Joseph Cote's Blog

Gorgeous Time Lapse Photography

2011-04-21T23:15:00.000-04:00

So I'm a photographer and designer, most of you know that. It's this kind of incredibly gorgeous work that inspires me.

QRCode

2010-12-23T02:02:00.000-05:00

Ever see one of those weird block looking things in a magazine, in a store on a sign, perhaps on a business card and wonder "What the hell is that?" Well it's called a QR Code or Quick Response Code. It's a two dimensional barcode that holds a whole lot more information that just a simple number that your standard barcode holds.

These QRCodes are a new(ish) way of getting a message across to someone without having to write it all out. All you need is a smartphone and you're golden. Download a free QR Scanner to your iPhone or Android and go ahead scan that weird blob in and see what comes up. Alright alright, it literally decodes to the following:

BEGIN:VCARD
N:Joseph Cote
TEL;CELL:(760) 563-2683
EMAIL:josephacote@gmail.com
ADR;HOME:;;364 Wilder St;MA;Lowell;01851
ORG:207 Stills
TITLE:Photographer
URL:http://www.207stills.com
BDAY:June 30, 1986
END:VCARD

Which when you use a decoder such as QuickMark QR Code Reader 4 (99¢ via iTunes) it will most likely show you something much prettier like this:

So how is this useful you're asking. How could this crazy system of coding and decoding really be a viable source of communication? Well, just as everything else, it has its place. Let's say you're a small business owner and you want to place an ad in the local paper to advertise your new ice cream stand. Why not take out a very small box that simply has a simple tagline like "Here's the Scoop!" and next to that is a weird matrix of information that if you scan it with your phone brings you right to your ice cream shops website, or perhaps its Google coordinates.

How about you have a business card and you want all your friends, or new colleagues, to have your information in their phone immediately... put one of these QR Codes on your business card and hand 'em out. All your friends or colleagues have to do is scan it in with their iPhone and it will import your name, company name, title, birthday (if you so choose), your business phone number, perhaps a private link to your online resume. Whatever information you want to share, it can be imported to your card info on their phone immediately.

iPhone 4

2010-06-08T14:23:00.000-04:00

I'm sure you've heard the news of the new iPhone 4. Here's a great sentimental feeling video showing off Apple's newest, most technologically advanced smartphone ever:

DIY Strobist On The Cheap...ish

2010-03-18T00:53:00.000-04:00

I've been getting more and more involved with photography over the past few years and with every photoshoot I do I gain a bit of knowledge in some area or another. My next venture is getting into a more professional level of strobe photography. Currently I have two continuous 250 watt lights that I shoot with shoot-though umbrellas, which works... but it's just not enough power to really capture someone in all their essence. I'm still looking for a somewhat cheap solution to this issue, but so far I've found that the best investment seems to be in a strobist system. This is where you actually use standard on-camera flashes and you take them off... your camera...

This allows for the same quality shot you might get with a super expensive studio setup, but for half the cost, plus it gives you the option to go somewhere and shoot someone in a location where you have no access to a wall socket. The other nice benefit of using standard on-camera flashes is that making diy light modifiers (such as softboxes or snoots) is really simple.

So, how cheap is cheap...ish you ask? You can get a Vivitar 285HV for $81 bones on Amazon, a light stand and the connections for another 65 bucks or so, plus maybe an umbrella for $12 at Adorama. So for under $200 bucks you can have yourself a pretty nice little setup. I've been looking over my options recently and I think I'm going to pick up two 285HV's and a two flash strobist kit similar to this one from Midwest Photo Exchange. These kits start at $199 and include everything you need (minus the strobes themselves) to get the most professional lighting system a starving art student can ask for.

Pictory Mag

2009-12-03T23:29:00.000-05:00

Telling a story is always easiest and most effective when you have an image to simply show what you're talking about. pictorymag.com is a new site that exemplifies the exact point. here's what the site looks like, check it out and see for yourself how awesome it is to see incredible imagery that perfectly explains the story attached!

Google Wave

2009-12-03T23:03:00.002-05:00

Google Wave is the internet-based communication of the future, no doubt about it. It's like email 2.0. Here's a video from the developers themselves introducing Google Wave. it's a great watch.

I love the ability to have images, videos, and music put right in line with my message. Also being able to have conversations with many people at the same time about the same topic such as planning a trip, then having a private message with just one person about the same topic who's already a part of the conversation; maybe asking Sally if she's okay with us inviting her ex-boyfriend... she might not want to answer that to the whole group involved in the conversation, but to just me she's more than willing to answer so we know what's the best course of action. This can all be done within the same thread. Public and private messages including pictures, video, music, slideshows, links, you name it.

Nikon Film Festival

2009-11-25T22:53:00.000-05:00

What would your day look like in 140 seconds? That's the question Nikon is asking. Nikon's Film Festival is where you can see the answers other people have posted. They encourage you to use a Nikon dSLR with video to make your movie with either stop motion or in movie mode, but it's not a requirement. A day in the life of photographer Chase Jarvis for example...

New Remastered Beatles Box Set

2009-09-17T15:40:00.000-04:00

If you're a beatles fan this should be exciting news! Apple/BMG just released a new box set with all the original albums remastered!

Check out the original article from NPR's All Songs Considered, this last weeks episode is all about the new box set and what's actually new

Google Voice

2009-09-06T12:09:00.007-04:00

Google Voice is a fantastic beta service by Google. Here's a quick video to give a brief explanation:

The first thing all my friends say is, "But I only have one phone line, so why would I want this?" I then start to list off all the other benefits of a Google Voice number, like how when you get a call you can choose to answer it, send it to voicemail, or send it to voicemail and listen in on the message. If you choose to send the call to voicemail it will then transcribe what the person says and then send it to you in an email and text message if you'd like.

The next part is what I love so much: free calls. Call your own Google Voice number from any phone you have set up on the account and you can call any number for free. So say you're at home and you want to call your sister in Seattle but it's only 3:40pm on a Tuesday afternoon so you won't get free minutes on your cell, no problem, go online to your account or call your Google Voice number, hit 2, then dial your sisters number and #. Then you will be connected for a free call.

I use Google Voicemail so when I can just give out one number to everyone: friends, colleagues, family, clients, someone who got my business card or maybe got my number from a friend. When people call I can place them into categories and down the road when I have a work phone or land line I'll never have to bother my friends with new numbers. I control who calls where and when they can reach me.

Say I go on vacation, I can set up a temporary number so all my calls go to my cell for the week. When I get back everything automatically goes back to normal. I can set up do not disturb times as well, so if I want to go to sleep and never get a call from anyone but certain emergency numbers between the hours of 11am and 8am, I just set it up!

To see a full feature list of the incredible and, as always, forward thinking Google Voice service, cheek it out at Google.com/googlevoice/about.

Write on your desktop with Desktastic

2009-08-23T00:45:00.000-04:00

Ever get a call and need to write something down but you aren't in quick reach of a pen? Or maybe you just like to doodle. This app is a must check out app, it's call Desktastic and it lets you do just that, if you have a Wacom tablet, it takes advantage of the pressure sensitivity and the eraser.

Here's how it works: you have a tool set on your desktop at all times and when you want to write a note, draw a picture, write some text, or point something out to someone, just hit the user-customizable enabler hotkey, choose the tool you'd like to use and you're all set!

It's a eat app for productivity or just fun, so check it out! The app will run you $12 bucks if you want to use it past teh 30 day trial period, or the serial is in June 2009's Serial Box, which worked for me.

Delete Saft... For Good This Time

2009-08-21T01:02:00.000-04:00

First off Saft is an input manager for Safari, it enables many features that Safari will probably include next time around such as full screen options, ad blocking, and session restoring. It's a great tool, but it only supports certain versions of Safari, so when you upgrade Safari to the most recent release, it breaks Saft and it's useless, meanwhile leaving you with an annoying reminder that Saft isn't properly running.

This is an excerpt from sniptools.com that explains perfectly how to solve this problem for now:

"If you’re here, you know what I’m talking about. The Safari plugin sounds like a neat little tool but is a pesky customer on any computer. Not the way to win hearts. Deleting it doesn’t work, nor do the instructions on their website.
Here's what you do:

First, close Safari. This is VERY important, as it does not work otherwise.
Start Terminal. (Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal, or type Terminal in Spotlight).
Under Terminal type “sudo -s” without the quotation marks to log in as root.
Then enter: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
Go to the blue (or gray) apple at the top left of the screen, then select Force Quit. From the menu of items, click on “Saft” and click on the Force Quit button.
Then, in the same Force Quit window, click on “Finder” and click the “Relaunch” button.
In the Finder window, on the top right bar (the Filter spotlight bar), type “saft” without the quotes. Delete with delight any file called Saft. Note: This may reveal a few other files that may contain the word “Saft” such as threads.py in my case (a Python file). Naturally, you want to NOT delete these. Just get rid of the Saft files.
Empty the trash. If there is a file that won’t delete because it’s in use, then Force Quit “Saft” again as in Step 5 above, and then Empty Trash again.
Go back into Terminal, and type “sudo -s” again without quotation marks. Then enter: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
This will set the Finder back to the way it was before. Then type “exit” and it will exit out of the root.
Now navigate to the folder: /Library/InputManagers. Note that this is NOT the “Library” folder in your Users folder. This is the Library folder from the root. Inside InputManagers is the “saft” folder — get rid of it.
Empty Trash (again). If it says Saft is in use, reboot the machine and empty it then. Or if you use some excellent utility like MainMenu you can “Force Empty Trash”.

