mott's blog

It takes a little getting used to, but showing the Path Bar in the Finder window (Finder, View -> Show Path Bar) is like traveling your Mac with a GPS. It takes a little screen real estate, but it may be worth it if you get lost navigating your Mac as it gives you a snapshot of where you are at all times.

Another option is to command-click the proxy icon at the top of the finder window. This will give you a list of the folders in which your document is nested.

Carla Thomas would be proud.

Are you having connection issues with your Mac?

Relationships can be hard work, but Cupertino provides built-in Dear Abby services when your network and Mac won't play nicely.

The Mac OS X Network Diagnostics and Mail Connection Doctor can offer you great tools to to troubleshoot network issues.

If you're having trouble surfing, open your Network System Preferences and click "Assist Me" (Apple -> System Preferences -> Network -> Assist Me). You'll be asked whether you'd like help setting up a new network connection ("Assistant...") or troubleshoot a problem with your current connection ("Diagnostics..."). Network Assistant or Diagnostic will guide you through the troubleshooting steps any decent live Help Desk or Tech Support would work through with you on the phone, without the 40-minute wait on hold.

Likewise, if you're having trouble downloading or sending mail, there's a built-in Mail Connection Doctor in Apple's Mail program (open Mail, then Window -> Connection Doctor). It will tell you which SMTP servers are working (for sending your mail) and which E-mail accounts are connecting properly and which aren't for downloading.

If there are problems, Mail Connection Doctor will offer suggestions, and double-clicking on the message will bring you directly to your Mail Preferences so that you can easily try different configurations until you're up and running.

In addition, if you're having trouble with your wireless network, AirPort Utility (Applications -> Utilities -> AirPort Utility) can also guide you through problem-solving.

Listen to your Mac (it's always about communication, isn't it?), et voilà, no more relationship troubles.

An article by Suzie Boss on Edutopia.org discusses the tricky debate that happens in every school and Board regarding internet filtering: whether to block or not to block.

These discussions often have all the passion of a religious war, with both sides convinced of the blasphemy of the other.

Those wanting to block see paternalistic protectionism as the duty of educators, and that the risk of stumbling upon the some of the unsavoury and dangerous elements of the web outweigh the inconvenience of lacking access to sites with genuine educational value.

Others argue that the impossible task of a perfect blocking system - namely one that allows each and every needed site while blocking all universally objectionable material (whatever that is!) - means that a better and more realistic strategy is to focus on educating students about net citizenship and safety and how to use this ubiquitous technology appropriately.

I'm clearly a disciple of the second approach, which in my view makes more sense educationally and practically.

First, in terms of education, it is our job to prepare our students for the future, not to help them ignore it. What better place than the safety of school, where there is supervision and instruction, to come to terms with the dangers of the internet when they are discovered? Second, in terms of practically, in an age where thousands of new web sites are born every second, where proxy servers can spoof any domain, where Mobile Computing devices have instant access to the full internet... there is no possibility of winning the battle.

It is education that provides a protection that avoidance cannot.

Incidentally, I checked the first link in Boss's article "Stumbling Blocks: Playing It Too Safe Will Make You Sorry" at my school. The link was to a copy of the United States Congress' Children's Internet Protection Act hosted on the Internet Free Expression Alliance site.

It was blocked.

So I read it on my iPhone.

Before iTunes 8 and the "Genius" feature, there were a few, and just a few, options for Mac users wanting to automatically generate Smart Playlists built on complex characteristics like BPM ("Beats Per Minute"), Intensity, and the more esoteric personal "style". Pandora, a great service no longer available in Canada thanks to the moronic music industry hacks whose main strategy to save their corporations is to antagonize and alienate customers and make the product, music, inaccessible and inconvenient... was one online option. It used the "Music Genome Project" algorithm that actually involved humans rating music. The human touch is still the most accurate.

Another option was Tangerine by Potion Factory. The advantage of this application was its iTunes integration, though BPM accuracy is in the range only about 70% of the time. Download the application, drag it into your Applications folder, launch it, and without further adieu it starts analyzing your iTunes library. It will cost you $25 to export the results into your iTunes library.

Given the number of songs...

(All of them paid for... in one way or another.)

you can expect your Mac to take some time on the calculations, however, even given the extent of a 50,000 strong library, Tangerine seemed to stall far too repeatedly.

To cut a painfully long story down to pithy, and painfully written, blog post: Tangerine is stymied by the DRM iTunes puts on non-iTunes Plus music.

The solution is to exclude Protected music from analysis. To do this, you could peruse Andy Kim's blog archives, of Potion Factory fame, for this brief entry and to read the hint "I suggest filtering out protected songs using the rules in Tangerine!'s preferences..." If you didn't find this advice, the solution is to go to Tangerine Prefs:

Click on "Rules", and then "Edit".

Add "Protected AAC Audio File" to the Default Rule.

Tangerine will then only analyze the remaining songs that are not excluded via the preference rules.

The long and the short is, once again, the music industry feels consumers will flock to buying music of lower quality and greater inconvenience than free, high-quality, convenient pirated material.

If the labels provided the BPM, and other detailed information, it might be able to make some pretense at providing value for the inconvenience of DRM. But they provide nothing.

Nope, if you're interested in automatic music playlists for classes, it's sad to say, but stick to torrented files.

Sigh.

"Oh... I like... what I like!"

- Steve Colbert

Ever wonder what the numbers and symbols mean on your cheques? Mindprod.com has a good post to explain it all.

Not really Mac related, not really academic, but useful to any teachers who have to use their Mac to set up online banking.

Just add money and stir!