Macs, iPods, and the like
Mac tip: Using iPhoto smart albums to build a better screensaver
The latest version of Mac OS X, 10.5 aka Leopard, includes a nifty screensaver setting that makes one of those mosaic patterns. It starts off with you looking at one photo and then zooms out to show dozens of other photos and then when it zooms out enough you realize they all make up another photo. And then it continues ad infinitum.
I’ve had this set to a smart folder in iPhoto that gathered all my pictures of Isabella based on the keyword of her name. And that worked well until Sophia came along and I wanted to include her as well. Now, I know I could have gone through an re-tagged all my photos of Isabella with a new tag like “my kids” and then tagged all of Sophia’s with the same and then created a smart folder for that tag and made the screensaver run from that … but that sounded like too much work.
Instead, I decided to use nested smart albums. Except, I found to my chagrin, iPhoto doesn’t supported nested smart albums. What do I mean by nested smart albums? Smart albums are photo albums constructed not one by one, but automatically by the program based on criteria you give it, such as keywords, dates, ratings, etc. What I was hoping was that one of those criteria could be whether a photo was in another smart album. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. Thus, plan B.
I created three smart albums: “Isabella”, “Sophia”, and “Isabella and Sophia”. The critera for each were:
- [Isabella] Match all: Keyword contains “Isabella”; Date is after “5/17/2006” (the day before Isabella’s birthday); and Keyword is not Sophia (i.e. photos of just Isabella alone)
- [Sophia] Match all: Keyword contains “Sophia”; Date is after “3/3/2008” (the day before Sophia’s birthday); and Keyword is not “Isabella”.
- [Isabella and Sophia] Match all: Date is after “3/3/2008”; Keyword contains “Isabella”; Keyword contains “Sophia”
So now, I have smart albums of the two girls alone and then together. Now I just drop those in a folder called “The kids” and in the Desktop & Screensaver Preference Pane, I point it at this folder and voila!
Just don’t ask me what I’ll do when the third child comes along. Maybe by then Steve Jobs and Apple will have added nested smart albums. Whew!
Synchronizing your Mac’s iCal with your Blackberry’s calendar
One feature I’ve wanted for some time is the ability to reliably and easily synchronize the calendars I keep on my Mac in iCal with the calendar in my Blackberry so that I have the information in my pocket when I need it. The problem is that Blackberry does a poor job of supporting Macs and even the third-party software, such as Mark/Space’s Missing Sync, is unreliable at best.
So I set out to find a better solution and I did, even if it’s not exactly a free solution. The key is to use Google Calendar (Gcal) as the intermediary. Gcal is free to use and it has the benefit of allowing you to share calendars with others (like your wife, so you always know when her appointments are or when the kids have things scheduled).
The first step—and the part that’s going to cost you—is to download and install Spanning Sync. This product is a Mac OS X Preference Pane which as 15-day demo period. If you decide to keep it, you can sign up for a one-year $25 subscription or buy it outright for $65. I opted for the latter, because I’m betting I’ll still be using it in three years.
Spanning Sync simply allows you to synchronize your iCal calendars with your Google Calendars. The interface is clear and you can synchronize any number of calendars on both sides. It’s best to set them up with the same names on both sides, but if you’ve already got a Google Calendar, you can choose to sync some or all of your calendars no matter what they’re called. Just follow the instruction included with the software and you’ll be good to go.
From this point, by default, your iCal and Google Calendar will synchronize every hour. Now to set up the other half of the equation.
Using your Blackberry’s web browser, go to mobile.google.com and then either click “Download All” if you’d like the other Google mobile products too, or just the “Sync” link. The program will download and install.
When it’s done, click on the “Sync” icon that should now be on your phone’s screen. Open up the menu, and chooe “Sync Now” to initiate the first synchronization. Thereafter, depending on how you set your options, it should sync every hour.