Go back to your happy, problem free Mac!"

Facebook Suggestions

2009-08-12T17:19:00.000-04:00

I love social media, I think it's such an integral part of web 2.0. It's really leading us into a world where advertisements are actually interesting, such that they introduce me to things I'm... actually... interested in! (Weird concept, I know!) Well, that said, I think Facebook needs to alter their algorithm a bit... I changed my relationship status today and IMMEDIATELY I started to get these "Meet Sexual Girls" ads all over the place. I would think they would target things a little more related to me... like my music, movies, and interests, especially knowthing sort of advertising is old school, and doesn't work on 98% of users.

John Quincy Adams Tweets

2009-08-05T22:43:00.000-04:00

Apparently some high schooler from Boston noticed that our sixth president had a diary in which his entries were mainly consisted of posts that were less than 140 characters... being the Internet savvy child that is the youth of today, he decided to use the short length to his advantage and start posting one post a day on Twitter @JQAdams_MHS.

Nikon and OS X Tethering... For Free!

2009-07-30T00:57:00.000-04:00

Until recently if you wanted to use your Nikon to shoot tethered with your Mac (snap pictures and bypass the SD card and just save your pictures right to a folder on your Mac...) you had to dish out some serious cash (ahem, $150 bones for a proprietary Nikon application). Well, not anymore! Now it's easy and FREE to shoot tethered from your Nikon or Canon dslr camera. Just head on over to www.sofortbildapp.com and download their application called Sofortbild. It connects automatically to your camera when you just simply plug it in and turn it on.

You get to see and edit any of your camera settings right from within the application. On top of that you can access the shutter right from your computer, you can set up bracketing and HDR support, also self timer and interval shooting controls.

Do yourself a favor and set this app up, if not to use the computer controls, have it save images to a folder that you set Lightroom to watch and auto import from! Have fun!!!

Monitor Calibration

2009-07-24T01:52:00.000-04:00

If you have an Apple MacBook Pro with an LED based screen and you do anything having to do with color (i.e. photography, web design, graphics, flash, et. cetera) then you HAVE to calibrate your screen in order to get correct color representation. If you don't calibrate, the work you do won't look the same on other computers... not good. Here's a link to six .icc calibration files you can download and check out. Try out the different calibrations and see what works best for you!

When you get the file unzip it and place the .icc files in Macintosh HD/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/, open up the System Preferences, then hit the Displays button. In this pane select Color, then switch between the new calibrations to find the best one to fit your screen. (Note: if you don't see the new icc files, uncheck the box that says "Show profiles for this display only.")

Twitter Clients

2009-07-16T13:35:00.000-04:00

There is a plethora of Twitter clients out there that all have their own special features or areas they excel in, but which is the best for you as a Mac user?

TweetDeck - It is one of the most popular twitter clients with large user-base. Multi-column twitter timelines, powerful twitter search and custom groups makes it an ideal twitter client for power users. It has a rich URL shortening support. You can also update your Facebook account via Tweetdeck. You can also use the TwitScoop cloud to keep you updated about what's hot on twitter. Tweetdeck updates itself automatically and has various customization options including custom colors. The only issue that is frequently raised by users is the memory usage. TweetDeck is available for Mac, Windows and Linux platform.

Twidget - Currently, it is only available for Mac platform. This light weight twitter client is ideal for casual users who doesn't have large network of active followers. Some of the features include auto-updating timelines, alerts for new tweets, new version availability alert, links to DM's and twitter contacts and much more. You can also favorite selective tweets directly from within the refreshing timeline. Twidget also allows you to collapse and expand the timeline window at will. Future versions will have Growl notifications, audible notifications, URL shortening support, multiple language support and flexible resizing option.

Twitterrific - This twitter client has stunning interface and is light on system resources. It supports multiple twitter accounts and provides access to user profile pages with a single click. It supports audible alerts and keyboard shortcuts. You can also set custom hotkey for showing and hiding tweets. twitterrific also supports deletion of your own tweets and has customizable timeline auto-refresh intervals. Replies and direct messages are displayed inline highlighted with different colors for easy readability. Through custom settings you can also set window auto-hiding. There are two more variants of twitterrific for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Tweetie - This Mac-only client is my personal favorite. Like Twitterrific it stays tucked in the menubar when you're not using it and when someone tweets the menu icon lights up to let you know. Custom hotkey for showing and hiding the window included, all the other standard features as well, but my favorite part is that it has bit.ly, TinyURL, is.gd, tr.im, and DiggBar integration for URL shortening services. Also support for TwitPic, yFrog, Twitgoo, Posterous, img.ly, and pix.im integration for image services!

...In Plain English

2009-06-26T11:27:00.000-04:00

Common Craft is a classic favorite site that shows you how things work visually. I thought this might be an appropriate introductory video since everybody seems to be all-a-Twitter these days...

Check out many of their popular videos on preparing an emergency kit, electing a US president, Twitter, blogs, phishing scams, RSS, podcasts, social networking, wikis, investing money, CFL light bulbs, et cetera all 'in plain english.'

Hulu Desktop

2009-06-20T19:54:00.000-04:00

Bored, poor, and sick of waiting around for your favorite tv shows to come on? Well now it's time to check out Hulu.com. Not familiar with Hulu? It's a wonderful service sponsored by NBC and ABC. They play tons of movies and tv shows old and new. Well recently they released a desktop version of their website that works almost exactly like a tv guide channel on digital tv.

Hulu desktop can even be controlled by an Apple remote! It's well worth a quick download. You can log in under your username, subscribe to shows, watch them as they are released... it's wonderful!

Flock

2009-05-08T00:31:00.001-04:00

Flock is a browser that's built on Mozilla, so it feels just like Firefox... just with a social twist. I've recently been having browser woes, so I thought I'd give this browser a try! The thing that sets it apart from all other browsers is that is connects you with all of your social websites such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Gmail, et cetera without actually having to go to those websites! For instance, if you want to update your Twitter feed, you can just hit the twitter icon and post your newest tweet. You want to see what your friends are up to? Hit the Facebook icon and check out your friends' recent updates!

Flock has all your standard browser features also of course such as tabbed browsing, themes, rss reading, it also has some other features built in that most browsers don't, such as support for Delicious bookmarking and email notification out of the box.

This nifty browser is available no matter what operating system you use, OS X, Windows, or Linux! :) so give it a spin and stay connected with all your friends and social services with much less effort!

Sync Your Life

2009-04-03T17:08:00.000-04:00

Syncing your daily routines can not only be kinda cool, but it will definitely help you out when you can’t access your computer. I’ll highlight some of the best places to get you started and on your way toward a life where you can access your information no matter where you are! Oh, and the best part is that these services are all free!

The first of four main services I’m going to highlight is the simplest: Delicious social bookmarking. This is a free service that lets you first put all your current bookmarks online for easy access anywhere, then once you’ve done that You’re ready to start using Delicious for what it was really designed for. This service is widely popular and has plugins for every major browser that make this new way of bookmarking as simple as your usual command-D or “New Bookmark” button. Here’s how it works, you bookmark a site with Delicious and you can add tags to the site to help you remember what type of content it had, then you can search those tags later on to find some bookmark you made years ago to find that perfect italian restaurant in Little Italy, San Diego. The next fun part about Delicious is now you have your bookmarks online so you can easily access them anywhere, not only that you can add bookmarks to Delicious from any computer, even if it’s not yours and even if it doesn’t have a plugin installed!

Next up is Evernote! This is a note taking and bookmarking application that lets you organize information for a project, or even just keep a list of wines in your cellar. Your Evernote notes can include text, pictures, links, whole web pages, pretty much anything you want to save for later. The saved notes can be accessed on your local computer, online, or on your iPhone.

Dropbox is as simple as it gets for syncing files across computers anywhere in the world! You literally just sign up online, download the application, and then you are all set to go. Put any files you want to sync across to another computer or just backup online. Simple and easy!

Last but most definitely not least is Google. Google apps are easy to use because if you have a Google account, you already have free and easy access to all of the services they offer. The list of services they offer is out of control, they offer everything from calendars to a photo sharing resource Google has a wide gamut of choices of awesome and helpful applications that can all be used anywhere and saved right to your account online for access anywhere.... for free!

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Sync iCal with Google Calendar

2009-03-08T20:21:00.000-04:00

How nice would it be to have your calendars with you wherever you go? The iPhone and iPod Touch help out with that a lot, but sometimes you just want to work with your schedule on a real computer. Say you’re at your friend’s house and you need to check what time your appointment is tomorrow, but you don’t have your computer with you? If you use Apple’s built in iCal you have no reason to not sync with Google Calendar!

