The server that holds my MacReviewCast and Surf-bits.com domain names crashed last night and will be down for a bit longer. Please have patience with me if you’re looking to download a podcast episode or if you’re using my surf-bits.com email address. Please use the surfbits.com address. We’ll be up again soon. Thank you. UPDATE: [...]
Continue reading about Trouble with the MacReviewCast Server – Resolved
If you’ve had the opportunity to listen to the latest (#249) episode of the MacReviewCast you’ll know I mentioned my strange passion for something more “analog” then “digital”. When I’m not in front of the keyboard or iPad, I’m enjoying using one of my expanding collection of fountain pens. Along with fountain pens, you find [...]
For those of you that have followed my online musings, you’ll know I have a bad habit that I’ve talked about in the past. I am not even close to the point of addressing it, in fact, I’m still embellishing it. The bad habit I refer to is my storage addiction. Yes, I have a sever problem controlling my urge to accumulate mass volumes of hard disk space. My Mac Pro is filled full of 1TB disks, my Drobo is filled with 1TB disks, my external FireWire 800 drive has another 1 TB disk in it, and I have another one or two USB drives thrown in for good measure. Then if you sneak a peak on the top shelf of my desk, you’ll find 5 more hard drives in static bags ready to spin up at a moments notice. (I just feel better knowing I have spare drives laying around).
This was all fine and dandy. I could handle this storage “problem” and quit anytime I wanted. After all, I need all this storage for the video and audio production work I do, and I believe in practicing what I preach when it comes to backing up my data. I have backups of my backups. At least I felt this “problem” was under control until this last weekend. I had time to do some personal reflection and I realized that this storage addiction has spilled over into my online life too. My digital life has become very “cloudy”.
Let me explain. It started with my need to backup data to the cloud in order to keep it safe. The idea made sense to me and all the cool kids in the Mac community are doing it. So after much deliberation and some research, I decided to open up an Amazon S3 account. I loved it. Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, you just pay for what you use. My bill has never been over $3 a month for what I’m storing in their amazing cloud. I almost forgot about my Mobile Me account. I have 10 gigs of storage available and really only use a small portion of the 10 gigs for syncing my Macs. Then the fine folks at Carbonite contacted me and wanted me to try out their Cloud storage solution. I installed it on my MacBook Pro and it works like a charm. Between Amazon S3 handling my Mac pro and Carbonite taking care of my MacBook Pro and Mobile Me handling my syncing, what other clouds would I ever need? Glad you asked.
Cloud storage is no different then actual hard drive storage. The same slightly warped theory on hard drives I have which forces me to fill up every available hard drive bay I own, and then to purchase more drives to keep around just in case one crashes, prevails in my online cloud storage. More is better, you never have enough, free is good, it’s like a restaurant buffet, grab it and devour it. The buffet cloud had opened it’s doors to me.
Somehow I had a Microsoft Live account, so I was able to sign up for a free 25 gigs of storage online with Microsoft’s SkyDrive. Then the temptation of Pogoplug’s Internet accessible Network storage device with 4 USB ports and Terabytes of possible storage was too much to pass. My home files were now available from anywhere with a connection. But it didn’t end there. Google Docs allowed me to store all my important documents in the cloud and access them from anywhere, create them from anywhere and share them with anyone. My addiction was getting fed like a buffet at Golden Corral. It started to spin out of control.
I joined Dropbox and received 2 gigs of shareable storage across all my computers for free. I opened an Evernote Pro account and have an unlimited filing cabinet in the cloud that searches all my information and OCRs it too! I downloaded and am trying out Cloudapp. It’s in beta and is still searching for an identity, but I am extremely intrigued with it’s possible uses. While we’re talking about specific cloud applications, don’t forget the unlimited space I have for photos my Smugmug Pro account, or my free Flickr space. Then for video I have an Exposure Room and Vimeo account.
This addiction for storage didn’t just appear with the advent of cloud storage. I traced it roots back many years ago when I bought my first overseas server, (which I still have and use) and several reseller accounts on virtual servers around the world. I may have only 5 and 10 gig storage on these remote boxes, but they still have a purpose, serving up websites and files.
