#169 Aperture, iChat screensharing, VirtualBox, Growl annoyances

Kyle fixes his first flat tire, Pat Dengler from onepluszero.com replaces my hard drive and in Dumb Question Corner we figure out how to get rid of autofilled email addresses in Mail. Andy McCaskey of sdrnews.com gives a spontaneous review of ScreenSteps and Matt Brown gives us a review of Aperture. I interview Kelly about helping her mom using iChat screensharing, and Donald Burr of otakunopodcast.com and voicesoferinn.com reviews VirtualBox from virtualbox.org. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I do sort of a hodgepodge episode. First we discuss the virtues and dangers of Growl from growl.info then I go on yet another rant about iPhoto, and finally Bart winds it up with a rant about how Evernote.

Listen to the Podcast Once (59 min)

Today is Sunday September 14th, 2008, and this is show number 169. Was it a fun little surprise getting a bonus episode yesterday? I was really happy with the DEMO episode, I’m sure it came through how excited I was about everything I learned about in those two days. Here’s an indication of how much I enjoyed myself – late tuesday someone tweeted me asking me what I thought of the big Apple announcements, and I realized I totally FORGOT about the Apple event! Oh well, I think I learned more interesting things that day.

The Boy has Become a MAN
Is there a more tender moment than when a woman gets to show her daughter how to change a flat tire? I remember fondly teaching Lindsay…how to overcome the grease monkey’s strength or air wrench, how to leave the tire slightly touching the ground so it won’t spin when you try to loosen the lugnuts, and of course passing along my dad’s favorite flat tire changing story. You know the one, where the guy is changing a tire outside of an insane asylum. He takes off the four lugnuts (not sure why the wheel only has FOUR, but work with me here), and sets them down and all four roll down into the gutter. He’s clearly upset, and a guy hanging out of the window of the insane asylum watching him says, “hey, why don’t you take one lug nut off of each of the other wheels and put them on the fourth tire?” The guy realizes this is brilliant and says, “that’s a GREAT idea! Why the heck are you in an insane asylum?” and the other guy says, “I’m crazy, not stupid.”

So anyway, even though showing my daughter how to change a flat was a beautiful experience, but this week my son became a man. Kyle had his first flat tire, and I got to instruct him. It of course killed him (and Steve) for me to be instructing, but I AM the expert. I actually had 17 flat tires in TWO YEARS at the end of high school, beginning of college. At first it was annoying, but when you get up around 10 it gets kind of comical. I remember around number 10 when I was in high school, I was in marching band (SHUT UP!) and I wanted to drive a bunch of my friends out for ice cream at Farrells after the football game. I was driving my mom’s 1964 Ford Falcon Station Wagon with retreads on it (in 1976) and my mom was very worried about a young girl driving that car late at night. I convinced her that I would have a bunch of guys with me, no problem mom! Of course AFTER I dropped off the six guys I had with me and I was on a deserted section of road (in a really nice neighborhood) that I had my 10th flat tire. I remember sitting in the car laughing. someone stopped and asked if I needed help, and I said, “naw, but give my dad a call so he doesn’t worry?” My dad came out came out and brought a flashlight, but of course I was fully EXPERT status by then! Heck, as time went on, I’d be in the car with other people and THEY would have flat tires!

When Kyle started telling me about his flat tire, he jokingly tried to blame it on Honda bob, because Bob just filled the tires on all our cars. Oh yeah, probably it was Bob’s fault, or PERHAPS it was the nail in the tire that did it? When I was showing him how to get his spare out, he and I both realized that Bob actually SAVED him because he filled all our tires on his last visit – AND he filled our spares too. Which means Kyle had a spare to drive on to get his tire over to the tire repair place.

I promise this didn’t start as a Honda Bob ad, but he spontaneously did something that really helped us. If you live in the LA or OC areas, you could call Honda Bob at (562)531-2321 or send him an email at [email protected]. HDA Bob’s Mobile Service is not affiliated with Honda, Acura or Honda Worldwide.

ANYWAY, Kyle is a man now, he’s fixed his first flat tire!

Pat Dengler is my hero
So remember I’ve been complaining a lot lately about how I’m always running out of disk space? On a good day I have maybe 3GB left on my drive, and since I generate about 2GB of audio files every weekend creating the show, I spend a ton of time just cleaning things up trying to make space. I was whining about this on a user group forum I follow and this lovely woman Pat Dengler wrote to me and said, “want me to drop a 300GB drive in your MacBook Pro for you?” I told her I’d struggle along till the new laptops come out (I’m DUE you know, this one will be three years old in January!)

Well, that was Monday. Thursday I was sorting out files to see if maybe I could just dump all of my avi’s off onto a dvd or two and have Steve make some nice random video for me. While I was in the midst of making a smart folder to do just that, my drive started making that dreaded tick tick tick noise. you know, the same one I heard just six months back? the noise that means you’re going to have a very nasty next few days? Yup, the darn drive went belly up. I cried on Bart’s virtual shoulder as he advised me on a few things to try, but when i booted from an external firewire drive (the terabyte drive Honda Bob gave me in the ICY DOCK case that Namdar gave me), I tried Disk Utility on the internal drive and it basically told me to lay my head down and cry. Or maybe it was Bart who said that.

So, I jumped on email and dashed off an emergency note to Pat, who dropped everything (well, ok, she got her hair done first) and then ran over to a dealer she trusts, bought me a 300GB drive, drove to my house, and replaced the drive for me! All while I kept working upstairs. After she was done we slapped in my Leopard disk, and hour later I could run the 126 updates, and then in another 3 hours I had my backup from SuperDuper! done and I was back in business! Instead of three or four days waiting for Apple or another dealer to help me, Pat had me back up and running in about 11 hours. I can’t thank Pat enough for her help. Pat is a consultant in LA, so if you need any help with hardware or learning MAC OSX, shoot me an email and I’ll get you in contact with her. Or check out her website at onepluszero.com. I could not possibly be happier with her service. Pat Dengler is my HERO!!!

