Monthly Archives: March 2009

I need your help- Yahoo!—Google?

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Fellow blog readers, I ask of you to do something for me. It is free, and I’d like you to use it in your daily lives for 2 days.
First, use Google Desktop for 2 days. get at least 3 Gadgets of your liking, and use them in your daily life. PC users might want to use the key shortcut to show the widgets instead of the sidebar,
but I may be wrong. Also try using the search box (PC users press CTRL 2 times really fast, Mac users press command 2 times really fast). After using that for 2 days, get Yahoo! Widgets. use the default widgets, try them out on your desktop, change the things you don’t like, and personalize it to your liking. After those 2 days, write HERE which you think was better, if you thought spotlight beat the google search box, and hive them both a rating out of 5 stars. You can download them below.

Review: Wireless Mighty Mouse

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I have always been interested in Apple’s buttonless mouse. But I used to be so aggravated by the lack of scroll capabilities and right-click. That was an an Apple Pro Mouse, which was the standard for the old tinted dome iMac. But now, all of that has changed.

Pros: Sleek buttonless feeling, wireless, right and left click, 360º scrolling, amazing laser precision, side buttons, and every one is completely customizable.
Cons: Side buttons a little hard to squeeze.
It is amazing how responsive the click is. It’s actually a, click!, loud, but you barely have to press on the mouse itself. It is also an amazing shape to the hand, for all sizes. It can run on 1 AA battery, but for longer life put in two. Also, If you have a mac, the Mighty Mouse works riot out of the box. It even comes with 2 Energizer Lithium Non-rechargeable batteries! All you need to do is pair it with your mac, and then you can start using it! I think that the default tracking speed is too slow, and I have it one notch away from fast. I also turned up the scrolling speed. The default is a little different from what you hear it is. Even the scroll ball isn’t set to 360º scrolling. I think that the best configuration is this:
Also, the precision of the mouse is amazing. I have never seen the kind of laser technology they use before. The light from the laser is completely invisible. The only indicator is a small green light above the laser. Also, the mouse turns off, by moving a slider over the laser. Reverse that to turn it on. But it doesn’t auto-connect, so to connect it, I need to use my trackpad and go to the little bluetooth symbol in the menu bar, hover over my mouse, and click connect, like below. The keyboard shortcut I assigned myself in system preferences, and that is not by default.
Also under the mouse preferences, you can rename the mouse, and see the battery level. If you have a bluetooth keyboard, you can do the same, but as you can see, I don’t have one (yet).

Fluid

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Hey, mac users. Remember what happens when you put a web location on your desktop or in the dock? You see a spring with an @ at the top, right? well, no more of that! With fluid, the website is actually an application, and you can select your own icon and name. But the interesting part is, that it is actually an application. It doesn’t open in safari, it opens in an app that is what you named it in Fluid. Below is a screenshot of the inputs. For this example I am using youtube with a custom downloaded icon, and I am saving to s specific folder I selected. The icon will work in every format (at least that is available of of google images) and every size, and Fluid will resize them for you.

All I have to do now is click create and it will create a .app file in the folder you selected (the default is applications). The app will look like the image below. Notice the name of the app is the name I specified in fluid (YouTube).
As you can see in the Get Info panel, it is a .app file.
Now, open the app.
WOW.
Take note of :
1. The icon
2. the menu bar’s app name
3. the lack of a url bar or back/forward buttons
4. the title bar of the window
If your icon is a png and has transparency, there won’t be a white background like in the above screenshot. That’s because my icon image was a jpg. But I can easily add transparency with Photoshop. If you have many sites that you visit frequently but you don’t want to use too much dock space, I would recommend stacks. Just drag the folder into the right side of the dock, like the below image.

Cover Flow + Remote App + iTunes DJ= Awesome wireless listening experience

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Sometimes I like to do nothing but listen to music. My computer on my desk playing music, me sitting on the other side of the room on a pile of stuffed animals. But what do I look at when I listen to my music???? And how do I change the music, request a song in iTunes DJ (itunes 8.1 only), or change the volume??

Well, all of that is now solved.
I always use iTunes DJ for my needs now. It plays my higher rated ones more often, I can request songs, and I can remove songs from the DJ playlist. I have a great set of speakers, and I can turn them up to a very high volume. I must say, the iTunes DJ is very good at thinking what music you want to listen to. And the request feature makes it a very realistic “DJ”. Too bad it doesn’t have a voice… but Apple could definitely put that in there. I mean, they put it in that ipod.. Hey, where is it?, aka, the iPod shuffle.
Question 1: What do I look at when I’m listening to my music?
Answer 1: The awesome cover flow look. I can see what song just played, and what song is coming up. I can put it fullscreen, so that’s all I see- My album artwork of what song is playing, and a few before and after the song that is currently playing.
Question 2: How do I change the music, request a song in iTunes DJ, and control the volume from across the room?
Answer 2: Simple. I have an iPod touch as you may know, and I have a cool app that is made by apple and is called remote. You can hook it up to your iTunes library, and over wifi, you are able to control the music. It also puts your iTunes library as the Music app’s interface, but sadly you can’t rotate to view cover flow. but I can do all that: request a song in iTunes DJ, go to the next song, and even control the iTunes volume.
VIDEO!!!!!!!!!!!

