#241 FLV Crunch, Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, Intaglio, Soundgate iPod Unit

Glasses over contacts, send your email address in if you’re going to MacWorld and want to meet up, Pat Dengler Your Mac Doctor shares one of her hardware secrets. FLV Crunch saves the day moving VOB to dv files. Book recommendation: Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo. Loving shareware developers, especially John Clayton of coderage-software.com and Mike Yenco of yenco.com. Full review of vector-drawing program Intaglio from purgatorydesign.com. Soundgate iPod unit for Acura/Honda/Goldwings from 2003-2010 at logjamelectronics.com. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart tells us about Patch Tuesday’s mildness this month, a zero day exploit from Adobe adobe.com/support/security. Try PDFCreator from sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator and Foxit Reader from download.cnet.com/Foxit-Reader instead of Adobe products. Zero day exploit in all IE’s at microsoft.com/technet/security and rounds it out with a phishing attack on MobileMe users at tuaw.com. In our first main topic Bart explains how to enable a free SSL Certificate to protect your WordPress login, and in the second he explains how cool Services and Automator are in Show Leopard. See also MacBreak on Services at pixelcorps.tv/macbreak235

Listen to the Podcast Once (1 hr 23 min)

Today is Sunday January 17th, 2010 and this is show number 241. So I’m old. Not sure you realize that because of my youthful demeanor, but it’s true, I can prove it, because I need reading glasses. Everyone else just gracefully goes out to Costco and buys a 10 pack of the ugly little reading glasses and distributes them around their house and office and moves on with their lives, but this bugs the daylights out of me. Maybe it’s because Steve mocks me every time I take them out, I’m not sure. He tries to pretend that he’s not old too, but since he’s only 4 hours younger than me we know that’s not true. He also says he’s not getting grey hair, that those are blond hairs, but I’m not buyin’ that either.

My friend Diane came up with an intriguing solution. We both have nasty prescriptions with bad astigmatisms so we only get good distance vision with our contact lenses, not with regular glasses. Her solution was to get glasses that are actually clear in the middle and progressive lenses down below for close and mid-distance vision. Right, she wears glasses AND contacts. I thought this sounded so great that I went to the eye doctor to get the same thing. YOu also need to realize though that I’m not authorized to choose my glasses on my own. Jeannie at my eye doctor usually picks them out but frequently my friend Nancy goes with me to help. Today Nancy couldn’t be there, so I thought, hey, I’ve got my iPhone with me, I should be able to do some live streaming to her!

so I started with Qik, set it to record and turned the iPhone so the camera was facing me, then I called Nancy on my Blackberry. This was a complete fail. It turns out Qik didn’t live stream, it just created a recording on my phone that I could later upload. How lame! Even lamer is when I uploaded it, the movie never starts to play on Qik’s website, even though the video plays beautifully on my iPhone. Phhhbbbtttt.

Not to be daunted, we switched over to Ustream. Now technically I can’t call this a COMPLETE fail but it sure was dodgy. My image only moved every minute or so, but the audio was excellent. And since there actually was a picture, she got to see my proposed glasses. It was an awful lot of bandwidth for a really stupid reason and almost complete failure (I coulda mailed her a GOOD picture much faster), but it sure was fun to try and do it the geeky way. Nancy was a great sport about it too.

MacWorld
If you’re going to MacWorld, be sure to send me an email so I can add you to the NosillaCastaways Google calendar. I’ve settled on a meetup date and place – we’re going to Jillians at around 6pm right after the last big event on Thursday. I’ll give more details to the folks who sign up for the calendar, so be sure to let me know if you’ll be there!

