The legend of the Haribo tree

I recently celebrated my 32nd birthday, and I had to write a short post to preserve my finest gift for posterity. I had a number of lovely gifts, but for sheer ingenuity and creativity, this was the clear winner.

I arrived at Joe and Clare's last Sunday to find a large Amazon box stood up, with the flaps loosely sellotaped and a card hinting cryptically at "enjoying their creation". When I opened the box, I couldn't believe my eyes:

Mother-flippin' Haribo tree.

Yes, a Haribo tree. And a massive one at that. Only in my wildest dreams had I imagined that Haribo could in fact be grown and cultivated rather than purchased, but here in front of me was gelatinous proof.

Haribo tree in situ.

I'd never encountered anything like it, but there do seem to be some commercial offerings although they look pretty weedy in comparison with the craft foam ball, wood, No More Nails, cocktail sticks (x1000) and soil construction of my wondrous tree.

Once we started "pruning" the tree we discovered that the Haribo was so tightly packed onto the tree that some Haribo fossils had been formed. Generations of future confectionary archaeologists will surely marvel over Haribus Cola Bottlus:

Rare fossilised cola bottle.

I might go as far as suggesting it's one of the best gifts I've ever been given. Mostly because it's given me a new interest in gardening; unfortunately though, none of the "cuttings" I've planted at home are showing any signs of life.

iMovie 11 fails to export Quicktime with error ~2125 on Lion

I recently tried exporting 2:49 hours of HDV footage to a 1080p Quicktime using iMovie 11 on my brand new Mac mini. The initial estimation of duration was 13 hours, which rose to 21 hours and then 24 hours.

This morning I discovered that the export had failed with a rather cryptic error code of ~2125. While I was on the phone to AppleCare (summary based on my first ever call: don't bother) I noticed that I only had 5gb of disk space free. Before I started exporting I had around 120gb free.

What I discovered is that iMovie uses a temporary file, and in the case of a ~2125 error this temporary file is not removed. After much searching, I tracked my file to the following location: ~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/

Here's the culprit:

-rw-r--r-- 1 timdp staff 112589413689 11 Aug 01:33 ICMMultiPassStorage-526-bfffde94-1

Taking up 113gb (22.6% stats fans) of my drive. Not cool.

Here's my remedy:

Press CMD + Space

Type Terminal, press return

In Terminal, type cd ~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/

Type ls -l, to see if you have a large file

Type rm , so in my case rm ICMMultiPassStorage-526-bfffde94-1

Close Terminal