DV for Teachers

One of our professors met the author of this article about backing up your Mac while in California at a conference. You do have good backups, right?

Losing data is a drag. Many of us store digital photos, original documents, calendaring and contact information, architectural drawings, spreadsheets, video and music on our computers. This data can be irreplaceable if your computer is lost or stolen, or if your hard drive fails.

With good timing, The Unofficial Apple Weblog adds this article on External HDs to their Mac 101 series. External drives are inexpensive (I checked prices at dealnews’s storage pages, they listed tereabyte drives for less than $180 – oof!), it’s really important to backup, and it’s getting so easy to do with Time Machine or other solutions.

Do it now!

Mac OS X 10.5 Help: Calibrating a MacBook or MacBook Pro battery

Calibrate the battery in your MacBook or MacBook Pro every month or two to keep your battery functioning at its fullest capacity.

I didn’t know this. I shall calibrate tomorrow and then I’ll get to feel all virtuous. Ah, small victories.

At my host, Joyent, I’ve managed to move from Harwood, a FreeBSD Linux server to Laurel, a “Shared Accelerator” on Sun Sparc hardware running OpenSolaris. Which means little to me, a n00b who knows enough to create a lot of difficulty. Once I figured out the database password confusion, this blog reappeared along with my other one. This post is a test, to make sure I can still post. If you’re reading it, well, guess what?

Posting this morning from Meadowcreek High School in Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta. It’s a professional development day for the teachers here and my workshop is about working more efficiently on the desktop, keeping files organized, and getting more from the browser. The network here won’t let my laptop online, so I’m posting from a lab computer with Internet Explorer 6 – so no tabbed browsing, no Google toolbar, no

... I have to post his NOW, so here goes!

Prepping for an inservice presentation, I found The How-To Geek”, a slew of helpful tips for Windows, Mac OS X, Office, Linux, and much more.

For example, I was looking for tips on Microsoft Word, and found Search and Replace Specific Formatting (fonts, styles, etc.) in Microsoft Word. I did not know you could copy and paste style attributes like that – I knew about it in advanced video editors, but not in Word. A valuable tip.

Lots of things to catch up on – I’ve saved several drafts I want to get back to, five just this morning, from sites I’ve found in the last week or so, since my last post – and I’ll take a break from the web for a day or two. I have to do email here at work of course, but the edit room and some overdue projects there call me. The biggest issue there is audio dropout in a multi-camera shoot. The tape with the two-shot of a conversation also has the main audio, and there are several places where words and parts of words just disappear, along with the time code, but there are no breaks in the video. Odd, and Final Cut just doesn’t like it. I’ve tried capturing with iMovie but FC doesn’t like to import those files either. I’ll keep at it and report back here.

And then I’ll finish updating the site, and catch up on the many many many drafts I haven’t posted, and keep up with my video projects, and work on more workshops, and continue to add features and fine tune the lab iMacs and MacBooks – including adding Windows via VMWare on one for a test case – and continue to learn more about Photoshop, add more storage to the XServe, and there’s always more which is good.

OS X Help offers “Insanely simple tutorials for the first time Macintosh user.”

Welcome to OS X help. If you are new to the Macintosh, OS X, and Apple, you have come to the right place. If this is your first time here, we suggest you start at the beginning, and work your way to the current post, which you see below.

The tutorials are friendly and simple, and well well worth it if you’re a recent switcher. Recommended.

Did I say I like them? Just go, already.

Macworld tells us the ins and outs for setting up Time Machine. If you you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, this is more than worthwhile; it could very well save your bacon, by which I mean all your important data… which these days is all your data. Right?

Jochen Wolters at O’Reilly’s Dgital Media Blog posts Play it again, Macworld!, a pointer to streaming video from January’s Macworld, including sessions on iPhones, Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac, and a 6-hour (!!!) stream in digital photography. Whew. Grab your camera, get comfy in your chair, and take notes. It’ll be worth your time.

BTW, with this post, the O’Reilly’s Mac coverage begins to regain some of its lost luster. They had a great group blog at MacDevCenter, but last year it went without an update from early August to late November, but no hint of why they were letting it languish.

Now they’re doing more coverage under the Mac category at O’Reilly’s Digital Media Blog. This will make it easier to follow in my RSS reader, but while getting the MacDevCenter URL for this post, they’ve got fresh updates there too.

O’Reilly – please – for a web-savvy company, keep us informed about what’s where without the guessing game.

I’ve upgraded the back end of DV for Teachers with the latest WordPress. I’ve changed to a new look, and it’s going to take some tweaking: I need to update the default blogroll for one thing, fix the background color on the Categories and Archives menus up top for another, unify the color scheme of links pre- and post-visit, as well as come up with (at least one) new header graphic.

All this will be fun. For me, any way.