Things you’ll need:
• OS X 10.5
• iCal calendars
• a Google account
• Google Collaboration sync tool for iCal

Okay, first things first. You probably have calendars already in your iCal, so we need to export those and import them to Google Calendars. To do this select the calendar you would like to export (you have to export and import one calendar at a time unfortunately...) then go to File and “Export...”

Save each calendar to the desktop then head on over to Google Calendar. First thing we need to do is make the same number of calendars in Google Calendars as you want to import. To do this click “Create” on the left side:

Then once, you’ve made your new empty calendars, you’re ready to import. On the bottom of your current calendars you will see a link to “Add” the select “Import Calendar.”

Select each calendar individually and import them to the corresponding calendar you just made.

Now just go back to your Google Calendar page to see all of your calendars imported to Google! Now that the hardest part is over, lets get the syncing part set up! Download the Google Collaboration sync tool for iCal. Just open the application and plug in your Google name and password and select “Add to iCal.”

Just delete your original Calendars so you don’t have doubles of all your events, and you’re all done!

Now whenever you edit, add or delete anything on your calendars they will automatically update both on your computer and on Google Calendars. If you’re in a place with no available internet, no worries, the next time your computer sees a connection it will update!

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Simple Wikipedia

2009-02-23T21:04:00.000-05:00

It’s the end of the day and you’re tired. You want to do a bit of research but you don’t want to deal with all the stress of reading a lot, say no more. Try out Wikipedia Simple English, it uses simpler words originally intended for those who don’t speak much English.

Off Camera Flash Photography

2009-02-08T18:12:00.000-05:00

So you’ve got yourself a nice dSLR, but you find yourself still using it on Auto mode all the time. This is a common thing for beginner photographers, but if you’re interested, there’s a whole world of incredible photography beyond the standard point and shoot method of our parents’ time. The two photos below show the difference between just turning on your camera and hitting the shutter button (left)... and using the aperture priority function and an external flash placed behind the subject (right).

Notice the flatness and lack of shadows on the coins in the left photo when the flash is pointed directly at them. Now look at the right photo and take note that when we place the flash behind the coins we get much more natural lighting leaving us with shadows that help define the coin faces. Also when we use the aperture priority function to focus in properly we get great depth and definition of the coins!

This is a lighting technique that every professional photographer utilizes to give the subject a ‘natural light’ look by not eliminating all shadows, but actually creating them. This helps us recognize the fine details in the photo.

How do you take your flash and put it elsewhere you might ask? Well, this process is easy and pretty cheap! You must have following three things to utilize this technique yourself:
• a camera that has a sync cable jack (or you can buy a hot shoe to sync cable adapter for $9.95 dollars at Adorama)
• an external flash (any old flash will work just fine, if you don’t have one, this external flash is really great!)
• a pc sync cable

All you have to do now is connect the flash to your camera with the sync cable, turn your camera on to any of the priority modes (Program Auto, Shutter, Aperture, or Manual), and shoot!

I decided to make my own hot shoe connector and cable to save some money. To do this I soldered a hot shoe connector together with a piece of pc board and some resistor wire. Then I opened up my external flash and soldered the wires that lead to the terminals on the hot shoe connector, then I put ethernet jacks at each end so I can just use any standard ethernet cable to connect my camera to my flash!

An additional perk to making my own cable is that now I have a cheap and extendable cable since we all have spare ethernet cables laying around!

Want to learn more? Check out the Strobist blog, it’s an amazing resource that I’m still learning from all the time! For more examples check me out on Flickr!

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

TUAW Tip: Sleep, Restart and Shut Down

2009-01-16T19:50:00.000-05:00

Enable iTunes 1/2 Star Ratings

2009-01-01T14:18:00.000-05:00

The five star rating system in iTunes works great for categorizing your favorite songs, but it doesn’t give you much leeway between a great 4 star song and a favorite 5 star song. This is where a simple terminal hack comes into play!

Simply quit iTunes, if it’s open, then open up Terminal (Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities) and copy and paste in the following command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

Your result should look something like this:

Now enjoy the ability to rate your music with 1/2 stars! This increases the variety you can rate how great a song is!

Joe's Cookbook

2009-01-01T09:21:00.000-05:00

Just getting into cooking, or maybe you just want some awesome tried and true recipes? Check out joescookbook.com for some of my favorites!

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

µTorrent For Mac Lacks

2008-12-02T01:16:00.000-05:00

My favorite bit torrent client is by far µTorrent. In the Windows version it allows me to throw an RSS feed into it and have it automatically download all my favorite shows, which means the fastest possible way to get my favorite shows the second they are available on the illegal market.

This is all fine and dandy... except when I opened up the new µTorrent Beta for Mac it seems to be missing the one thing it does best, the RSS handling. :( Oh well, a future update someday will hold what I so desire.

Big Huge Labs

2008-12-01T00:29:00.000-05:00

Flickr is a amazing photo sharing site, as well as just a great place to keep your favorite photos, but when you want to show off your photos sometimes showing friends a stunning picture, all the Flickr bars and options pull the attention from the actual photo.

Here’s where one of this week’s company come in... Big Huge Labs is a site that aggregates a whole slew of Flickr tools and toys all on one page.

Now on my more important photos I always add a link to “View This Photo On Black” so if someone wants to see the photo in the raw without all the Flickr tools and options that take away from the experience. Instead, the viewers gets the following experience.

Some other cool tools Big Huge Labs provides for your photos are adding a digital matting, puzzles to purchase, mosaics, calendars, movie posters, magazine covers, CD cover, blog headers, or maybe you would like to add cartoon bubbles to a photo with captions.

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

DIY RSS Bit Torrent!!!

2008-10-27T22:22:00.000-04:00

I’m sure you know by now that Bit Torrent is the most effective way to download music, movies, and television shows (legal ones of course...) and I’m sure you also know that RSS (really simple syndication) is the best way to keep up with your favorite websites and news without actually visiting the full websites themselves.

Let’s learn how to combine these two concepts into a cool little mash-up! First you’ll need to download two applications: NetNewsWire and Transmission (both free! :)).

Now that you have the two essential components needed to create the best ‘automatic’ RSS downloader let’s start the configuration!

Step One: Open up Transmission and go to the Preferences window and the ‘Transfers’ tab.

Now copy my settings into your prefs window and make sure to check the ‘Auto Add’ box at the bottom and select a folder where you want Transmission to always watch for new torrent files.

Step Two: Navigate on over to tvrss.net and find an rss feed that fits your liking and copy the url. (example, here’s an rss feed for one of my favorite shows: right-click on Dexter and copy link)

Step Three: Open up NetNewsWire and click into the pref pane. / ‘Downloading’ tab / ‘Downloads Folder’ tab

Now, choose the folder you made before to download your files to.

Step Four: Now just hit the subscribe button on the top left and paste in the RSS url! Then select an episode and hit the download button at the bottom left of the window and it will download the torrent file to the folder Transmission is watching which will cause Transmission to start downloading the episode to your desktop. Ta-daaaa!

IMAP Gmail Settings

2008-10-27T21:43:00.000-04:00

If you have an iPhone and check your email with it as well as use a desktop mail application you should make sure you’re using IMAP. This lets you keep your mail on the server, and when you read or delete an email from your phone, it will say it’s read or it will also delete on your computer.

The other great thing about IMAP is you can see and edit all your online folders that Gmail provides from your desktop and your mobile device. The downside is these folders really clutter up your inbox... also I don;t want to see my spam email, that’s why I have the spam filter in the first place... so the solution comes with Google Labs!

Scroll halfway down and look for “Advanced IMAP Controls” and click enable. Then go to your settings and the labels tab (or just click here). Now you have complete control over what folders are visible when you access your IMAP email!

Now your iPhone can be much less cluttered, and when you delete emails on the road you won’t have a full inbox when you get home!

Top Draw Viewer

2008-10-10T15:46:00.000-04:00

Like to switch your desktops up all the time? Well Google has made it easy for us Mac users to have really cool artsy backdrops randomly generated and replaced on our desktop at a given time interval with their new application Top Draw. Here’s an example of what Top Draw has on my desktop right now...

iTunes 8

2008-10-08T22:30:00.000-04:00

Two bits of iTunes awesomeness... first up, iTunes 8 is out, as many of you must know by now. Well there are some nice new changes and one annoying one. First the good: the new Genius feature lets you get a chance to make playlists that are similar to the song you are currently listening to. A lot like Pandora al in itunes with your music. The other great new feature is the new visualizer!

Along with being really cool it can be controlled with some pretty basic key commands that make it even more fun!

Check it out:

• + and -: Increase or decrease the intensity (brightness) of the particles; multiple presses further increase or decrease the intensity.
A and S: Add or Subtract particles to the visualizer. You can make the visualizer as complex (or sparse) as you wish.
R: Reset the intensity and particle count to their default values.
E: When in nebula mode (press N), this greatly accentuates the nebula clouds, making them very easy to see. (If you’ve used the M key to change modes, you may find that the nebula clouds aren’t visible; it seems they’re only used in certain modes.)

