Apple | Keys Corner

Junco-operative

By John, on March 23rd, 2009

Sometimes I ask myself what the developers of the Apple Mac spelling checker are smoking…

Fortunately, most people don’t accept that particular suggestion – not everyone was paying attention however…

Getting the most out of iTunes

By John, on March 9th, 2009

Here’s a good article on Gizmodo, which lists a bunch of useful additions to iTunes, some for the Mac, some for Windows and even a couple to allow you use Linux to play from iTunes libraries. Take a look.

Removing duplicate files in iTunes

By John, on March 7th, 2009

I have been moving our music library to a new external disc drive this weekend, and after running the consolidate command from iTunes (File > Library > Consolidate Library) I noticed that although I only have each track listed once in iTunes, I have two files for each track in the iTunes music directory . . . → Read More: Removing duplicate files in iTunes

Get your audio books set up correctly in iTunes

By John, on October 18th, 2008

I found this excellent tip on lifehacker.com. If you have ripped audio books from CD into iTunes, normally iTunes will think that you have added music. Since iTunes 8.0 it is possible to reclassify the tracks, so that iTunes recognizes them as audiobooks, which means that they will appear in the audiobooks section in . . . → Read More: Get your audio books set up correctly in iTunes

Getting an i-Blue 747 GPS logger to work with OS X

By John, on September 13th, 2008

I bought an i-Blue 747 GPS track logger recently. You can pick one up, new, on eBay for around 40 – 50 Euro. The idea is to use it to tag photos with their position – our cameras don’t have GPS receivers built in, and often when we get back from holiday, its difficult to remember where exactly we took which pictures. If you set the clock in the (digital) camera before you set off, the time-stamp from the GPS log, together with the position data allow you add the exact position of each photo to the EXIF data that the camera stores when each picture is taken.

The problem is, few GPS loggers come with any software for downloading and processing the track data on a Mac. I’m not aware of any that supports OS X “out of the box”. However, there is lots of third party software around which can be used to read out the scans and process them on the Mac. It takes time to track them down, however. So here’s what works for me:
Continue reading Getting an i-Blue 747 GPS logger to work with OS X

Apple at the Beijing Olympics

By John, on August 23rd, 2008

Apple is using the Olympics to market it’s Macs and professional image processing software, Aperture, to the press photographers attending. They’ve set up 50 workstations with 30″ Cinema Displays and all the necessary software (Photoshop, Aperture, and more) for the pros to use in the Kodak Photographer’s Center. The set-up is being managed by . . . → Read More: Apple at the Beijing Olympics

How long is a piece of string?

By John, on August 18th, 2008

How long is a piece of string? … or are Macs more expensive than Windows PCs?`

The answer is: it depends. About the same price for a similar specification About double for a basic machine

So it depends what your priorities are. But if you are considering buying a new Mac, remember that the . . . → Read More: How long is a piece of string?

Troublesome technology

By John, on May 14th, 2008

I have been tearing my hair out, fighting technology, at home this last week.

Firstly, I have been trying to get a decent wireless LAN connection from the office to the cellar. The problem here is that the floors in our house are made of reinforced concrete (and, I suspect so are at . . . → Read More: Troublesome technology

Reformatting Windows (NTFS) disks for Mac OS X

By John, on April 6th, 2008

I’ve bought several external hard drives recently to use for backing up under Leopard. Getting them reformatted from the pre-formatted Windows NTFS partition to Macintosh Extended Journaled has been unexpectedly problematical – usually the best chance has been to reformat (on the Mac) to MS DOS FAT format and then try to change the . . . → Read More: Reformatting Windows (NTFS) disks for Mac OS X

Palm OS on an iPhone

By John, on February 24th, 2008

Maybe, one day, it will be possible to run Palm applications on an iPhone. Style Tap have produced a proof-of-concept demo. It may seem strange to want to do that, but some people have Palm applications which they would like to continue to use. You can use Parallels or Fusion to run Windows . . . → Read More: Palm OS on an iPhone