Love the podcast, deeper, darker tips

Using windows in a non-boot camp partition (just the image) is the most convenient way to run windows, but even if 90% of your games run, you can’t run all your games unless you dual boot at least for those 10% (and load the partition in vmware for the other 90%)

just my $0.02

MacSpeech Scribe with my iPhone may foot the bill. I really wish there was a 30 day trial period though, the videos of the product don’t make it seem ‘Mac-like’…

Thanks again,
Scott

I’ve listened to a number of podcasts covering adding movie media to iTunes but no one ever seems to help users with adding metadata, subtitles, HD/SD tagging etc. You typically end up with pretty scruffy movie and TV libraries. With Davids OCD I cannot believe that he lets his itunes get this way.

I’ve looked at 3rd party software to help automate this and have created a 3 part article covering ripping, adding metadata subtitles and HD-SD tagging and optimal TV shows. If you’re interested please take a look at my articles on my website at http://www.theapplechap.com. A shortcut to the first of the 3 articles is at:

http://www.theapplechap.com/TheAppleChap/Blog/Entries/2010/4/23_Perfect_video_in_iTunes_-_Part_1Getting_great_ripped_content.html

I’ve ended up with a fantastic library that feeds the optimal resolution content to what ever device that can access the iTunes libruary.

Hope you find it useful.

Alan

I’ve had this basic setup now for about a year and found it to be pretty much bulletproof. The only minor annoyance is the stupid “this accessory is not compatible …” message that I dismiss and everything works fine.

I used to be very interested in this whole itunes server thing to stream my music and videos to my living room. However, now with Rhapsody and netflix, i have cut my consumption of Itunes products exponentially: i can get most movies and songs without actually downloading them in itunes.
So if most of my songs and movies are played through netflix and rhapsody, the apple tv really loses its value, and I’m better off connecting a computer to my stereo/hdtv (yes, I’m ashamed to say: a msi netbook with a wonderful hdmi port that sells for about 500 dollars!).

As subscription services become more and more popular and all-encompassing, you got to ask yourself if it is really worth it to “own” a song or a movie, vs accessing the entire universe of media via a small monthly fee.

(Thanks!)

1) VPN server, so you can set a VPN on your iPhone/iPad. You will be always protected regardless the wifi you are connected to due to the fact that all the connections will be encrypted back to your home and only from that point on will be unencrypted.

2) Attach a Drobo to it and use the filesharing in order to backup multiple macs with Time Machine to a single, reliable place.

On the issue of having a home server, I wanted to briefly share my experience. I have a Mac Mini which serves the dual purpose of the being my media centre (attached to the big TV in the living room) and my always-on home server. That was one of the key reasons I went for the mini rather than the Apple TV – it performs both of those tasks well.

By having it on all of the time it filters the mail that arrives at my iPhone and iPad, it serves up my media to any of the computers around my house and I can use Dropbox to initiate TV/movie downloads from work.

The final, really cool, advantage of having the server always on is that you can use an inexpensive app on the iPad or iPhone called Air Video to stream that video to your device wherever you are in the world. The app even converts on the fly so you don’t need to have converted it to a supported video format beforehand. It’s great to know that I can pull out the iPad wherever I am and have almost instant access to the all the movies and TV shows sitting on my computer at home. And because the mac mini has such great power management I have no qualms about leaving it on 24/7.

I’m using it occasionally, because it quite useful for those “temporary” feeds.
Sometimes I’m posting a comment on a blog, where I want to keep track on the comments. If it’s a WordPress blog, practically everything can have it’s own feed. Just add /feed to the end of a URL to get the feed.
I then drag the feed into my Safari menubar. That way I get updates as soon as they occur. (A number next to the bookmark item)
That trick is useful for blogs, forums or support request sites like getsatisfaction.com.

