I finally gave in to temptation and bought this media powerhouse. And I’m hooked!
I love video games and the PS3 delivers gaming in all its 1080p glory. A blue-ray DVD player is built directly into the system as well. But one of the features I’m most excited about is streaming all my digital media from my Power Mac to my television and surround sound.
Nullriver’s MediaLink is the link between my Mac and PS3. It does give me “iLife in my living room”!
Just wanted to share this picture. I use Adium X as my chat client on my Mac and just found this SF Giants Ducky Icon for it! Awesomeness!
If you are interested in Adium, it supports many different chat protocols, including Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk, Facebook, Myspace, AIM, MSN, Jabber and more! I’ve been using if for quite a while and love the way I can customize it!
No, I’m not talking in another language. Ubiquity and Wisestamp are two plugins for Mozilla Firefox that I have been playing with this week.
If you have ever used Quicksilver or Butler or Launchbar for the Mac, then you will be familiar with Ubiquity right away. For those of you who are even further confused, just watch the video below:
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/1561578]
Ubiquity really does make your web browsing so much easier, especially if you use a laptop with no mouse. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and it is so easy to find something from the internet and send it to a friend via email or twitter.
Download it, play with it, and comment back and let me know how you like it.
Wisestamp is a very cool plugin that allows you to insert html signatures into your gmail, aol mail, hotmail, or yahoo mail account.
My custom signature is above, but you can customize it however you want! If a custom, linkable signature for your email is something you want, then Wisestamp is something you must try. Again, free software doesn’t cost you anything to try!
I blog about a wide variety of topics. I’ve been a little surprised that my most read entry is about Quicken and its alternatives for Mac users. (Read that entry here)
I was a little shocked that I’m the number two blog when a person googles Quicken alternatives! Check it out below…
Yeah, that is pretty sweet for a small time blogger like myself. I am also curious at the pressure to write another blog that will garner that many hits. I hate doing anything for popularity’s sake, and I’m not writing a follow up entry for that purpose.
I have stumbled upon some interesting Quicken for Mac news. It is concerning Intuit’s new product, entitled “Quicken Financial Life for Mac“. It supposed to be a redesigned Quicken that is specifically built with Mac users in mind.
I captured a bunch of screenshots and will post them here. But the best post I’ve found so far on this subject is from Apple Insider. Click right here to go to that article.
I also try to sign up to be a beta tester for the Quicken product, but alas, I was rejected! My “you are not cool enough to play with our software” letter is below:
So I don’t have any hands on experience to report. Hopefully Intuit will release a product that is as good as their windoze version. The screen caps from Apple Insider look promising. Below are the screen caps I took directly from Intuit’s website.
So you might have read about my ultimate nightmare of losing my entire 300 gigabyte iTunes library. I made a few phone calls today and got prices ranging from $500 to $2500 (plus the cost of a new hard drive) to recover all the data from my dead drive. My bank accounts just can’t take that type of hit at the moment, so I have resigned myself to building back my entire music library.
I do have to give props to Apple, as they are letting me download all of my purchased music and videos again. Unfortunately I have many, many, many more albums that I have acquired elsewhere. Those will be regained via Bit Torrent!
I got a great deal on a 1.5 terabyte Segate External Drive at Best Buy and will steadily rebuild my music library. I’m using Senuti to recover all the songs that are still on my iPod. The salt in the wound is that my iPod crashed about a week before my hard drive. I had my 30 gig iPod stuffed with music! After it crashed, I was lazy and didn’t put much music on it so that sucks!
I’ll probably be blogging on my situation from time to time. Wish me luck!
So I got my wife the new iPhone 3G for her birthday. She’s on it all the time and she is always wanting more storage space, so I thought it’d be a great idea.
But what do I do with her “old” iPhone? We passed it down to my daughter to use as an iPod Touch. The first gen iPhone could still be used without a sim card, as long as you had the 2.02 version of software. It is a great gadget, and the wi-fi internet connection works great.
Today I was prompted to install the 2.1 update on Bekah’s iPod Touch (the 1st gen iPhone). I updated like a good boy and BAM! her iPod no worky! Said I had to install a valid sim card and activate the phone via iTunes! Boo!
