This is an easy one. And, yes, people still use QuickTime 7. In fact, pretty much anybody who has had anything to do with editing videos on the Mac for the last five or so years has been using QuickTime Pro for this purpose and they will continue to do so until QuickTime X actually gets updated like Apple “promised.” Rather than sit around and wait for it, though, we’ll just keep using QTP instead. Saves us a lot of time, grief, hassle, etc. Besides, other than recording your screen and a little bit of trimming capability, there isn’t much appeal for professional or even novice video editors with QTX. Thanks, but keep trying.

Keep trying, Mrs. Florick. You’ll hit on it. -The Good Wife

I’m always using the zoom feature on the Mac to zoom in to a Flash video on the web, rather than going in to full screen. It helps save on processor power and possibly extends the life of my computer. I used to be able to do this by zooming in and then hitting command+L to and the Escape key to hide the cursor. However, after youtube changed their keyboard shortcuts on videos, the L key skips ahead ten seconds on a video, so I had to get a little creative in order to circumvent this issue. Rather than continue typing about it, I’ll just let my video do the talking. And, as always, thanks for watching.

This is my first tutorial video on youtube in quite some time, so don’t be too harsh with the criticism. I didn’t even talk on this one cause I’m so out of practice. I see and hear people ask about this more often than you would think. It’s an easy task, really…getting all those desktop icons off of your desktop. Just follow the tip outlined in this video, and you’ll be good to go. One thing not mentioned in the video, is that when you make the icons disappear, start adding new icons, then go to make the old ones unhidden, you’ll have a cluttered mess of icons overlapping other icons. An easy fix for this would be to just right click on the desktop and click “Sort by” and pick your poison.

Image courtesy of iconarchive.com

Organizing Your E-Mail

Say you’ve been away from the internet for a few days (anything’s possible) and you come back to find your inbox completely flooded with messages and you don’t even know where to begin. Or you’re subscribed to quite a few mailing lists and the messages have just been piling up over the last few days. Or you’re really internet popular and everybody and their brother has been trying to get in touch with you about something “really important” since you’ve been gone, or whatever the reason. You’ve got to get this organized somehow.

There are a couple of different ways to get this done in the Mail app on the Mac. You could use Smart Folders to search for keywords, senders, subject lines, etc., and organize your mail that way. I don’t like doing this because instead of just reading the email and deciphering where it needs to go, your Mail application has to search through everything new every time you launch to try and find out where everything goes. This can be quite taxing on the hard drive, and that’s not what you want. To circumvent this issue, I set up Mailboxes (or folders, rather) in Mail, and then set up rules in the Rules preferences dialog box that correspond to those folders/mailboxes.

Like so:

You can also do something very similar to this using Thunderbird. So, if you’re in Linux or Windows, you can also have this same kind of convenience added to your mail application.

So, I was hanging out over at IndieNation the other night listening to Brian Aldridge talk about people getting their financial information stolen from a website like youporn (no, I’m not linking off to that trash.)  I am still quite amazed, even given my own idiosyncrasies, that people would hand over their financial information to a website whose sole purpose is to provide people with the trashiest, nastiest videos and images on the web.  And youporn, as ugly as it may be in my mind, is still probably one of the mildest places you could go on the internet to get a fix of…whatever the hell you need a fix for.

But, and I still can’t get over it, if you’re going to give a site like that your personal, financial information, why don’t you just cruise on down to your local crack den or “corner drug store” and hand them your credit card, social security number, home address, phone number, etc?  Yep, that’s rhetorical.  I really gotta wonder this stuff because I don’t smoke crack, snort coke, toke weed, drop acid, bang heroin, pop pills, or anything like that.  And I’m not really coming down on anybody who indulges in such activities.  But, I really gotta wonder just what the hell you have to be on in order to have a mindset of thinking that something like that is actually safe, wise, or even practical.  If you’ve really got money to burn, why not drop some cash on your own XXX domain name?

Some people wonder why there’s such a fight to keep the xxx domain name or to a rush to register your own domain with a triple X extension on it.  My answer?  Because it’s big business.  As much as it shocks me that people would not only pay for such things but also for over their own personal, financial data on the web to gain access to it, they’d also spend thousands just to get something like that set up, after which they’d rake in millions.  Same with drugs, guns, prostitution, and gambling.  Pretty much everything you’re going to see when you sit down to indulge in yet another episode of Law & Order.

It kind of makes me think of MyDamnChannel over on youtube when he tells his viewers to just “strap on yer stupid and let’s get at it.”

So, yeah…let’s strap on our stupid and go on over to them internetz and give them all our info and see what happens then. “Hey, fellars, watch this!!”

Cuddy: Are you being intentionally dense?!
House: HUH? O_O

Cleta told me this was a “touchy” subject. She’s a funny…..hey! I see what she did there! >.>

It actually takes a lot of pressure off of me knowing that I’m not going to be “the guy” that everyone’s going to be looking to for great pictures from the wedding.  I’m an amateur photographer at best, and have never been relied upon to be in charge of photographing such an important occasion.  Though, I have been complimented quite a few times for the good eye that I do have when it comes to capturing a scene in a way that people might not normally think about when just giving something a quick glance.  I’m inspired quite a bit by professional photographers and even movie photographers who can make something as simple as a wasp (something I’m deathly afraid of) look like a work of art.