That’s it! From now on your Mac’s calendar will always be handy in your pocket and changes you make to your phone’s calendar will automatically appear in your iCal. Worst case if you set them to synch every hour is that your phone and iCal won’t be synchronized for a maximum of two hours. That’s not bad considering you don’t have to do anything else.
A lightning sale at the Apple Store
One of my siblings (they get annoyed when I identify them by name on the blog now for some reason) had a lightning bolt hit the telephone pole outside their house in the middle of the night last night. It fried their computer, the wireless router, and the DVD player, at least. Perhaps other stuff they haven’t found yet.
So today they were at the Apple Store buying replacement equipment (the homeowner’s insurance should cover most of it), but it could have been worse.
Their neighbor had everything single piece of electronic equipment blown out: plasma TV, home theater system, computers, everything. Ouch.
N.B. Great thing about the Apple Store. Bring in your old Mac and they’ll transfer all your data and applications to the new computer for you for a small fee. They’re doing it for my sibling even though the motherboard is fried by taking out the hard drive and putting it in an external case.
So now they replaced their several-years-old eMac with a new Mac mini running the latest OS and everything. Good for them.
Man buys still-new-in-box Apple //c
I had an Apple //c computer back in the day (about mid-80s). It was an awesome computer, later replaced by my also long-lost Apple IIGS. There’s something about those pre-Mac Apples that hasn’t been replicated in today’s new Macs.
A very lucky and nostalgic fellow found a //c on eBay that was still new in its box and has posted photos of himself unboxing it on Flickr.
Anyone else remember Roy Scheider using one of these in “2010: A Space Oddysey”? It even had the near-mythical flat screen on it. In a couple of years this guy could make that vision come true!
Mac tip: Mail Act-On and Yojimbo working together for organization
There are several indispensable tools I use on my Mac to keep me organized and efficient. (“Okay, Melanie, stop laughing.”) I mean, slightly less chaotic than a room full of 3-year-olds hopped up on cake and ice cream.
Anyway, two of the tools that I just figured out how to get working together are Mail Act-On from indev software and Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software. Mail Act-On is a neat little addition to Apple’s Mail that allows you to perform numerous actions—from simple things like filing an email in a folder to more complex actions such as executing an AppleScript—with just a keypress. Yojimbo, meanwhile, is a standalone program that acts as a repository for all kinds of documents, tagging them and keeping them organized.
As an example of how I use Yojimbo, I print receipts from online shopping to a PDF (a built-in function of OS X and a tip I’ll share later) right to Yojimbo. I also use it store software serial numbers and the myriad of text, PDF, and Word documents, as well as non-personal pictures, I’ve gathered over the years and that were cluttering up my hard drive.
What I was missing was a simple way to file particular emails in Yojimbo. Sure, I could print the email to a PDF and put that in Yojimbo, but that was more complicated than I thought it should be. So I turned to “the Google”.
That’s where I stumbled on this blog post and an AppleScript that connects Mail and Yojimbo. It’s exactly what I was looking for, since it takes the entire email, including sender and subject and date, and makes it a new Yojimbo document.
So all I had to do was create a Mail Act-On rule, which would activate the AppleScript on a keypress.
Success! Now I can quickly file my email, not just into my email folders, but also into my document organizer, too. Organized! Efficient!
P.S. My other Mail Act-On rules mark an email as “blogworthy”, meaning I want to blog about it later; mark the email as part of one or more ongoing projects using Mail Act-On’s sister product, MailTags; send the email to OmniFocus, personal productivity software; and more.
This station is now the ultimate power in the universe
As we were preparing to leave for Austin last week, I prepped my MacBook Pro for the flight ahead. We agreed that the best way to distract Isabella for a couple of hours would be to play her favorite movie, “Finding Nemo”, which she calls “Fish! Fish!”
However, I knew that playing the DVD in the notebook would burn up battery life like crazy so I ripped it to my hard drive. (Yes, I own the DVD and I had it on me at all times.) This way I could run it from the hard drive and not the electricity-sapping DVD drive. Yet, even so I had still disturbingly short battery life on the MacBook. As in less than 2 hours on a full charge. What gives?