Hope that’s useful for some of you. Thanks for podcasting.
Zettt

I originally bought a boxed copy of Parallels desktop 2 and ran it just fine on my MacBook. Then some months later I get an e-mail from them saying “hey, there’s an update available, go get it here! All existing license keys will work!”. So naturally I go and download it. After installing the update I need to activate it using my license key – which does not work! At this point I send e-mail to Parallels support asking for help. After three days of radio silence, I finally find out that some mastermind at Parallels had put both of his or her braincells to work and decided that the license keys are different for boxed and downloaded versions, even though it’s the same piece of software! So I had to uninstall Parallels, reinstall the boxed version and update it using the built-in update checker. After that I went through that fateful e-mail in detail to see whether this incompatibility was mentioned somewhere. It wasn’t. There was only the assurance that _all_ existing license keys will work. I wrote to Parallels support to complain about this whole episode (they first urge me to break my installation and don’t even bother to provide help when a paying customer contacts them), but I wasn’t surprised that this, too, was ignored by them. So I wouldn’t count too much on getting any support from Parallels should you need any.

Nowadays I’m a happy VMware Fusion camper. Fusion also has the added benefit of having a proper support for non-Windows virtual machines as well.

I use slimbattery monitor as well. For the customization freak, it’s better than the default apple battery thingy. Istat menu has a battery module that’s even better, but costs $15 or so for the package.

Just listened to the Backup show and thought I’d mention CrashPlan. Phil Simonson in an earlier comment mentioned the feature to sync between computers, which is excellent.

However, I use it primarily as an off-site backup through their CrashPlan Central service. I found that with the family plan, I can backup all my computers as well as my family’s computers for $100 per year, which is well worth it. So now I don’t have to worry if my Mom has done her backup, or my sister-in-law forgets, CrashPlan handles it in the background.

In addition, I have had zero family tech support calls on the software or the service. All-in-all CrashPlan has been a very reliable, flexible and cost effective backup solution for my entire family.

Awesome tip on Breevy and other Windows TextExpander alternatives!

Another related technology to keep an eye on is from a company called AquaConnect (www.aquaconnect.net). There are several great options for Mac->PC RDP, but I haven’t been able to find any good PC->Mac remote desktop solutions. (To clarify, there are options like VNC, GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, etc. that are very good for ad hoc access, but I don’t find them suitable to use for extended work sessions like I am able to do with RDP from a Mac to a PC.)

AquaConnect has licensed the RDP protocol and is going to be releasing a product that will let you use any RDP client (Windows, Linux, iPad, etc.) to connect to your Mac remotely over RDP. I saw a demo of this at an event last week (including iPad), and it looks fantastic. Beta is supposed to be coming soon.

They are already shipping an enterprise product that lets you do the equivilent of Terminal Services/Citrix (multiple user concurrent user sessions on one machine) on a Snow Leopard server. Extremely cool, but too expensive/overkill for what I (and probably most of your listeners) need. Forthcoming Mac Remote Desktop product is for 1:1 connections and will presumably be much less expensive.

Thanks for sorting me out on the finer points of RDC and VNC. For the record I knew it was NTFS and have no clue why I said NTSF repeatedly. I suspect it was because I was podcasting about Windows and that gave me the willies. I’ll make sure to follow up on these items in the next show.

David

I do it for performance to force my fast access data to be at the edge of the hard disk.

I guess this is getting pretty serious about performance at this stage.

http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-WhyYouNeedMoreThanYouNeed.html

I run a 320gb 7200rpm drive in my macbook with a 32gb partition for snow leopard which also holds my 10gb xp vm for fusion (runs around 10gb free).

The rest of the data is on another partition i.e. itunes/photos/downloads/encrypted drives.

I use a script for SuperDuper to clone the partitions in one hit (so one runs after the other) to my now pgp encrypted hard drives (Thanks Dave!)

Great podcast, keep them coming.

In contrast, VNC just lets you share the screen of someone else. if you know the VNC password (no user name needed, and defaults to no password), you can gain control of the computer no matter who is logged in. I think it is also possible to set up VNC access in such a way that it does not announce (to the person sitting at the computer) that a VNC session is active. I’ve heard that many companies block VNC at the firewall level for these reasons. I would not recommend anyone use VNC unless RDC (or another solution) did not fit the bill.