Up until a couple of months ago, I’d been using nothing but my cellphone and my iPod Touch for basically all of my photography.  I’d never owned a digital camera in my entire life.  Though, I did get to use one once when my mother and I went to one of our local museums.  The caretakers there, who are all volunteers, did give me a few funny looks, (not sure if photography’s allowed there) but they never said anything to me, so I just kind of kept on shooting.  I was using my mother’s Canon PowerShot SX 110 IS.  I’d never held it before, so all of the pictures definitely didn’t turn out the way I would’ve wanted them to, but given that it was my first time with the camera, I don’t think I did too bad of a job.

I’m actually really excited to be going to a wedding with my camera.  That’s going to be a lot of fun. Considering that I’m not going to be the only one there with a camera, and I’m also not “the” photographer responsible for getting all the important shots.  Sure takes a lot of pressure off of me.  I look forward to it and hope it’s going to be a good time for everybody.

After I did that, they let me choose which color I wanted the ID card to be, and I was off to the races. I just clicked to generate and the image immediately downloaded to my computer. What I thought was cool, was that they put a Quick Response (QR) code at the bottom of the ID card, so when you scan it with a QR scanner, (I use QRReader on my iPod Touch) it immediately takes you to my Google Plus profile. Pretty nifty.

They bought the biggest and most active video sharing website on the web, they created the fastest growing social network in the history of the web, and they’re integrating the two quite well, so far. But that last part is just my opinion. True, they need to work on some things. Nobody’s perfect. It would actually be cool if someone shared a youtube video over here and someone gives it a +1, if that would turn into a thumbs up over on youtube. Do they have that yet?

So, what is it? Is it the popularity of the social network that makes it a success? Or is it the sharing features, the user interface, etc.? I really don’t know. But, I think I’ve got a handle on what it is that makes a social network fail. The people. I wouldn’t say it has much to do with the user interface, because Facebook has screwed that up so much lately, and it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. People just keep using it no matter how much Facebook completely fails. lol And there I go hating on Facebook again. Whatever.

Any social network is here to stay just as long as the people are here to stay and use it.

Current bid on Ebay, at the time of this writing, is forty-five hundred dollars. So, if you’re someone who has that kind of money and has to have the shoes, what the heck are you waiting on?

I wonder if they have, or will ever release a pair, that isn’t so bulky. I couldn’t picture myself wearing a pair of gray shoes that look almost like combat boots. Especially if they don’t even have power laces! If they don’t have power laces, then what part of the shoes is it that requires batteries? I don’t know. Maybe because of the LED lights on them.

It’s all for a good cause anyway, so go bid on them!! :O All the proceeds go to The Michael J. Fox Foundation to help fight Parkinson’s Disease. And, of course we would have to wait until 2015 until the shoes are released with power laces. Did you ever know anything from a Back To The Future movie that had something significant happen in a year that didn’t end with the number 5? 1885, 1955, 1985, 2015? Hello? What kind of homage would that be if the shoes from the movie came out and had power laces in the year 2011?

It would be nice if Apple would release an update for Safari that addresses the issue of the broken Web Inspector, that they broke. It used to be, if you had developer tools enabled in Safari, when you right click on something and then click “Inspect Element”, Safari would do basically the same thing that Firebug for Firefox does. It brings up a little inspector at the bottom of the page for you to view an organized outline of all the content on the page and the source code that puts it there.

Safari Web Inspector

Well, Apple released an update for Safari that makes the Web Inspector pop up in a separate window every time you go to inspect an element. This is very annoying behavior and should’ve been fixed by now. The only thing that I could think of, is that this is probably going to be yet another thing that they break in one operating system and don’t release a fix for unless you update to their latest OS. Like they did when they broke the Wikipedia feature of their Dictionary application in Leopard and only released a fix for it in Snow Leopard. I’m speaking of the issue in Dictionary when you look up a word and click the Wikipedia tab in Dictionary, you only see the top of the Wiki page, with no way to scroll down except by clicking and dragging the mouse down the bottom edge of the window. Very annoying behavior that Apple never bothered to fix in Leopard. And no, Wikipedia isn’t to blame for breaking this feature. If they are, how come it works in Snow Leopard but not in Leopard? Even trying to use a tip never did fix the issue for me.

Currently, when using either Google Chrome or Firefox with their Firebug plugin, this isn’t an issue in either one of those browsers. So, a big thank you to those developers for keeping an eye on this and not letting it become an issue. I don’t know if you’ve ever used any of these things before, but for a web developer/designer, having to click the button that says “Dock to main window” every time you want to inspect something on a web page, can be very monotonous.

I find myself using Google Chrome more and more lately, given this handicap feature of Safari Web Inspector, and the fact that there are basically no plugins for Safari that have to do with Google Plus. I guess we can all just sit back and give a big shout out to open source.