Rod Roddenberry joins Katie and David to talk about his new documentary Trek Nation, and how he runs his life and business with Apple technologies.
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You mentioned scanning in signatures for use in PDFpen. I’ve always found I get better results by using a large marker and full sheet of paper. I write my signature large and then scale it down for use in software. It gives a result more like it was written.
Nice show. Again. Will you ever stop being so good? Hm. Anyway. I love your show, i didn’t found anything comparable to it in Germany. Maybe there are not enough Macs around? I am working on it, but till the day Apple rules old europe i have to listen – and to learn the language again – to english podcasts. And as i said before: i love your podcast.
Greetings from Germany and all the best to you and your families. Andi
This one was with the son of Gene Roddenberry? Till your podcast i didn’t know Gene Roddenberry has a son. OK. I am a Trek fan, and so this podcast was an eye opener for me. There is a Trek documentation i wasn’t aware of – and the Enterprise computers would be built by Apple. Good. I like it. And as from every show of yours i heard before, there where a few tricks and apps i could adopt for my every day work. This time caffeine, which solved a problem i had since a few weeks. Thanks
Keep on doing this great, amazing job with “Mac Power Users”. Really it is a great show with very friendly hosts, well chosen topics and great value. Thanks a lot for your work and time spent to record it
Remember all those Star Trek episodes when the Enterprise was under attack and everyone on the bridge was tossed around like rag dolls, including Kirk and the other officers seated in chairs.
Even as a kid I kept wondering, “Where’s the seatbelts? Did they forget how to make them in the future?”
My reaction to the early part of this episode was similar.
The Enterprise, with Kirk still in sick bay from being flung around the bridge, was pulling into port when Rod first started talking about software that he uses which seems to actually help his organization needs.
Gmail, Google Talk, Google Voice.
Hallelujah! It just works.
A good part of Michael Potter’s latest “For Mac Eyes Only” is a compare and contrast of Apple’s troubled iCloud email,calendar, sync with other options, focusing on Google, but also including Dropbox and similars.
Worth a listen, if you’re wanting to set up a way to organize from 1 to
100s.
http://www.formaceyesonly.com/2012/01/08/for-mac-eyes-only-keeping-an-i-on-the-cloud/
Well, I want Apple to make custom voices for Siri, one of them being the computer on Star Trek, which was quite obviously the inspiration for the whole Siri having a female voice in the States thing.
And George, I think that the no seatbelts thing was actually a product of the times in which the original Star Trek first came out, an era when there were no seatbelts. (I should know, I have a roommate with a 1968 Ford Mustang that has no seatbelts… I feel like I’m wearing a red shirt every time I go in his car!!)
BJ
BJ -
Ford introduced seatbelts into production cars way back in 1956. They were optional. Seat belts were mandated on US autos beginning in 1968.
But, hey, they were in use in military aircraft long before cars!
So you’d think StarFleet could have met at least the safety standards of the Italian Air Force —
My own premise about the missing Star Trek seatbelts was the need for drama. Their big “special effect” was a shaking camera, some POOFs from the electronics going bzzzzzzzt, and the crew rolling around on the deck.
Wouldn’t have looked like much action had the crew not been hurled around the bridge.
About public Wi-Fi: use Cloak https://www.getcloak.com on both iOS and Mac.
Small business: 37signals Suite.
Thank you both for another great show. I was curious about the app Rod mentioned called GrowlVoice. In your show links you have Google Voice mentioned but not the app he discussed.
Here is the link to GrowlVoice: http://www.growlvoice.com/
It looks like a very interesting I’m wondering if anyone on this list has used it and their feedback about it.
These days, when I rip a book on CD, I first tell iTunes not to rip the CD. Then, I choose all the tracks and tell iTunes to “Join CD Tracks” in the Advanced menu. Then, when I tell iTunes to rip that CD, it rips it into a single MP3 that combines all of the tracks together into one file. Being built into iTunes, this is free.
(Before any of this, I’ve gone into iTunes Preferences, General Preferences, Import Settings. I have chosen the MP3 Encoder; Setting Custom: Stereo Bit Rate 64 kbps, Variable Bit Rate Encoding, Quality Medium, Sample Rate Auto, Channels Auto, Stereo Mode Joint Stereo [which setting I've not looked up], Smart Encoding Adjustments, and Filter Frequencies Below 10 Hz; and Use error correction when reading Audio CDs.
OK, so I now have a single file per CD of the narrated book, and the quality for a voice recording is quite reasonable, at a smaller file size than it would be with the default settings (which are reasonable for popular music).
But that’s still too many files for me. So, I use the “join together” script from “Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes” at http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/jointogether.php. This lets me combine them together into a single file. I try to match the QuickTime Settings in the tool to the settings used in the original rip, so it doesn’t need to recode the audio. As part of this process, I have it create the combined file as a .m4b.
(There had been some issues with creating files longer than about 12 hours, so for longer books, I’ll divide the set into 2-3 big chunks. Also, I had run into some issues with joining the second set of files in a single “join together” session, so I always exit “join together” and restart it for each book chunk.)
The “join together” script is free, with a Plus version that’s only $7, which, at that price, is probably worth buying just to express appreciation for the tool.