Tim's Reflection Connection

Today I attended my first MacWorld conference. Yes, you guessed it, a conference completely for and about Apple. The day began with throngs (literally tens of thousands of people) gathered around the Moscone Conference Center here in San Francisco waiting in the chilly fog for the doors to the conference doors to open. I was [...]

Apple’s attention to detail is nothing short of refreshing! I recently was told that the new computer voice in 10.5 (Leopard) actually incorporates the sound of breathing to enhance the natural sounds we expect when people talk to us. I had never noticed it. Indeed, my computer breathes! I created an audio podcast of the [...]

As far as I am concerned, this is nothing less than theft by taking. Microsoft is taking away your capacity to open documents, a capacity you paid them to have when you purchased their product! This is so typical of this horrible microsoftian business model. So, let me guess: to keep you safe from the [...]

Here are a few Leopard tips I don’t want to forget, so I’m including them in this post. If you don’t know about them, enjoy! They offer some excellent shortcuts I’m trying to get in the habit of using for efficiency. 1. Control-F3 makes the dock active. Then type the first letter(s) of the application [...]

Immersive Media makes 360-degree panoramic videos. Push play, then mouseover to move your viewpoint left or right while the scene moves. You can also pan while the video is paused. This video is 42nd Street in New York City. Other video demos are available at the site. Link Push play, then click on the video [...]

I have been using a little program called ecto for almost as long as I have been blogging–around May, 2004. ecto (yes, properly not capitalized) is a little desktop application that links to a large number of the most popular blogging platforms and allows users to quickly and easily post content. For example: the Mac [...]

The art and science of making a pano has been a royal headache to date: trying to calibrate my 8mm fisheye so I could develop a lens template has all but driven me to drink! And all of the recommendations and step-by-steps leave major aspects of the process out or assume you understand the deep [...]

I have to gloat! Everyone seems to hate this OS as much as I do! Why can’t a company with the vast resources of this software giant create the perfect operating system? The people have spoken and Microsoft is listening. The company has decided to continue selling Windows XP through the end of June 2008, [...]

This is fascinating. This new technology resizes images without much distortion and could perhaps have significant implications for web design. Can the algorithms be programed into a device’s OS so as to resize the image just before it is drawn on the screen so it fits the native size of the screen? This could afford [...]

Can you tell that I am about to launch into some serious production and encoding projects over here?! I know this bores many of my readers out of their minds, but Mark, you probably need the info, and I need to keep track of this as a reference guide. This article, by Jesse David Hollington [...]

I came across these two iTunes visualizers that seem to be popular at the moment. So I downloaded them. Pretty coo, actually. It would even be more cool if my AppleTV could play these as the screen saver instead of just photos or album art. One of the programers is funny: I make no guarantees [...]

I always learn something from John. He’s smart and knows a whole lot more about technology and Mac than I ever will. I found this little tidbit interesting. I had no idea, but it certainly makes a lot of sense. He is discussing the reasons Apple is porting the Safari browser over to Windows: But [...]

So Steve did his Jobs thing today out in California at the WWDC ’07–cool graphic by the way. As a dutiful disciple of “Think tnereffid,” I followed MacRumors’ live “coverage” of the event. Did I miss something? I must confess to being completely under-whelmed. But then I haven’t seen the keynote video yet as it [...]

Interviewer: In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.  Bill: You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts….  I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done.

Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES This tells the system that you no longer wish to have Dashboard available….  The easiest way to do that is to type this command into the Terminal (and press Return when done): killall Dock After the Dock restarts, hit F12 and you’ll see…nothing at all….  You can do just that by opening Terminal again, and typing this command: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO Once again, you’ll have to use the killall Dock command to make the changes take effect.

So, in the months ahead, expect to see tag clouds and the like appearing here at timtyson.us.  But one of the concerns I had was knowing when links die, when sites are no longer up….  This little program not only checks the links at your del.icio.us to make sure they still live, it provides you with a simple way to immediately access the dead links through The Way Back Machine!

Source: macosxhints.com – Working with screen movies in iMovie If you’re using iMovie to create screencasts, e.g. for software demos, there are a couple of things to know to get the best quality.  When you import source videos, iMovie seems to resample them to it’s own internal resolution, so resampling on import followed by resampling on export can cause a substantial loss in quality and produce lossy videos full of artifacts….  Depending on the video format you select when you create a new project, iMovie will work at different resolutions: • DV: 720×480 • DV Widescreen: 853×480 • HDV 1080i: 1920×1080 • HDV 720p: 1280×720 • MPEG-4: 640×480?