[WelMac] Welmac News & Update 28 Aug 05
Jo 'Mangee' Booth
jo at welmac.org.nz
Fri Sep 2 06:19:54 CDT 2005
RE-POSTED:
CONTENTS:
________________________________________________________________________
____________
1. MEETING UPDATE
2. NEW WELMAC EMAIL DISCUSSIONS LIST
3. 2005 NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL SOLUTIONS EXPO
4. WEB WATCH
5. WIDGETS
6. INDY: YOUR OWN INDEPENDENT RADIO STATION
________________________________________________________________________
__________
This email news and updates newsletter is sent each week to all
WelMac members who have requested to receive such messages when they
applied/reapplied for membership. To subscribe, go to <http://
web.welmac.org.nz/cgi-bin/lists/mail.cgi?f=u&l=announce>.
************************************************************************
1. MEETING UPDATES
The next main meeting of the society will be held on Monday 29 August
2005. This meeting will be held in the Large Gallery, Level One in
Turnbull House, 11 Bowen Street, Wellington from 7.00pm until 9.30pm.
(parking should be available on The Terrace and further up Bowen
Street, past The Terrace intersection)
The August Home User meeting will see andrea Robinson, a local music
teacher and composer, showing how to produce music on a Mac. This
will be followed by a look at customising the interface and operation
of your Mac. We will break for a short supper then conduct a Mac Help
Desk session.
For those members living at or near the Paraparaumu area, our next
Kapiti meeting will be on Monday 5 September at the Rita King Cottage
at St Marks Church in Rosetta Road, Raumati. The topic will be
announced shortly. Please note that meetings will be held on the
first Monday each month from now on.
The next Speciality Group meetings are as below and each meeting is
held from 7pm to 9pm.
Mac Help Desk Monday 29 August 2005 at Turnbull House
(see above)
New Media Group Check <http://nmug.welmac.org.nz/>
Digital Video Users Group Monday 19 September 2005 at Turnbull
House (see above)
************************************************************************
2. NEW WELMAC EMAIL DISCUSSIONS LIST
Want to get more from your membership of WelMac? Need help now? Want
to share?
A number of you have asked for an easy way to chat with other
members, to ask for help or support, so here it is.
WelMac discussions list is designed to help us help each other. If
you have a tip you want to share, a mac related event you are
attending, a problem you need help with, or just want to chat with
other mac users - then post away.
Join the WelMac discussion list today - just pop over to the WelMac
Discussion list on <http://nzmac.org/mailman/listinfo/welmac_nzmac.org>.
************************************************************************
3. 2005 NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL SOLUTIONS EXPO
Its fast coming around to the time of the year that our annual
digital expo opens its doors. There are going to be a number of
changes to this years event, the first being the relocation to the
Renouf Foyer on the first floor of the Michael Fowler Centre. We have
also engaged the services of a marketing consultant to assist us with
the preparation and delivery of our advertising and this year we have
decided to dispense with television advertising for a direct
marketing campaign to small and medium sized businesses.
WelMac will once again have a stand and the committee decided at its
last meeting that we would produce a video of of the expo to
demonstrate some of the activities that members do in their everyday
work. We decided on video as we felt this would be more visually
interesting and hopefully attract more attention and possibly new
members. We will also be preparing music and other audio for the
video at the expo.
We would like to ask for some assistance to help man our stand as
well as a number of people to take registrations as in previous
years. The expo will be held on Friday 30 september and Saturday 1
October from 10am until 5pm. If you are able to help for some or all
of the two days of the expo, please contact Graeme Moffatt at
<graeme at digitalexpo.co.nz>.
************************************************************************
4. WEB WATCH
compiled by The MUG Center <http://www.mugcenter.com>
Links to cool, interesting and useful information for user group
members.