Pat Dengler – The Mac Doctor
Friday night I had my good friend Pat Dengler over for dinner. You remember Pat, she’s Your Mac Doctor, the one who kept me from jumping off a tall building after I set a magnet on top of the hard drive in my brand spanking new MacBook Pro while transferring all of my data to it. Remember that? I did short interview with her that I think you might enjoy…

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Video is Hard
It’s possible I’ve mentioned before that I think video is hard. That really came to light this week with Steve and his new adventures in Final Cut Express. With help from Don McAllister and Matt Hillyard, he got over the hump of actually getting started pulling in the three hours of video he took on our trip to Mexico. In addition to his footage and my photos for the slide show (that’ll be another hour), we also paid for a DVD of our ziplining adventure. They were very specific at Los Veranos Canopy Tours that we could take the photos and video we bought and do anything we wanted with them. So first Steve used Mac the Ripper to rip the DVD into VOB files on his Mac. Next we had to turn the VOB files into something that Final Cut Express could read. There’s a lot of options, many tools would create an mp4 file, but even if you encode with h.264 (the best encoding algorithm out there today in terms of quality vs. size), you’re still compressing the video when you do that. That means when he exports his 3 hour tour movie, that same video will get compressed again, so it’s not ideal. And remember that when Canopy tours put it on a DVD, they already compressed it once, so you’d end up compressing it three times.

What he really wanted was to convert the VOB file to a dv file which is uncompressed (I think). He started with Handbrake from handbrake.fr which according to what he read on the internets should have been able to convert to dv format, but I think it was greyed out. Ok, next up he tried MPEG Streamclip from squared5.com but it said that he would have to go to Apple and buy the MPEG import tool. That made no sense since MPEG Streamclip was able to import the vob file just fine, it couldn’t export, so we abandoned that whole path. We even tried VideoMonkey from videomonkey.org, the open source version of the wonderful VisualHub that is no longer – but even VideoMonkey didn’t have the vob to dv output that Steve needed.

At this point Steve’s getting discouraged, everything about this new workflow seems to be problematic and he’s not getting any joy out of video production now. I could tell something wasn’t going well because he suddenly got very productive around the house, replacing the carriage lights out in front, buying new jacks at the hardware store so he can more easily rotate his tires. I told him it looked just like when I had finals in college, I had the cleanest bathroom of anyone! I didn’t want making his videos to be like finals week, it’s supposed to bring him joy.

So we sat down together and started an exhaustive search for the tool to solve his problem and I’m delighted to say that we found it, and we found it for free. I want to tell you where we found it because that’s almost as important as what we found. download.com is a site run by CNET, where they vet everything they post there. If it’s on CNET’s download.com site you know it’s virus free. Many products show an editor’s rating and all of them show user ratings. I trust download.com, especially when recommending software to my Windows brethren.

Enough teasing, the software we found to convert VOB to dv format is called FLV Crunch. It runs on Intel and PowerPC platforms from OS 10.1 through Snow Leopard. It’s had 125K downloads and has a user rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars. I gave it a 5 out of 5 and a rave review because it worked!

FLV Crunch has a crappy little OS 7 icon that’s actually kind of endearing, and oddly the listed vendor site is geocities.com. this is odd because Geocities was shut down just recently, the link isn’t even to a specific Geocities account, and the software was just updated on CNET’s site just 5 days ago! It almost feels like a joke is going on here and I just don’t get it.

anyway, joke or not, the FLV Crunch opens with a format pulldown containing mpeg1 and 2, mp4, quicktime’s mov, .avi, 3gp for mobile phones, our beloved dv digital video format, wmv, flash in flv, mp3 and aac audio only. that’s a pretty darn good set of export formats! Next up you can choose to wreck your video by messing with the frames per second and bitrates, which is always a great way to lose an afternoon. Those options aren’t available on the dv output format luckily. You can change the resolution if you like, or tell FLV Crunch to keep the original value. It also comes with standard presents like iPod, High Def, Standard def and VGA. That’s not a lot of options compared to something like Handbrake or VisualHub or VideoMonkey, with those you get things like iPhone, AppleTV, even Zune I think. For us those two characters dv were all we wanted.

