Very useful at home, not useful in a lab where there are 23 other mice it could possibly pair with.This, will, however kill it:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth BluetoothAutoSeekKeyboard -bool false;
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth BluetoothAutoSeekPointingDevice -bool false;

You can’t view albums by grid (well you can view ALL your photos in a grid, but not an album), you can’t easily select multiple photos at once easily.

The iPhoto library has to be updated every time it launches before it will see new photos. Including photos taken while in iPhoto, with a loading screen that blocks you from using the app (they can’t put it at the top of the screen to indicate why I don’t see new photos while I work on some other ones):
Notice also the extensive help options, to get around the fact that you don’t know what the flag, flower pot (oh, it’s a medal), toolbox icons do when you first open it. Only when you click on the Gear do I get an option to revert the photo. But when I click on the Gear somewhere else do I get preferences. The brushes palette blocks most of the screen, and also darkens the photo in the background (to make the fancy brushes pop more) but that also makes me doubt if saturation or contrast needs to be changed:

And one feature I thought that would be useful immediately, Events, doesn’t even do Events properly. Why do I need to plug my iPhone into iTunes for this to even show up? All my photos have Exif data with date/time stamps on them. How can you not do a display of all the photos taken today, yesterday, the last week, the preceding three weeks, then monthly breakdowns. Then I have some sort of starting point to sort out the events on my device.

In the grid view (which is unsorted, firehouse chronological list of all your photos), there isn’t even an option to pinch/zoom on the photos or change the thumbnail view size.

Last minute update: you can actually select up to five! photos by using two fingers to tap on the two most distant photos on the timeline and then all five are selected. Then you can email those, apparently.

In the end: Photos lets me sort photos better and faster than iPhoto. I can’t easily share them from iPhoto as I can in Photos. The feature I would want: auto sort by locations and dates either requires iTunes to use it once, or each time (is it just syncing my Mac’s iPhoto library then?). The retouching interface takes up entirely too much screen size for the iPhone, I could see it working on an iPad, but it is still comical. By comical, I don’t mean “this is made for amateurs” which obviously iPhoto is always geared towards, but comical as in “this is just cartoonish.”

Underneath the Christmas tree for me this year was my own 2 liter baby barrel, made here in Portland. I didn’t even know where to start with it, and was not the must excited when I realized the amount of money I’d have to spend on spirits only to not drink them for a month or two. That is when I brought up the conversation with Justin Akins of Vintage Cocktail Lounge and asked if he would want to use the barrel to experiment with some of his own inventory. So now I had a sponsor, but what cocktail should I start with?

Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s barrel aged Negroni at Clyde Commons came to mind, I mean, it was rated one of the best in the world over at Imbibe. And I love Negronis, but what I love even more? A Lucien Gaudin, one of the rediscovered cocktails in the last few years that came around about a decade after the Negroni. Dry vermouth instead of sweet, and the addition of Cointreau makes this a more balanced drink in my mind, a little less sweet, while still keeping bitter component of the Campari in check. I first found it in Dr. Cocktail‘s great collection of recipes and lore “Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails.”

So that is what Vintage currently has aging (twelve days old at this point), along with their usual collection of house-made tinctures and infusions. Already at this point it has mellowed out a bit, taking the edge off the gin. Hopefully by the end of March it will be ready for serving tastes to intrigued cocktail nerds.

Recipe: Oak Aged Lucien Guadin (makes 2 liters)

• 800ml Gin (Brokers)
• 400ml Campari
• 400ml Dry Vermouth (Noilly Prat)
• 400ml Cointreau

Mix into a large pitcher, pour into barrel, wait. Rotate the barrel 1/4 turn every week. As for serving, we haven’t gotten that far yet, but chilled and up with a lemon twist is what the original drink called for, and that sounds like the logical place to start.

It was originally brought to my attention by Robert Hess when he featured it in one of his cocktail videos.