Apple

I see Red, finally

by Scott Bird
17 Jul 2007

Red NanoI noticed this afternoon that Apple’s Red range is finally available in Australia. Time to do a little shopping.


Apple recycling

by Scott Bird
14 Jul 2007

ComputersI love this time of year. Tax time, council pick-ups for larger items and a general clean-up around the place - it all has that superb ‘starting again’ feel.

Part of this cleanup inevitably involves disposing of a small pile of old computer gear (I seem to magically attract the stuff), and - in Sydney and Melbourne at least - Apple is helping out there. Perfect.


SolarRolls

by Scott Bird
21 Apr 2007

SolarRollVia Rainy Day Magazine : Just under 10 years ago I undertook about 6 months of the almost-obligatory backpacking that follows a few years of hard study. I often wonder just how many of today’s gadgets I would’ve carried with me had they been available back then - such as a digital camera, a notebook and a SolarRoll to keep them going.

The SolarRoll is exactly what the name implies; a number of photovoltaic cells put together in a flexible membrane that can be rolled up when not in use. Weighing less than half a kilogram and unfolding to just under 1.5 metres, the SolarRoll produces a respectable 14 watts of power - enough to power a laptop or digital camera. Perfect.


Forerunner of the iPod

by Scott Bird
9 Apr 2007

Watch-case phonographVia Modern Mechanix.


SketchFighter 4000 Alpha

by Scott Bird
31 Mar 2007

070331_sketchfighter.jpgSketchFighter 4000 Alpha. Spaceships, graphpaper and the fate of humanity. Beautiful.


Monolingual

by Scott Bird
7 Mar 2007

MonolingualLooking to reclaim a little space on your hard-drive? Running OS X (Panther or later)? Head over to Monolingual.

Monolingual simply removes the languages - installed by default - that you don’t use. A list appears, check the ones you want to get rid of; simple. It’ll generally free up anywhere from 2-4 gb. Beautiful.


Voltaic Systems Solar Backpack

by Scott Bird
1 Mar 2007

Voltaic Systems Solar BackpackThese look great - and will be even nicer once they have the ability to charge a laptop. A MacBook Pro, preferably.


Delicious library

by Scott Bird
2 Feb 2007 iWozI was recently discussing part of my book collection with a friend of mine, and I suggested that I jot down a few books for him to look at. Just when I was getting ready to grab the nearest text editor, a much more fun way to do it came to mind - Delicious Library. A Mac, an iSight camera and a book or two. Ah, now that's better. NB : iWoz (pictured) is a great book. I'll do a full review of it shortly.

Macworld 2007

by Scott Bird
7 Jan 2007 Steve Jobs at Macworld 2006If you can't make it to San Francisco for Macworld 2007, you'll be able to keep up with things from the comfort of your own home. Here are a few links that should come in handy : Vendors NB : I'll continue to update this list throughout the show. Let me know if you find any sites you'd like to add during that time.

Take the Elevator

by Scott Bird
23 Dec 2006 ElevatorLooking for a last minute Christmas gift for a laptop owner? How about Griffin Technology's Elevator.

What's your best iPhoto tip?

by Scott Bird
14 Dec 2006 iPhoto 6For the past few weeks I've been gradually immersing my dad in the world of digital photography. As it's his first Mac, iPhoto seemed like the perfect choice. iPhoto is quite a powerful tool behind that deceptively simple exterior. Although he's mastered the basics admirably, I'd still like to squeeze a bit of extra mileage from this great application. To that end, what's your best iPhoto tip?

7 Essential Front Row tips

by Scott Bird
10 Dec 2006

Front RowFront Row seems in many ways to be one of Apple’s forgotten children. Underneath the simple exterior, however, is quite a powerful beast. Here are 7 ways to squeeze a little more out of it.

1. Sync the remote with only one computer.
If you’ve got multiple Macs and their corresponding remotes (as in a store, school or even home setup), you’re probably growing tired of the fact that a click on one remote opens Front Row on several machines. To prevent this, pair each remote with its intended machine by pointing the remote at the usual target (Apple logo for iMacs, left of the latch for MacBook Pros) and hold Menu + Next for 5 seconds.

An icon of two chain links will appear to indicate that the pairing was successful.

2. Open and close Front Row using keyboard
The default key combination used to open Front Row is Command-Escape. To change this, enter your System Preferences, open the Keyboard and Mouse Panel, and navigate to the Keyboard Shortcuts Tab. Scroll down to the Front Row section and change to the desired combination.

