Tips

An article in the December 2008 issue of Men's Health offers a half-dozen good tips for shooting pictures. It may be a useful resource when doing units with iPhoto and Aperture with the students.

Fair warning: the other articles in issue are about building abs of steel, how to be better in bed, and advice on picking up women... which may not be quite as applicable to educational practice.

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.

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.

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!

We use two Apple TVs at the school to publish student projects. They provide a wonderful, interactive mechanism for accessing student work in the lobbies. However, not everything, even at Apple, always works as described.

One great feature of Apple TV is the ability to stream music from your iTunes library to your Apple TV.

What Apple, and any discussion forums, fail to mention is that this "feature" can often present the symptoms of a bug. In particular, depending on your Apple TV network connection (ethernet 100/1000, wireless g/n), the size of your iTunes library, and the content you're accessing, the streaming feature may in fact cause video to stutter and pause, or the remote to become unresponsive.

Don't despair, the solution is a check-box away. If your Apple TV is unresponsive enable the "Show only the synced items on my Apple TV" under the "Summary" tab of your Apple TV in iTunes.

This is a good news/bad news solution: you will be limited to playing only content stored on the Apple TV's internal hard drive, however, it will work.

Setting up prudent smart lists and clever syncing will give you all the dynamically changing content you want, even with the 40 GB drive, and help you avoid the perils of a slow or altogether unresponsive Apple TV.

Think of this setting as a mocha-java skinny-latte cappuccino for your Apple TV.