And my one annoyance is that now iTunes has the arrows to the iTunes store on always... not cool. Well throw this line into your terminal and goodbye annoying little arrows!

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Until next time, enjoy!

Google Chrome

2008-10-01T11:52:00.000-04:00

Google seems like they want to get into pretty much anything and everything that touches the internet... until recently they had yet to make a browser; enter Chrome. This browser is still in the workings, but Google has released a working version for XP and Vista so far, and... I really like it.

Chrome is smooth and simple to use. The url bar doubles as a search bar, the tabs are above everything and out of the way, but they don’t feel out of place. Bookmarks are imported from Firefox automatically, including the toolbar bookmarks. My favorite part is that Google thinks of everything... when you open a new tab the window shows you your most visited sites in thumbnail form and has a list on the side of recent sites. How cool is that?

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Eubiq

2008-08-31T10:52:00.000-04:00

Eubiq is a really awesome company that offers a modern alternative to electrical sockets. They took the standard plug and made it safer and easier to use in cluttered areas. Check it out!

Facebook Chat in Adium 1.3

2008-08-28T08:20:00.000-04:00

The newest version of Adium, the far superior iChat replacement, now incorporates Facebook chat! You know, that really annoying chat window that pops up now and then from someone you don’t talk to enough for them to have your number or screen name...

My favorite part about this is not the chatting ability, but rather that I can set my Facebook status easily without ever even opening up a browser.

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Leatherman Keys!

2008-07-24T14:57:00.000-04:00

Instructables has a wicked cool Leatherman hack that lets you have both your favorite mini tool and your keys with you at all times! Check it out!

B+ with Jamie Lidell

2008-07-18T09:12:00.000-04:00

Here’s one of my favorite songs and the promo video that goes along with it, so if you’re feeling in a down mood... cheer up and B+!

dSLRs And The Nikon D40

2008-07-05T13:55:00.000-04:00

The Nikon D40 is a wonderfully made digital single lens reflex (dSLR) camera. It includes an 18-55mm kit lens, which is equal to about a 3x zoom, and can be interchanged with a variety of other lenses from cheap $250 upgrades to the same $2500 lenses other super high end cameras can accept. This is exceptionally awesome because you are given the option to do a LOT more with your camera down the road when you want to step up your photography.

If you’re used to normal digital point-and-shoot cameras but you want to get a much better picture quality and a more organic feel to shooting photos this is the perfect camera to help you transition from a general point and shooter into the world of amateur photography.

The learning curve is very minimal if you’ve ever used a standard 35mm SLR film camera, digital SLR cameras work almost exactly the same. Anyone can easily pick up a D40 and take amazing pictures, it’s as easy as learning how to use the zoom and then the rest is generally the same as any other digital camera.

The main reason to step up to a dSLR of course is to get better picture quality. The D40 is a 6.1 megapixel camera, which seems low for a high end consumer camera/low end professional camera when compared to some Olympus 10.2MP camera you can find at Target for $250... but the megapixel rating has nothing to do with quality, just physical picture size. When you take a picture with a dSLR your camera actually opens a shutter and looks through an aperture for a given amount of time which exposes a certain amount of light in, and that image information is recorded digitally to an SD card just like a film camera would record that information to the mylar film.

The colors dSLRs are able to capture are simply amazing! Where you really notice the difference in your photos is in the saturation and clarity of colors and shadows. This seems basic, but the ability to capture black as ‘black’ and not just ‘dark grey’ is absolutely crucial to presenting colors as they look in real life.

For instance: the photos below are cropped from larger versions to accentuate the differences. On the left the photo was taken with a standard point-and-shoot (Canon PowerShot). Notice how it looks grainy and the colors are dull. Whereas the photo on the right was taken with a dSLR (Pentax K100D) and you can right away see how much more clear it is and how the colors really pop out. You can see how shadows really make a difference if you look at the difference between the boy’s hair in the two pictures; the dSLR lets you really see the true colors and definition of everything in the photo, where with the standard camera everything just looks dull and flat.

The next thing that worries people often times with dSLR cameras is they think they will be difficult to use or figure out all the different settings... well the Nikon D40 takes all of that frustration and throws it out the window! You can just throw it in automatic mode and it will figure everything for you except how close to zoom in; that includes ISO, shutter speed, aperture, focusing, flash, white balance, and the list goes on!

When you do get to a level where you want to experiment a little the camera has built in pointers to help you shoot perfect pictures too. So say you’re in a dark room and you need a flash, the camera will tell you that you should turn on the flash because of low light. Also, when you are changing settings like ISO you are shown examples of what the different setting should be used for. This makes the Nikon D40 not only easy to use, but much more fun when you can get professional quality photos without even opening up the manual or taking a photography class!

Pros: High quality ‘prosumer’ level dSLR camera with interchangeable lenses, very cheap ($475 on Amazon) for a dSLR with a kit lens included, can shoot in RAW, high quality 6.1 megapixel sized photos, very easy to use as a beginner, excellent color capturing capabilities.
Cons: The msrp of $499 for this camera is not cheap by average camera standards, it can’t even compare to the size of a simple point-and-shoot camera

The Bottom Line: The Nikon D40 is for the aspiring photography hobbyist, not the layman nor the professional. This is a perfect stepping stone from general picture taking to the world of professional digital photography. It’s cheap, comes with everything you need right in the box (except an SD card), and it’s very easy to use and catch amazing photos with. This is a great buy, DEFINITELY check it out if you want to capture life’s very best memories to remember for the rest of yours... just as you lived them!

Overall: 8.5

Usability: 7 This is a very easy dSLR to use if you know anything about cameras, but it’s not for the layman
Customizability: 8 Interchangeable lenses, the ability to add on filters, and external flashes is awesome, some old lenses won’t fit properly without expensive adapter rings though
GUI: 9 very appealing indeed, beautiful screen that tells you every pertinent piece of information you’d need to know to take simply amazing photos
Coolness: 10 This camera turns heads left and right... and it takes photos that do the same!

Hi-Res LED Screen Color Profile

2008-06-21T23:38:00.000-04:00

I have been slightly struggling to get the perfect calibration for my MacBook Pro 17” with the new Hi-Res LED backlight screen. The screen is VERY bright (as you can see in the comparrison photo), and uses very little energy, but the colors aren’t as impressive as the standard TFT screens.

These screen often show deep blacks as dark grey. I’ve posted my screen calibration profile though, that seems to be quite accurate and true at presenting colors in a realistic light. Just downlod the zip file, unzip it, and place the calibration .icc file in the path included, then choose it from the display color settings in the system preferences.

Android Kicks iPhone's Ass!

2008-06-01T10:56:00.000-04:00

Google Android is an open source cell phone operating system that will be available at the end of this year. Here’s a video(full article) from a recent press conference Google put on to show off some of the awesome features.

You will notice a lot of iPhone-like features, which is awesome because why not use ideas that are already great and work well, but Android steps it up and takes iPhone features and improves upon them in a way that makes the device much more fun and easy to use.

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Minimalist Outlets

2008-05-22T21:51:00.000-04:00

Here's a wicked cool idea for the minimalist in all of us! Bocci has a system that lets you install these reeeeallllly cool looking electrical outlets in your wall!

You do have to do some pretty serious surgery to your walls... but if you're handy, determined, crafty, or think you are any of the above ;-), then this is a definite must check out product!

Floating Stairs!

2008-05-13T10:23:00.000-04:00

Uhh, floating stairs? Yes please! This is awesome! I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be letting my niece play on them, but they give such an awesome modern look!

Comcast on Twitter?

2008-05-06T12:36:00.000-04:00

On Twitter this morning I posted that I was going to find a local Comcast service center to return my modem and when I got back I noticed that, what? Comcast posted a reply...

Weird and kind of creepy if you ask me. All I did was mention Comcast and they are right there trying to help me, I didn't say I had a problem, all I said is that I was trying to find a local store... I'm not one to usually care about privacy issues, but this is pushing it.

Commands-N Concept...

2008-05-05T23:03:00.000-04:00

Just thought I'd share a bit of geek humor mixed with a relaxing concept...

Grand Central

2008-05-04T23:25:00.000-04:00

Grand Central is a recently Google acquired service that lets you have one phone number that will call all of your devices. This can be really handy when you're home so you can answer either your land line or cell phone calls on whatever phone is most convenient. Or say you're on vacation... never miss an important call again. Or if you want to let it go, it will go to one central voicemail so you can access it from anywhere.

In addition to the basic features, you can also monitor your calls on your computer as they come in, listen to the calls as they are being recorded to voicemail, block callers, record calls, one number that can ring different phones depending on who's calling, switch to another phone in the middle of the call if you need to be on the run but aren't ready to hang up, special rings, and ringback tones too.

Obama "Yes We Can" Video

2008-05-03T23:49:00.000-04:00

Kudos to will.i.am for gathering such an amazing group of people to express the message of hope from our next president.

