More posts coming to podfeet.com, and don’t forget to go to mactopics.de/nosillacast to try to win a copy of Clarify this week. Two new interviews from Streaming Media West. First we talk to Telestream Project Manager Kevin Lauden about Switch, a not-yet-released multimedia player for OSX now that QuickTime is being deprecated, and Episode which is a video transcoder for Mac and Windows. Our second interview is with Ahn Le from Shoelace Wireless where he demonstrates a not-yet-released app that allows you to combine Internet connections to get faster speeds. Two new Clarify tutorials are up on podfeet.com – How to Create Return Address Labels Using Apple Contacts and How to Create To: Labels Using Apple Contacts. In Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart takes us into Taming the Terminal part 12 – The Environment.
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Hi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday December 15, 2013 and this is show number 449. When Bart and I recorded Chit Chat Across the Pond, I hadn’t talked to him in so long that I was really having fun jumping in and asking him questions (I miss him when we don’t record for a while!) so we kind of did a really long recording. Taming the Terminal Part 12 is awesome! That’s good news though because I hadn’t done a lot of prep for this week’s show yet, and once I had that recording I decided not to do much work at all! Don’t worry though – we’ve got two great interviews Steve and I did back about a month ago at Streaming Media West that I haven’t been able to squeeze into the show so we’ll get those done this week.
Enhancements to podfeet.com
I’ve been noodling an idea for a long time and I’ve just started to execute on it. Often I have a thought or an idea or just something fun to talk about but it’s mid-week. For the last 8.5 years I’ve waited until Sunday night to tell you about it. And if it doesn’t really fit into the show, then it simply never gets posted, or it ends up crammed into a 140 character tweet. Now with the G+ community I often post cool stuff over there, but I still think I want to do more on podfeet.com. So officially beginning now because I’m telling you about it, I’m going to start posting randomly on podfeet.com in addition to the weekly giant blog post of doom. You don’t lose a thing, you only gain (that is if you go over to podfeet.com from time to time mid week!)
I said “officially” because I secretly did do a blog post mid week a while ago! Remember last week I mentioned the visual walkthrough of how we put up the Nest Protect Smoke/CO sensors? That was an actual blog post. Maybe this is not as ground breaking of a change as I’m making it out to be but since I’m so rigidly disciplined, it feels huge to me! I’ve also thought about the value to some people of having parts of the show as individual blog posts. Let’s say I’m doing a review of an application – I send the entire 5000 word blog post to the maker of the software, and that means they can’t easily reference it as a testimonial if they like it. I’m not sure how I’ll do that, or if I’ll do it but it’s something I’ve been noodling. I know there’s a way to reference a link within a web page using anchors, but it’s actually technically and finger typing very difficult. I’ve done it before and each one takes me like 30 minutes to do! I wish there were a keystroke or two to execute on this but I’ve never found one. When I’m done posting the show, it’s usually 8pm on a Sunday night and I’m ready to hang up my hat for the night so the last thing I want to do is spend time creating anchors and referencing them. Maybe some day but not today.
Another fun thing for this would be when we do video interviews, I could post them as blog posts while we’re still at a show, and it would be more timely that way. On the podcast we’d still have the audio but the video could stand alone as a blog post. Much more fun for those being interviewed, and more fun throughout the week for you guys. I don’t promise to do it daily or anything like that, but just when I’m inspired! I’ve got some other ideas too but I’m just not ready to kick those off yet but stay tuned for even more fun.
Mactopics.de contest for Clarify!
From Claus Wolfe:
I just wanted to remind you and possibly your audience that starting tonight (9am Pacific) the participants can sign up for the fourth week of MacAdvent at MacTopics.de and next week’s prize is going to be a license to Clarify. The landing page mactopics.de/nosillacast is still live, so a great place to get started.
