kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: February 2008

Mac Lab Rat – GGP #78: The Game

A pretty good show again this week on the Global Geek, despite some technical trouble on my end (which you’ll hear was starting to frustrate me), the Geeks got through the whole show but as usual ran over the one-hour mark.   :mrgreen:  I’m in a tad bit of a rush this week so the notes are a bit more succinct than normal.  Enjoy!

Handbrake Solutions for <ahem> archiving your DVDs have been covered on occasion on the GGP, and this week I’ve got a great option for those of you running OS X.  Handbrake allows you to rip archive a DVD to a digital format that can be stored (and played back) on devices other than a DVD player.  Handbrake will allow conversion to more than a half-dozen different file formats.

Download Handbrake.

 

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p align=”left”>Houdini Houdini is a simple application that allows you to simply manage hidden files and folders.  If you need to hide files or documents from someone else who is not overly technical Houdini can help (though I don’t recommend using hidden files as a security mechanism, but that’s a rant for another post).  Through a simple GUI you can manage your hidden files and folders and change the from hidden to visible on command.

Give Houdini a try for basic hidden folder management.

 

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p align=”left”>PTHVolume Finally this week a menu-bar add-on for controlling the volume of your various audio outputs independently.  This application is restricted to OS X 10.5 (Leopard), but does work pretty well.  It provides an extra level of control over a system-level function which is something that Apple doesn’t often provide out of the box.

For a wee bit more control over volume, download PTHVolume.

Join Dave and I again this coming week for the next installment of the GGP.

Podcasters: What mic do you use?

Calling all Podcasters!

Regular listeners to the Global Geek Podcast will know that the microphone I use for my segments isn’t the greatest.  To be truthful, it’s a four-year old cheapie that I bought at London Drugs back when I used to actually play games.  :wink:

So I’m now on the lookout for a replacement… the question is what to get?  I’ve been using this headset-based version for some time now, but I’d really like to get something with decent quality.  I know Dave has a higher-end setup with a mixer and stuff because he needs to edit the show together.  While I don’t think I need to go quite to that level (yet), I haven’t ruled out the idea of a good, standalone USB mic.

I’d like to come to a decision in the next couple of days and try to pick up a newmic before we record this week’s show.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Lunar Eclipse 2008 – Amazing Perspectives

There were some great views of the Lunar Eclipse this past week.  I had the opportunity to take a break from a class I’m taking and watch the eclipse reach totality.  The event lasted quite a bit longer than I had anticipated (admittedly, I’ve never spent the time to watch a full eclipse event before.

Photo Credit: Helpman 77 on Flikr Photo Credit: Helpman 77 on Flickr

Our partly cloudy skies gave us an interesting view of the event through the cloud and occasionally directly at the moon.

Mac Lab Rat: GGP #77 – Well Oiled

Dave’s choices in naming episodes not withstanding, we had a great show again this week.  I joined the geeks for the latest round of the Global Geek Podcast.

LiteIcon First up this week is FreeMacSoft’s LiteIcon.  This is a great application for helping you manage the system icons on your Mac.  Apple has a tendency to dumb-down everything for their systems hiding the guts behind nicely designed UIs… most of the time.  Icon management is something that they’ve never gotten right.

LiteIcon will allow you to swap out your  icon set for OS X, and more importantly, swap them back to the originals.  The only thing this doesn’t include is icons for you to use.  You could always get some icons from a site like InterfaceLIFT to pimp out your mac.

LiteIcon is a freebie.

Flash Video Downloader 2 The second app for this week is Tesseract Software’s Flash Video Downloader.  This app will allow you to point any website URL to the tool, and it will scan the source code for the page and find any flash video links and it will automatically download the .flv files.

The app works fairly well and allows you to download batches of files at a time, and has some other “batchy” features like a notification beep, or the ability to shut down the computer afterward.

The only catch with this tool is that it won’t allow you to convert the files from the .flv format.  But for a freebie, not too shabby.

VisualHub It’s been a long time since I did an app that wasn’t a freebie, but in my search for a really good conversion tool I came up empty in the freebie department.

Techspansion’s VisualHub is an app that will take any format in, and push any format out.  There’s support for pretty much every video format on the market including H.264, DV, PSP, AVI, and the ever ellusive FLV.

The only downside is that the app costs about $25… but like the Techspansion dev team says: “justify it by thinking of the cost per frame.”

And that wraps up this weeks Mac updates.  Join us again next time for more mac apps, and more GGP goodness.

Advertising on Blogs

This is a topic I’ve been considering for some time now. Many of you (who don’t use an ad-blocker) will have noticed that late last year I began experimenting with placing ads on the blog. The idea behind this was the “get-the-blog-to-pay-for-itself” mentality that most of us go through when we realize that there are costs associated with maintaining a presence online if it’s done using your own domain… and what self-respecting geek wouldn’t want full control over their site??

So that led me to ads. There are four different kinds of ads on the site: the Firefox referal link (via Google), Google Adsense ads, TTZ Media ads on each post, and most recently an Amazon referal ad (left-side near the bottom).

When you let an advertising company into your blog you’re allowing them to place text and images on your site which they say will match the content of your site. I’ve found recently that this isn’t always the case. A post that Dave put up on the GGP blog last week illustrates the point. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait.

Different vendors classify products differently. In this particular case, some rather questionable material ships as a “technology” product because it’s on DVD. Lovely. There are lots of DVDs out there, I wonder how many have shown up on the blog?? I’ve had a couple thousand page impressions of the Amazon ad (not to mention the others) and it really made me think. I’ve had ad-code on the site since the fall, and have managed to rack up an amazing $2.72 (all of it from Google AdSense). To me, the cost of cluttering up the site and the potential for “bad press” far outweighs the benefits of maybe someday possibly getting a month’s worth of hosting paid for.

