Category Archives: Apple

iBooks Authoring and Me

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ibooks authoringNot long ago Apple introduced a book authoring program called ‘iBooks Authoring’. Its an application that makes publishing books to the Apple iBooks store a whole lot easier. One of the reasons my book ALL THAT MATTERS was not published to the iBooks store was because of how difficult it was to do so. To solve this problem Apple has made an application that will make the whole process of publishing to their store easier.

When I checked out the application on the Mac App store the other day I saw loads of comments from people who have already used it publish their own books and that it was very easy.

But will I use it?

The answer is yes and no.

I will use ‘iBooks Authoring’ to post ALL THAT MATTERS so it will finally be available on the Apple iBooks store. I plan to do that as soon as I am done writing MIRROR IN TIME. While I have been writing my second book, I have been planing in the back of my head to hire a third party to code out the book for the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other e-book readers. Coding out the first book took up a lot of my time and I just assume put that in someone else’s hands who has more experience than me at doing it.

Lossless Audio

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I really love music. All of my life music has played a big part in it. I remember at a very young age listening to vinyl records on my father’s Sony turntable home stereo system. I would listening to records for hours and hours. When CDs first came out I started buying them. To this day I still buy CDs and have a pretty large collection.

When MP3s started to make an appearance in the 90s they had one large advantage for the causal listener and one large disadvantage. The advantage being that file size of an MP3 file was is very small. You could store hundreds of MP3 encoded songs on one CD. This was huge and lead the way for music players like the Apple iPod.

The big disadvantage to MP3s for people like me was that since the audio was compressed to be a smaller file size you could hear the compression or the missing audio data when listening to an MP3. This drove me nuts!

I have friends that to this day swear up and down they can not tell the difference when listening to a song on a CD or when listening to the same exact song from an MP3 file. To me the differences have always stuck out like a sore thumb. Which at times I can’t even believe since I have been a rock drummer for so many years and I have to be experiencing some form of hearing loss by now.

So, because I can tell the difference between the lower quality audio as a result of an MP3 file and a CD I have just always bought CDs.

Very recently I have been educating myself on the virtues of the Free Lossless Audio Codec, or FLAC for short. Because FLAC is a lossless audio format it sounds just like my CDs sound. I can not tell the difference when I am listening to a FLAC audio file verses listening to the same song on CD. Everything I have educated myself about FLAC says that there really is no audio difference between the CD audio file and the FLAC audio file. The lossless audio codec was specifically designed for audio and the resulting file will drop down to at least 50% if not more of the original audio file from the CD.

So, why do I care about all this? Why don’t I just continue to listen to my CDs? Well, I do still listen to my CDs at home, but we now live in a world with lots of portable devices that were made for our connivance. I would like to take full advantage of my devices.

When Apple announced the iPhone 4S, I ordered one right away. At the same time I started researching FLAC audio files as a solution for my portable music listening pleasure. I found the following FLAC audio encoding guide and FLAC audio player ‘Golden Ear‘ for my iPhone. I also ordered a pair of really great headphones that I can’t say enough good things about right now. Sony Dynamic Stereo Headphones MDR-7506 Professional.

Based on the audio guide I found I started encoding my CDs right away. I received my headphones a few days later and then my iPhone 4S arrived. I purchased and loaded a copy of ‘Golden Ear’ on to my phone and transferred over a few songs to test out the application and my head phones. I was amazed! Every song sounded wonderful and crystal clear. The ‘Golden Ear’ audio player works a lot like iTunes for the iPhone. You have the quick access controls from the home screen as well as a play list of music to scroll through and choose from.

If you are really into audio quality like me, I can tell you I am so happy that I found this solution. I wish I had found it sooner. It would have saved me years of frustration.

What Steve Jobs Ment To Me

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Steve JobsIn 1997, I found myself, along with three very close friends of mine, huddled together looking at the glowing screen of an Apple Power Macintosh 5000 series computer in our high school graphic arts class. We where all very different from one another. Brought together because of our shared interests in computers and technology. That glowing computer screen held for me, the most earth shattering and amazing news I had ever read. Steve Jobs was returning to Apple as Interim CEO. The Co-founder of the greatest computer company to ever exist was back to lead the company he help start, and save it from what some where saying at the time was Apple Computer’s last days.