I figured out what gives when we arrived in Austin. I started the neat little application Coconut Battery that tells you the original maximum capacity of the battery and the current maximum capacity. It’s a fact of rechargeable batteries that over time they eventually lose capacity. But in the space of 9 months my battery had been reduced to just about 50 percent capacity!
Thankfully, there is an Apple Store near my in-laws’ home at a new chic shopping center called The Domain. I made an appointment at the Genius Bar and my mother-in-law graciously drove me the next morning.
Incidentally, I love going to the Genius Bar and showing off my Mac ninja moves to the Genius and having him get all impressed at at the level of my Mac wizardry. Does my geek cred good.
Anyway, he checked the number of charging cycles on my battery, only 79, and said that a normal wear and tear for a battery with only 50% capacity should happen at about 300 cycles or more. That meant a free replacement battery. Whee!
Unfortunately, none were in stock so I’d have to wait until Wednesday or Thursday. Then, that afternoon I got a call. They got a shipment that day. Yay!
So here I have a brand new notebook battery with hours and hours of off-the-grid power, all thanks to Apple standing behind its products and their excellent customer service. Apple Store FTW!
I’m no Warren Buffett, but …
I opened my first IRA account on September 17, 2001, the first day the New York Stock Exchange opened after 9/11. I had several goals in mind. Obviously, planning for retirement was one, but another desire was to show my faith in America’s resiliency in the face of terrorism and to do my small part to show our enemies that we will not be intimidated.
I started the account through ShareBuilder, a company that allows you to build up your portfolio through dollar-cost averaging and dividend re-investment, which — in a nutshell — encourages you to invest the same amount every month in a set portfolio of equities, averaging out your risk as the share prices rise and fall. The most basic rule of investing is buy low, sell high (or at least don’t buy high). So, for example, is Share A’s price is $10 today and you’re investing $100 per month, then you buy 10 shares this month. If the price rises to $20 next month, then you buy only 5 shares and if it falls to $1, then you buy 100 shares. Obviously, you want to be invested in solid companies that will grow over time, not volatile or risky stocks.
Anyway, I set up to invest in four different equities, and the one I was most personally interested in was Apple. On that day of my first investment Apple was trading at $16.85. That was one month before Apple introduced the iPod. Today Apple was trading in the high $180s.
Now, I wasn’t faithful to the dollar-cost averaging plan. I only invested for 12 months before circumstances dictated I pause my investing, and I only just resumed a few months ago. Nevertheless, my total gain to date on my investment in Apple has been 1,239.05 percent. That’s percent.
Of course, as the advertisements warn you, past performance is not an indicator of future returns. Still, that’s a mighty nice little nest egg we’ve got there. I’d love to see it continue growing. Now if only the other equities in my portfolio weren’t such turkeys, I’d be much happier. (Oh okay only one of them is a turkey, a big orange hammer-carrying turkey.)
What’s wrong with Wall Street?
Sometimes I just don’t get the herd of investor-sheep out there. On the day that Apple introduces the most amazing iPod product line ever and even drops the price on the most successful smartphone ever to make it more accessible to even more people, the stock drops and then drops again the next day. Huh?
Are people actually listening to the Business Week’s FUD? Only in America do people greet a price drop as a problem. Listen up people: A drop in price in this case is an indication that the device is selling so well that Apple is willing to forgo insane profits in order to make good profits on more units moved.
On the other hand, if investing were easy, everyone would be a millionaire and I can look at this as an opportunity to shift more IRA money into Apple. That’s right, run scared Wall Street. I’ll buy up your underpriced shares.
Beatles, shmeatles
So Apple introduces the most amazing iPods yet today, removing a few of the remaining flaws pointed out by critics(like being able to buy music directly from iTunes using the device) and what does the major business magazine say?
“iPod Refresh Does Not Include the Beatles,” says “Business Week”.
