Recently a friend asked how to make pretty emails in Apple's Mac Mail, or Mail.app.

It is done with a simple button. Here is a vid on finding that button.

I watched the Moment video yesterday. Mindblowing. I couldn't take my eyes off it! Watch it in a dark room with a good pair of headphones, fullscreen. That's the best way to do it.

For those who haven't seen it, watch this video:
http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/08/14/16-moments/

(Make sure you click the HD button)

These are the notes I took for the June 6th GeekSpeak show in 2009. I discussed music sharing services that I have tried.

Lately I've been spending a lot of time worrying about how much free space I have on my drives. As drives have been getting cheaper and I've been buying more drives, I've been facing a growing storage and backup problem. For a while, I looked at building a NAS (Network-Attached Storage Unit) with RAID, but I ended up not doing it for one primary reason:

I love portability! I love the flexibility I get in my day when I can do my animation, audio, or video work on trains, in coffee shops, and while I'm out of town. My solution was to get a few 2.5" external USB drives, and carry them with them. I've been using them almost constantly, so I took the next logical step and attached them to my MacBook Pro. I used velcro, so I can always remove them. Granted, it adds a bit of bulk, but I think the convenience is worth it. Pictures below:

A student at work is doing an art project in which he is trying to create a thermostat (which controls other things) and he needs to make the markings for his thermostat and was having trouble drawing them in Illustrator without going insane.

One of the most useful features I've found in any video compression program is the ability to do batch compression. This is extremely powerful. Without batch, you have to manually compress each video for upload, one by one, and you have to wait until it's done to start on the next one. The idea behind batch is implemented in many different ways, and for several applications. For example, in Final Cut Pro, you can do a batch capture. You scrub through your tape (or clip) and set in and out points for the sections you want to capture. Then you press "Batch," and it captures it all for you, while you get a nice cup of coffee at your local coffee shop. Similarly, with Batch for video compression, you can set up a list of things for the computer to do, and it will perform them sequentially, without wasting your time, or CPU cycles. In fact, I'm convinced that the real reason for batch actions is for getting coffee!

Here are step-by-step instructions for using MPEG Streamclip (an amazing, free, compression program for Windows and Mac) for compressing videos specifically for upload to Vimeo. You can use this same process for Youtube.

Question
I use iTunes to download your weekly podcast, as well as several other public radio podcasts (Car Talk, Wait Wait, etc), using my home desktop. When I’m on the road (as I am the coming week, when we will be driving down Route 1 from SF to LA), I use iTunes on my laptop to download the podcasts. However, the two computers are not synchronized.

If I haven’t used the laptop in several weeks, I find that I am downloading program episodes that I have already heard when using the desktop. Is there some way to synchronize iTunes on the two computers (the only iTunes feature I use is to download podcasts)? Does iTunes, for example, use a data file that I could copy from the desktop to the laptop just prior to leaving on a trip?

The new iPhone G3 has a flush mount headphone jack and that is a good thing. The original iPhone had a resessed headphone jack that made it inconvenient to say the least. I constantly grab a pair of headphones and have to slice off a bit of the plug to allow it to fit into the iPhone. But that only gives me good listening and doesn't provide a microphone.

IMAP is, in my opinion, the way to go for email. It allows you to view your email from any computer and yet keep a master copy of the email messages on a server. Google has IMAP support built into GMail so that you can use your favorite email client to read your GMail email. So, for quite a while now, I have been using IMAP to connect too my 3 email inboxes. And, being on a Mac, I have been using Apple Mail, sometimes called Mail.app to read my mail. But about 2 weeks ago I noticed that I could not use the Mail search to find matches using "Entire Message" as the target of the search. Here is how I fixed that problem.

Recently a listener wrote in:
"Can not figure out where or how, when online, I can select a portion of a
page, select color or grayscale, and select "best, normal, draft," etc.
Even in Word it takes a bunch of steps to do that, but online the "copies
& pages, paper/type/quality" is missing from the list. How do I do this?
Thanks, Jim, using an iMac and OSX."