Schinckel.net

MyMac.com: Macspiration 22 - Four More Hidden Preview Tricks

1. Change the File Format. Yep, knew this one.
2. Scan an image directly into Preview. Excellent. That’s one more reason not to have to load up Photoshop, just to scan an image!
3. Take a Screenshot. Harder than ⌘$ (Cmd-Shift-4) for Window/Selection (Space Bar to toggle mode), or ⌘# (Cmd-Shift-3) for Screenshot. Can do timed screen, but generally don’t need this with ⌘#.
4. Slideshow. Didn’t know it specifically, but I did know you can drag multiple documents to Preview at once and cycle through them.

So, one out of four ain’t too bad!

…via The Tao of Mac - Battlestar Galactica (Image cropped to fit site width).

I set up a ‘fake’ domain to use as testing, I basically made up a word, Shotza, to use. So, I could use it as http://shotza/ in a podcast - it would remind me that it wasn’t really supposed to point to my computer, just as a temporary thing. Anyway, when online tonight, I tried it from within iTunes. It wasn’t working. So I tried it in Firefox. http://shotza/ worked fine, so I tried http://shotza/rn/ Imagine my surprise when I get transferred to the page: http://www.ilovedmypet.com/view.asp?id=11753&preview;=yes&warned;=yes How the hell does my browser get hijacked like this? I’ve never turned on a setting that allows for host names to be used to try and find out what I meant! Is this a Firefox setting somewhere? It doesn’t seem to happen in Safari…I wonder if it could be a hard-coded thing in FireFox? Update: It seems to have something to do with Google, as this site is the first hit for a search for Shotza. Hmm, how do I turn that off?

I’m involved in a trial program using Microsoft Scholaris, an online educational management and teaching tool. There are some issues I’ve come across as I work on it, and I’ll keep a bit of a record of them as part of this blog.

• The first, most obvious one is that it doesn’t work correctly on a standards compliant browser. You guessed it, it only works well on Internet Explorer, and only on a PC. IE mac is pretty ordinary anyway, btu Safari and Firefox both have some serious display issues. It’s almost like it’s been deliberately coded to not work properly.
• econdly, I’d like tools to work with tables better. HTML is notoriously hard to work with tables under. Surely a WYSIWYG editor that can do tables acceptably well isn’t that hard to include.
• Third: I don’t want the students to be able to enter styled text unless I deem that it is necessary. I am interested in content, not style.
• Finally, it takes so damn long to set up one assessment task. To do one questions, where the students have to enter five words, and five descriptions (Electrical Safety/First Aid, DRABC), it has taken me about 10 minutes to set up, and it still isn’t looking right. When I choose not to have a line break, don’t keep on inserting one!

I would love some software like this, that makes it easy to set up online tests and the like, but at this stage, Scholaris isn’t easy. I don’t know who Microsoft bought Scholaris from, but I think they should have waited a bit longer before doing so.

I teach _AutoDesk Inventor _at school, and I love using it. I have come across what I deem to be a major issue. I work from a USB Drive, for a couple of reasons - the main one of them is that most machines I work at are shared machines, and the second (the reason I cannot just work from the network storage) I sometimes take work home. Finally, the USB device seems somewhat faster to access than my network drive. However, my USB Drive doesn’t always mount as the same volume letter. On most machines, it mounts as E:\, however, on the machine I am on now (a different pool), it mounts as J:\. Normally, this doesn’t matter, as files tend not to refer to one another. What’s not cool is when these locations are hard coded into a Project file. And moving machines means I need to go through and change each location. And then repeat this when I go back to the original computer.

One of the most common issues we see on the Blogsome Forums is when a user tries to post an article that has non-latin characters in the title. I found I had done this, with a recent post without realising this. What I propose is a change to the Blogsome code that either just strips out the extended characters, or replaces them by similar characters. It could convert any of the characters: à áâãäå into a, for instance, and æ into ae. For others, it could either convert ² into 2 or squared. I’m guessig a simple function could be rolled to do this, or even found out there already on the Internet.