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Cork'd

2008-04-30T20:01:00.000-04:00

If you love wine, want to catalog your wine cellar, or just get a feel for what other people think about the wines you're drinking, you should check out Corkd. I've been using this awesome free site for around a year now (only since I turned 21 of course ;-)), it's a great site that lets you read and write reviews, take personal notes, or just keep track of wines you've tried or want to try.

Cork'd can also log all the wines in your cellar for you with vintages, varietals, scores, average prices, reviews, and quick easy to use tasting tags (for example: cherry, honeydew melon, raspberry, apple, et cetera). Once you have an account, get some drinking buddies and recommend wines to each other! It's a great way to find the best wines at reasonable prices, let someone else try them first... :)

Afloat Goes 2.0

2008-04-30T15:42:00.000-04:00

Leopard is great, but with Leopard came the inability to have transparent windows anymore :(. Until Afloat 2.0 was released just recently! The old Afloat was great, but it was broken when Apple upgraded to 10.5 Leopard.

Afloat is an app that lets you make windows transparent and adds various other superfluous effects to all cocoa apps.

A quick FREE download and you'll all ready to go! Just open up any cocoa application (Safari and iChat for example) and click on the "Window" menu item. Any option with a little cloud next to it is a special Afloat add on.

Facebook Chat

2008-04-23T14:49:00.000-04:00

Facebook used to be clean and easy to use, that's why pretty much every college student told MySpace where to stick it. Facebook was then opened to the public, which wasn't too much of a difference for most people. THEN applications were brought to Facebook... This caused a pretty big uproar and is still as issue among many students. The next big thing that Facebook just publicly released this morning is chat.

You could always see who was on Facebook right now by going to "Friends > Who's Online" but now you can go one step further and talk to those that are online right away. The chats are instant messages just like AOL Instant Messenger so there's no need to wait for a reply like in a personal message or wall post. Want to check it out? Go to Facebook right now, look on the bottom right corner of your window and you'll see the new chat box. Neat huh?

NOAA.gov Buoys

2008-04-22T10:47:00.000-04:00

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is an organization funded by our wonderful government and they are diligent scientists that record everything there is to record having to do with water and weather in the US. The department I'm really excited about is the automated buoy information system. There are self sustained weather stations with solar powered accelerometers and computers that record and keep track of the movement of the water.

This recorded data is then sent by satellite back to home base and is actually posted on their website every 10 minutes!!! Wicked cool!!! The information that is recorded is ridiculously in depth too, the best parts are the height of the swells, the length of the period between swells, the water and air direction, water and air temps, et cetera. Check it out, there's even an RSS feed!

LED Magic

2008-04-18T09:10:00.000-04:00

This is by far the most impressive stop-motion video I've ever seen, period. What's so interesting is that this project could have only been captured by long exposures (10 seconds each) due to the LED light sources and how they are being captured as pictures. Keep that in mind when you check out this film.

Panoramio

2008-04-15T23:32:00.000-04:00

Yet another FREE Google service that is awesome! Panoramio is a great web based service that provides the same service as Flickr's geo tagging, except Google takes it one step farther, you can then see those tagged photos right in Google Earth when you view that area!!! Pretty cool huh?!?!

Here's what the site looks like

Here's what that looks like in google earth with a photo selected

Leopard Volume!

2008-04-13T20:03:00.000-04:00

(From TUAW)
"Sure, you can use the volume key on your MacBook or Apple keyboard to do quick volume changes, but that doesn't adjust the volume that precisely. If you want to fine tune your volume, you have to either open System Preferences or click on the volume icon in the menu bar. However, you can also tweak the volume by holding down the option + shift keys and tapping the volume up/down keys on your keyboard.

As an additional note, you can also hold down the shift button while pressing the volume keys to mute the "pop" that you hear when pressing the volume key.

If you want to permanently silence the volume-adjust beeping, uncheck "Play feedback when volume is changed" in the Sound Effects preference pane and it won't bother you again (helpful for podcasting or other situations when you might need to adjust your volume on the fly)."

Calibrate Your Screen

2008-04-10T10:47:00.000-04:00

Most people take their computer screens for granted. They don't realize the full potential is just a few clicks away! Leopard has a built in screen calibrator that will help you get your screen looking as color popping and accurate as possible!

Macworld has this slightly old, yet still accurate article on how to set up your screen quickly and accurately. It was a great help when trying to match my two screens so they were similarly and accurately displaying color.

Syslogd Process

2008-04-06T03:25:00.000-04:00

If you're using Leopard's Time Machine, from time to time check out the ram/cpu usage on a process called "syslogd." It gets extremely high, the good news is all you have to do is kill the process and it restarts in a few seconds at its normal ram usage around 7MB. There are two ways to go about doing this without having to open Activity Monitor every time you notice this problem. The first way uses the Terminal, just type in sudo killall syslogd then enter in your password. like this:

Or you could write an Applescript that says the following:

This is what I do because I use the scripts menu item and I can access and run this and other commonly used scripts with just a quick click. I like menu items a lot, what can I say? :)

Flickr Pro

2008-04-04T22:00:00.000-04:00

We all know about Flickr, the website for organizing and sharing our photos. Most people don't actually have an account though. I got a free account a little over a year ago to host some photos, but recently I decided that I was going to use Flickr a lot more, so I upgraded to a pro account. Lets compare the differences: with a free account you get a 100MB a month upload limit, you are allowed 3 photo sets and your photos are cut off at the 1024x768 size, images under 5MB each only.

With the Flickr account you are given unlimited storage, unlimited photo sets, a permanent online archive for your photos, ad free browsing and sharing, account and photo statistics, and the photo quality has essentially no resolution limit.

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

2008-03-31T21:39:00.000-04:00

What's Adobe Lightroom? Well it's Adobe's version of Aperature... which is like iPhoto and Photoshop all rolled into one clean program.

In short, it's a gorgeous application that lets you organize and edit your photos, create awesome slideshows, prints, or webpages to show off your photos. This video will show you what Lightroom is and the quality of photos you can make and edit.

Click here for some cool video tips on how to get started and use some of the more advanced features.

Evernote

2008-03-27T15:04:00.000-04:00

This is a new way of keeping everything you need t remember organized and easily searchable. I won't do Evernote justice, so watch the short video to learn about what it really does.

VMware Fusion

2008-03-20T13:17:00.000-04:00

If you own an Intel powered Mac you probably know about Boot camp and Parallels, but VMware Fusion is in a whole new league of awesomeness! This is what you see when you first open Fusion.

Oh, you see a few distros of Linux up there you say? Yeah, Fusion can handle any OS you throw at it... 32 or 64 bit! That includes any distribution of Linux, Windows 3.1 to Vista plus server editions, Solaris, Novell NetWare, Free BSD, and pretty much any other OS that can run on an Intel processor.

With VMware Fusion you can enable Unity, which lets you run Windows apps right on your Mac desktop right along side your Mac apps. You can then minimize them to the dock, use them with Spaces and Exposé. You can actually save programs to your dock just like normal Mac apps and when yo want to open them you just click on it like a regular application and it opens on your desktop just like normal. Above you can see my desktop running the Windows version of Firefox and Minesweeper right alongside with Apple Mail, Adium, and iTunes.

You should really check it out, there's a free demo on the VMware site, and I found my copy for $39 on Amazon.

Hulu

2008-03-20T13:01:00.000-04:00

Don't you wish YouTube was higher quality? Not just the content it provides, but the whole media service itself as well? Take a gander at Hulu, a new video service that has high quality tv shows and some HD quality movies. The list of shows they offer is still growing but they offer whole seasons of a good handful of shows you most likely watch, oh yeah... it's all free too.

Some tv shows come with commercials, but they are 30 seconds or less, so you're back to your show in no time. Plus the ads that I have seen are usually not too bad, I've seen only Chevrolet and Saturn commercials, both cleaver ads that show how economically sound their hybrids are. definitely no "as seen on tv" ads here!

With a nice clean slick player, Hulu really has done it right. I have moused over the video so the controls are shown in the screen shot above, but normally you would just see the video playing in a nice black gradient surrounding, or you can view in fullscreen with nothing but your video on the screen. It's pretty awesome, go check it out for yourself!

Twitter

2008-03-18T12:15:00.000-04:00

What are you doing? That's the question. The whole idea behind Twitter is that you can say what your doing and if someone wants to know, they can take a look. Kind of like away messages in AIM, except for your whole life. The guys over at Commoncraft have put together a really good video explaining "Twitter in Plain English."

If you're on a Mac check out either the full featured awesome Twitterific ($15), or the barebones, stripped down, widget app, Twitgit (free!) and you can update your Twitter feed in seconds just as if you were updating your aim status, it's that easy.

Sofa Control

2008-03-12T23:19:00.000-04:00

Sofa Control ($14.90) (or use the key in iSerial) lets you control everything on your mac with your Apple remote. Keynote, Preview, iPhoto, VLC, Quicktime, DVD Player, Finder, Mail, you can even control the mouse with your remote! Plus over 60 more applications. When you start it up for the first time Sofa Control shows you how you can use it with a very interactive presentation using your remote right off the bat.

