Author: jamesclay

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You’re starting to annoy me…

My Canon MP600r is starting to annoy me.

Every time I try to print from my iMac, the printer can not be found on the wireless network.

If I power cycle the printer, it “magically” appears and I can print!

The same more often then not for scanning.

Now I have no real idea what the problem is, whether it is a wireless, printer or some other issue.

I do need to do some further testing. Things I may do including connecting the printer by wire to a wireless WET54G and see if it is a printer issue.

If it is a wireless issue I may connect the printer direct to the iMac by USB and share it across the network.

Canon MP600r

More soon…

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Evernoted

I have been using Evernote for a while now.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Now what I like about Evernote, is not only can you use it online from any web browser, they also have clients for OS X and Windows. If you have a Tablet PC you can even use your “Pen” to make notes too.

They also have a Windows Mobile client and one should also be available for the iPhone (and so the iPod touch) soon.

There is this video which helps explain things a little better.

Evernote was until yesterday an invite only site, it is now in public beta so anyone can now sign up.

Find out more.

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“Why Kyte will kill Qik!”

Robert Scoble on TechCrunch has written a well detailed and informative article on why he reckons that Kyte.tv will win over other services such as Qik in the mobile phone streaming live video arena.

Anyway, back to the fight between Kyte, Qik, and Flixwagon over your cell phone video experience. Last year I was Kyte’s top user too. Why did I switch to Qik? Because I saw that cell phone video would let me extend my brand into places no other video network was letting me get to. I was the only one doing cell phone videos from the World Economic Forum, for instance, something that got me a lot of attention and followers. I told Kyte’s CEO, Daniel Graf, tons of times over the past seven months to get video streaming into his product. At first he resisted, thinking it wasn’t that big a deal, but on Friday I finally tested it out on my cell phone and was impressed enough to give Kyte a second look.

Robert Scoble is one of the top (if not the top) streaming mobile phone video users and has done some really interesting stuff at events all over the world.

“Why Kyte will kill Qik!”

Article is certainly interesting and well worth reading.

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iPhone SDK

iPhone

Took the time (and the bandwidth) yesterday to download the iPhone SDK (eighth beta), all 1.25GB of it.

The eighth beta version of the iPhone SDK includes Xcode IDE, iPhone Simulator with Open GL ES support, Interface Builder, Instruments, frameworks and samples, compilers, and Shark analysis tool.

I have not installed it yet, in the main as I am still running Tiger on my iMac, so I need to connect up an external drive with Leopard on it.

Download it.

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You’re noisy

So here I am moving photographs from my iMac to my MacBook Pro over the wireless network, and can you believe the noise the MacBook Pro is making?

It’s horrendous!

I am not doing anything else on the MBP, all it is doing is importing photographs via iPhoto. I am using the iMac, but it’s dead quiet in comparison.

Ah well, good thing I am not doing any audio recordings!

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Wordle – a new way to look at tags

If you look to the left of this blog post you will see my tag cloud, which is basically a list, with the “importance” of tags (by number of times used) illustrated by the size of the font.

Wordle does something similar but looks very different.

Wordle - a new way to look at tags

Now unlike the tags on the left, the sizes here are not based on my blog, but some other indicator on the web; this is why windows is so large and molenet is so small compared to my own tag cloud.

However Wordle can use your del.icio.us tags, so the size of the tags is relevant to the number of bookmarks you have saved and the tags you have used.

Wordle - a new way to look at tags

It’s all just a bit of fun really, it really needs to be able to use other sites other than del.icio.us and the words need to be links.

Create your own here. Thanks to Helen.

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Fast Firefox 3

I have been using Firefox 3 for a while now and I much prefer it over Firefox 2. It’s much faster and more stable than Firefox 2.

Overall well worth upgrading.

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“Facebook a valid educational tool”

Is your institution using Facebook?

According to a report, if you’re not then you could be missing out.

The Guardian reports:

Teachers and lecturers are getting the lowdown on how to use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo in an educational way.

Most schools and colleges in the UK block access to the websites but they are missing out on their potential for education, a government-funded guide says.

Have a look at the full report.

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Screencasting on your Mac

I have been looking at screencasting software for the Mac.

One of the original applications for this kind of activity is Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro X.

Snapz Pro X allows you to effortlessly record anything on your screen, saving it as a QuickTime movie or screenshot that can be emailed, put up on the web, or passed around however you want.

Snapz Pro X works for me and I do use it quite a bit.

Snapz Pro X

ScreenFlow is pretty good too, but Leopard only. It looks fantastic and unlike Snapz Pro X the resulting capture can be edited, annotated much more easily.

ScreenFlow is a complete workflow for creating screencasts: powerful enough to capture your desktop, video camera, microphone & computer audio at the same time.

Screenflow

IShowU is suppose to be very good. I did give it a go and seemed pretty easy to use.

Need to show something to someone? iShowU is your answer! iShowU is designed to record anything on your screen, instantly — both audio, and video!

I wasn’t too impressed with the results of capturing video, ScreenFlow and Snapz Pro X seeme better at that. However IShowU does have a range of capture option choices depending on what you want to show the video on.

IShowU

CamTwist can be used too, though the focus here is on web based video chat type video, so not something for high quality video or presentations. However for the web (ie via something like Ustream) it is ideal.

CamTwist is a software package that lets you add special effects to your video chats. It’s also possible to stream your desktop and still images.

CamTwist

Overall there are many choices in screencasting on the Mac and of course with Parallels you can also now screencast Windows using the same software.

Personally I like Snapz Pro X, but if I was running Leopard on my iMac I think I would be using ScreenFlow.

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Borderless Printing

Printing from Indesign CS2 using my Canon MP600R can be fraught with difficulties if I want to use borderless printing.

Even if I think everything is fine, the print which pops out of my printer has a white border… another (expensive) sheet of Canon’s Photo Paper Pro heads for the bin!

Part of the problem is the InDesign print window, which can be confusing and doesn’t always pass on what you ask to the printer.

Printing

The other part is that the Canon Mac printer driver won’t let you do borderless printing unless you are using one of their special papers.

As a result you can change the paper to borderless A4…

As a result you can change the paper to borderless A4…

But as you haven’t changed the paper in the Quality & Media of the print setup, the paper will default back to non-borderless A4 as you can’t use borderless printing with Plain Paper!

But as you haven’t changed the paper in the Quality & Media of the print setup, the paper will default back to non-borderless A4 as you can’t use borderless printing with Plain Paper!

Even if you now change the media to some posh (and expensive) Canon paper and print (what you think is borderless), your printout will still come out with white borders.

The key is to change the paper quality before you select the paper type.

Don’t mind me, I just need to go out and buy some more expensive paper…