I would also like to mention that while Microsoft’s RDC is a good option, I think a better option is CoRD. It has a nice side drawer that lets you see all of the various computers that you’ve set up (double click to start a connection). It lets you log in to more than one PC more easily than RDC does. Changing setups later (when passwords change) is also much easier.

1) Cutting off 30% of your hard drive from your backup so you can easily run your backup program is not a good reason to partition. Dealing with partitioning might add back the same amount of work. Your clone drive simply needs to be equal or bigger. Don’t do extra work to save $50 for a real drive. People do this so they can get away with using old (and soon to die) hard drives as backup!

2) If you need speed, don’t do a RAID-0 with partitions, using the outter faster half of your drive. Get an SSD drive.

3) If you need to do bootcamp, fine. That’s an OK reason to partition, but I still feel sorry for you.

Your time is precious. Say no to partitioning.

Never used Bootcamp since I found virtualization was always good enough. As a developer running Visual Studio I have been able to do work at home just find. I have also used both VMWare Fusion and Parallels and concur they are both great products. Though I would say that Parallels has the edge still and speed tests comparing the two confirm this.

After 2 years on the Mac after using Windows since 2.0 and DOS before that I have found that I pretty much never run windows for anything but work. There are no Windows programs that I did not find a better and more capable Mac version of.

Though one annoyance for switchers is common keyboard shortcuts. Sure you can map the Mac keyboard to work like Windows – but I found I much preferred the Mac shortcuts for cut/copy/paste which requires less finger stretching. So what I did was map the Left Alt key on my work machine to Ctrl. So I keep the exact same shortcut without having to think about it.

Dropbox is great for synching – that is unless your IT department blocks it like so many do.

1) Remote Desktop is not VNC. They are two completely different solutions.

2) Your coverage of connecting to exchange using Mail.app was over simplified.
a) Mail.app does not support MAPI (the native exchange/outlook protocol)
b) You’ll need to have Outlook Web Access enabled on the server for this to work.

3) There are malicious programs that can “jump” from your VM to your mac. They are not “viruses” but they are malicious. Typically they use MS Office Documents (with Macros) or Adobe Products (Flash, Shockwave, and/or Acrobat) as a vector.

Also glad I finally gave in to the Dropbox recommendation. I’m using it with 1Password and it’s working spectacularly. I’m really curious to see about TextExpander and Breevy.

- Set up the VM on an external drive (strangely, it seems to run faster than on the internal hard-disk, even on my USB-only MB Air)
- Make sure there’s plenty of free space on the drive (Fusion seems to need lots of elbow-room); my VM started slowing down horribly when there was only 10 GB or so left.
- Allow only one core on dual-core machines
- Don’t give the VM too much RAM: 512 MB (but not much more) if you only have 2 GB of RAM
- Don’t use Fusion’s SnapShot feature; it seems to chew a lot of drive space and processing power (but that was maybe just my impression). Rather make complete copies of your VM (to which you can then easily roll back if your VM goes bad).

Keep up the great work!

A great tutorial on how to set this up is found at:

http://alturl.com/cdbm

I commonly use Dropbox to sync content. It works brilliantly by syncing on my school XP box to my home folder on the Windows Server. As soon as I change anything in this folder the one XP machine I keep logged in with the client syncs everything back. I sit at the back of the classroom working in SMART Notebooks on my mac, save them and walk over to the XP machine and load them up. Simple and awesome.

Thanks for the Podcast guys.

Scott

#!/bin/sh

if [[ $extension == "dmg" ]]; then
echo "yes" | hdiutil attach "$1"
fi

The other one is a set of rules which I use to automatically move projects from my actions folder to one another. I use tags (Spotlight comments: &pending, &waitFor, &junk) to determine whether a file should go into ~/Current/1 – pending or ~/Current/4 – junk (or 2 procrastinate or 3 idea). When I change the tag of a file from, let’s say &pending to &junk. Hazel moves that folder automatically to 4 – junk.
Took me a while to figure that out, but now it’s working ubercool.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6102/tmp/hazel_rules.zip

(If you have a place to upload this I would appreciate it since I will delet this zip sometime soon)