If you want to quickly exit Front Row using the keyboard, press F11 or F16. Other options are to press the Home key (which will leave the music and video playing, just exit Front Row) and the key combination Command-Option-Escape, which will quit Front Row (and everything playing) instantly.

3. Installing Front Row on any Mac running Mac OS X (10.4.5 and above)
Andrew Escobar has detailed instructions on this on his website. As long as you have a PowerPC Mac (the Intel Macs all ship with Front Row and a Remote), with a minimum of the items listed below, installation is a straightforward affair.

You’ll need :

4. Use the Front Row Remote to control other applications
The Front Row Remote can be used to control many things within OS X Tiger, including :

5. Play Xvid, DivX, and 3ivX using Front Row

The logic behind this one is simple. Front Row’s multimedia capabilities lean heavily on Quicktime, so just installing the various codecs on your machine isn’t enough. You’ll need to install the Quicktime compatible versions of each.

Links to each of them - as well as a detailed explanation of their installation and use - can be found at Paul Stamatiou’s site.

6. Using Front Row to play media on external drives

Let’s face it, transferring everything to the internal drive of an iMac isn’t too bad; but the novelty wears off quickly if you’re using a MacBook. Storing your massive media collection on an external drive not only makes sense, it’s possible for Front Row to see it.

How? Aliases.

An alias is just a pointer to another location (if you’re making the switch from Windows, think of shortcuts). To make an alias, open the Finder window for the external drive, locate the folder which contains the media you wish to play via Front Row, and drag it to the relevant Front Row directory (such as ‘Movies’) whilst holding down the Option and Command keys. Alternately, select Make Alias from the File menu, and drag the resulting folder across.

7. Play movies from VIDEO_TS folders

Although Front Row itself doesn’t support movies in VIDEO_TS folders, DVD Player does. Squished Squirrel’s DVD Assist (an Applescript ‘stay open’ applet) bridges this gap by closing Front Row upon selection of a video in a VIDEO_TS folder and opening it in DVD Player. Glorious.





Organisation in iPhoto

by Scott Bird
3 Dec 2006 OrganisingIn the two weeks I've had the new MacBook Pro I've been quietly ignoring the piles of DVDs sitting on my desk. These don't contain movies (those are elsewhere); they are simply backups of several years of digital photographs. To say I've got quite a few pictures there is an understatement. My first thought when picking up the laptop was to accompany it with a copy of Aperture; however I quickly decided to give iPhoto a serious run instead. After all, it was bundled with the Mac, and I really didn't know anything about it. Today was designated a photo-sorting day. A few hours' copying photos to the iPhotos library (from the backup DVDs) took me about a third of the way through the first pile; nowhere near completion but it gave me around twenty thousand images to play with in iPhoto. The first thing to do was to organise them a bit. This organisation incorporated several techniques, a few of which are outlined below. Behind each of them was the idea that it must be a simple, easily repeatable process as well as being automatic wherever possible. Smart albums iPhoto's Smart albums operate in the same way as Smart playlists do in iTunes. The album is always automatically generated based on the current contents of the library, based upon criteria you define at the start. Of particular benefit were the 'recent roll' Smart albums as discussed in Macworld. From the article :
In particular, I find the last roll album quite useful when I want to see just my newest pictures. However, sometimes I’d also like to see the second or third newest. You might think you’d be able to do this by just telling iPhoto to show two or three albums in the last roll album, and you’d be right. If you want to have the five newest rolls always available in their own albums, though, the preferences setting won’t help—Smart Albums will.
Keyword Manager Bullstorm's Keyword Manager is a great iPhoto plugin that succeeds in performing one task extremely well. As you've no doubt guessed from the title, Keyword Manager greatly simplifies and enhances the task of assigning keywords to photos. Not only is it fast and straightforward; the ability to create your own hierarchical keyword structures is superb. NB: Keywords are shown using View -> Keywords. Ratings The ratings feature of iPhoto is a powerful tool which I can't help thinking is often overlooked. After all, assigning a rating to each photo is not exactly as exciting as life gets. However, having the photos rated allows a more creative use of slideshows and the creation of powerful Smart Albums. At the very least, a 'Best of' smart album containing only photographs with a 5 star rating is great for showing to friends, relatives and potential clients. An automatically updated portfolio if you will. With this last thought in mind (an automatically updated portfolio) I created a simple smart album which contained only 5 star photos, taken anywhere at any time. It was then time to quickly scan through the various collections and pick out the cream of the crop, with fingers poised over the CMD-5 keys. A little effort, but well worthwhile. This smart album now forms the basis of a desktop image, screensaver and slideshow. NB: Ratings are shown using View -> My Rating. Titles When it comes to tagging photos en-masse with great searchable information, Titles are right up there with Keywords. For each album my process is : For example, an album may start with all photos being given the title 'Australia', some of which are then called 'Sydney, Australia', a few of which are called 'Hyde Park, Sydney, Australia', 3 of which are called 'Archibald Fountain, Hyde Park, Sydney, Australia'. You get the idea. NB: Titles are shown using View -> Titles. Now, time to look at a few external hard drives - several piles of DVDs to go.