Dumb Question Corner
Shaun’s going to start us off on Dumb Question Corner today:

I have a dumb question for you. I design part time aside from fine art to pay the bills and so transferring files via email is pretty common. I recently sent a number of files to a publisher I work with only to find three days later he wasn’t getting them. I couldn’t figure it out. These were time sensitive prints for clients. Ugh. Anyway, I realized that I had entered his email wrong when switching to Quickbooks Pro for tracking my bookkeeping. However, even after correcting this fauxpa “Mail” kept the incorrect address in an autofill which screwed me up since I don’t usually double check this and practically rely on autofill as a feature not so different from not knowing my contact phone numbers vs. pushing their name on call back. So the question is, is there a way to delete these incorrect names from the Mail memory and how. Thanks in advance Allison. Keep up the good work.

Wax On
Shaun Peterson
http://www.qwalsiusstudios.com

Great news Shaun – I know the answer to this one because I had the same dumb question! In Mail, click on window, and pull down to Previous Recipients:

click on the name you don’t want and click the button that says Remove from List as shown below:

I did a big cleanup of this once, but it has hundreds in it now. I kind of like it because I may not add you to my address book, but I may also want to write to you again and that makes it easy. What is a drag is that sometimes I just THINK I have someone in my address book, so I go to gmail or .me online and I try to write to them and they’re not there! You can use the same window to click on a name and officially add them to your address book so you always have them. love the signature.

ScreenSteps
When I was at the New Media Expo last month, I told my friend Andy McCaskey of SDRnews.com all about ScreenSteps. I thought it would be more interesting if you heard someone ELSE talk about ScreenSteps so let’s hear what he has to say:

=====================INSERT ANDY=======================

Thanks Andy, so glad it’s helping you out! If the listeners would like to hear daily tech news from Andy, check out sdrnews.com. And if you want to try out ScreenSteps head on over to ScreenSteps.com or just click the giant ScreenSteps logo in the sidebar at podfeet.com. If you do decide to buy, be sure to enter the coupon code NOSILLA to get 25% off!

Matthew Brown on Aperture
A while back I bought Aperture thinking it may be the compromise I want between my desire to control my file system for photos and having a nice interface for editing and managing like iPhoto. Of course I’ve carried the book around that I bought for it EVERYWHERE and no matter how many times I put it in my suitcase I still haven’t learned how to use it. I know, weird, isn’t it? anyway, Matthew must have actually READ the book because he’s a big fan and sent in a review.

==========INSERT APERTURE REVIEW===========

Ok Matt, you’ve inspired me. The things you’ve explained here, like the fact that I can in deed keep my own anal file structure, AND it doesn’t make a darn copy of the file every time I do an edit really tells me I’ve got to get in gear and learn how to use Aperture. thanks for the inspiration!

Kelly turns into a Geek
Remember years ago when calling someone a geek was an insult? I love that now it’s a badge of honor to be called a geek! One of the best examples of that esteemed title today is my daughter’s roommate Kelly. she’s a regular person, not one of us, and yet she tells a great story of how she was able to help her mom with her new Mac using the new screensharing capability in iChat. I interviewed her about her experience recently, here’s that conversation:

========INSERT KELLY===================

Donald Burr on VirtualBox
Donald Burr of Otaku No Podcast and Voices of Erinn is back with a review of VirtualBox:

===========INSERT DONALD ON VIRTUALBOX===========
You’re always on top of things Donald – I only heard of VirtualBox for the first time on Friday! I haven’t tried it myself yet, but now that I’ve got a 300GB drive I think I’ll have enough room to put it on. One caution, you mentioned accessing applications on your corporate network – but the license for the free version does say “not for commercial use”, so be sure to comply with the license agreement if you’re using it for work. good job bringing your time down, I have every confidence you can get your reviews under 5 minutes some day!
Download VirtualBox and view screenshots of it in action at:
virtualbox.org
Donald’s podcasts:
otakunopodcast.com
voicesoferinn.com

Chit Chat Across the Pond
In this week’s episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I do sort of a hodgepodge episode. First we discuss the virtues and dangers of Growl from growl.info. Bart finds it intrusive but controllable, I find it delightful. Then I go on yet another rant about iPhoto, this time about how you can’t easily upload videos from iPhoto to services like Facebook because they hide the file structure from us. Finally Bart winds it up with a rant about how Evernote won’t export to mail that isn’t Mail.app on the Mac, won’t let him use Thunderbird.

============INSERT CCATP===================

One little addition to the debate Bart and I had about iPhoto and exporting videos. I called Lindsay and told her about Bart’s idea to export the videos out of iPhoto into a temporary folder and then doing the export to Facebook from there. Lindsay immediately told me that she had TRIED that, but that the exported videos aren’t really video files! for some reason, a bug in iphoto that’s been reported as far back as november, iPhoto creates a thumbnail jpeg of the video and declares it the video! So, even exporting from iPhoto won’t work! Only opening the package contents (which they don’t want you to do) or right clicking on the file in iPhoto and selecting show in finder will allow you to get to the file. What a stoopid program.

I can’t believe I managed to crank out two full shows in one weekend, I’m quite full of myself now. If you have a dumb question to submit, or a suggestion, or even an audio review, send them on in to [email protected]. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.