I was really very fortunate to have such great friends like this in high school. While other people our age had their respective hobbies, my three friends and I spent our free time at each others respective houses geeking out at the latest technology news or fiddling with some new piece of hardware we got our hands on.  I have very fond memories of that time.

Steve Jobs’s passing has really affecting me. Much more than I ever though it would. We all knew this day was coming. We all prepared ourselves mentally for it. I have thought long and hard about whether or not I would write a blog post about this. I almost didn’t write anything at all. I didn’t want to come off as too emotional. I thought I could just sit this one out quietly and wait for the moment to pass. But I can’t.

Steve JobsThe news sites have been showing images of people grieving for a man most of them have never met. (I, however was lucky enough to have been in the same room as him.) Flowers and tokens of remembrance have been left outside of Apple’s stores around the world and outside Steve’s home in California. All these people have had a chance to grieve in one way or another. I have not.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Apple inc. have directly or indirectly forever changed the world we live in and the technology we use. For me that impact is a personal one. I have always admired Apple and the people who founded the company. From the time I could afford to buy my first computer I have always used Apple products. Steve Jobs was able to take the very ugly world of technology and make it beautiful. He was able to make it easy to use, and user-friendly, and in a world mired with technological chaos, he was able to make it user-friendly for people.

The thought of Steve Jobs no longer over seeing the company that I have grown to love and admire. The thought of the world no longer being able to benefit from his in site and influences leaves me weeping.

I have lost a man I have admired and looked up to all of my life. The world has lost a unique soul that wont soon be replaced.

All I have wanted to do since Steve Jobs passed is to call up my three good friends from high school and take them all out to dinner. I want to have an evening where I can sit down with them and talk about technology and the future just like we used to do in high school. And hopefully be reassured that even though we have all lost an important person in our lives, the fait of the company he help start will live on as faithfully as it ever has.

Molly, The Office Pirate Bird

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Youseph with MollyI don’t have a glamorous day job by any means. (I am still waiting for PIXAR, Apple, or ILM to call me back.) What I do have at work are animals. This is the first place I have ever worked that allows you to bring in your own pets. Which is nice at times.

One of the pets we have is an office bird named Molly who usually hangs out in the Physical Therapy (PT) department most of the day. Sometimes when employees leave the department to assist people, Molly is left all alone and starts to squawk. When this happens I normally run to her rescue and let her hang out on my shoulder while I work while I pretend to be a pirate. (I have the beard for it don’t you think?) At least until someone from PT comes to get her.

I thought I would share some photos of Molly hanging out with me and destroying my desk. She is quite fond of my iPhone head phones.

A Very Simple Wiki

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I have almost always had a wiki in one form or another to help me keep track or remember things that I just don’t use everyday. It’s been a very useful tool for me, not only at home, but also in the work place.  TiddlyWiki stands out as one of my better wiki experience as I could just keep it on a thumb drive in my pocket.

My thoughts on keeping data in a manageable wiki have changed recently. This is due to a post I read at mnmlis titled: Store everything in text files.

The argument it is that text files are not only faster to open, but if you have a modern operating system the contents are completely searchable. On my Mac for example, I can be almost anywhere and press Command + Spacebar and I am presented with a search field. I can just start typing whatever it is I am looking for. If I am looking for my Corned beef recipe I just have to type “Corned beef” and my text file with my corned beef recipe comes right up.

I do keep all my text files in a directory called “Wiki” located in my Documents directory. I also try to keep the titles of my documents somewhat standard. For example, the title of my Corned beef recipe is “Recipe – Corned beef” so if I search for the name of my recipe only Corned beef will show up. If I search for just “Recipe” I get a nice list of every recipe I have saved on my computer.

The whole thing is a lot faster than any wiki I have ever used and has been working out just great for me so far.

Bob Iger Interview

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Bob Iger is the current CEO of The Walt Disney Company. This guy is someone who caught my attention early on when he started working as CEO for Disney because he gave an interview in TIME magazine, I believe ( I still have the interview clipping) where he talked about his normal work day and how he manage to get things done. Little tips and tricks he shared with the Magazine. Things like how to make sure he had enough time to just get work processed that was sitting on his desk. How to properly thank people and to use history as a key to master the future. I guess you could say he is someone I respect and find inspiration in.