I did a quick Google search on how to downgrade the phone back to the 2.02 software found promptly found out that Apple made sure you couldn’t downgrade. Thanks a bunch Steve!
Fortunately for me, I found this website on how to “jailbreak” the 2.1 software. Turns out us Mac users are a lucky bunch! This program does everything in one step, whereas windoze users have to jump through some major hoops to jailbreak their phones. I ran the software and POOF! the iPhone-turned-iPod Touch was working great! Yay for me!
I’m not a pro photographer by any means, but I have managed to click a few thousand pictures ever since we bought our first digital camera.
I’ve been using iPhoto for a couple of years now and I have accumulated quite a large library of pictures. They are all broken into “Events” that each have a name describing that particular event. That was the extent of my organizational skills! Trying to find “that one” picture is literally like finding a needle in a haystack.
Enter Keyword Manager for iPhoto. This program is a godsend if there ever was one. Here is a blurb from their website:
Whether you have 300 or 10 000 photos in your iPhoto library, organizing the photos with keywords will help you quickly find what you are looking for. In iPhoto 6, this was a really cumbersome task, which got some improvement in iPhoto 7; but Keyword Manager really takes it to the next level.
Using Keyword Manager to manage your keywords allows you to quickly and easily tag all photos in your library, regardless of how many photos you have and how many keywords you want to use. Since Keyword Manager uses iPhoto’s own keyword system internally, it is completely safe! Even if you decide to stop using Keyword Manager, all your keywords will remain!
Take it to the next level indeed! The concept of tagging or adding keywords might be a little new to you, so let me explain. Like I said, I have a lot of pictures, mostly of the kids. Here’s what I do…I find a bunch of pictures of my son Nathan. I select them with the mouse, and then simply assign the keyword “Nathan” to those pictures. I also assigned the keywords “2007″ and “Halloween” to the same pictures. I can add any keyword I’d like. They keywords let you search your entire picture library by that word. You can also create “smart albums” within iPhoto based on those keywords. These are albums that are automatically updated when a keyword is assigned to new pictures.
To the right you can see a list of my smart albums. Now all I have to do is click on those albums to see the pictures that are of our dumb dogs (doggies) or pics that were taken in 2007 (2007), birthday pictures of all years (birthdays). You can create any number of rules, loose or strict. One benefit of using a Mac is the integration of the entire iLife suite of programs. I can now see these smart albums in iTunes (to put on my iPod to show my friends and family), iDVD (to use in Menu drop zones) or iMovie to make a slideshow.
If you prefer not to create smart albums, I understand. You can still filter your picture library directly from the Keyword Manager interface.
Here I have my photo library open with the Keyword manager hud (heads up display) floating above it. All my keywords are shown. To the right of them is a small empty circle. I can filter my pictures by clicking on these circles.
Here I have one keyword chosen, “first day of school”. Now my entire library is filtered to only include those pictures with that keyword.
Now I have added another filter, the keyword “2008″. My entire library is widdled down even more. Only pictures the the keywords “first day of school” and “2008″ are shown.
You might be thinking of your picture collection right now, and saying “that is just too much work”. Unfortunately it is, but I think the pay off is worth it. I spent a good 3 hours in front of my computer last night sorting through pictures and tagging everything. And I’m nowhere near finished! The key will be to remember to enter keywords as soon as I import pictures into iPhoto!
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few phone calls today and got prices ranging from $500 to $2500 (plus the cost of a new hard drive) to recover all the data from my dead drive. My bank accounts just can’t take that type of hit at the moment, so I have resigned myself to building back my entire music library.
Take it to the next level indeed! The concept of tagging or adding keywords might be a little new to you, so let me explain. Like I said, I have a lot of pictures, mostly of the kids. Here’s what I do…I find a bunch of pictures of my son Nathan. I select them with the mouse, and then simply assign the keyword “Nathan” to those pictures. I also assigned the keywords “2007″ and “Halloween” to the same pictures. I can add any keyword I’d like. They keywords let you search your entire picture library by that word. You can also create “smart albums” within iPhoto based on those keywords. These are albums that are automatically updated when a keyword is assigned to new pictures.
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