Create a 'parent directory' Toolbar button One of the few things I
like about Windows that I thought OS X was sorely missing was a
Parent Directory button (a button that opens the folder containing
the folder the current window is showing) http://www.macosxhints.com/
article.php?story=20050719002836371&lsrc=osxh
Editors' Notes: Getting the boot, FireWire edition James Galbraith
discovers that booting from a FireWire hard drive-- seemingly a basic
feature--isn't always considered a standard offering by some drive
makers. http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/08/fwbooting/
index.php?lsrc=mwrss
Skip a few seconds forward/backward in iTunes I listen to podcasts
within iTunes. Sometimes, I like to skip through some material (e.g.
ads or music or whatever). I used two extremely simple AppleScripts
that will do just that (forward or backward). http://
www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200507192227372&lsrc=osxh
How to multi-import audio files On a computer that holds a mass of
music you want the best-sounding files you can afford. On an iPod
with more limited storage you'd like to store that same mess of music
in a more compressed form. Here's a good way to go about it. http://
playlistmag.com/features/2005/08/multiimport/index.php?lsrc=mwrss
Mac OS X Hints: Spotlight set-up Rob Griffiths kicks off our brand
new OS X Hints blog with a tip on making Spotlight work in tandem
with third-party launchers. http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/
macosxhints/2005/08/spotlightsetup/ index.php?lsrc=mwrss
Install and remove fonts without restarting apps Here's another "WOW!
I can't believe I missed that" hint. I don't know when this was
introduced (10.3, 10.4,?), but it seems that you no longer need to
restart applications when you install new fonts. http://
www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050728024345911&lsrc=osxh
Mac 911: Capturing streaming audio Entranced by streaming French
radio? Tune in to learn how to capture this captivating sound. http://
www.macworld.com/weblogs/mac911/2005/08/capaudio/index.php?lsrc=mwrss
Turn your old Mac into a jukebox If you've spent any time at all
ripping your CD collection to your Mac, you've probably got gigabytes
of music sitting on your hard drive. But what to do now that your old
machine is just gathering dust? Simply attaching it directly to your
stereo lets you control everything. Kirk McElhearn shows you how to
get started. http://www.macworld.com/2005/08/features/
oldmacnewtricks2/index.php?lsrc=mwrss
Mac OS X Hints: Disable Dashboard Dashboard can be a real drain,
particularly for memory-challenged Macs. Rob Griffiths shows you how
to shut down Dashboard to deny yourself the temptation of using its
ever handy Widgets. http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/
2005/08/disabledashboard/ index.php?lsrc=mwrss
Quickly free up RAM used by Dashboard widgets If you want to quickly
free up the memory being used by all your Dashboard widgets, simply
restart the Dock application. Open / Applications -> Utilities ->
Activity monitor, and find the application named Dock in the list...
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050730103745353&lsrc=osxh
Digital Photography Hack: A Hands-Free Shooting Rig Here's how to
build a hands-free photography rig using an iSight, a Bluetooth
headset, a backpack, and a dash of AppleScript that enables you to
capture images on the go by simply speaking, "Take shot." http://
www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/08/05/photography.html
Set Safari's RSS article length via keyboard shortcut In Safari,
after going to the RSS view, press Tab once. This selects the Article
Length slider. You can now fine-tune article length by pressing
Control-Up Arrow (increase) or Control-Down Arrow (decrease). http://
www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050803134045449&lsrc=osxh
Organize new albums across multiple hard drives Do you keep music on
multiple hard drives? Or do you like to organize your music files
your own way--say first by genre--and don't use the iTunes option to
keep music folders organized? http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?
story=20050802123239701&lsrc=osxh
10.4: Make a UDF DVD for set-top DVD players in Finder I haven't seen
this discussed too much anywhere, but Tiger's disc burning from
Finder now formats discs in a Mac OS Extended/UDF dual file system.
In Panther, disc burning used the ISO 9660 standard. So it is now
possible to ... http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?
story=20050812073029849&lsrc=osxh
How to map F14, F15, and F16 to Exposé, Dashboard, etc. This hint
explains how to use the F14, F15, and F16 function keys for your own
uses -- Dashboard, Exposé, etc. http://www.macosxhints.com/
article.php?story=20050801052917667&lsrc=osxh
Do-It-Yourself Wi-Fi Antennas Looking for an affordable way to
increase the range of your wireless network? Trying to reach dead
spots inside or outside a home, sharing a signal with your neighbors,
or maybe for a point-to-point link with another network? http://
www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/08/doityourself_wi.html?
CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890
Mac 911: Full screen for free Care to view your QuickTime movies in
full screen but lack the necessary cash to pay for QuickTime 7 Pro?
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/mac911/2005/08/fullscreen/index.php?
lsrc=mwrss
Quickly find a song in the iTunes library Searching is one of the
great features of iTunes. Despite this, most of us neglect the search
box in the top right corner. But you can keep neglecting it and still
be able to use iTunes' search feature. http://www.macosxhints.com/
article.php?story=20050808214402623&lsrc=osxh
Create gapless yet skippable music files for the iPod If you listern
to classical, DJ sets or live performaces on your iPod, you either
had to put up with track gaps, so you could select which part of the
performance you listened to, or you ripped the whole set as one track
and ... http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?
story=2005081423571277&lsrc=osxh
************************************************************************
5. WIDGETS
George Carrington
Dashboard, the application that runs Widgets, is both cute and
useful. Admittedly, Widgets are basically a marketing ploy – I’d
hazard a guess that they’ve sold more copies of Tiger than have some
of the other, less obvious features – e.g., did you know that now you
can clear the print queue by going into the Print & Fax System
Preference, adjust an image in Preview, or disable the Caps Lock key?
Unfortunately Widgets 1.0.0, as shipped with Tiger, has one great
drawback – there is no easy way of getting rid of those Widgets you
don’t want, which means that if you download a Widget and then find
it useless, it’ll stare at you, reminding you of your (here insert an
appropriate word!) in downloading and trying it in the first place.
Actually, there are three ways of coping with this.
Installed Widgets are kept in either ./Library/Widgets or ~/ Library/
Widgets. I prefer to keep all of mine in the former. If you don’t
want to keep a Widget, simply drag it out of Library/Widgets into
Trash. This technique is commonly referred to in Geek Talk as
“Uninstalling “. Or you can carefully read what I had to say about
Widgets in the July newsletter – get a copy of Widget Manager (http://
www. downtownsoftwarehouse.com/WidgetManager/index.php, free), and
follow the directions for removing/de-activating unwanted Widgets. Or
better still, install the OS X 10.4.2 Update, which includes a Widget
manager.
When you download a Widget, in order to have it actually show up in
Dashboard (that’s that row of Widgets at the bottom of your screen,
which come up when you click on the + button), it has to be stored in
one or the other Library. There are – as far as I can tell – two ways
of getting the newly downloaded Widget into one or another Library –
drag it there or drag it over the Dashboard icon in your Dock. But ,
Widgets are smart. You can run a Widget regardless of where it’s
stored. Try it and see if you like it. If you do, then by all means
add it to your collection; if you don’t like it, click on the +
button, and suddenly all your active Widgets sport an x in the top
left corner. Click on the x of the offending Widget, it’s
deactivated, and you can trash it from wherever you put it after
downloading.
Once you’ve reduced your collection of Widgets to those that are
genuinely useful – i.e. YOU want to actually use them – and those
“that might come in handy/be fun/fiddling with which will fill in a
bit of time”, it’s time to learn to actually make them run. When I
first started out with Widgets I had three –Weather, iTunes and
Converter (permanently set to convert US dollars to Aussie dollars –
you can get it convert all sorts of things, though at present the
Lead-to- Gold converter only works if you sacrifice a certified
virgin under a new moon!).
The Weather Widget gave me the most trouble for a start – I couldn’t
get it to stay with Canberra as a location. Tristan showed me the
trick here – scroll down until you get Canberra (NSW), then select
the entry and hit Return. This results in the Widget “authenticating”
the entry. Next time I opened my Widgets the Weather Widget now read
Canberra, Australia (ACT).
The other Widget that gave me trouble was the iTunes one. No matter
what Playlist I selected on the reverse side, I’d get all the songs I
had selected in the order in which they appear in the iTunes Library.
It took me a while to discover that if you want to change the
Playlist you’re using in the iTunes Widget, you had to turn the music
off, then select the Playlist, click Done and then click on the Play
button. Oh, and it also helps if all the tunes you want to listen to
are selected in a Playlist in iTunes.