So next up add the source files, set a destination folder and you’re done. Steve threw in his vob files and it took a while but he got his dv files out at last. And that’s when things go worse! He dropped the dv files into Final Cut Express and instead of the perfectly good soundtrack that was on the dv files (which we tested in Quicktime before the import to Final Cut Express! Now we were really discouraged, we’d been at this for hours and hours. Luckily the interwebs were on our side yet again, turns out there’s some weird thing with Final Cut Express that sometimes it has to be kick started to render the audio correctly, a simple command-r and then a reasonable wait and the audio was in there perfectly. Whew!

It’s been a long road to travel for Steve but I think, I dearly hope we’re over the hump now and he can have fun with video production again. Stay tuned…

Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo

For Christmas I got a terrific book called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo. I heard about it on the Real Deal Episode 181 when Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman interviewed Carmine about the book. It’s a great episode of the Real Deal and if you haven’t seen or heard the show you should go check it out in any case.

The reason I’m bringing up this book is because it’s fascinating. We all know about the Reality Distortion Field that Steve Jobs creates when he does a presentation, but I always assumed it was something they pushed through the ventilation system or something. I’m sure they do that at the Apple Stores because I saw a guy once minding his own business walking down the mall and suddenly his body whipped sideways and he flew into the Apple Store. Sure, it’s possible he just noticed he was about to pass his intended destination but I think it was the reality distortion field.

Carmine Gallo has clearly spent a lot of time studying the methods Steve Jobs uses to create his dynamic and passionate presentations, and he actually breaks them down into practical steps you can follow to try and create some of the magic Steve brings to a speech. I’m about to do some presentations in my day job to some really big audiences, and while that doesn’t give me the cold chills normal people get at the thought (you HAVE figured out at this point that I like to be the center of attention, right?) I still figure I can improve my techniques. In particular I refuse to ever again give a PowerPoint presentation with a white background and black text in bullet form with long sentences. I’m just not going to do it. I’m also not going to start throwing in gimmicky fly in slides that twirl just to get attention and throw people off the message.

Instead I’m going to learn from Carmine Gallo and Steve Jobs how to more effectively draw in my audience and impart on them some of the enthusiasm I have for my topics. Luckily the hardest part is easy for me – Carmine says that you have to be passionate about your topic, and I only pick subjects about which I’m passionate! If I’m not excited about something, I refuse to stand up and talk about it, and I refuse to take on the assignments. I know everyone doesn’t have that luxury but for some reason I’ve gotten away with it for over thirty years.

I know this book is working because I can’t sleep after I’ve been reading it. I find myself going over and over ideas for my talks, working on tag lines and thinking of ways to get rid of material on my slides. If you do any kind of presentations and you’d like to see if you can better capture the imagination of your audience and suck them into your madness, I highly recommend The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo.

Zooom/2
Have I ever mentioned how much I love shareware developers? I really really do love them. I had two experiences this week that continued to cement that opinion. Back on show #206 in May of last year I reviewed an application called Zooom/2. The main thing I use Zooom/2 for is the ability to move a window by grabbing it anywhere. You’d be amazed how often you’ll use this. My Twitter client du jour, Twhirl frequently misbehaves and falls off the screen where I simply can’t grab the top of it, but no worries, since Zooom/2 is running in the background, with a little key combo I can grab it anywhere.

Anyway, the reason i bring this up is I was having one annoyance with Zooom/2 – the developer, John Clayton, updates the product pretty often which is very cool, but every single time I get an update i have to re-enter my license code. It was driving me berserk. So finally after about the 15th time I wrote him an email. He got back to me INSTANTLY, and explained that this has been driving him crazy too – because he can’t replicate it! He’s had a few people have the same problem but because he can’t make it happen on his end he can’t figure it out. He very politely asked me if I had the energy to do some experiments for him, running logging so we could crack the code.

