Archive for the 'Tips' Category

Sometimes it’s helpful to change the location of your iTunes music library.

For example, I currently use Amazon S3 to store my music through iTunes, but since it’s a network drive, it’s really slow when importing CD’s, or downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store.

The reason is because it has to upload at the same time it downloads. I’ve seen some strange things happen when I attempt to do this, so to be safe, I always change my iTunes music library to somewhere local before I try any of those tasks.

Lately I’ve been bothered by a couple of things, regarding my digital music library:

1. I have to keep upgrading my external hard drive storage capacity, because new music is consistently being added.
2. My music is only accessible from wherever the external hard drive is, which means I have to lug it around to work, on vacation, etc.

There are three things I wish to accomplish:

1. Eliminate the limit on my music storage capacity.
2. Access my music from anywhere in the world.

I’ve always been interested in selling some of the technical books that I’ve amassed over the years. Some books are outdated or just don’t pique my interest anymore.

Rather than continue to use them as “door stops,” or squashing large bugs - I’ve decided to scrape the bug guts off them, and sell them through the Amazon Marketplace.

Google Video Player lets you download and watch videos in full high-resolution quality instead of the low quality streamed video available at video.google.com. Videos that contain detailed visual information (like application demos or code samples) must be viewed in their native resolution to discern fine details. This player combined with downloaded video solves the problem of “fuzzy” (but fast) streamed video available online. Google makes a downloadable player for Windows and Mac (though I didn’t test this).

There comes a time when having something in PDF format is a necessity. It may be that PDF is the preferred format for your email recipients or maybe it’s that you want to give someone a document but do not want them to have direct editing privileges. Whatever the case may be PDF Online comes to the rescue…and it’s not limited to just documents.

PDF Online Basics

Google Calendar allows you to use SMS, to remotely interact with your calendar.

This is extremely handy for when you are away from the computer, and/or an internet connection, and you need to either check your events for the day, or add future events for another day.

If you use text messages a lot on your mobile phone, you can easily interact with you calendar:

• Check today’s events.
• Check tomorrow’s events.

Unfortunately the preferred file systems for Windows XP and Mac OS X do not permit users to read and write data between each other. NTFS is the recommend file system on Windows XP and HFS+ is the preferred file system on OS X. Recent versions of OS X will read NTFS partitioned disks, but will not write to the partition. I have a PC and Mac, but my PC is my primary machine. I want one disk drive that I can swap between my Windows and OS X computers, so I found the overall easiest solution to be a Mac-formatted FAT32 single-partition external disk drive.

I have hundreds of photos online, shared through my SmugMug account. SmugMug has many nice features, one of them is their slideshow implementation. SmugMug slideshows display annotations (titles, captions) for photos however this option is not turned on by default. Annotations add useful information to the slideshow, so I want to make sure friends and family know how to enable these options. Additionally, SmugMug slideshows support fading transitions and can be controlled with keyboard commands.

The story surrounding this router is an interesting one. The WRT54G is a consumer level router with a wireless access point that has been selling “literally hundreds of thousands per month” according to an article at Linux Devices. The router has been through several versions (around 6 major versions) as Linksys has tweaked the hardware and software. Recently Linksys has decreased the hardware performance of the WRT54G while leaving the product name unchanged, confusing and arguably, cheating consumers.

Here’s a quick tip on how to customize the view options for Finder windows in Mac OS X.

Most Mac users already know that every Finder window (in the current version of OS X) can be viewed in three different ways: Icons, List, or Columns.

But did you know you can fully customize each view for specific folders?

While in the Finder, go to View > Show View Options.