Tips

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If in your country the eyeTV program listings feature functions properly, read no further. Unless you really love macademic.info prose. And then you've got bigger problems, anyway.

eyeTV provides a good solution for Mac users to watch and record television on their Macs. The new version even enables streaming to other devices. Up until last year, a generous programmer, Guillaume Boudreau, provided a solution for the lack of EPG (Electronic Program Guide) support for Canadian customers. However, the solution stopped working when Zapt2It stopped making its data available.

(As an interesting side-note: many Canadians would be willing to pay for this service, but the company makes it virtually impossible to purchase the data from Canada... it is difficult to understand this business model strategy.)

In any event, necessity is the mother of invention. For Canadian users "Makemineamac" suggests this solution for Canadian users of eyeTV. It is abbreviated below:

1. Create an account at Schedules Direct ($20/year).
2. Add a new lineup to your Schedules Direct account by simply selecting the local TV provider you use.
3. Download the free, and fabulous, MacProgramGuide. Donations accepted. (And suggested by macademic.info.)

While this solution is not quite as slickly integrated as the Zap2It solution that the built-in program guide of eyeTV provides, it is a great alternative that involves only one or two additional clicks. Launch MacProgramGuide once you've created your SchedulesDirect account, find the program you'd like to record, and click the little "eyeTV" button at the bottom left of the MacProgramGuide window. Your program will be automatically added to the eyeTV recordings schedule.

Hope this helps with integrating media in your classroom.

And I swear, The Simpsons is educational.

Mailwash.

And we're not talking about a suggestion to improve Men's Room hygiene.

If you've ever got to remove line-breaks or those annoying E-mail arrows (">>>>>") here's a simple website for you.

Oh, and for all our sake's, please remember to wash your hands.

This is one of those productivity tips for a small sub-goup of Mac users: those of us with a Mac Pro (because of the multiple hard drive bays). Ironically, if you own a Mac Pro you probably know this already, which undoubtedly begs the question "Why write this entry?" Well, it was enough of an epiphany for me that I thought this may save someone somewhere some grief.

RAID = "Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks"

In short, RAID rocks. In particular, "Striped RAID" for its read/write speed efficiency. In concrete terms, a RAID is a combination of two or more drives into a single volume. You can create a RAID disk set with hardware, like a RAID controller card, or software, like Disk Utility. (Or anyone, Mac Pro or not, could just buy a Drobo.)

Disk Utility offers three options for creating a RAID: Mirrored (RAID 1 - or "Scary RAID"), which duplicates the same information on two or more drives; Striped (RAID 0, or "Slightly Less Scary RAID"), which splits the information between two drives, or concatenated or JBOD ("Just a Bunch of Disks" - I'm not kidding), which saves consecutively, filling one drive and then continuing onto the next, and allows you to drop in a new drive at any time without having to reformat to keep your storage space expanding infinitely.

Now, why, you may ask, am I going on about this?

Well, I have about 1 TB of data (mostly media files) that is expanding daily. I've been having problems with time-lags in using iTunes and my AppleTV. It's too early to tell if creating a 2 TB Striped RAID 0 will solve all my problems (hair loss, hearing loss, aching knees, a "different" sense of humour...) but I can tell you this:

Copying my information from a single drive using FireWire 800 took 14 hours. To copy the same information back onto the Striped RAID I'd created took only 7 hours. If my math is correct, it looks like I've doubled my read/write speed. (14 over 7, carry the 2, add COS over SIN, and multiply by mass...)

You've read technical articles about the benefits of RAID, or the lack thereof (some pundits believe there is little or no benefit to RAID, and considerably increased risk of disk failure). I'm not taking one side or another, but so far, in my experience, RAID 0 seems pretty darned fast, and I'm liking striping.

Well, the title says it all, so consider the content of this post the filler that it is.

There is no obvious way to create a list of events in iCal, like, say, for example, a button that says: "Create Calendar List". Something, I imagine, many users would find useful: for example, listing all the upcoming assignments for the term. Apple, ahem, Apple... are you listening?

The not-so-obvious work-around is to select the calendar for which you'd like a list (easy tip: command-click a calendar and all the calendars will toggle on or off), and then type an open quote, or a double quote, into the search field. This becomes a wild-card and searches for every event in that calendar.

Et voilà.

A recurring frustration I've encountered is the disappearing finder window when I'm ejecting volumes. That and colleagues stealing our lab coffee mugs. But I digress.

Often, when I've been installing applications, or have external disks mounted, I'll eject them and all my finder windows appear to disappear. Very stupid behaviour from my favourite operating system, if you ask me.

As it turns out, it's actually very stupid behaviour by me: it turns out that this "bug" is actually a "feature"... and I'm not even being sarcastic.

In short, if you want to keep the Finder window open when you eject a volume, simply highlight another volume or folder before clicking the eject button in the sidebar. The OS is actually trying to help you be efficient, because if you eject the volume while the volume is highlighted in the sidebar it will close all open windows with content from that volume. This makes sense: given that you're ejecting the volume it seems obvious you no longer need the contents of that volume.

This was pithily explained in a posting in the Apple Support forums by Scott Radloff:

Mystery solved.

Now that Apple has updated the Airport Base Station Firmware to allow Airdisks to be used for Time Machine backup, you may find that theory and practice are frustratingly far from each other. In my case, the simple fix was to change access in File Sharing from user accounts to a "With a disk password" option. Your milage may vary.

A helpful airdisk/Time Machine discussion can be found on the Apple discussion forums.

As my great-great-grand-pappy's chiropractor used to say, "May your back-up, not get your back up."

Argh.