Well you know me, this was like asking me if I wanted a hot fudge sunday! Of course I would play! We did about 25 experiments, writing back and forth as I ran the tests…and in the end the problem went away. It was very aggravating because of course we didn’t solve it for anyone else! But the main point is that instead of being annoyed at some whiny user, John was delighted that I’d written, apologetic that I’d had problems, and asked for my help with the product. That to me is perfection. Let me give him another plug – check out Zooom/2 at coderage-software.com In this case I love the software, but I’ve actually met the loveliest people when I didn’t even like their software – gracious and understanding and truly wanting to learn what they could do to improve.

iKeeper
The second example is Mike Yenco from yenco.com who wrote iKeeper. I did a review of iKeeper over on Tim Verpoorten’s Mac Reviewcast this week. I had one little question about the software, and wrote to Mike and he wrote a 2 page letter to me explaining his philosophy in what he’d developed, told me how much he adores Macs and Mac podcasts (he had me there). It wasn’t so much about the product but it was just delightful getting to know someone this way. The Mac community really does rock, you know?

ScreenSteps
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but we all know video can be even more powerful. So what if you could teach people things using words, pictures, AND video? You can do that with the latest version of ScreenSteps from ScreenSteps.com. You can write specific instructions explaining the why of each step, drop in an image showing the exact menu you’re talking about, and then embed a video screencast so you can really dig into the complexities of your subject. You’ll be a hero with your co-workers, your employees, and your customers. I even use ScreenSteps to teach relatives so I don’t have to repeat things over and over – give them a ScreenSteps document and they can pull it out every time they forget what you taught them. For only $40 for the standard version or $80 for the pro version of ScreenSteps you can have this kind of fun too. Heck, knock off 25% using the coupon code NOSILLA and it’s even less expensvie! Don’t forget to check out the educational and enterprise licensing too. Get on over to ScreenSteps.com

Intaglio
Are you old enough to remember MacDraw? It was a vector-based drawing program for the Mac that was wildly popular from the first Macintosh in 1984, was upgraded to MacDraw Pro in the 1990s (now with color!) and Claris got hold of it and mutated it into ClarisDraw it pretty much lost favor with the Mac community. Oddly it didn’t fall out of favor because there was something better out there, but rather because it was missing features compared to the older versions. Ask any old fart Mac user about MacDraw and they’ll get misty eyed on you thinking back to those delightful days.

I called MacDraw a vector-based drawing program – that means you’re drawing circles, lines and boxes that are not just bit-mapped pixels on the page, but rather can be dragged around and have their shapes changed after the fact. Well I have good news for you, there may finally be a replacement for our beloved MacDraw. Purgatory Design at purgatorydesign.com has a product called Intaglio that they bill as the MacDraw we’ve all been looking for. The folks at Purgatory Design have been developing for the Mac since 1984 (under different names) so I think they may be onto something here.

I did my usual poke around and press buttons method, and then I added a crazy new technique I’ve been trying out – I started reading the manual. I know, it’s kind of off the wall but you wouldn’t believe how much good information you can find in there! let’s start with the results of my poking around method and then we’ll get into more depth from the manual.

Intaglio has a beautifully simple interface, but do not let that fool you. You get a nice big area to draw with gridlines on by default, and then a row of tools down the left and some modifiers across the top. Very standard looking, and you can get started drawing simple little boxes and circles and arrows immediately. Right away you notice something nice, as you draw you’ll see you get alignment lines popping up to show when you’ve drawn parallel or lined up with another object on the page. I love that – it’s something you get with applications like Omnigraffle.

Almost immediately after I drew my first object, I noticed that in addition to the normal arrow tool for pointing at things and moving them around, there’s another arrow that’s hollow, and it’s a magic arrow. When you have this arrow selected you can do some amazing transformations of your objects. Let’s say you draw a rectangular box, click on the hollow arrow and the corners of the box will change their little handles from being solid markers to hollow ones. Now click and drag on one of the hollow handles, and the corner will change into a curve, morphing as you move your cursor around! So now it’s curvy, and you also get a tangent line that you can rotate changing the shape of the curve too. I put a picture in the shownotes that might help understand what I mean.

