Oct 07

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

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Oct 03

Nine Inch Nails – the band – have released some of their older songs in full garageband format. This includes all the individual vocal, guitar drum tracks etc. Now even if their music is not your style, it’s a great chance to have a play with some good quality recordings and have a practice at mixing them and so on.

Here’s the link – click on the garageband files.

http://www.ninremixes.com/multitracks.php

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Aug 23


I just upgraded  the boot drive on my Mac Mini to an SSD drive and it’s by far the biggest speed enhancement I’ve experienced on any computer! The speed increase is incredible – almost hard to believe – boot time went from 60 seconds to under 30 seconds, and applications launch instantly – no bouncing dock icon.

This is not for the beginner, it’s quite technical, but here’s how to do it.

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Aug 21


In this article I talked about the best import settings for iTunes. Since then with the increase in Hard Disk space I now think it’s best to import all your songs using the apple lossless encoder. This still compresses the files by about 1/3 but there is no loss of audio quality at all. With AAC and MP3 files, not matter how high you set the quality, there is ALWAYS some loss of quality. Apple Lossless audio is exactly the same quality as what’s on your CD. Here’s how to import into iTunes using the Apple lossless encoder.
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Aug 17

If you’ve ever been given a pdf file that you want to edit, or a pdf form that you need to complete and return electronically, you’ll realise it’s not obvious how to edit a pdf file. The good news is that the OSX built in pdf reader app – ‘preview’ – can edit pdf files. You can’t move around or change what’s already in the pdf document, but you can add text and graphics. Here’s how.  Continue reading »

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Aug 08

The new OSX Lion comes as an upgrade from the Apple App Store – not on a DVD. The good news is that once you’ve paid for it once,  Apple allow you to install it on all the computers you own for free! After you purchase it from the App Store you  just have to go into the App Store on your other computers and Lion will be there – all paid for and ready to download again!

The Apple page on this is here.

Of course, you need to upgrade all your existing computers to Snow-Leopard first.

The main hitch is that it needs to download lots of files first.  See Paul’s comment below on how to avoid this.

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Jul 30

 

I was recently given a keynote presentation which contained a movie. When I played the presentation the sound worked but the movie was blank. It turned out the movie was not in a format that Quicktime could play and it turns out there are many such formats. When I tried to play the movie in Quicktime I got an error saying ‘The document could not be opened. The movie is not in a format that QuickTime Player understands.You may need to install additional software to open this type of file.’ The tell me more option was next to useless, but there is a solution.
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Jul 26

Yesterday Nuance released to Dragon dictate 2.5.

So what’s it like?

STOP PRESS: Even though initially I wrote this great review, after using version 2.5 for a week I find that  it often crashes when I try to use the correction window. There are a lot of complaints about this in the Dragon Dictate forums. I’d hold off  till the next update comes along . Dragon Dictate 2.5 is quite unstable.

 24th August 2011: Dragon Dictate 2.5.1 was released this week and  all the stability problems seem to be fixed. 

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