The other day I saw this video posted on hulu. I have no Idea how long the video will be available, but I wanted to share with anyone who is interested.

Power Outage

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Last night around 9:30 when I should have been in bed, but was instead up watching a movie with Hannah on my Media Center, the power went out. We only pay some of the highest rates in the country for electricity so it stans to reason that it would go out ALL THE TIME. The two of us got up from the couch and lit some candles and got a flash light. Looking out the window I could see that the whole Juneau valley -with exception to the airport- was with out power.

Even without power I was still upbeat. As soon as the power went out I heard the beeping of my APC UPS that power my Qnap NAS going off every 15 seconds. “Is that thing going to be alright”. Hannah asked.

“Yeah. The NAS should power it’s self down in two minutes if power is not restored”.

“Oh, cool”. she said.

Qnap NAS

Sure enough at the two minute mark I heard the shut down signal of the Qnap Nas. Moments later it was off. Things like that make me smile. When things just work as they are supposed to.

After that Hannah and I crawled into bed and as most nights I proceeded to read to her. I no sooner got myself situated in bed when the power came back on.

Update from KINY News: Unknown cause spurs area wide outage

The city and borough suffered an area wide power outage last night.

Gail Wood of Alaska Electric Light and Power says the lights went out at about 9:45 with power restored around 11 p.m.

Wood says the outage location has been identified as the East Terminal where the lines transmit into the submarine cable that crosses Taku Inlet.  A crew will go to the area at first light to investigate.

Wood says the outage lasted about an hour and a half for those who had power restored last.

In the meantime, AEL&P is running off backup diesel generators, and power from the Annex Creek and Salmon Creek hydro projects.

Update 2 [12:32pm]: Utility crew can’t pinpoint cause of area wide power outage

The city and borough suffered an area wide power outage last night.

Gail Wood of Alaska Electric Light and Power says the lights went out at about 9:45 with power restored around 11 p.m.

Wood says the outage location has been identified as the East Terminal where the lines transmit into the submarine cable that crosses Taku Inlet.

A crew went to  the area this morning  to investigate, but could not locate the cause of the problem.

AEL&P  rann the system with backup diesel generators, and power from the Annex Creek and Salmon Creek hydro projects following the problem.  The system was scheduled to be back on full hydro by mid-day today, according to Wood.

She says the outage lasted about an hour and a half for those who had power restored last

Mac Mini Media Center Project (Part 4)

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One big reason behind wanting to do this media center project was to reduce clutter. Having nearly five hundred DVDs take up a bit of space. Since I was going to be encoding all my DVD movies and TV shows and storing them digitally; what was I going to do with all the original DVD disks? I wanted to keep them. I knew that much. I just needed to come up with a better way to store them. I finally settled on a high capacity DVD Album.

DVD ORGANIZATION.

Thanks to some help from a friend I was pointed to Meritline.com. An online store where I could purchase a cheap 520 Capacity DVD Album. The DVD Album looked sturdy, so I ordered two of them. A lot of the DVDs I owned where spechal additions that contained two disks. I also know that my original count was off as to how many DVDs I owned because of the TV shows I had collected. I figured two of the 520 capacity DVD albums could hold 1040 DVDs. I not only would have enough from for my existing DVDs, but I would have plenty of room for growth in the future.

The DVD albums shipped and arrived in Juneau in less than a week. Once they got here I proceeded to take the pile of DVDs I had already encoded and start inserting them into the DVD album. When I was done I had freed up a lot of space that the DVDs where taking up and I did not hesitate to throw out the DVD cases they where in. I bought these DVDs for the movies on them and not for the cases they came in.

I have yet to quite fill up one whole album with DVDs. I am close though. I still have plenty of movies and TV shows to encode. When The first case is full I plan to store it under my bed.

DIGITAL FILE ORGANIZATION

As I encode movies on my Mac Mini I transfer them over to my Qnap Nas. I set up an alphabetical file structor inside two main categories (‘Movies’ and ‘TV Shows’) to save my encoded movies in.

Sometimes a movie that is encoded with Handbrake needs to be renamed. For whatever reason the file name is often wrong. It is important to make sure you name the encoded movie correctly because it will cut down on time you might have to spend on finding the correct movie meta data for which ever media center software you end up using.