You think that’s fun, grab the shape tool that’s a star, and you can mess with all the points on it – where it doesn’t even vaguely resemble a start at all. In the modifier buttons across the top of the window, there’s a sheer button to let you change a rectangle into a parallelogram (I hope you guys paid attention in high school geometry – it was my favorite class in school!) Arcs, free from shapes, line drawings – all of these are traditional at first and then they’re set free by the Intaglio magic. I know I’m sounding maudlin but the phrase that keeps coming into my head is complete freedom. I drew a free line with the pencil tool, then thought, “wonder what these scissors do? I was able to cut the line, and then move the ends independently so I had two curves in space, but they were essentially one shape because they moved together with the sheer or rotation or location pointers.

This complete freedom even works with text! Put in text with the text tool, and you can change what’s called the “kern”. I’d heard that term before but it wasn’t until Intaglio that I understood it, because as you slide the kern slider, it changes the distance between characters. I’ve wasted countless hours of my life trying to get text to fit inside other objects, if I could have just pushed the kern in a smidge I would have been so happy! When I was thinking about the complete freedom, it reminded me of Tom Terrific – that little cartoon that played during Captain Kangaroo in the 1960s. Tom was a simple line drawing character (along with his wonder dog Manfred) but because of his magic funnel hat, he could transform himself into any shape! Ok, enough old geezer talk but Intaglio really did remind me of Tom Terrific!

Adding a gradient to an object is a push of a button, figuring out how to change the colors for the gradient was a bit trickier. It turns out that under the Window menu you can turn on and off about 8 gazillion palettes for modifying just about anything you can imagine. Opening up the gradient palette lets me choose the two colors, and whether it’s a linear or radial gradient. Once you’re in that palette you’ll notice all the options to work with a pattern instead of a gradient, or solid color, or even a texture if you prefer.

What really excites me about Intaglio is the smooth transition from the completely pedestrian tools to options that stretch your imagination on what you could create with Intaglio. Maybe I was just going to draw a layout of my office with Intaglio, but pretty soon I’ll be putting textures on the chair drawing and adding woodgrain to my desk I bet. By the way, drawing my office layout in MacDraw Pro was the single main use that I miss! I have been stuck doing it in PowerPoint of all things, oh the horror!

You do realize at this point that I’ve only told you what I figured out from simply poking around, right? Digging into the help file was another joy. The folks at Purgatory Design have done a fabulous job of documentation. Every tool is explained with a graphic first showing you what tool they’re talking about (don’t you hate it when they say, “grab the conbabulator tool and then all you do is…” but they don’t tell you what the conbabulator tool looks like?) and then they show the modifier options and give a clear explanation of how you would use the tool.

There’s a freehand tool for sketching paths, both straight lines and these lovely Bezier curves (that’s the fancy name for the curves I was telling you about). there’s a path tool which is slightly different, it actually creates open or enclosed objects that can be filled but created with complete irregularity (rather than mutating a rectangle like I did, start with complete freedom).

I can tell I’m not going to be able to explain everything here – just the Star tool alone is crazy – you can define how many points the star has, the inside radius, and whether the outside and inside points have loops (think curly-queues). Back to arcs again – I challenge you to try and draw an arc that’s exactly like what you want with PowerPoint. Seriously, think up how much of an arc you want to draw, and try to do it. We’ll wait. silence….naw, we’re not going to wait, I was kidding.

The only time I didn’t have immediate joy was in using the Dimension Tool. This is a tool you use if you want to draw single straight segments with the dimensions showing. For some reason it wouldn’t automatically line up the end points for me, or indicate when things were getting close like I described in the early part of this review. Oh well, so Intaglio isn’t a good drafting too. I can live with that. The measurement tool works great at least – you can measure across any kind of object really easily, great for that office layout!