Another reason why Apple rules….

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Ah, another day. Standard. I have my iPod touch in my lunchbox, even though we are not aloud to have any electronics at school at all. my lunch is a peach cup, a sunny-D, and a PBJ. Standard. I also have some cheese curls for a snack. Well, it is all normal, when I go to have snack. I eat my cheese curls, Drink some Sunny-D, and put it all away, covering up my iPod touch. Then, 45 mins later, it is lunch. UHOH. I open my lunch box, and what do I see? Sunny-D leaked out of the bottle. ALOT OF IT. so much, that my iPod touch is almost submerged in Sunny-D. So, Secretly from rules, I go off sprinting to the bathroom, and there I take it out and #1- turn it on, make sure it still works. it does, but the contrast is all white, and it is pretty insensitive to touch. So I go off cleaning everything I can, wiping it off with paper towels, and in the end I decide; this is never going to be okay unless I get a sympathetic understanding and knowledgeable adult to help me with my problem…. Ryan to the rescue! ryan is %100 the best teacher known to man, and he is everything I stated before: sympathetic, understanding, and knowledgeable. so he helps me with cleaning it off with rubbing alcohol and putting it upright on the heater vent, and it slowly starts to recover… But when I get picked up I route straight for the apple store, so they can check it out because it is still failing. I bring it in, get an appointment 10 mins after we arrive, and talk to a guy I know there from a previous problem

( I know about everyone at this retail store!). my words: my ipod had a little accident involving liquid… and before I can say anything else he takes it and uses a special tool that was like what doctors use to look in your ears and looks in the bottom ports. Apparently, there are liquid submersion sensors inside that turn pink when submerged. Now they would have been pink if Ryan hadn’t put them over the heater, which I think disabled them. But of course I didn’t tell them that, because right after they give me the news about the Liquid Submersion Sensors not going off, he says they will replace it for free. So, here I go, with a brand spanking new iPod touch for free, replacing the old one, too bad I couldn’t keep the old one I would have dissected it and put it on the will next to the old iPod mini! Look at the picture below of the new one before I take it out of it’s packaging. too bad they don’t give it to me in the box.

No more mirrors!

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This post is outdated and false. For the newer alternative then Jing, look here

What?? I finally bought captivate? no…..
But I did get Jing! Jing is a free, simple, screen capture software. Unfortunately, the saved output file is a really disgusting kind of swf file. What I mean by disgusting is that it really doesn’t work with many kinds of swf to _____ kind of converters. The only way to view it is through safari(/Probably any other browser with flash installed), and since I don’t have a server for myself set up yet (I have a domain and a server, waiting to be setup!!!), I can’t put that there for you to view through the web. I would really like to have the video right below here. That is possible, but I would have to pay $15 a year for it. I know, not allot, but to me all free things are good. But to get it below, I would get the pro version of Jing, which I can upload it to youtube, and in youtube there is an embed feature that I could just put right below or in the code of this post. But luckily, TechSmith (the creators of Jing) have registered www.screencast.com, where you can upload your jing video. Which is how I am showing you the video I made here: http://screencast.com/t/MrUZCeFWon

You need to zoom WAY out to see my whole screen!

Email: Empty or full?

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According to the most recent NYT Tech talk podcast (my favorite), Responding to your emails quickly and moving them and archiving them immediately is very important. They also state that That empty inbox is a beautiful sight. But to tell you the truth, I have to disagree. I always love to get emails. Also, if you have one email you use for your work stuff and everything else, You know that it is hard to know on weekends when that email is useful to read or should wait until the next workday. For this I would highly recommend getting a gmail account and getting all of your personal emails there. Using outlook? On the Gmail help site they show how to set up your gmail account in outlook. Have OS X Mail? Just type in the full email address, not username (username@gmail.com) and your password. Mail will automatically set it up for you. Notice that this is a prime example of where Macs are so much easier than PCs. But the point is, delete the emails you never want to be reminded of, organize some of them into folders / mailboxes, and the rest? Keep is your inbox! Wondering where something is? There is a place for searches called a search box! I use mine all the time. But the question is, If you have an empty inbox, where does the rest go?? I love having stuff in my inbox. with a flick of 2 fingers (a scroll wheel on a PC!) I can go back in time and see some conversations from a long time ago. Do you disagree with me? I am begging of you to post your answer in the poll in the sidebar! Also, There are 2 comments on this whole blog. Please, comment! you can select anonymous, so you don’t have to give your name or anything! I will do my best to answer your comment/question. To add a comment/question, just click the 0 comments at the bottom of this post!