Social Media: A Crash Course — Another Fine Class by Tom and Dave!
Are you curious about how to use online social media to your advantage? We are covering a whole slew of “keeping in touch” methods in this course: having a web site, surfing the web, passwords and online safety, email and etiquette, newsletters, instant messaging, blogs, podcasts, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter - there’s so much, and we are doing our best to cover it all. We will let you know what it can (and can not) do for you, and answer your questions.
The course is split over two evenings next week, from 6 to 9:30PM, on Wednesday the 13th and Thursday the 14th. They are being held at the Routhier Community Center, at 172 Guigues Ave.
The price for this class will be $150, taxes included.
Please contact me directly to register!
Mac Classes coming up: Intro to Mac and Beyond the Basics, January 10th and 17th!
Tom and I are offering 2 more Mac classes this month: the first is an updated version of our “Intro to Mac” class, and due to demand we have added a more advance one we are calling “Beyond the Basics”.
The introductory level class has been revised since we last offered it, we have updated some of the content so we could focus more on the Finder and System Preferences. We have also added a section on backups, and how to do them easily with Time Machine. Yes, we’ll talk about restoring files too!
Our second course is oriented to staying in touch: we will be teaching you how to use the Mac OS X Address Book, do an audio or video chat with iChat and Skype, and having an in depth look at Mail. I know that we spend so much time with email that we want to make sure everyone is very comfortable with it. What else? Safari, the iPhone and iPod Touch, and some discussion on troubleshooting.
Each course has an hour at the end where will will address questions brought up in the class.
Interested? To register and reserve a space, you can either call me at 613-262-4705 or email classes@darnermedia.ca.
More details on the dates: Saturday afternoons on January 10th and 17th, location: the Routhier Community Center or pricing: $79 +GST, or prepay-for-both and get a 25% discount, can be found on the Darner Media page for the classes.
p.s. we are still following leads on a projector.. so if you know where we can rent/borrow one please let us know!
Bringing up your Mac’s Color Picker anywhere!
I was wandering through Smoking Apples earlier today, and ran across their article: Deconstructing the Mac OS X Color Picker. Now, honestly, I do not use it very often.. but it is a very useful tool to keep track of a few favorite colors, and an easy way to pickup new colors from something else on your screen.
They also mention a few plugins, one of which I am going to grab ASAP: a hexadecimal color picker, which you can use to get color values for use in your web pages.
Last, and not least, is the super simple way to open the picker from anywhere! Make a new script in your Script Editor and type in ‘choose color’ and save the script as an application. When you run it up comes the color picker! Feeling too lazy to open Script Editor? The folks at Smoking Apples made the script and put a nice icon on it already. It’s in their article.
Thanks guys!
Archiving selected emails to a single file.
Posted by: dAVE in General, Mac OS X, Random Observations on June 13th, 2008
I needed to gather about 50 emails into a single file so I could sift through them and pull out a variety of information. Going through them one at a time in Mail was going to take longer than I wanted, or was willing to do at once, so I decided to save them to a single file so I could do it later.
It turns out to be very simple: you select the relevant emails, in my case the result of a search, and do a “Save As..”. At this point you have a choice of how to save them, and I chose the default “Rich text Format”. I ended up with one file with all 58 emails in it.
Now I can open it in TextEdit and delete the parts I don’t want.
Open a pile of links in browser tabs, all at once!
One of things I occasionally do at work is to grab every url for a client’s domains/sites and open them up to eyeball them and see if anything obvious needs fixing.
First I go and copy a list of all the active domains, and clean it up with a “search and replace” script. I end up with a list of url’s, one per line.
After that I copy it all and go over to the Terminal and run a nice little script which I call “tab”. My current default browser then starts sprouting tabs galore.
Here’s the script:
#!/bin/bash
pbpaste | tr "\r" "\n" | xargs -n 1 open
How does it work?
pbpaste provides the contents of the clipboard to the command line (see pbcopy to put things into the clipboard). tr translates characters, in this case from one kind of line end (or return character) to another. An issue with pbcopy from what I can tell! Then the cleaned up clipboard gets pushed to xargs which take the command -n 1 open and builds one open per line of data being fed to it. Yes, xargs is very cool. The open command will then “open the URL in the default browser”.
I am sure this can all be done in Applescript or Automator.. but typing tab and return on the command line is the fastest and simplest for me!
If you want to use the script and are not sure how to take the shell code above and turn it into an actual script.. let me know and i’ll provide instructions (gee, another blog post!).
How to run the same application more than once!
I spotted this trick on macosxhints.com: An easy way to run multiple instances of any program
Apple’s Developer Resources has a copy of the man page for open and explains it like this:
-n Open a new instance of the application(s) even if one is already running.
So what can you do with it, and why?
I had no real use for it until this morning when I wanted to test the CPU load on Safari of a web site, without having to close all my windows and their tabs. So I fired up the terminal and did;
open -n /Applications/Safari.app
… and then there were two Safari icons in my Dock!
The MacOSXHints article warns that there is some danger having multiple copies of an application open, as they will all be trying to read/write to shared files like preferences.
Let me know if you have any cool uses for it!
The perils of VOIP and cluelessness!
Posted by: dAVE in Rant!, Tech. Support on March 31st, 2008
OK, so it’s really not VOIP’s fault.. here’s my clueless CSR story of the day:
My mom called to let me know that everything was fine, and that they would be offline until they come back from their home-away-from-home in Florida. What happened? Well, it turns out that when your phone is VOIP and you call Comcast (their local cableco) and tell them to disable the internet in a week, they just hear “disconnect”. The call dropped about 15 seconds later.
After a day of calling on their cell phone and trying to get the service reinstated *for just one week*, and not getting anywhere they gave up.
fun, eh?
Fingerpainting recipe..
I spotted a nice and simple recipe for fingerpaint linked off of swissmiss’s site.. but it contains food coloring, which I would prefer to avoid, seeing as my son is allergic to it.
Alternatives anyone?