In more reading I discovered that what I thought was freedom was actually a restricted world, start holding down the option key while you’re messing with your graphics and you’ll find out what real freedom is all about. Draw an arc, then hold down the option key and as you drag the points is as though you’re moving it around in 3D. Wild I’m telling you!

I thought that was wild, until I read about masking. Objects move forward and back just like in PowerPoint and the good old days of MacDraw, and can be grouped. So draw one object, draw another one partially covering it, and then group them together. When you turn on the mask function, the only part of the lower object you can see is the part that’s directly under the upper object. I found one thing I couldn’t figure out how to do with this – I wanted to take a circle and cut a quadrant out of it. I think that’s sort of the inverse of what masking does, it would show only the quadrant if I put a rectangle over a circle. I’m sure there’s a way to do this, I just haven’t gotten to it yet.

Intaglio imports graphics from a ton of different things – you can import EPS, Vector files, PDFs, Images and text. You can export PDF, PICT, TIFF, EPS and whatever LinkBack Connections are. If you’ve got some of those old MacDraw files lying around, Intaglio will import them – MacDraw II and Pro both convert to Quartz graphics so you can continue to use your old work.

The only thing I didn’t like about Intaglio was that I couldn’t figure out an easy way to use the same tool twice in a row. If you draw a circle, the cursor changes to the pointer, so you have to click the circle again. I tried double clicking, and I tried right clicking but all I saw was this silly choice of Lock which I ignored. I kept ignoring it and being irritated throughout the review…and then of course I finally tried Lock and it did exactly what I wanted, let me create multiple objects of that type. Sheesh. A simple right click on the object to unlock, or the even more intuitive escape key and I was free of that tool. So, um, yeah, the only thing I didn’t like, I was just an idiot.

It is extremely rare for me to actually be this thrilled with a tool, but I’m enchanted by Intaglio. I tried really hard to find something wrong and other than having a tidbit of trouble working with the Dimension tool, the darn thing was perfect. They even support key commands to switch tools! And get this, Intaglio even lets you play if you have a PowerPC Mac.

Intaglio is $89, and while that’s pretty expensive for shareware land, this is a fabulous vector drawing tool that performs flawlessly and I’m pretty certain I have only scraped the surface of what Intaglio can do. Head on over to purgatorydesign.com and try out the free demo. Learn everything you want with the demo, you just can’t save your drawings or export from Intaglio without buying it. If you print from the demo you’ll get an unlicensed watermark. You can really run Intaglio through it’s paces and make sure it’s everything you want it to be before you put down your hard-earned money. I only have one question to ask before I finish up with Intaglio, how is it that this fantastic tool has been out for over TWO YEARS and no one ever told me about it before???

Honda Bob
I’m really excited because my friend Adam found me a new iPod adapter for my car. Years ago Steve put in a unit that sits under my seat and connects to the back of my built in stereo head unit and lets me connect an iPod or my iPhone through a dock connector to play podcasts (and music if someone else is driving) through the stereo. I know it’s sad, I have a dolby 5.1 stereo system in my car and I play mono mp3 files compressed at 64kbps, but it makes me happy!

I guess I should explain why I want a new one if this is so great. The one I have is pretty restrictive on how you can use it, you have to queue up on the iPod what you want to play, then plug in the dock connector, and then it will play. You can stop and start the iPod by turning the radio on and off, but that’s it. You can’t rewind, switch to another show, you can’t even change the volume of the input from the iPod. I’ve tolerated that over the years and become accustomed to the restrictions, but when I got a new iPod Nano for Christmas, it wouldn’t charge through the dock on the car like the old 2nd generation Nano would. That means I’m constantly having to find time to charge it which is really boring!