Let’s set aside for a moment dismissing a major shakeup of one of the most successful consumer electronic product lines as a “refresh”. Why is everybody so obsessed about the Beatles coming to the iTunes Store? Can you not buy every single one of their albums not just individually, but in multiple box sets, in CD format as it is? Can you not rip them to your computer’s hard drive to your heart’s content?
Yes, the Beatles were groundbreaking. Many people consider them to be the greatest rock band ever. Fine.
I suppose this is wider than just a rant about media coverage of the iPod and Apple, but I just don’t understand why everybody practically pees their pants at the mere mention of the Beatles. Maybe I’m too young too understand the greatness that is the Beatles. Maybe it’s because I’m not a member of the Baby Boomer generation, which still thinks the world revolves around it and chafes at the thought that they’re not considered the Greatest Generation by anyone but themselves.
Still, it’s a bit annoying that every time over the past two years that Apple has said it was announcing a new product, this “Beatles on iTunes” rumor pops up. On the other hand, maybe this time it’s actually going to happen. Ack! Now I’m doing it.
Mac Tip: Twitter + Quicksilver + RememberTheMilk.com = Easy Task List
Okay, all you Mac power users out there, are you using Quicksilver yet? If not, let me just say that Quicksilver is the insanely awesome software that lets you take control of your computer and the Internet in ways you have not imagined yet. I don’t want to take the time to go into it here, but do a Google search on “What is quicksilver for the Mac?” and explore some of those links.
So here’s an awesome way I use Quicksilver along with several Internet services to make myself more productive. I use the free (donation-requested) web site Remember The Milk to keep my to-do lists. What makes RTM special is that it accepts new to-dos in English (“Meet John at Immaculate Conception Church in Salem, MA, at 6:30 pm tomorrow”) and will translate that into an appropriate task. It will even send you a reminder via email or SMS text message if want. You can even set up recurring events (e.g. every weekday or every Tuesday).
What’s especially nice is that RTM lets you create new to-dos via multiple methods such as email, SMS, and even Twitter. What’s Twitter? It’s many things, but suffice to say for this post that it’s a broadcast messaging system. You send it short posts (140 characters or less) and it sends it out to friends who are also using Twitter. For our purposes, RememberTheMilk has set up a special link between their site and Twitter to receive “tweets”, more specifically direct message tweets that only the “rtm” account will see and which remains private.
So, for example, I can send the same new to-do to my Remember The Milk to-do list by sending the following via Twitter: “d rtm Meet John at Immaculate Conception Church in Salem, MA, at 6:30 pm tomorrow”. The “d” stands for “direct message” and the “rtm” is Remember The Milk’s Twitter address. Now this wouldn’t be a very big convenience if I had to go to Twitter’s site to enter the command. I could just as easily go to Remember The Milk’s web site. Here’s where Quicksilver comes in.
Blogger and Mac user Coda Hale has written an Applescript that allows you to send “tweets” via Quicksilver. After you’ve set it up (see the instructions at the link there), you just invoke the Quicksilver summoning keystroke, type an apostrophe (to let QS know you’re doing text entry), and type your Remember the Milk tweet: “d rtm Meet John at Immaculate Conception Church in Salem, MA, at 6:30 pm tomorrow”. Type tab and then type Tweet and hit return. Off it goes. You didn’t even have to leave whatever program you were working in or open a web browser.
Incidentally, the same basic setup will work with Google Calendar. Just follow this tip at Lifehacker.com, which sets up the system like with Remember The Milk and you’re good to go.
Being productive was never so much fun.
Technorati Tags: quicksilver | Mac | productivity | tips | twitter | gcal |
Mac Tip: Update to “One iPhoto library to rule them all”
Back in April, I wrote a Mac tip on how to set up a centralized iPhoto server that stays synchronized to one computer in your house. One reason you'd want to do this is if the primary residence of family digital photos is your MacBook, which isn't always at home or available when others might want to access those photos using iPhoto's network sharing capabilities.