It has been fascinating watching Widgets crawl out of the woodwork –
at the last count there were over 700 Widgets on the Apple Widget
site (http://www.apple.com/downloads/ dashboard/) alone. There are
now so many that they appear in categories – Just Added, Top 50,
Business, Movies & TV, etc. Unfortunately there’s no ranking by
users. For what it’s worth I have developed my own ranking, but, as
this is a family oriented publication …
Out of the 700 or so Widgets I think I’ve actually looked at about
150 or so (meaning I’d read what the author had to say about it),
tried about a dozen, and ended up with three more than what I started
out with – iCal Events, the Australian White Pages and Joy of Tech.
Of these iCal Events is really useful – it provides me with a summary
of all the reminders I have on my iCal for the next few days. I have
mine set to show me any upcoming events for the next seven days, but
you can choose anything between one and fourteen days. The Australian
White Pages directory is handy when I need to look up a member’s
phone number to ring them back. And that’s about it, as I have found
that for any serious work I still get a better result going to my
browser and clicking on my White Pages/Yellow Pages bookmark. And
finally there is the Joy of Tech Widget. If you don’t know what Joy
of Tech (http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech) is all about, I feel
sorry for you.
What about the Widgets that come pre-installed? Frankly, I found most
of them no more useful than the 700 or so on the Apple web site. The
calculator Widget is nifty – most of the time I don’t need the
complexities that the full-blown calculator.app gives me – and when I
want to put the result into a document it’s a simple Cmd-C – Cmd-V to
place the answer at the cursor. The Dictionary – well, it saves me
having to dash down the hall to get at the Greater Oxford. Finally,
the World Clock. Comes in very handy when Apple releases an update. I
can check what time it is in the US, and pick a time – or an
alternate server somewhere else in the world – when I can count on
most of the Geeks wanting to download the update actually being asleep.
As for the Widgets only appearing in their own space, rather than
being “out there” on your desktop – personally I prefer it that way,
but if you don’t agree, try Amnesty (http://www. mesadynamics.com/
amnesty.htm, $US 19.95), a utility for Mac OS X Tiger and Panther
(10.3.9) that allows Dashboard widgets to live directly on your
desktop via a convenient icon in your system menu bar. Probably the
best thing about Amnesty is that it lets the OS X 10.3.9 laggards in
on the joys of running Widgets!
So – wot are yu vaitin’ for?
************************************************************************
6. INDY: YOUR OWN INDEPENDENT RADIO STATION
by Adam C. Engst <ace at tidbits.com>
Some years ago, best-selling author Stephen King bought a local radio
station in Bangor, Maine, reportedly so he could be assured of
turning on the radio and hearing music that he'd probably like.
Thanks to a brilliant little program called Indy from Change.TV, I
don't have wait until I'm a multi-millionaire to enjoy my own radio
station.
<http://www.zoneradio.com/wkit/>
Crystal Set with a Feedback Loop
On its face, Indy is incredibly simple. It displays a small window
with basic controls: play/pause, previous/next, volume, and five
stars for rating tracks. It also displays the artist name, track
name, and elapsed and total time for each song. To start, you click
the play button, and Indy starts playing a song it downloaded. Once
you've developed an opinion about the current song, you assign a star
rating, with one as the worst and five as the best. If you give a
song only one or two stars, Indy instantly moves on to the next
track; higher-rated songs finish playing after you rate them. If you
don't rate a song before it finishes, Indy waits for you to give it a
rating before continuing to the next song, although you can play the
song again if necessary, and you can even flip back through
previously rated songs with the previous button. Although it can be a
bit annoying to be forced to rate every song, it's a key aspect of
Indy's interface, because otherwise it would be too
easy to be lazy and not rate anything.
<http://indy.tv/>
Behind the scenes, Indy downloads MP3 files to your computer (in ~/
Music/Indy) and plays them from local files; it's not streaming.