This app is really awesome and the only thing I wish they would add is support for more applications.

Above is what this what you see overlaying the desktop when you hold the menu button for 2 seconds. You get a global menu that gives you access to a whole bunch of the Finder native options. (i.e. dashboard, exposé, front row, screensaver, sleep timer, shut down, restart, also you can open any application or file).

Remote Pairing

2008-03-12T09:48:00.000-04:00

I got my new MacBook Pro a few days ago! It's blazing fast like you wouldn't believe. So I'm getting ready to go to bed and I go to turn the volume up on my computer with the remote and i heard my roommate's computer respond as well... not cool.

So I knew that I could pair my computer to my remote so I tried doing what Apple says, hold the menu button and next/fast forward for 5 seconds in front of your IR sensor... nothing. I try it again... nothing. finally I found out that if you hit menu and select for 5 seconds it works great! Apparently, Apple doesn't know all there is about their own products though, a little weird.

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Dock Library

2008-02-29T09:30:00.000-05:00

Dock Library is a really cool application that lets anyone using Leopard to catalog and change their dock theme easily and quickly.

You just have to head to over to LeopardDocks.net or Dockulicious.com, and download any theme you like, then click the import dock button and select the .zip file then select it and hit set dock. Couldn't be easier!

MacBook Pro Penryn Update

2008-02-27T14:33:00.000-05:00

Finally Apple released the Penryn based MacBook Pro!

The 17" now comes with an LED backlight screen option. Both 15" and 17" models support gesture tracking, and sport the new NVIDIA 8600M GT 512MB graphics card. I can't wait to get my hands on this newly updated 6MB cache 800MHz frontside bus over my 5 year old 167MHz FSB 2MB cache 1GHz PPC with 1 GB ram... :( soon he will have a new home.

Firefox 3 Beta 3

2008-02-13T14:58:00.000-05:00

I'm wicked excited for the final version of Firefox 3 to be released, which should be sometime before April. Until then though, the Beta releases will have to do... and I must say that the most recent release (Beta 3) is pretty awesome.

Other than the new Leopard-metal-rounded look, other features include: the newest version of Gecko (1.9) which is the rendering engine, cool new add on manager, the address bar also will now search your bookmarks and history as you type, and my personal favorite... over 350 memory leaking issues were fixed! As with most pre-releases, this version breaks a lot of add-ons, but the most important ones still work for me. Everyday developers are updating their add-ons to work with the most current versions too, so that's a plus. Download your copy here.

TimeMachineEditor

2008-02-05T12:31:00.000-05:00

If you are like me an have an old, yet still Leopard compatible, computer you have probably noticed that Time Machine slows up your computer during its hourly backups. Well TimeMachineEditor lets you edit how often Time Machine backs up!

Your options are at an interval of specified hours, once a day at a given time, once a week at a given day and time, or once a month on a given date and time.

New iPhone and iPod Touch Sizes

2008-02-05T12:28:00.000-05:00

Today the Apple store went down for a little while, as it usually does on Tuesdays, but today we were graced with an actual update! The iPhone is now offered in a 16GB model and the iPod Touch is offered in a 32GB version, both for a premium price mind you.

We'll just have to wait around a little longer for a 3G version though I guess :(.

How to download a tv show you missed

2008-02-03T22:16:00.000-05:00

This article will walk you through how to download a tv show you may have missed via means of torrents. As a light disclaimer, this is not legal per sé. It is very rare that anyone ever gets in trouble, but that doesn't mean you have no chance. So proceed at your own risk... Now that the nitty gritty is said and done with, download Transmission.

Then go to tvrss.net then click on "Search"

Enter in, for instance, "House" into "Show Name" and check the "Exact" check box so that the search does not include shows like Desperate Housewives or Run's House. Then hit return, or click search. You will see a list of what shows they have available.

For most circumstances you'll want to choose a feed that is not 720p quality, so choose a file that is any other option as listed under the "Quality" column. Then click on the file you'd like to download, and save the file to your desktop. The file should look like the following:

If the file looks like that just double click on the torrent file from the desktop and it will open Transmission and It will start downloading the actual file. If it looks different, right click on it and select "Open With" and select Transmission.

For optimal downloading go to Transmission in the menubar and then click on "Preferences" click on the bandwidth tab and set your settings like this:

This will ensure that your internet speeds won't go down while you're downloading, which will keep everyone else on your network happy :). Any further questions? Contact me!

LowKey Stand

2008-02-01T13:48:00.000-05:00

The LowKey stand is awesome for anyone who uses a cinema display with a laptop because as you may know the cinema display is about 3/4" lower than the screen of a 17" PowerBook or MacBook Pro, on a standard laptop stand. This means you have to put something under your screen to raise it up so the two screens are level. (in my case a Rosa Parks children's book and an empty dvd case is just the right height!)

Although on the pricey side of $59 bucks, this is awesome for keeping your desk clean and the your screen at the right height, plus easy access to 4 USB 2.0 ports! Not to mention it is a very study aluminum to match the metal of the display of the cinema displays and iMacs.

iPhonesque Growl style

2008-02-01T08:57:00.000-05:00

Usually I'm pretty disappointed with the OS X notification system Growl styles and I just default to a plain black semi-transparent Growl style, but then came along iPhonesque.

These guys have done a great job at creating something that looks great, not customizable at all, but looks awesome!

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Jaye Drew and a Moving Train

2008-01-26T16:12:00.000-05:00

One of my music teachers from my high school has been in numerous funk/jazz bands over the years that have all been quite good, but I recently checked out a show with his newest band Jaye Drew and a Moving Train and they were excellent! They had the perfect mix between jazz, funk, soul, hip hop, and rock to be a great crowd pleaser.

This group of young musicians are currently working on their debut album as Jaye Drew and a Moving Train.

Intel x9000 processors are let into the wild!

2008-01-08T18:49:00.000-05:00

Yep, that's right, Intel released today their newest line of processors that incorporate their newest technology. These new 45 nanometer processors, code named Penryn, are super fast and use less power than the previous 65nm processor models. I'm most intrigued about the X9000 mobile chip because it's their new Core 2 Extreme and it boasts 2.8GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 800MHz frontside bus speed, and also has the newest SSE4.1 instruction set.

Hopefully Apple will embrace this processor series in their new MacBook Pro they will release on January 15th, that'd make me just about the happiest man ever!

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Opera in the Can

2007-12-18T13:06:00.000-05:00

I gave Opera her chance, I even made it my main browser for several weeks. I loved everything about it... except for a few bugs that inevitably brought it to its demise on my machine.

It's true, I'm a fan of the Opera, but certain things such as not conforming to certain web standards has made me decide to go back to my gold standard: the reliably slow... Firefox. When I went to digg often times Opera wouldn't let me digg an article, the script would "fail to initiate" so it told me. I will miss the very speedy browsing, and built in scripting, rss feeds, and torrent client, but not enough to keep me an Opera user until they make it more compliant with today's web 2.0 standards. I must say as a final note though, the pc version of Opera runs like a dream, and I'd highly recommend it to any Windows user out there!

Google Profiles

2007-12-16T19:02:00.000-05:00

Google is going to come out with a way for people with multiple Google services can express who they are, kind of a like Google business card for the net.

For more info check out the unofficial Google news and tips site.

Tiki Bar Fans

2007-12-16T19:01:00.000-05:00

The ever famous Lala from TikiBar tv decided to please her fans by making a 12 month pin up calendar. You can check it out at thelalastore.com where apparently more Lala stuff is soon to come.

QuickLook

2007-12-04T21:26:00.000-05:00

Leopard users know about how useful QuickLook is when you want to quickly get a glimpse at a photo or a video, well until now looking at folders just showed you a big image of your folder icon. With this pretty cool plugin you get an added functionality where you can see the contents and information about them. Click the picture (or here) to download the file to install this neat addon.

To install: open your hard drive/Library/QuickLook and put the component file from inside the zipped file in this folder and log out. When you log back in QuickLook into a folder and check out the goodies!

Bit Torrent Clients

2007-12-02T13:48:00.000-05:00

When bit torrent clients are active they can absolutely EAT internet speeds. If not set up properly these programs devour the speed of your network because they are constantly checking for a better tracker to connect to, and they don't limit upload speeds.

If you use a client such as Azureus, Transmission, Xtorrent, or even the torrent downloader built right into Opera(my current favorite 'cause it works well and it's wicked easy) you most likely won't even notice a difference on your network because they are set up to work optimally right out of the box. These modern clients don't aggravate your network with constant tracker updates and they have the options to limit upload speeds. Check out the difference in ping times from when I had Bit Torrent running downloading a file without an upload limit and when I quit the application, which is necessary to making sure the client isn't still running. When you hit "pause" it doesn't stop the client from slowing the network at all, you need to actually quit to be sure.