Streaming Media West
About a month ago I got an invite from Telestream, makers of Wirecast Studio to come to a show called Streaming Media West. It’s a fairly small show, put on by streamingmedia.com. I was really excited to have a chance to talk the the Telestream folks, for two reasons. I love Wirecast Studio, as it’s the application that makes the live show possible. I’ve had great support from them over the years and sometimes it’s fun to go high five people in person. I also wanted to talk to them about some of the problems with Mavericks. I think they had just released the Mavericks version or maybe it was right before, but either way I was having that weird problem with the video playback of me being jittery if I had a Desktop Presenter session open. Desktop Presenter is the tool that lets me send video of different applications local to my machine or from another machine so that’s how you see GarageBand and the live chat room during the live show.
Steve and I went to Streaming Media West which turned out to be only about an hour away, and we got to talk to Telestream about all of the stuff I mentioned. While we were there with a camera and mic and everything we decided to do an interview with Telestream. We’re going to talk about a player called Switch, which is a multimedia player for OSX that I think you’re going to want to know about, and Episode which is a video transcoder for Mac and Windows. I’m going to play the audio right now but there’s also video over on podfeet.com of this interview with Kevin Louden, Project Manager from Telestream.
Using a Screen Reader? click here
Ok, that last part was pretty funny – right as we ended the interview, Kevin’s co-worker Andrew came dashing over with the award they’d just won and we all thought it was hilarious how long the title of the award was! I put a link in the shownotes to the page where you can learn more about Switch and also to put your name and email address in if you want to be notified early of their progress. I sure put my name in there, it sounds like something I need and will become more necessary when QuickTime is deprecated!
Shoelace Wireless
The show floor at Streaming Media West was pretty small but we did find one other company in our short time there that had a super interesting product. The name of the company is Shoelace Wireless and they’ve got a super interesting technology to tell us about.
Using a Screen Reader? click here
I really enjoyed the ingenuity of Anh and his team here. You really might want to head over to the blog and view the video because it’s hard to believe what it’s doing without seeing it with your own eyes. I think Anh is overly optimistic that he’ll be able to get Apple to let him do this. He’s the inventor and I’m one of those people who’s happy living inside my box and saying something can never be done, so don’t listen to me, listen to the big thinkers! These forward thinking opinions brought to you by the woman who said there was no need for a computer monitor to be color and we never needed a screen bigger than the original Mac 512K.
Remember at the top of the show I said I’d like to do more random blog posts that aren’t necessarily tied to the show? These two video interviews would have been a great example. In the future I think I’ll plop the videos into the blog as standalone posts, and then play the audio as part of the show. That way the people I’m interviewing can link right to the videos, people who don’t listen but just read the blog can get it early and you guys still get the content when I’m ready to play it – everybody wins!
Clarify
This week I had a blast using Clarify. Steve and I got ready to do our Christmas cards and discovered that we don’t have any good return address labels. I thought maybe I could make them using the Contacts application on my Mac. I brought up my card, and told it to print, and then chose the Avery number for the labels I keep on hand, only to discover that it was only going to print one label. From there began my adventure to figure out how to print 30 on the page, how to get them to look nice by putting in a graphic and how to make sure I selected the right font and label. What fun would it be to figure all of that out if I didn’t also use Clarify to document the whole process? Of course I posted the tutorial on podfeet.com. While I was at it, I made a Clarify document of how to create the To: labels as well. it’s not all that hard, but it’s SUPER easy to miss one little thing and waste a lot of money on poorly printed labels. I walk through all the mistakes I make on the way each time, like not remembering to change the label number (it reverts back go 5161 by itself every time), forgetting to only print Home addresses, forgetting to print the country, and on and on! Both tutorials are up on podfeet.com under the Tutorials tab. That tab is getting REALLY long, I need to figure out a better way to categorize them so they’re easier to sift through! Of course there’s links in the shownotes if you’re ready right now to check them out.
If you’d like to learn how to explain stuff like this so next year you don’t have to figure it out all over again, or you’d like to be able to send explanations to your friends and family to help them out, check out Clarify over at clarify-it.com. They have a free trial and everything! When you buy, be sure to tell them Allison sent you and for now do buy at their store not the Mac App Store because you’ll get the free upgrade to Clarify 2 when it comes out soon!