Now with the new version, iPhoto '08, this has changed somewhat. In the old version, all the photos were stored in a series of folders in your Pictures folder inside the Home folder. My tip kept you from having to copy all of your photos every night by using the 'rsync' Terminal command that only copies the changes. If you added only a few new photos today, then it would only copy a couple of hundred megabytes instead of copying the entire multigigabyte file.
But Apple has changed how iPhoto '08 stores its photos. Now they are kept in a 'package', a special kind of folder that the computer sees as one big file. Thus anytime your library changes, then the whole multigigabyte file has to be copied. Every single time. This is a bit of a pain, especially if you keep your laptop connected wirelessly all the time. I stopped doing this recently and now leave my MacBook Pro sitting on my desk at night connected with an Ethernet cable, which is going to be much faster. (Wait, is that right? I'll have the check the relative network speeds.)
On the other hand, the change to storing the photos as a package has one benefit. For some reason the old version of iPhoto would sometimes not recognize the new photos after a synchronization. I think it certain preference or other files weren't always being updated along with the photos. In any case, since the whole library is being copied every night, it means that the iPhoto server always shows all the photos in its library.
Man, if Apple would only come out with some kind of iLife Home Server or something, it would make all this much easier. Hey, Apple, are you listening?!
iPhone luv
I was able to spend about five minutes with Apple’s iPhone today. It was my first time with the actual device in my hand—I was in the Apple store picking up something else—although I’ve heard so much about it I feel like I own one.
Have to say that despite the worries from naysayers that typing on the screen would be imprecise and difficult, with just my first five minutes I was doing pretty good. After a half hour, I think even my fat fingers would be doing a good approximation of accurate typing, certainly no worse than my current rate of misspellings on my full-size computer keyboard.
My desire for the iPhone has not abated, although I’m still put off by (a) the $600 price tag for a 4 Gb model and (c) the lack of advanced features. I’m waiting to see what an eventual version 2.0 will offer or even whether the next generation of iPod gives me enough of what I want in the iPhone. I think I might be happy with a phoneless iPhone, i.e. the iPod and Internet device elements.
Also took a gander at the new iMacs, looking all sleek and brushed aluminum and glass. Very fancy. The glossy screens are very large, very bright, and very fingerprint-prone. (Not unlike my MacBook Pro’s screen.) It’s a good thing they come with a chamois. Owners of the iMac will need it.
The new keyboard is pretty sweet too, coming in both Bluetooth and wired versions. It’s incredibly thin and now has a bunch of keys for controlling iTunes and Expose and more. If I was still working on a regular desktop machine, I’d buy one in a second. Frankly, if I hadn’t just bought a new keyboard for my Windows machine at work, I’d buy the Apple one. It’s even less expensive than the Microsoft keyboard I did get. Shucks!
The purpose of the trip, however, was to pick up new version of iWork, which I use for various simple page design projects, and iLife, which a co-worker mainly uses for its photo book capabilities. I’ve only used the software for a short time so far, but I’m liking the upgraded features. Maybe I’ll do a short review later.
For now, I’m going back to imagining all the cool stuff I could be doing with an iPhone. Hmmm.
What a Mac user likes (and dislikes) about Windows #1
I’ve started using Microsoft Windows recently and if know me as a Mac user, you know that’s somewhat of a shock to the system. Oh, I’m not one of those Mac bigots who thinks that Windows or Microsoft are evil or who thinks they are horrible and unworthy of ever being used by anyone anywhere.
I simply prefer Apple computers and OS X. I think they are superior hardware and software that are reliable and easy to use and very powerful. I can do things with OS X that perhaps might be possible on Windows, but would take me a long time to figure out.
That said, I’ve found some things about Windows in the past few months that I like and a few things I dislike. (I will reserve my comments to Windows 2000 and XP, which are the only two Windows versions I’m familiar with; I have not yet used Vista.)