I mentioned this to my friend Adam and he found a unit from a company called SoundGate, being sold by logjamelectronics.com that works on Hondas from 2003-2010, and Acura’s and oddly the Goldwing motorcycle series. This new unit will let me display text from the iPod on the radio (maybe even the Nav?) and I can control the iPod using the iPod while it’s connected. It WILL charge when plugged into the car too. It’s $170 from Logjam Electronics but no tax and no shipping makes it a bit more palatable.

First thing I did after Adam found it for me was write an email to Honda Bob to find out if
he’d install it for me. I know, Steve could do it, but it just isn’t a happy experience for him. He loves the outcome of projects like this but there is zero joy in the middle part. Honda Bob on the other hand does this kind of thing for fun I think, so why not let Steve play with his video and Bob play with my car?

You might have thought Honda Bob was only there to change the oil and fix the power steering unit, but he’s so much more. He has a terrific website at hdabob.com where he explains how all the parts of a car work, and tells interesting travel stories from his years on the road fixing peoples’ Hondas and Acuras at their own homes. If you live in the LA or Orange County areas, give Honda Bob a call 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.

Chit Chat Across the Pond

Security Light

• Patch Tuesday has been – update all those VMs! – microsoft.com/technet/security
• ANOTHER big 0-day from Adobe – reported to be used in the recent Chinese cyber attacks! adobe.com/support/security
  • Alternative to Adobe Acrobat forWindows:
    • PDFCreator to give you the print to PDF capability like what comes in OSX: sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator
    • Foxit Reader as a PDF reader from download.cnet.com/Foxit-Reader
• MS admits a big 0-day in IE – affects all versions of IE, but IE 6 particularly badly! – best defense, don’t use IE! microsoft.com/technet/security
• Mobile Me users being targeted by phishing attacks –tuaw.com

Main Topic 1 – Get a Free SSL Cert to protect your wordpress

• If you run your own WordPress and you do not have SSL then your password is flying across the internet unencrypted each time you make a post – regardless of HOW you post, be it with a client or directly into wordpress
• You can minimise the risk by using a different password that you NEVER re-use, and NEVER updating your blog from anywhere but at home
• Or, you can install SSL to protect yourself and your site
• Many hosting companies provide optional SSL certs of their own, but they are usually expensive, often more than a whole year’s hosting cost!
• SOME hosting services however also allow you to add your own cert. The details of exactly how will be different for each provider. You will definitely need a dedicated IP though – which may cost a little extra per year, but should not be too expensive. You’ll need to contact tech support to find out if they allow your to provide your own cert, and how
• IF you can use your own cert, then you can get a free once from startssl.com.
• The Start SSL cert won’t be recognised by your browser, but you can accept it, and then it will. Once you add the cert to your browser it will give all the protection of a regular cert. This is NOT a good option for anything user-facing, but perfect for protecting just the admin section of your blog.
• You CAN configure MarsEdit to use the cert too, but you do that by adding a system-wide exception using Safari.
• To do that, go to the page in Safari, when it pops up the cert error click on "Show Certificate", then expand the "Trust" triangle, then change the "when using this certificate" dropdown to "always trust". The cert will now be trusted system-wide.

Main Topic 2 – Services & Automator in SnowLeopard

Full notes on Services & Automatorfrom Bart are at:bartb.ie

to learn more about Services from Alex Lindsay and Sal Saghoian on MacBreak: pixelcorps.tv/macbreak235

I guess we have to draw this show to a close, even though the chat room is going to start boohooing about it. You really should join us some time, it’s a lot of fun in there. If you’d like to join in, it’s really easy. Just go over to podfeet.com/live at 5pm GMT-8 on Sundays (remember that’s Monday some time in Australia and India) and you’ll see my smiling face making mistakes and being chastised by the chat room. You can chat in text and help remind me to save in case my system freezes up too. It’s very welcoming and family friendly so come join us some time. In the mean time, be sure to keep those dumb questions coming, along with comments and suggestions, praise and criticism by sending them in to [email protected], and follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/podfeet. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.