Occasionally, the ABC have items on their programs to which they don’t have the copyright for, and as such they cannot post an MP3 of the program, but will do a Real Audio stream. Meaning you have to use Real Audio to listen to it, and you cannot archive it. Or so it seems. Now, I refuse to use Real Audio: it’s nothing to do with commercial software or anything like that (there is after all a free version), but I just don’t like streaming. I find that on dialup it just doesn’t work well. And, the time I spend at the computer I am generally reading, so listening to anything other than music just doesn’t work well. I much rather listen to Podcasts while commuting. So, how do you get an item into your iTunes Podcast library? You’ll need mplayer. You can find it at the MPlayerOSX Website. Install it, and then add the following to your ~/.profile:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14

    function realdump
    {
        if test -f $1 ; then
            realdump `cat $1` 
        else
            export temp=${1/#*\//}
            export filename=${temp/.*/.wav}
            ~/bin/mplayer -cache 128 -vc dummy -vo null -ao pcm -aofile $filename $1
        fi
        if test $# -gt 1 ; then
        shift
        realdump $*
        fi
    }

You’ll also need something to encode in either MP3, or AAC format. faac is great for the latter, LAME for the former. I use faac, and have the following in my ~/.profile:

1
2
3
4

    function faac_podcast
    {
        faac -b 64 -w $1
    }

You’ll want something similar if you use LAME. The ABC has a placeholder MP3 file, that is usually just a short blurb saying they don’t have the ability to put the program up as an MP3. Download this, and then go to the website of the program in question. Find the Real Audio stream, and download the .ram file. Open this in a text editor, and use the Terminal to download the stream using: $ realdump rtsp://www.server.net/path/to/file.ra Then use the following command to encode the file: $ faac_podcast filename.wav This may take some time - although on my computer it was a bit faster than the previous step. In iTunes, ask the Finder to reveal the placeholder file (select it, then use ⌘R, or File - Show Song File). Give the replacement file exactly the same name, except keep the right extension, and copy this file to the same location. If they are the same file format, it will overwrite the placeholder, and you are finished. If not, you need to delete the placeholder file, but not the library entry. Moving the file is not enough, you must delete it! Then, to connect the entry to the replacement file, use ⌘I (Get Info…) and choose to select the file. Choose the replacement file. You can use iTunes to import and convert the file, but for me this was much slower. It requires copying the full WAV file to the library (slow, since mine is on a server), and then converting it to MP3/AAC (again, slow, as it needs to get all of the data back from the server, and then send the new stuff there).

I use a “Rating is no stars” playlist, but it seems to pick up the tracks rated 1-19 as well. I’m not surprised, in the light of my recent article on the relative play counts of various rated tracks.

OmniNerd - Articles: Extended iTunes Rating

iTunes has the ability to store ratings of a finer gradient than just the number of stars. Higher rated tracks should be played more, but is this always the case? I needed to know the answer to this.

This is the long-awaited article I wrote for OmniNerd, expanding on the results I obtained in my ratings research and experiment using iTunes. Well worth the read, if I do say so myself!

My biggest hate about iTunes is that if the download of a Podcast fails, it needs to restart the whole download, rather than just resume. This really sucks if you are 21Mb into a 22.5Mb download. Using the technique illustrated in Adding a Podcast to a Pre-Existing Subscription, it’s possible to download the files in another program, such as wget, which can handle resumes. It also tends not to drop out as much as iTunes does when the network is congested. Which it is automatically when three downloads are concurrently occurring. There are some changes that need to be made to the process, but these are really just simplifications. You need to know the URL of the file you want to get, which can be obtained using the following AppleScript:

1
2
3

    tell application "iTunes"
        set the clipboard to address of item 1 of selection
    end tell

Then, set up your http server, and create the same directory structure from your server root. Go to the relevant directory, and download the files you want to grab. Finally, go offline, and point the domain(s) at your own computer. Go back into iTunes, and use the GET button to grab the files from your own ‘server’. Don’t use the Update Podcasts button, or an error may occur. This removes the need to recreate the XML file, which is the most labour intensive part of the process illustrated in the previous post. It works a treat.