Installing Win XP on Parallels (Mac OS X)

by Scott Bird
25 Nov 2006 Win XP under ParallelsMy recent purchase of a shiny new MacBook Pro - as great as it is - left me with a large pile of Windows-based applications. Whilst the inbuilt functionality of OS X made up for a couple of them, and there were quite a few that rarely saw much use; the few remaining ones were enough to grab Parallels, and install XP on the Mac. Before you get too upset, XP certainly doesn't replace OS X - Parallels is a VMM (virtual machine manager). XP runs in its own window, and switching between it and the main OS X desktop is only a keyboard shortcut away. A very good setup. On to the setup itself. I'll cover the installation of various Win XP applications later, but for now a basic XP setup will get you going. Time to grab a couple of discs (the installation discs for both Win XP and Parallels), a cup of coffee and put aside 15-20 minutes or so. The installation itself takes the form of 6 stages, which are as follows : Software update First things first. Make sure your Mac is up to date ( -> Software Update). Download and install any firmware or OS updates. Install Parallels The Quick Start Guide that comes with Parallels should be enough to complete a standard installation (it really isn't more complicated than inserting the CD and following the instructions). Don't bother creating a new VM yet, we'll do that it a minute. Update Parallels Before creating a VM and installing XP, check for any updates to the Parallels software (Help -> Check for Updates). Download and install them as directed. Install XP Installing Win XPCreate a Typical VM as per the Quick Start Guide. Select your CD/DVD drive as directed. Insert the XP disc, follow the instructions at the start, and sit back.
Clone default XP install Once the XP install is finished, use the Clone option (VM -> Clone VM) to duplicate the basic XP install. This will save you having to reinstall XP if/when it requires a clean start. Install Parallels tools The tools allow you to share folders between the XP VM and the Mac OS X desktop; in addition to improving mouse and video performance in XP. Install them using VM -> Install Parallels Tools. That's it. You now have a fully functioning (and fast) XP installation on your Mac.

MacBook Pro

by Scott Bird
19 Nov 2006 MacBook Pro and Apple IIeAfter around two years of regularly pestering my parents to buy a computer, I found myself - at the mighty age of 13 - the proud owner (OK, user) of an Apple IIe. When the time came to upgrade to something more powerful I ended up on the Windows path, on which I stayed for all home computing for the next two decades. Last week I looked around me to see that I owned 5 computers, all of them running Windows and only one of them fully functional. When this last one died - at least the primary hard disk did - I decided to rejoin the Apple path. The logic was simple: it was another thing to learn. The simplicity, aesthetics and suitability for my needs were only minor considerations; nice to have but nowhere near as important. The major factor was that I could run Windows on a Mac, but not (as least not yet) run OS X on a PC. I ended up getting a shiny new MacBook Pro, which has just been upgraded to the Core 2 Duo. Together with double the RAM (now 1gb by default) and a host of minor improvements - notably to the DVD burning capabilities, which is ideal - it's a great, beautiful and exceedingly fast machine. I love it. One of the planned uses is the running of Win XP in a virtual window, largely because I already have a few high-priced (and paid for) applications for that OS; but also so I can keep up to date with that and other operating systems (I play with various flavours on Linux from time to time). I'm about to install Parallels and XP, and will post up a summary of the experience once I've had a chance to test them both out properly. The same thing goes for the MacBook itself, but at the moment I find it hard to believe that it's going to be anything less than a glowing review. It really is a superb machine.

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