Chit Chat Across the Pond
Security Light
Important Security Updates:
- Last Tuesday was Patch Tuesday – both MS and Adobe fix zero-days (the MS update fixes the TIFF zero-day we talked about a few weeks ago, the Adobe update includes security fixes for Flash) – http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/12/zero-day-fixes-from-adobe-microsoft/
- FireFox 26 released, including a number of critical security updates – http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2013/12/11/Mozilla-Releases-Multiple-Updates
Important Security News:
- PSA – if you run a Drupal site be sure it’s up to date – there have been some VERY important security updates recently – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/29/drupal-security-update-fixes-a-laundry-list-of-problems-including-predictable-random-numbers/
- Followup – DLink release firmware for many older routers to patch the backdoor we talked about some weeks back – http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/12/important-security-update-for-d-link-routers/
- Android Flashlight app caught stealing people’s location data to sell it to advertisers – http://www.fastcompany.com/3023042/fast-feed/this-popular-flashlight-app-has-been-secretly-your-sharing-location-and-device-id
- RELATED – Google kill feature that briefly allowed Android users to protect themselves from this kind of thing – http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/13/us-google-android-idUSBRE9BC0YO20131213 & https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/google-removes-vital-privacy-features-android-shortly-after-adding-them
- RELATED – FTC give company responsible for the all a slap on the wrist – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/12/06/ftc-acts-against-brightest-flashlight-app-for-deceptively-tracking-your-location/
Suggested Reading:
- Be ware of FaceBook clones – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/12/03/cloned-facebook-accounts-hit-up-friends-with-spam-and-money-requests/
- JP Morgan Chase data breach puts 465K users at risk – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/12/05/jp-morgan-chase-owns-up-to-data-breach-465000-customers-at-risk/
- NSA tracking at least hundreds of thousands of cellphone locations – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/12/06/nsa-tracking-hundred-of-millions-of-mobile-phone-locations-worldwide/
- WoW, Second Life, Xbox Live and more a wash with government spooks – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/12/10/nsa-and-gchq-spies-snooped-on-online-gaming-worlds-including-world-of-warcraft-second-life-and-xbox-live/
- French government caught in SSL Cert shenanigans – http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/12/09/serious-security-google-finds-fake-but-trusted-ssl-certificates-for-its-domains-made-in-france/
- Brian Krebs explains a way in which American citizens can make a real and concrete contribution to the struggle to protect privacy in the 21st century – http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/12/help-bring-privacy-laws-into-21st-century/
- FCC reaches agreement with US carriers to make legal cell phone unlocking easier – http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/fcc-and-wireless-carriers-reach-agreement-on-cellphone-unlocking
Main Topic – Taming the Terminal Part 12 of n – Introducing the Environment:
http://www.bartbusschots.ie/blog/?p=2691
So remember the part in the middle where we exported a variable from the shell to the environment and Bart said that it didn’t get linked to the environment, it was just a copy? And I was trying to replicate the proof of that but changing the variable in the shell DID change it in the environment? Well Bart was able to replicate my experience after we got off the recording so it turns out the shell variable IS linked to the environment when you export it, which is actually kind of cool. Bart wanted to make sure we clarified that point in case anyone was hollering at their iPods at us!
That’s going to wind this up for this week, many thanks to our sponsor for helping to pay the bills, Blue Mango Learning at bluemangolearning.com makers of ScreenSteps and Clarify. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter and app.net @podfeet. Check out the NosillaCast Google Plus Community too – lots of fun over there! If you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.
Thank you so much, Allison! There will certainly be a lucky winner on Sunday, and who knows – it might be a fellow NosillaCast Away. Clarify being won by a NosillaCast Away would be fitting, don’t you think?
that would be so awesome, and yes, fitting! I mentioned it at the beginning, during the ad, and in the outtro so if they don’t win it’s their own darn fault!