Network Ping times (the time it takes for information to get from your computer to a site, in this case Google, and back, in milliseconds:
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=855 ttl=115 time=4053.799 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=856 ttl=115 time=4099.037 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=857 ttl=115 time=4055.384 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=858 ttl=115 time=4033.114 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=859 ttl=115 time=4195.999 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=860 ttl=115 time=4137.639 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=861 ttl=115 time=4139.862 ms

Here is what happened when Bit Torrent is quit... we magically get normal ping times again:
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=862 ttl=115 time=19.645 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=863 ttl=115 time=13.137 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=864 ttl=115 time=15.742 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=865 ttl=115 time=14.918 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=866 ttl=115 time=17.739 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=867 ttl=115 time=16.239 ms

Moral of the story, make sure your bit torrent client (and your room mates!) is set up to work optimally to keep your internet running like normal, not to mention so as not to piss off your friends on the network.

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Google Image Labler

2007-11-26T20:01:00.000-05:00

Google has a new beta tool that lets anyone help label random images by use of a fun little game where you are matched up with a random buddy and you as a team pick out terms for the image, when you both match terms the image goes away and a new one is presented. You are assigned points for using terms that are more descriptive, and say the image was a of someone on a sailboat in the water, you would have certain restricted words such as: boat, sailboat, water. You would have to say maybe vessel, yacht, and sailor. Check it out here, or by doing any image search.

Try to beat your friends with a game that helps everybody at the same time by helping Google label their images.

Give Opera A Chance

2007-11-20T20:32:00.000-05:00

Pretty much everybody knows that I'm a big proponent of Firefox, the extensions just make it the best browser out there. Having that said, I decided to give Opera a second try. I tried it once a year or two ago and it wasn't very feature packed and didn't support add ons. This time around was (is) a much better experience! Pretty much any extension you love from Firefox (or you wish Firefox could have) is actually built right into Opera.

• RSS support. An awesome reader in fact.
• Ad blocking with selective blocking capabilities.
• Advanced pop-up blocker that only blocks unwanted pop-ups.
• Widgets like on iGoogle. This is an AMAZING feature! I have my Pandora player, weather, Google Maps!!!, etc... these can be accessed anytime, not just from a webpage.
• Mouse gestures
• Notes for marking up webpages for future review
• Smart auto-fill
• Skin flexibility
• Downloader that works like DownThemAll!
• Mail and chat built in. Which is awesome because you can sync your Opera browsers on multiple computers so your mail and chat goes with you wherever you go!

The more I use Opera the more I like it, it's getting dangerously close to making me switch it over as my default browser, which is a big deal.

Amazon Kindle

2007-11-19T15:58:00.000-05:00

Amazon, of all companies, released a portable eBook called Kindle reader today. From first glance I'm not really a fan of its design, mainly because of screen size. The feature set though, is far beyond impressive. You'll have to check it out at its Amazon product page (linked above), where else right?

Although the product is a little odd shaped and designed, the feature set of the Kindle is impressive enough to more than overcome the downfalls of the hardware. Built in WiFi for access to all of your favorite blogs, that update all day long! Also you can purchase subscriptions to most major newspapers and journals and have them delivered each morning before they even hit the newsstands. Access to wikipedia via WiFi and a built in dictionary for any concept or word you might be misunderstanding. Check out the Amazon page linked above for a full feature set.

iTunes Sleep Timer

2007-11-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

If you're like me, you enjoy listening to music when you go to sleep from time to time. The only problem is iTunes doesn't have a sleep timer function, which is weird given that its predominantly a stereo for most college students. Anyways, here's how you can add sleep timer functionality right into iTunes without downloading any extra applications:

For this you'll need an application called Script editor, you will have it in your applications folder inside a folder called Applescript, unless you were trying to save space one day and threw it out, any script editor will do for this very small task though if you did trash it.

1. Create a folder called “Scripts” in the “Users/you/Library/iTunes/” directory.
2. Open the Script Editor located in “Applications/AppleScript/” folder.
3. Type the following code:

Tell application “iTunes”
Delay 3600
Quit
End tell

*note that you can change the delay time to any other time in seconds.
**also note that you can change the "Quit" to "Pause" if you like.
4. In the File> Save As… menu save the script as a application, deselecting the Startup Screen and Stay Open options. Save it to your newly created “Scripts” folder with whatever name you want.
5. Open up iTunes. You’ll see a new menu that will give you access to all your iTunes AppleScripts.
The only issue with this little trick is that once you tell iTunes to start a script it won't let you do anything within the program until the script is done. So if you change your mind, you'll have to force quit iTunes.

Time Machine Backs Up Too Often!

2007-11-17T21:09:00.000-05:00

So if you have an old machine like me (1.0GHz PPC PowerBook G4), then you've probably noticed that your computer can run pretty sluggish at times. If you look at your active processes you'll most likely see a process called “mds” taking up around 100MB of ram about once every hour for 10 minutes or so. That's time machine looking at your system to see what's changed. Well it just so happens that this interval can quite easily be changed from 3600 seconds (every hour) to anything you want. I switched mine to 14,400 seconds (4 hours for those of you non-math people). This simple act of making my system backup less often is great on my processor and ram!

Here's how you do it:
Navigate to: /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. There you'll find a file named com.apple.backupd-auto.plist. Copy this file to your desktop and then open it with any text editor (or Apple plist editor if you have it!) and look for this section:

Change the 3600 number to some other time interval in seconds, Save and quit, then replace this file back into the LaunchDaemons folder, you'll need to be an admin. Restart your machine you'll have a new Time Machine's backup interval!

Leopard Dock Themes Made Easy

2007-11-15T22:20:00.000-05:00

There's actually a pretty large collection of awesome Leopard dock themes out there that are wicked easy to install and enjoy. Check out LeopardDocks and see what fits you best! Also, download the app at the top of the page called “Change Dock,” it'll be a big help and just makes the process much less stressful. here's a quick look at the first few themes at LeopardDocks.com:

MenuCalendarClock

2007-11-14T19:40:00.000-05:00

I have always wanted for Apple to implement a feature to the menubar that almost every Linux distribution has had for years, a calendar when you click on the time, not just the date. Well this awesome little app does one better, it lets you view and add new events to your iCal calendars! Plus, do you use the to do's in Mail or iCal? They are now integrated right into this clock replacement app. Give it a look, it's awesome, doesn't use hardly any system resources, after all it is just a clock most of the time.

As you can see the clock at the top right with the iCal logo is MenuCalendarClock. You can set a key to automatically make the calendar come out and in if you like, or just click on it. If you click on the list icon at the bottom your to do's will come up and you can check them off as you complete them. When you hover over a date scheduled in your calendar (colored blue) a small text tip bubble comes up to tell you what's scheduled, if you double click on a date it will open iCal to that date!

Dock Separators

2007-11-13T12:18:00.000-05:00

I did post a while ago on how to keep your dock clean and in categories using little dock separators. Well now that Leopard has a new dock those old separators don't really look good anymore... I've made a new version based on the “Railroad” divider between the apps and stacks. Check it out on my Goodies page!

Replacing a Notebook Hard Drive

2007-11-10T13:08:00.000-05:00

The hard drive in my PowerBook died a few days ago and the first thought in my head was, “Oh man... now I'm gonna have to shell out 350 bucks to apple to replace my drive and be without my computer for a week.” Then I thought to myself, I wonder how hard it could really be?

Well, I decided to check with my good friends over at iFixit and they had a great step-by-step guide with pictures on how to get to the hard drive. The short of it... a new 160GB Seagate drive and 24+ screws in little Sobe caps later and I'm inside my laptop, scared I might break something.

Well, that looks daunting huh? Well, it wasn't too bad... just a lot of steadyness and being static-free.

After I replaced the hard drive (bottom left in the picture), I restarted onto the Leopard disc and chose the restore from backup option. This lets you restore a system from a backup, such as time machine.

It actually lets you choose any saved state to restore from. I chose the most recent backup version. Nevertheless it took around 4 hours to transfer the 70 GB from my backup drive. Now everything is EXACTLY the way it was before my drive stopped working!

Google At The Pump!

2007-11-07T14:52:00.000-05:00

How awesome would it be to be able to stop at a gas station when you're lost and immediately know where you are and with a few taps, you'd know how to get where you're going? Sounds too good to be true huh? Well Google and pump maker Gilbarco Veeder-Root have announced a partnership that will bring driving directions, local search, and coupons to over 3,500 internet enabled gas pumps by next month!

Now you can just stop at the station and print out directions to yoru next location, how convenient? You'll never be embarrassed asking for directions again!

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Dark 3D Dock in Leopard

2007-10-31T18:37:00.000-04:00

So I've had Leopard since the night it came out, and I've had some time to really get to know it. Most of it I like, the only parts I currently dislike are parts that are slow because my laptop is old and the resourses are taxed. Quicklook for example, it's a really great feature, but on my machine it's a little sluggish. Anyways, back on point, today I have a nice customided little haxie you can do so your new Leopard dock will be a smooth dark grey that excentuates the mirror effect instead of the standard light grey with arcs in the background.

Get your dock looking like this by going to the Goodies page!

