Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Quick Access to Time Machine

Monday, February 11th, 2008

UPDATE:  As of OS X Leopard version 10.5.2, Apple includes a menu bar item to provide this same quick access to Time Machine.  Keeping the same sense of simplicity I try to apply to my Dock, I think I’ll keep this out of the menu bar and save on some of that limited screen real estate.

I try to keep my dock as simple as possible, and reserve it only for applications I frequently use. By default, Leopard adds Time Machine to the dock, which I find to be just a bit of showing off what’s new to those unfamiliar with Leopard’s features.

Since Time Machine works behind the scenes to backup your data, you’ll hopefully never have to touch it until you need to recover something, therefore making it pointless to keep in the dock.

I keep an alias to Time Machine.app in my Time Machine drive. That way, if and whenever I ever need to fly through deep space to recover a file, I need only open my Time Machine drive in a Finder window.

Posted in Apple, Leopard, Technology | No Comments »

HowTo: Fix iDVD hanging at audio encoding

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

A few months ago, I set someone up with a 24″ iMac, to do music and video production. He imported a short movie he shot previously, and added sound effects, music, titles, etc using iMovie. All was well and the video turned out excellent, but he ran into a problem when sharing the movie to iDVD.

The disc would process and start to encode, then hang at audio encoding, with a spinning beach ball cursor, and the burn icon in iDVD stopped spinning. In addition, Force Quit and Activity Monitor showed the application as Not Responding. We tried everything. After multiple trips to the genius bar (which prompted him to tell one genius he didn’t deserve the title!) and multiple calls to Apple support, we finally found a tech at one of the call centers who actually knew exactly what was going on.

The problem is that he shot the video with the camcorder in 12bit audio mode, and iDVD likes 16bit audio. Shooting in 12bit allows you some flexibility to add more audio when editing without a computer, but since this is going through a computer, we can strictly use 16bit.

First off, if you’ll be doing all of your editing on a computer, permanently switch your camcorder to 16bit audio mode!!!! What to do with footage you’ve already shot in 12bit? Simple–import it to an iMovie project, then share that iMovie back to a blank, brand new miniDV tape on your camcorder (which has now been set to 16bit audio, remember?). Once it’s on your tape, you can re-import it again to a new iMovie project, and this time, the audio is coming over in 16bit. Both sending to the camera, and then back to iMovie happen in real time (i.e. your movie will play through to the end as if you’re sitting down to watch it), so this might take a while if you have a long movie.

You can then proceed to add your titles, music, effects, chapters, etc, and share to iDVD when you are finished. You should notice a pretty decent decrease in the time it takes to encode, as well as a resolution to any crashes or hangs you were experiencing before.

This issue came up today at work when a colleague tried to burn a two hour iMovie project, so hopefully this can save other from the time wasted and frustration associated with trying to figure this out. Good luck!

Posted in Apple, Technology, Tutorials | 2 Comments »

USB Rechargeable Batteries

Monday, March 26th, 2007

File this under “why didn’t I think of that?!” While reading the latest issue of Macworld, I cam across a company called moixa energy that just made Al Gore a little bit happier. Moixa makes rechargeable AA batteries that charge over USB. The kicker is, there’s no charger or dock required, simply flip the lid and plug it in. According to the website, the batteries obtain a 90% charge in 5 hours, and “charging for just a few minutes provides extra hours of instant use for most input devices.”

USB-Rechargeable Batteries

One of the biggest obstacles facing the widespread adoption of rechargeable batteries has probably been the need to get out the charging dock. With USB ports readily available these days, it makes perfect sense. A set of AA’s goes for about $20, and other size batteries, including cell phone and mobile devices are in the works.

[Link]

Posted in Technology, Why Didn't I Think of That | No Comments »