This time it was an ad for asian girls in an oil-wrestling DVD.  At the end of the day it probably didn’t hurt my reputation much, and Dave got some fodder for the GGP blog.  But it also didn’t help me much.  I expected to see a mini spike in traffic for the day, and that didn’t happen either.  And what about next time?  What if the next “oops” is more damaging?  Bottom line, getting $10 a year (maybe) isn’t worth the crap I’m dealing with at this point.

Expect the ads to come down shortly.

Jott Launches Local Canadian Numbers

JottMessaging and “GTD-ish” service Jott has just launched new local numbers in many major cities in Canada. The service has gone from one local number in Toronto, to twenty nation-wide.

Here is an excerpt from the email sent to Canadian Jott users today:

In an effort to protect your privacy, most Canadian mobile providers have blocked caller ID information from being passed to toll free numbers. This leaves the alternative of using local access numbers across the country, so that everyone can send Jott messages without having to pay long distance fees.

Here are the new Canadian local numbers

CITY NUMBER
AURORA +12898020110
CALGARY +14037751288
EDMONTON +17806287799
HALIFAX +19024828120
HAMILTON +19054819060
KITCHENER +15199572711
LONDON +15194898968
MARKHAM +12898000110
MONTREAL +15146670329
OTTAWA +16136861502
QUEBEC CITY +14189072209
SAINT JOHNS +17097570047
SHERBROOKE +18193401636
TORONTO +16477245365
TORONTO +14168001067
VANCOUVER +17787868229
VANCOUVER +16044841347
VICTORIA +12509847093
WINDSOR +15198000031
WINNIPEG +12042728154

I’ve been using Jott off and on for the past couple of months, and with the addition of local Canadian numbers, I can definitely see this becoming a regular part of my GTD arsenal.

WordPress Woes: Read the Damned Instructions!

Recently some of you may have noticed some instability with the theme on this blog. The theme on the blog seemed to reset to the WordPress default without any rhyme or reason. I assumed it was one of the many plugins I had installed to try to provide additional content or functionality on the site. I tried enabling and disabling all of the plugins but to no avail, there didn’t seem to be anything that would correct the problem outright.

After several hours of frustration, I came across an article on coderemedy.com which provided an explanation, and pointed me at Scott Burkett’s blog for a solution.

What it boils down to is this: I use Alex King’s WP-Mobile plugin to permit the blog to be viewed on small mobile devices (like my own Treo 700wx) and this plugin was not set up correctly. I made the assumption that the plugin behaved like any other and didn’t read the readme file. Suffice to say there’s an extra step with this plugin and I didn’t follow it.

Once the plugin is uncompressed there is a second wp-mobile directory which needs to be moved into your wp-content/themes directory. The directory structure looks something like this:

wordpress/

    wp-content/

        themes/

        plugins/

            wp-mobile/

                README.txt     (where the solution is!)

                wp-mobile.php

                wp-mobile/

                    comments.php

                    index.php

                    style.css

Once the move is complete, the directory structure looks like this:

wordpress/

    wp-content/

        themes/

            wp-mobile/

                comments.php

                index.php

                style.css

        plugins/

            wp-mobile/

                README.txt     (where the solution is!)

                wp-mobile.php

See? Simple! Just read the damned instructions.

Mac Lab Rat – GGP #76

Another week and another GGP. We had an absolute blast on this week’s show. So on with this week’s collection of Mac Freebies:

iPhoto Batch Image Enhancer
This application gives you the ability to make changes to large batches of your iPhoto images. This is a standalone application and doesn’t integrate into iPhoto, but it is fairly lightweight and runs at a reasonable speed. There are a couple of little quirks that make it so that you really shouldn’t do much else while you run the batch, but it’s a good free option for set-and-forget operations.

Download iPhoto Batch Enhancer from the feroXsoft website.

Oxidizer
Oxidizer provides you the ability to build your own background… but not just any background: A fractal! I’ve always loved fractals, but the majority of the fractal programs out there require you to enter weird commands from the command line, and/or have a masters degree in mathematics. Oxidizer allows slaps on a fairly usable GUI and allows you to build some interesting fractal images.

Oxidizer is offered as an open-source project.

Download Oxidizer.

DockDoctor

DockDoctor is yet another in the series of OS X Leopard “tweaker” apps. This one is geared specifically toward adjusting settings of the Mac OS X dock, and does so from the Dashboard. I’ve covered apps like this in the past, so I won’t spend much time on it. Suffice to say the widget has options for a 2D or 3D dock, and a button to automatically restart the Dock application.

Download DockDoctor from Inner Mind Media.

Admin Links Widget for WordPress 1.1.0 Released

Well after a far more successful 2007 than I could have imagined, I’ve released the first significant feature update to the Admin Links Widget.

First, THANK YOU to everyone who has downloaded the widget.  It has been downloaded an astonishing 2300 times since the inaugural release on August 14th of last year.

The most significant changes for this version are the addition of two new links that you can add to your site:

  1. Edit This Post
  2. Edit This Page

These links provide you the opportunity to edit a specific page or post from a link in the sidebar whenever you’re viewing a single page or post (ie not the front-page, or a search result).  This is particularly useful for blogs which don’t have an edit link built into their current theme.

Please take a moment and download the latest version of the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.  And as always, if you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on the blog.