Guest Login

2007-10-23T20:38:00.000-04:00

Ever had a friend over and they want to use your computer and you reluctantly say yes knowing they'll probably mess with your settings? Well Leopard comes with a new feature that is JUST for these moments!

Guests can login and are allowed to do only the things you predefine. But instead of restricting your friends, you can pretty much let them do whatever they want because when they log out the account is expunged, and the next time it's logged into it's as if it's a brand new account again. Apple reinstalls the user each time you log into this special guest account, that way no matter what your guests mess with, they'll never do anything to your computer!

Leopard

2007-10-18T09:34:00.000-04:00

Just as a note to those of you who live under a rock Apple will be releasing their new operating system OS X 10.5, or Leopard, in just 8 days now. Apple just updated their website with a list of 300 new features they've added since the most recent operating system version, 10.4 Tiger.

Check out some of the recent screenshots taken right from the most recent developer build that showcase some awesome new features and a great new look.

Quicksilver

2007-10-14T22:21:00.000-04:00

Quicksilver is a great little app that gives you control over a LOT of features in your computer just by typing anything you want. For instance you can use Quicksilver as a launcher, where you would just type "iTunes" and hit enter and iTunes opens. But say iTunes is already open, then you're given a new set of options if you hit tab instead of enter. You can look through playlists, change the volume, or add the current song to a new playlist. The other great use for Quicksilver is using it as a spotlight that can also control your media and search through bookmarks and web history. Look below, I started typing clutter because I wanted a file inside that folder and this is what came up:

Next we have a screen shot of an add-on to Quicksilver called Constellation Menu, it lets you see things much more graphically for certain applications, such as iTunes, seen below.

Quicksilver has a plug-in for just about any application you use, and the repository works much like a Linux distribution system. You just go into the preferences and check off which plugins you want to be installed and they automatically download and install, no hassles. Hopefully Apple will take notice and add some of this functionality right into spotlight when Leopard arrives... or maybe later on. They do need to have things to upgrade too, they can't start with everything.

New Apple iPhone Apps Page

2007-10-11T18:46:00.000-04:00

So you got yourself one of them fancy iPhones but don't know what to do with it... check out the new Apple iPhone/iPod Touch Web Apps page!

Apple's got a great selection of the greatest iPhone and iPod Touch Web Apps for all to check out and bookmark!

No More Dotted Lines!

2007-10-10T20:20:00.000-04:00

Now That i just got done praising Firefox for its awesome features, lets talk about another awesome thing... customizability built in! Ever enter in about:config into your address bar? Try it! This is a great big long list of the features that Mozilla will let you edit to your preference. Here's one way you could change your Firefox to work to your liking (Mike Lipson), lets get rid of those annoying dotted line box around links and pictures after you click on them.

Go to about:config and filter down the results and look for browser.display.focus_ring_width, then click on the on the parameter on the right and set the value to 0 (zero). This will get rid of that annoying dotted line and make your browser much nicer on the eye when clicking links!

Grab and Drag

2007-10-08T19:36:00.000-04:00

Firefox extensions are what keep me from using Safari. I love the look and feel, not to mention the speed, that Safari has over Firefox on a Mac, but the extensions just get me. Here's what I mean...

Although Safari has wonderful RSS support that Firefox couldn't hold a match to, I just can't have my Facebook bar with buttons for sharing links or getting notifications when someone messages me. I can't have a built in downloader that works like a dream (DownThemAll!). I can't have the weather forecast(ForecastFox Enhanced) in my status bar for me to check at any time. I sure as hell can't use StumbleUpon features, or even my latest addition... Grab and Drag.
This extension lets you physically drag the screen up and down just like how the iPhone uses multi-touch. You can even turn on momentum features so when you drag and let go the screen will keep going and slow down to a stop with a friction that you set. You can alter how and where Grab and Drag works, for instance you can set it up so that whenever you click and drag only where there are no links or text the screen will move with the curser, this way when you highlight text the screen won't move around on you. So if you fancy Firefox, check this out and you'll find yourself trying to scroll with ease in tons of other applications wishing the feature was available there too!

Gateway One

2007-10-02T12:38:00.000-04:00

Check out this new Apple iMa... wait a second this is a Gateway... woah...

So I guess Gateway is really stepping up and trying to grab away the market that cares about what their system looks like. The Gateway One priced from $1,299 for the base model and $1,799 for the high end model. It boasts Intel's Core 2 duo processor and a 19" widescreen display. It also has 8 channel (7.1 Dolby Digital) audio, 8x DVD±R/RW, built in 5 in 1 card reader, 802.11n draft wifi, GET THIS... 7 usb ports!!!, 1 firewire port, 1.3Mp camera built into the screen, media remote control, up to a 500GB hard drive and up to 3GB of ram (2GB is standard!).

If you're in the market for a computer and you hate Macs (how could you though?), this would be my #1 choice.

The Fibonacci Sequence In Lateralus

2007-10-01T17:18:00.000-04:00

This is an awesome video that shows some amazing imagery from the Hubble telescope while showing the Fibonacci Sequence in modern music...

Further more, check this out... (It's crazy to see how genius some people are.)

"I had doodled a few spirals in the corners of my graph paper, and in doing so made the first important connection to Lateralus. I knew that if the tracks were in fact intended to be heard in a different order, "Parabol" and "Parabola" would have to go together. In drawing my spirals, I had begun with a vertex and 'spiraled' outwards. After writing the numbers 1 through 13 linearly, I could immediately see that Parabol and Parabola would have to be the middle of my spiral (in that 13 / 2 = 6.5). I drew a simple arrow between 6 and 7 and then pondered the next pair. At first, I actually drew a spiral connecting pairs of numbers whose sum equaled 13 (the number of songs on the album). This, however, left the last track in the same position and without anything to connect to. At this time, I had used my copy of Lateralus and Cool Edit Pro to take out the silences between tracks and put the songs in the following order: 6,7,5,8,4,9,3,10,2,11,1,12,13. The transition from Parabola into Schism blew my mind, as the plucks, probably dismissed by listeners as a drawn out rant of an ending, perfectly transition into the beginning of Schism. When you count out beats as the strings are plucked, Schism resumes with the same time signature and tempo - mirroring the progression of notes. The transition from Schism into Ticks & Leeches is equally intriguing. Schism ends with strong double-kick bass and tom smacks, and Ticks & Leeches begins with what many would call a 'tribal' drum beat. The beat at the very start of Ticks & Leeches is slightly different every subsequent time it is repeated - the measures are two beats longer. Yup - you guessed it - those two beats are ACTUALLY the last two beats of Schism."

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Free calls for the rest of your life.

2007-09-08T15:02:00.000-04:00

Would you like to NEVER see another phone bill again? Well you should check out Ooma. It's a replacement system for your land-line phone that only requires a one time fee for the hardware!

This one time fee is $399, it includes the main "Hub" for your home that controls all the calls. The Hub looks like an answering machine but can do so much more. This service uses a broadband connection, sort of like Vonage and Skype, but unlike the other guys, the Ooma system uses your current regular phone system in your house with the addition of a $40 box called the "Scout" that goes in line just before your phone. These Scout boxes give you access to voicemail at any phone in the house.

Hub ------------------------------------------ Scout

With Ooma you can even hold two separate conversations with two different people. This feature works like call-waiting, except you can put one person on hold and call another while the first is on hold, or switch between the two calls, all just by pushing on the number pad on the first line or second line buttons.

So for most homes your look at around $500, but since that's a one time rate and you will get free calls anywhere in the us whenever you want... forever... you will easily recoup that money and it will start paying for itself in under 2 years even if you are paying as low as 20 bucks a month! So after 2 years, at the longest, you will be essentially making money off your investment.

New iPods... again...

2007-09-05T15:50:00.000-04:00

Apple has, once again, released a new line of iPods. This time they have innovated, kind of.

There are two new iPods added to the arsenal: (from left to right) iPod nano(4 or 8GB), iPod classic(80 and 160GB, and the new iPod touch(8 or 16GB.

The iPod nano sports a shorter body and wider screen that can play video, the iPod touch is an iPhone without the phone or camera, and the iPod classic is a slightly redesigned version of the 5th gen ipod. No more glossy finish for the iPods!

As for prices...
4 nano $149
8 nano $199
80 classic $249
160 classic $349
8 touch $299
16 touch $399

Also, there is only an 8GB model of the iPhone now. The prices were dropped by 200 dollars! Now it's only $399!

Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!

Callwave Visual Voicemail

2007-08-16T17:48:00.000-04:00

Love the idea of visual voicemail that the Apple iPhone offers but don't have an iPhone? Well check this free service out called Callwave.

This service is a replacement for your regular voicemail your cell phone currently uses. Callwave receives calls just like your regular voicemail, but when you get missed calls or voice messages you can have notices emailed to you or you can also have your voicemails texted to you. Texted to you, but they are auditory messages from your friends? Yep, Callwave actually takes what the person said and converts it into text. This works about 90 percent of the time. The point of this service is to ultimately give you the option of listening your voicemails in whatever order you'd like.

Above is the OS X widget that you can use that will show missed calls, even play voicemails right from your computer!