One for the Kids – Elf Yourself

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Someone told me about this really goofy website called ElfYourself.com. It has four little elf bodies and you upload the faces of you and three pals and then you end up doing a very funny little elf dance. My kids love it and I must admit … so do I.
How to geek up your Elf.
Use a screencasting capture program (I used iShowU) to capture the whole thing into a Quicktime movie. You can then drop it in iMove or FinalCut for some quick titles and you are off to the races. I did this and now our family elf dancing routine is going on the annual Christmas DVD.

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Quicksilver Doomed!?

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Today lifehacker ran an exclusive interview with Quicksilver developer Nicholas Jitkoff in which Jitkoff essentially says he is moving on and leaving Quicksilver to linger.
Jitkoff: I’m inclined to encourage users to move over to the more stable and well supported alternatives like LaunchBar. Right now QS 54 (ed: the current build) accomplishes everything that I really need, the problem is stability, which for some reason most people seem to be ignoring.
Lifehacker: Right, in the end stability is what matters most. I have a MacBook Pro that—until your recent updates—crashed QS on a very regular basis, which was always heartbreaking. But I’ve seen major stability improvements since the updates, which has been fantastic.
Jitkoff: Basically, that branch is condemned to a long slow death. I just don’t know if the experimental one will ever be up to snuff. Hence the recommendation of third party apps.
Blink.
Quicksilver’s developer just told me to download Launchbar. The apocalypse has arrived.
I’ve noticed stability problems with Quicksilver since Leopard arrived. Primarily, it has shut down on me a few times requiring me to restart it. I’ve also helped a few friends troubleshoot some general Quicksilver wonkiness. While my initial reaction is that you’ll have to pry Quicksilver out of my cold dead hand, you never know. Jitkoff also implied that he has something else up his sleeve and, since QuickSilver is now open source, some enterprising programmer may just take it to the next level. Time will tell. For the meantime anyway, I’m sticking with it. There is just way too much functionality to give this application up.
You can read the entire interview right here.

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Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History

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I recently discovered a great podcast by Dan Carlin called “Hardcore History” Dan does a great job of drawing lines and connections that never occurred to me. For instance, in one show he talks about the similarities between Alexander the Great and Hitler. Dan doesn’t limit himself to any particular period and is full of insight. If you are a history junkie, this one is worth checking out.

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Yojimbo 1.5 Released

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Today BareBones released Yojimbo version 1.5. The new version adds several useful features including image syncing. The developers explain, however, “Please do not try to replace iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom with Yojimbo: You’ll make us cry.”
They also have improved searching performance. This was a big problem for me before and I’m glad this problem got some love.
Another nice addition is the ability to search by tag. Gone are the days where I have to make a smart folder just to find records related to a single tag.
There are loads of improvements and new features which you can read about here. You can download Yojimbo here.
My Yojimbo database was once huge with lots of PDF files. I’ve thinned it down quite a bit as a result of my dissatisfaction with its search (it was very slow getting rolling) and the way it would give my dotMac sync fits. I’ve also gotten a bit smarter about where I keep things. Now that I’m using it more for text and data and less for large file synchronization, it seems to behave much better. I am looking forward to trying out these new features and maybe adding a bit more weight back into my Yojimbo database.

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Day of the Ninja

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According to my Google Geek Holidays, December 5 is the official “Day of the Ninja“. Indeed there appears to be a grass roots effort at making this official. Now I’m all about holidays but not sure exactly how much traction this effort is going to get. Nevertheless, if you are in the mood to wear all black to work, today is the day. I would, however, recommend leaving the ninja sword at home. Razor sharp swords at the workplace are usually a bad idea.

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The Brotherhood of Mac

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So tomorrow I’m starting a big case and I want to give a print out of my Keynote to the judge with space on the side for him to take notes. It is never a bad idea to have the guy wearing the black robe go home with my Keynote in his briefcase while the other guy creates funny adjectives for me like “slick” and “fancy”.
Anyway, I put a PDF version of the Keynote on a thumb drive and cruised into the nearest Kinkos to have them run it on their gazillion dollar color machine. After all that work, it needs to look pretty. The only problem was the Kinkos guy could not get it to print. He was surrounded with customers and invited me “behind the counter” to try and figure it out myself. For some reason the Kinkos machine was hanging up in the middle of the print job. They poor guy was swamped and he really didn’t have time to help me. It is early December at Kinkos and that means the “Christmas Letter Gang” is in full swing. You know those Christmas letters, right? The one that explains about Uncle Earl’s Lumbago and how Linus finally won the cow chip throwing contest? (Yes, there is such a thing as cow chip throwing.)
Well, I really need to win tomorrow so I told him I’d grab my laptop out of the car and re-create the PDF to see if that was the issue. He then shrugged at me . . . probably secretly hoping I just wouldn’t come back.
Anyway, I went to the car and returned with my trusty Mac. That was when things changed for the better.
The Kinko’s guy, demonstrating an instinctual Mac geekiness, popped his head out of the crowd of irate Yuletiders like a lemur on the first night of mating season. Suddenly the Christmas letters weren’t so important. Turns out the Kinkos guy was part of “The Brotherhood.” He explained he is a proud owner of a G5 and card carrying member of the Brotherhood of Mac.
He brushed aside the Lumbago gang like so much rubbish and came straight over to bask in the glory that is my MacBook Pro. We reset the PDF and I gave him a quick spin on OmniFocus and then we went back to the big Kinkos machine. Suddenly he had all the time in the world for me.
Turns out the problem was Kinkos’ monster printer but we figured it out and in no time I had some beautiful color copies of my Keynote and a new MacGeek friend.
Never underestimate the Power of the Brotherhood.

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OmniGraffle Pro 5 beta 1 – Initial Impressions

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The march of the Leopard only applications has begun. The Omni Group just released beta 1 of Omnigraffle 5. I’ve reviewed OmniGraffle already and explained how darn useful this application is. The new version takes advantage of Leopard with many new features.
I’ve been using it a few hours this morning making some diagrams for one of my cases and so far it is “thumbs up.” This is a major upgrade and I’m too early in the process to really understand them all but some initial thoughts are as follows:
* The new stencil viewer is an excellent upgrade.
* The overall improvements have made the process of drawing and creating both easier and more intuitive.
* The new bezier system is a definite improvement.
* The integration with OmniOutliner seems easier with drag and drop.
I’m looking forward to getting to know this beta a bit better. In the meantime you can download a copy for yourself from Omni. Pricing and availability of the final build has yet to be announced.

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Holy Crackers! More Mac Software on Sale

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Isn’t December the month you are supposed to be buying gifts for family and friends? The Mac development community is sorely tempting me with a series of good promotions.

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MacSantaDeals.com


This is a daily list of programs with 20% off. They then linger at 10% off until Christmas. Today they have several interesting applications on sale. I keep looking at SpamSeive. Hmmm.

GiveGoodFood2YourMac


This is a group of excellent European developers. You can put together your own bundle of software including such excellent programs as Pixelmator, CSS Edit, and RapidWeaver. You get 30% off if you buy three titles and it scales up to as much as 70% if you buy ten.

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