DV for Teachers

Daring Fireball pointed to this: MFSLives

MFSLives is a sample VFS plug-in that implements read-only access to the Macintosh File System (MFS) volume format. This volume format debuted on the original Macintosh in 1984, and was supplanted by HFS (the predecessor to HFS Plus) with the introduction of the Macintosh Plus in 1986. MFS support was dropped from traditional Mac OS in Mac OS 8.1, and it has never been supported on Mac OS X.

I hope this means I can more easily retrieve some files from very old floppies… but I’m at home with them, and the floppy drives are at work. We’ll see.

New to Macs? Apple Matters offers a list of 20 Useful OS X Tips. Many are for working with windows, some are application-specific, like this one for Word:

Holding down the option key in Word while selecting text will let you select any rectangular body of text. Useful, for instance, to select a single column of text in the middle of a document and delete it.

I had seen several links to this Russell Davies post on PopUrls, and finally followed it. I may make this my home page, it’s so good and inspiring. Before following the link, I expected a guide to being interesting, but it’s really about being interested – ten suggestions for living in a more engaged and thoughtful way and sharing it through the web. (Jason Kottke linked to a New York Times story about Pixar University in January on the same idea; after reading the article, so did I.) Russell works in advertising, a profession that I find very problematic, but when practiced well combines the best of storytelling, teaching, and artistic expression. Imagine a classroom with similar guidelines. Teachers can model this for their students and they’d both find more in life to look forward to. He writes:

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

Read russell davies: how to be interesting

I’ve used ImageWell in the past to resize and sometimes annotate images; it’s a terrific tool for that. More often I’ve used Pixture Studio’s contextual menu plugin QuickImageCM for quick image adjustments for a post. ImageWell, though, had an FTP client build in, which was very handy, but my host only allows SFTP access for security reasons, so I had to crank up Fetch to upload the picture. With ImageWell’s newest update (still in beta), it handles SFTP. Very nice. ImageWell remembers my server settings, so all I need to do is drop the edited image in the well (no matter what app I use to edit it with), one click, and bink it’s on the server. Very nice. Thanks to Hagen, the developer, for a great app.

In this article – Compression Session: The Secrets to Great QuickTime Compression by PF Bentley – The Digital Journalist – the author explains his method for good-looking QuickTime for broadband, including a video of the export. Though Bentley’s exporting from Final Cut Pro, any app (and I believe that’s on Windows or Mac) that will export QuickTime will do this.

iRed Lite, a Mac OS X app currently free in beta (testing) mode that extends remote’s capabilities beyond Front Row, with built-in control for PowerPoint, iTunes, QuickTime, Keynote, Finder, Visualizer, EyeTV, iPhoto, and Preview. Applescriptable.

I tested it on a MacBook in both Admin and managed accounts, and though I couldn’t get it to load at login on the managed account yet, it works very nicely. It’s configurable, so you can add more applications to control, and change functions assigned to the buttons on the remote.

Take a look: iRed Lite.