, what if you are in the right frame of mind, and it’s not the time you set aside for writing?

I’d propose to stop thinking of “the right time to write” all together, and instead consider what you need to be in the right frame of mind. You see, a frame of mind is something you, yourself can control! Much more easily than the clock for sure.

Learn to steer your mind into the right frame for writing, and ANY time is the right time.

Turns out that the ability to converst any RGB PDF to CMYK is built into any Mac in the form of ColorSync and it's Quartz Filters. I won't describe the details here, but following this HowTo got me all set up (the concepts apply to any App, not just Pages):

I Work in Pages: Preparing colour separated PDFs using ColorSync