Initially, the files start out in an Unrated folder, and as you rate
them, they're moved to folders corresponding to the number of stars
they garnered from you. You can set how much disk space you'd like
Indy to devote to each rating, from None to Unlimited, with stops for
50 MB, 100 MB, 500 MB, and 1 GB in between.
As you rate songs, Indy uses the Collaborative Filtering Engine
(CoFE), developed by the Intelligent Information Systems group at
Oregon State University, to compare your ratings to those from 20,000
other Indy users. The goal is, of course, for Indy to feed you an
increasingly large percentage of music that you're likely to
appreciate. In the relatively short time I've been using Indy, I've
noticed a definite improvement in its selections, to the point where
I seldom rate anything as one or two stars any more, and I'm finding
more four-star songs and even a five-star song or two.
<http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/iis/CoFE/>
As an aside, the Indy Help makes some good suggestions about ratings,
particularly on the low end:
* One star: You don't like the song, and you can't imagine anyone
else liking it either.
* Two stars: You don't like the track, but you're happy to admit that
someone with different tastes might.
* Three stars: You like the song sufficiently to finish listening to
it in Indy.
* Four stars: You like the song enough that you'd buy a CD that
contained it (personally, I'd never buy a CD based on a single song,
so I'd recast this to "You like the song enough to want to listen to
it multiple times").
* Five stars: You like the music so much that you'd go see the artist
in concert if possible (again, I think that's overstating the case,
and I'd change to "You like the song so much that you want to hear
more from the same artist").
Clicking the artist or track name in Indy's window loads the artist's
Web site in your browser. I've done it a few times for the songs I've
most liked, but the problem is that the link to the Web site is
visible only as long as the song is showing in Indy. As you might
expect, the information is hidden away, in a playlist.dat file in the
Indy folder for recent songs, and you can ferret it out of your
console.log file as well. But neither is easy to access or permanent,
and even Spotlight doesn't seem to see inside either of those files.
Ideally, Indy would automatically add this information to the ID3
tags for each song, but many songs lack even basic metadata, much
less uncommon tags like Web URLs. That's not Indy's fault, since all
songs are submitted by the artists themselves (or at least with the
consent of the copyright holder), and it's up to the artists to make
sure that the ID3 tags contain Web URLs.
Music Discovery Service
The comparison to Stephen King's radio station isn't quite fair, for
two reasons. First, Indy never plays rated songs more than once. If
you like a song enough to keep it, you must add it to the rest of
your music collection in iTunes (it would be helpful if Indy would
automatically add songs of particular ratings to iTunes playlists).
Second, unless you're way more in tune with the independent music
scene than I am (which wouldn't be hard, admittedly), you won't
recognize many, if any, of the artists. Because of this, Indy is more
of a music discovery service than a radio station, at least the sort
of radio station that plays commonly heard music. I must admit,
though, as it has become more accurate, Indy is doing a pretty good
job as a radio station too. If I want to listen to music I already
know, I can listen to my collection in iTunes.
What's particularly cool about Indy is that it's not attempting to
maintain a centralized archive of songs, nor should it in any way run
afoul of the jack-booted thugs of the recording industry. That's
because, as I noted earlier, all the music is submitted by copyright
holders, and because it's served directly from the artists' sites. In
other words, Indy is a completely legal front end for discovering
music you're likely to enjoy from all around the Web. At the moment,
Indy knows about 10,000 songs, which should keep you busy for quite
some time.
If you're an artist, I strongly encourage you to submit some of your
music to Indy as a way of introducing more people to your work. Just
be sure to include your Web site's URL in the ID3 tags of your file!
One caveat: although Indy isn't likely to cause a Slashdot effect,
the increase in downloads may affect your hosting bills if you pay
for bandwidth.
<http://indy.tv/submit.html>
Although Indy serves only music right now, there's no particular
reason it couldn't support other forms of media, including photos,
video, and more, and the Indy FAQ states that such enhancements lie
in Indy's future. For the moment, though, I'm happy listening to
whatever Indy sends my way, and if you've wanted a way to expose
yourself to new music, give Indy a try. It works in Mac OS X 10.3 and
later, and Windows and Linux; it's a tiny 466K download.
<http://indy.tv/otheros.html>
************************************************************************
Some articles above have been reprinted with permission from TidBITS.
TidBITS has offered more than ten years of thoughtful commentary on
Macintosh and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and
access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit www.tidbits.com.
************************************************************************
More information about the WelMac
mailing list