How many Terabytes of storage online and offline do I actual own? I tend not to count it. It’s like asking a cigarette smoker with a bad habit how many packs he smokes a day. 0f you don’t really look, you’ll never have to see the addict you’ve become. Last weekend I looked closely and saw a problem. So will I do anything to fix it? Maybe, one day, but not right now. Maybe next December 31st I’ll make a New Year’s resolution to consolidate my online clouds. Just consolidate mind you, baby steps at first.
In December I purchased a new MacBook Pro. I am using it at the office 9 hours a day and then for any travel I do or as on a casual basis at home. I wanted it to be mobile so I ordered the 13 inch model. I wanted it to be powerful enough to [...]
I would not be surprised if everyone reading this post already have their own Dropbox account. But if you’ve not had the chance to download and use Dropbox, you’re missing a wonderful application that makes your computer time so much more enjoyable. With Dropbox you can share files, and preference settings between all your computers [...]
Tim’s work combines several of his greatest passions: technology, teaching, photography, writing, and travel. all of these have been part of his life in some way for as long as he can remember, and became a major focus starting in high school. he has been focused on digital photography and imaging for over 10 years.
Tim has written more than a dozen books and hundreds of magazine articles on photography and imaging. he publishes the digital darkroom Questions email newsletter, as well as the Digital Darkroom Quarterly print newsletter. tim teaches through workshops, seminars, and appear ances at major events, and is a member of the photoshop World dream team of instructors.
This book is really one question after another Tim answered over the years, arranged in an order that makes sense and explains how to get the best picture possible from your digital camera. Chapter headings are:
Continue reading about “Take Your Best Shot”: O’Reilly Media
I thought I’s better let you know why the blog and podcast has been so quiet this past week. If you do not already know, I’m in San Francisco CA. for Macworld 2010. (and a little week of R&R). What I’ve been doing out here, both socially and business related will take weeks of blog [...]
By Gazmaz:
So have you just moved over to the Mac, and you have all these shiny new applications to play with, the likes of iPhoto, iMovie and the rest,
but all you actually want to do is write a document? So what has you’re Mac got for you to write a nice clean document.
You haven’t bought the likes of iWork or Mircrosoft Office for the Mac or you haven’t downloaded one of the great open free office applications. Well in jumps Textedit. Textedit can be both a plain .txt file generator or, you can easily create a Rich Text Format document. For those who don’t know, this basically means you can create a formatted document, which can then be read on all other RTF compatible applications on most other operating systems.
So the reason I wanted to mention Textedit, was because you saw a few items being opened in Textedit and then you may have copied the information and pasted it into another more powerful application. But if you just came across to the Mac, then don’t make the same mistake I made and ignore Textedit as just the Apple version of notepad from your Windows days, because it is most certainly worth a longer look.
Textedit can be used as a basic text editing tool, and to that end, lots of people use it to write HTML code, not something that I’m particularly into. But if your word processing needs are not overly complicated then you may be surprised at what Textedit can do. So let’s start off with a few basics, if you’re a, “I need to autosave because I’m used to my apps crashing all the time” user. (I know that happens less and less over on the Windows platform, but I certainly still come across Word crashing on my work machine), then Textedit has that simple, but great facility. You go into Preferences or CMD-comma, which is the standard preferences keyboard shortcut. You then click on the Open and Save tab and along with other options, you’ll see an autosaving option from which you can set the saving to every 15 secs, 30 secs, 1 minute, 5 minutes or never.
Now you may also say, “yes that’s great but when I open textedit it doesn’t look the same as the word doc I used to open”. If you’re like me you may have opened Word on the PC in Print View, don’t ask me why, but I used to like to see when I was formatting the document, what the finished item would look like once printed. You can have a similar view in Textedit. All you have to do click on format in the edit bar, then click on “wrap to page” or shift-CMD-W. All this really does is give you a border within the Textedit page window, but it is more familiar, certainly for me at least.