(I will be talking more about media center software in a future post)

I would say that since I started this project I have encoded a little less than half the movie I own. This is a long process, but I can already see how it is going to pay off when I am done.

To Be Continued…

Mac Mini Media Center Project (Part 3)

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After I filled up my Mac Mini’s hard drive with my encoded videos from my DVD collection there was not much more I could do till I ordered the Qnap NAS. This would be the most expensive peace of my Media Center setup.

Qnap NAS

After reading about NAS solutions online and talking about it with friends who have experience with such devices I proceded to order a four bay Qnap NAS TS 459 Pro+ Turbo NAS with five, 2 Terabyte Western Digital Caviar Black hard drives. The spare hard drive is incase one of the other harddrives fail.

I ordered both the Qnap NAS and the Western Digital hardrives from Newegg. I have had good experiences ordering products from them in the past and this was no different.

Both the hardrives and the Qnap arrived well packaged on a Friday. It was Martin Luther King weekend and I had all three days to work on this project.

The first thing I did was head to a local Electronics store and picked up this APC Battery Backup, and this Apple Airport Wireless Extreme Base Station. I spent a lot of money on this equipment and I don’t trust it to Juneau’s dirty electricity.

From unboxing everything to final setup only took me an hour. Which was great! I think it speaks volumes on how easy setting up a Qnap NAS. It also left me with a three day weekend to enjoy.

Following the easy to read directions for the Qnap, I took out four of my five harddrives totaling 8 Terabytes worth of storage and inserted them into the Qnap Unit.  I plugged in my APC Battery backup and plugged the Qnap and the Apple Airport into it, then plugged an ethernet cable from the Qnap to the Airport and turned it all on. By default the Qnap wanted to set up it’s self as a RAID 5. The unit supports other RAID options, but I chose to go with it’s suggested default of RAID 5. It took the Qnap maybe twenty minutes to partiton the harddrives and set its self up as a Raid 5 server.

RAID 5 IN A NUT SHELL

RAID 5 means is that event hough I loaded up 8 Terabytes of harddrive storage, I would have 6 Terabytes of usable storage. If I have understood what I have read the data I store on the Qnap is more or less available on two of the harddrives at any one time. The point of this is that one harddrive of the four can fail and I wont necessarily lose any data. Should that happen I would just follow the easy to read directions it came with regarding how to replace the failed hard drive. The Qnap system will rebuild it’s self and all will be right in the world again.

YOU STILL NEED TO DO BACKUPS

Let me stress to anyone who does a project like this or owns a computer in general, please back up your data. I still do backups. Things I keep on the Qnap that I can’t afford to lose, things like photos, home videos, and documents I still back up off of the Qnap on to another hard drive monthly.

With the Qnap up and running I first went into the settings and enabled Time Machine backups. Again, this was a simple process that only took a couple of minutes. Before long every computer in my house (that would be 5) where backing up wirelessly to the Qnap Nas.

Next I went into the settings enabled APC Protection. Should my house lose power for longer then to minutes the Qnap Nas which would be running off the APC battery at this point would shut down after 2 minutes if the power is not restored.

Finally I setup a shares and users accounts on the Qnap NAS. This allows me to store the encoded movies I had on the Mac Mini on the Qnap. After transferring over the movies I was able to start encoding more of them again.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE QNAP NAS

At the time of this post I have had the Qnap Nas for a little over three weeks now with no real complaints. I was able to set the whole thing up in under an hour and it’s been very easy to use. I do recommend the Qnap, but also know I have no bases for compression. This is the first NAS I have ever setup.

The Qnap is capable of doing much more then it currently is. I really want to explore the tons of options it has. I do need to compete this first task before I start playing with it more. I have to finish encoding my DVDs first, then I will go back and see what other Qnap options I might like to play with.

I have discovered that the Qnap and iPhoto 11 do not get along well togetherl. This is because of the format of the hardrives in the Qnap. iPhoto 11 requires HFS+ formatted hardrives to run correctly. Qnap does not support that format (yet). My workaround for this has been to use a separate external hardrive for iPhoto 11 which I also backup. I could keep all the photos and iPhoto 11 on my main computer’s harddrive, but I have so many photos  that the space it requires is very large for me. At this point it just makes sense to keep it on a separate external drive.

In my next post I am going to be talking a little bit about file and media organization.

To Be Continued…