I was helping Nathan tonight to print a CD cover image from within Mac OS X’s Preview application. Nathan doesn’t have Photoshop on his iBook and so we tried to do the printing via Preview. Well, it didn’t work very well on my local test because Preview is printing the PNG image rescaled all over the A4 paper and doesn’t respect the “print size” information a user can set via Photoshop or another graphics application (which is 4.75″ by 4.75″ for a CD cover).

So we went back to Preview’s printing dialog and tried to find any settings for “scaling”. And there is one. And it’s such a badly implemented option that you would only expect from a Linux printing dialog and not from a Mac OS X one. So, the scaling option is an input field that defaults to “100%”. It is a relative field, not an absolute one. So, how much percentage scaling you should input in order to get a print size of a 4.75″x4.75″ which is originated by an image pixeled at 780×780, and it’s going to be printed at an A4 paper? Go figure!

Some people think it’s a stupid idea to have your phone shock you instead of just vibrate or ring when you have an incoming call. Well, not if you are my father. He can’t hear well (so usually he can’t hear the ringing), and when he is arguing about politics in my village’s cafeterias (a very common and agressive… hobby in rural Greece), all of his mind is set on arguing against the socialists or communists.

I guess, a bit of electroshock will do him good. Maybe even, very good.