One thing I like about Windows that I wish were true in OS X is the speed with which applications open. If I receive a Word document in an email on Windows and click to open it, the program starts and the document opens in seconds. The same for other programs. They just pop open.
On OS X, it’s a lot slower. Now I will readily admit that part of the problem may be that I have tricked out my Mac with all kinds of utilities and enhancements that may be slowing things down, but even a fresh-out-of-the-box Mac is slower than any of the Dells I’ve used, including Melanie’s three-year-old Dell laptop.
Of course, there’s plenty to dislike about Windows. Configuring anything, especially hardware, is needlessly difficult and arcane. There is no consistency among programs. The first thing I have to install on a new Windows installation is anti-adware, anti-virus, anti-whatever software. Well, you know I could go on: Mac users’ complaints about Windows are well known.
I just wanted to note one positive thing I’d experienced.
Like father, like daughter
In a couple of years this will be me and Isabella:
Leta is watching GEORGE! watch ESPN when Jon walks in, braces himself, and tells her that they have to go run errands while Mama stays home to get some work done. Leta’s head erupts into spontaneous flames, and the bottom half of her body collapses prostrate across the coffee table. This is exactly what she wanted to hear.
“It’ll be fun,” he assures her.
“BUT I DON‘T WANT TO DO ERRANDS!” she screams through the fire on her face.
He nods and maintains a calm tone. “I know you don’t want to, but we have to.”
“BUT I DON‘T WANT—”
“First, we’re going to the bank, and then—”
“BUT I DON‘T—”
“And then we’re going to the Apple Store.”
Leta suddenly remembers all those times Daddy has taken her to the Apple Store to pass the time, those outings where he would inspect new hardware while she got to play Dora games on an iMac at the back of the store.
“Daddy!” Her tone changes instantly from CURRENTLY DYING to polite conversation over tea at the tennis club. “I’m going to the Apple Store with you! I love the Apple Store.”
Jon staggers backwards two steps, holds his hand over his heart and says, “If I were a normal man? This—” and he points back and forth between himself and Leta signaling what they have between them, “—this would be me teaching my son how to throw a baseball.”
Isabella and I will bond over trips to the Apple Store and I will teach her how to be a Mac fanatic. Heck, she already has her “iPhone”.
Technorati Tags: father | daughter | Mac | Apple |
The iPhone iDoubters iDoubted the iPod
The world has gone iPhone crazy (for those of you who weren’t aware, the snazzy new device from Apple goes on sale this Friday), with pre-release buzz unlike any other consumer electronic device in history. Some wags have even likened it to the Second Coming (“Rockwood”).
After months and months of media hype, the same gushing reporters now feel a need to dial it back a notch and offer contrary voices, like the New York Times did this past weekend.
What’s funny is how much the naysayers sound like thos who doubted the iPod several years ago. They said it was too expensive, that Apple was outside its core competency, that there was no market for it, and so on. Check out these actual quotes from the article in which I’ve substituted “iPod” for “iPhone” to see how much it sounds like 2001 all over again:
Industry analysts and executives offer mixed opinions about how much the [iPod] will shake up the [music player] business. … “[Apple] set the initial price very high, so it’ll likely do better once they lower the price, and align it with the value they offer,” said Mike Lanman, the chief marketing officer for [Rio]. … Edward Snyder, an equity analyst with Charter Equity Research, said that many people would be turned off by the price; older customers who can afford it, he said, will not care about all the fancy features of the [iPod], while younger ones who are excited about the device will not like the cost. … Implementing a [music player] is absolutely more difficult than anything Apple’s done to date,” he said … “I don’t think Apple’s going to be a big player in this at all.”
That’s all the same sort of thing we heard in 2001. Don’t believe me. Here’s a sample from the friendliest audience possible at the time: Mac users. The media and industry analysts were even harsher.
Will I buy an iPhone? I’d certainly love a phone that does everything Apple promises the iPhone can do. But there are two questions: Will it do all that? And will it come down in price quickly?
Ah, technolust, my old foe! I know you well.
