I just rendered an article I was writing in LaTeX, to PDF on my Apple Mac Pro. This worked fine - the PDF opened up in Preview and looked perfect. So I tried printing it on my LaserJet printer - but with horrible results. Font was wrong, spacing incorrect and symbols were missing. Look:

It took me 30 minutes but eventually I figured out the problem - it was not with my printer or the PDF document (all fonts were correctly embedded), however the issue seems to be Preview that sucks.

I have not fully written about this before, just briefly mentioned it, but it seems like what Apple fixed in 10.10.2 is now broken again.

When I was using Mavericks (Mac OS X 10.9.x) my Mac Pro 2013 was working wonderfully. I never had any issues with my WiFi, which is the conduit through which my Time Machine backups function. Then I upgraded to Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10.0). What a huge mess. First I had to completely rebuild my machine from an earlier restore, which never worked well. So I decided to give the benefit of the doubt to Apple by starting from a clean slate - as clean as they come. I wiped my whole SSD, partitions and all. I then installed Yosemite from scratch. I did not perform an archive and install - I manually reinstalled and reconfigured all my settings as to avoid any migration issues.

So the WiFi saga began. Time Machine would work fine for a couple of days then just stop. Looking at WiFi, it wither showed that it was connected and indeed I could connect to the network, or it showed it was disconnected and trying to connect would do nothing. If I performed an

So too is disk space it seems. Nice Apple:

Apr 21 09:22:22 waldomp.local com.apple.backupd[1411]: Will copy (398.1 MB) from Macintosh HD
Apr 21 09:22:22 waldomp.local com.apple.backupd[1411]: Found 8874 files (775.6 MB) needing backup
Apr 21 09:22:23 waldomp.local com.apple.backupd[1411]: 10.34 GB required (including padding), 2.44 TB available

In Canada (British Columbia at least) the legal age for being able to purchase and consume alcohol is 19 years. Unlike the states, you will only be asked to provide proof of ID if you look younger than 19.

Once is a fluke, twice is a charm it seems. I am very flattered that I have been asked twice now in the past couple of years to show my ID before I was allowed to walk out with some wine. Last time I asked the cashier whether she thought I looked too young; she said yes.

I have never really attempted this before, it is not really my thing. Since I am using an iPad recipe manager called Paprika, I was hoping to make the recipes look a bit better in my catalogue by adding pictures of the finished dishes. Initially I was not bothered, so I grabbed my iPhone and took some snapshots. The idea was to have a record of what I have cooked, and to add these images to Paprika eventually. The results sucked big time.

The problem with food photography is that if not done just right, the food will actually not look appetizing and it would render the photo pointless. The whole idea is to have your mouth water. So I have decided to change only three things - as I did not try to make the perfect photo, just one that would present the dish in a better way:

1. Spend more time laying out the food properly and appetizingly on the plate
2. Improve lighting
3. Use a camera with higher dynamic range and a faster lens for better depth of field control