You can insert tables into your document and adjusting the width of these columns is as easy as highlighting the border frame, click and hold and drag to the size you require. You can even nest a table inside another table, in fact the simplicity of this nesting seems to make this a more understandable process than I ever found in Word. You’ll find tables under the format option on the menu bar.
You can create lists. The list option can be found at the top of your open page as a drop-down option, there are plenty of types to choose from and these can easily be placed inside the table you just created.
Along the top you’ll also see a styles drop-down option, the usual center, left & right align and justify options, also a spacing option.
To go even further, you also have kern and ligature options from the format font menu options, in fact as you can see you have a pretty powerful little word processor built right into you’re operating system, and because it’s built into your OS you also have the built-in spell and grammar checking capabilities. It will also insert those smart “curly” quotes when needed.
Now if Textedit is sitting on your dock, try grabbing some text from the web or an email and dragging it onto the Textedit icon, a new Textedit document will open complete with the formatting of the text you have just grabbed, and this will show you is just how much quicker it is to open than those bigger heavier applications. So if you’re wanting to quickly get something copied or typed down, I would certainly go for Textedit as my first choice.
You can paste pictures and even sound clips into your document, but the editing potential and adjustment’s are very limited. But if you require that amount of power then certainly you need to go up a notch when it comes to Word Processing. Of course Textedit is not a total office solution, but if your looking for a quick to open easy to use, no messing about with templates word processor, then don’t ignore Textedit, I did for quite a while, and that was a shame.
Mac 101 : http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2523
If you or your company are thinking about creating a screencast from a desktop application or from a Powerpoint/Keynote presentation, even video, please drop me an email at surfbits@gmail.com and I would love to discuss the project with you. Doing a great screencast is not as simple as capturing your desktop movements or animating a presentation, it’s recording and mixing audio with the graphics to create a professional screencast ready for distribution on ipods, AppleTV, YouTube or DVD. No matter how small a project seems to be, it deserves to be done right. Let’s talk about it.
Continue reading about Does Your Company Need Audio or Video Help?
This has been a long week. I’m still in the hospital. I crashed on Thursday when a blood vessel burst and my blood pressure dropped to 60/40. I am hoping that I can get out on Tuesday. Sorry for the lack of communication, but believe me when I say that I was in no mood [...]
Just a quick update. I came through surgery fine and should be out be Saturday morning. Thank you for all the well wishes. [Posted with iBlogger from my ipod touch]
Leopard has been out for almost a year now, and those of us using Time Machine hopefully have had a good experience with it, I know I have. When I first setup Time Machine, I used a hard drive that I had partitioned, and well after about 8 months or so decided that Time Machine needed its own, much larger hard drive. I wasn’t able to go as far back in time as I hoped.
I purchased a new hard drive, and thought I could just drag my Time Machine backup folders from my original drive and drop them on to the new drive. Hmmm…….if only it was that simple. That just didn’t work!. After a few google searches I found the solution and thought, “I’d share it with everyone in 10 Easy steps.”
I work at a Mac software company, which of course means I have a Mac at home as well as in the office. But sometimes I realize that I need a specific file from my home Mac while I am in the office. So far I tried tons of solutions that make it possible to easily access my files or even the computer at home. When I wrote Tim that I would love to participate in the Mac Reviewcast he asked me if I could review ShareTool by Yazsoft which was probably the only Software solution I didn’t try so far but turned out to be the best. All you have to do is starting ShareTool and click the “share” button on the Computer you want to access from somewhere else.
Continue reading about ShareTool: Securely Access Your Network from Anywhere
Hey Tim – it’s been a long time! I’ve been going crazy between vacation, the New Media Expo, taking my son on college tours – and now I’m in the airport waiting for a DELAYED flight to Virginia to visit a friend. Delayed is the good news for everyone, because that gave me time to make this entry.
Continue reading about So Allison Thinks I’m the Feisty One!
I’ve been complaining of late that the Trouble with MobileMe should have deserved a 30 day free extension to MobileMe, but I never received that email from Apple. My bad. Apple just sent me this email,
