August 31, 2009

Cleaning Powerbook

I need to make some space available on my Powerbook G4 for upcoming vacation. There's very little space available for pictures and video that I'll be on taking on our trip. I am not sure what's using up all the disk space on my laptop, my initial guess is a lot of small files and not a few large files.

Here's the plan on freeing up disk space on the laptop:

iPhoto Library
Clean out all the old photos that I don't need, back them up to a DVD and remove the orginals from computer

iTunes Library
Remove all old pod casts. There's no need to keep archive of old podcasts. I can always goto iTunes and get the old recordings at any time.

Large Files
Search the computer for large files greater than 2MB. Backup any files that haven't been used for a while and delete them from the computer.

Mailbox
All my mail is archive on my desktop computer. I can go through my mail and delete anything I don't need. This means cleaning out the SPAM directory, there's zero reason to keep any spam mail. Pretty much the only valuable mail I have is the sent mail.

Applications
Backup all unused Application and removed them from the laptop. This includes games that I don't plan on using. I have plenty of cool games on my iPod touch and won't be taking the laptop out on the airplane to play games. Is there any reason to even have IE on my computer any more?

Using the above guidelines, I should be able to have enough space for my photos and video that I'll be taking on my vacation.

August 25, 2009

Powerbook Users

Apple has announced the latest OS will be available earlier than originally schedule. Apple consumers can get 10.6 (Snow Leopard ) this Friday. However, I found this little note on ClubMac's website:

Upgrade Information for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard:
Please note, that only Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard users are eligible for the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard upgrade.  Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger & earlier OS users will need to purchase either versions of the Mac Box Set.  Also, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard requires a Mac with an Intel processor.

This means that I won't be standing in line at the Natick Collections getting the latest OS software. All my Macintosh computers are using the old processors. Maybe this is the time to start thinking of getting a new computer?

April 29, 2009

LG vx8360

I am working on getting some wallpaper pictures on my LG vx8360. Here are some of the specs that I have found:

Main Display: 240 x 320 pixels
Front Display: 96 x 96 pixels

I'll put up some wallpaper on this blog once I put it on my cellphone.

February 13, 2009

Real Audio Player

If your looking to produce streaming audio, you should look into using Real Networks. While the technology is a little old, its certainly a good place to start learning the process of setting up streaming audio and video on any website.

The only downside of using Real Audio is that there isn't a Producer application for the Macintosh. They use to make a plug-in that worked with SoundEdit Pro. That's what I used when I first started putting audio on my website.

To get started you'll need the RealProducer, there's two version: RealProducer Plus and RealProducer Basic. Since your just starting out, I would recommend using the RealProducer Basic, its Free!

When linking to the RealAudio file, I would recommend using the rtsp:// format instead of http:// that you may be use to. Using rtsp:// forces the browser to open up RealAudio and play the audio as a stream media. Using the http:// will only download the music file and play it after the audio has been downloaded.

Example:
rtsp://www.cryan.com/realaudio/Concord.ra

Selecting the Right Audio
One of the things you should consider in picking your audio is what makes it unique from every other site that's out there. Why would people want to visit your webiste to hear your audio files? You need to find audio in your collection that is worth putting on your site.

Think PodCast!
The most popular audio file today isn't music, its Podcast. Podcasts are audio clips, usually about 5-10 minutes long talking about various topics. One of the advantages of Podcasting is sharing your expertise with other people. Think about a topic that you know very well that you could talk about

Copyright Laws
Just because you have a audio file doesn't mean you have the right to share it. You need to be aware of the copyright laws in your community to understand what you can put on your website and what's for your ears only. There's plenty of sites, in the United States the best site is Title 17 of the United States Copyright Laws.

Have fun
No matter what audio file you put on your website, have fun with the process and be creative. Think of some creative audio that isn't online yet and challenge yourself to do something different than what everyone else is doing.

October 20, 2008

Revolution iDVD

If you are looking for a way to change the text from "Revolution Chapters" to something else on the second page of the Revolution Design in iDVD 2008, Here are the steps I took:

• Goto the page that is displaying the "Revolution Chapters" text.
• The top text will say something like "Chapters 1-6"
• Click the text and make a change to it, For example put in two "!!"
• Click outside of the field
• You should see that "Revolution Text" has changed.
• Removed the above "!!" and you'll see it gets updated.