HBO’s Rome – My Latest Fixation

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I don’t watch a lot of television but once in awhile something grabs me. About 3 months ago I started renting the DVDs for HBO’s Rome from my local Blockbuster. I finished the last one recently. Rome is, essentially, a 20 hour miniseries following the rise and assassination of Caesar and the following power plays that led to the rise of Augustus. This is not a show to watch with kids or the faint of heart. There is blood, gore, nudity and sex. More than once, my wife asked me, “exactly what kind of movies are you renting Dave?”
I thought the acting was very good. Back in school I read the writings of Cicero and had a great deal of respect for him. The actor did such a good job of portraying him in a negative light that I’m going to have to re-read Cicero again. The production not only related the doings of great men but also the common people of the age. The DVDs have a feature where a historian will occasionally pop in a little text blurb to explain some historical fact related to the story that I found very interesting and educational.
Anyway, if you are comfortable with the very adult themes and content, you may want to give it a try.

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MacSparky is No Longer Dead to Google

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I’ve posted before, along with pestering friends and fellow geeks, with my big MacSparky problem since moving it to its own server. Specifically, I was dead to Google (and every other search engine). I knew this must be a simple problem but it was a bit disheartening to see that little box in my web stats that shows nobody was stumbling upon my ramblings with a search engine. The good news was that I still have a pretty good following of people that carry my feed and the numbers were still pretty acceptable. Maybe that is why it took me so long to get to the root of it.
Regardless, through a friend I talked to someone at Google and they were baffled. I wrote several emails to my hosting provider, Dreamhost, to which they very nicely told me it may just because my content isn’t that good. Well, THAT most certainly could not be the problem.
Last night I had some time on my hands and decided I was going to go through every line of every menu on my Wordpress settings and sure enough, buried deep inside, there was a check box called “Privacy” with a big ugly check next to it. I know I never set that but, alas, there it was. I unchecked it and this morning I find that MacSparky.com is no longer one great big black hole in the internet and people are actually finding me again. So there you have it, operator error at the root of my problems . . . again.

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MenuBar Apps – Jumpcut

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I’m going to do a series of posts on some of my favorite menubar applications. I thought I’d start with Jumpcut. Jumpcut is an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.
In addition to pulling your text snippets off the menubar, it also can pop them up inside your document with a bezel activated by CNTRL-Option-V.
This app is really helpful when writing just about anything and free! Check it out.

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Mac 101

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I’ve been helping a switcher friend get up to speed on the Mac. One resource I gave him was TUAW’s Mac 101 series. He reports these entries have been really helpful to him so I thought I’d share it here. Head on over to Mac 101 and I guarantee you’ll learn a thing or two.

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Review – FileChute

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If you would like to listen to this review, I recorded and published is as part of the MacReviewCast #135.
Like a lot of computer users I am constantly sending files around. It is easy enough with small files but what happens when the files get too big for an email. I send family movies to relatives in London and the Philippines. I send Keynote Quicktime movies to clients and judges. I even send the occasional AIF file to my good friend Tim at the Macreviewcast.
Well, up until recently I always did this through Pando or some other ubiquitous online service that agreed to be my middle man in large file transfers. This works well enough but if the file sizes get too large, those options start costing money. Furthermore, it always requires the participation of the other side. Sure I can tell my brother-in-law in London to get a Pando account, but can I really say that to a client or judge?
Well once again the excellent Mac developer community has come to the rescue. Yellow Mug Software’s $17.95 FileChute does the trick. This little application puts a box on your screen with a … well … chute. You then drag any file or group of files you want into the chute and the application prompts you to send it as-is or archived in dmg, zip, or tar formats. You can password the archive (or not) and then FileChute uploads it to your internet location of choice.

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I’ve got a .mac account and it works flawlessly. I also uploaded some files to the MacSparky server space and it works just as well. The first time you do this you need to tell FileChute where to send your file but after that there is no more fiddling required. I found the set up with a .Mac account ridiculously easy. On my own server I had to give it a bit more information but it still only took a few minutes to configure.

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Once the file is uploaded, FileChute gives you a link that you can put in an email, read over the phone, or tie to the leg of a pigeon. Your recipient just needs to click the link and the file downloads. No more do your recipients need to sign up for an “account” somewhere. No more is retrieving files such a chore. Click and download. It doesn’t matter if the recipient is on a Mac, Windows, or Linux. This really is FileChute’s greatest feature. The recipient does not have to be tech savvy to get your files. Suddenly, it is possible for me to send files to people who would otherwise have no clue as to how to retrieve them.
FileChute also cleans up after itself. You can set an expiration for the files to self delete in a certain number of days or you can tell it to delete the file immediately.
I tested FileChute retrieving files on both Macs and PCs and I never had any problems. I’m sure there could be some issues if your router or firewall is particularly grumpy but that wouldn’t really be the fault of FileChute.
This review is of version 3.01 which I ran in Leopard on my MacBook Pro. It is universal binary. You can buy a license for FileChute for $17.95 at yellowmug.com. I’ve written the developer however, and Yellow Mug has agreed to offer 25% off that price if you use the coupon code MACSPARKY so now is your chance. They also have a free trial and a 60-day, money back guarantee, and free upgrades. If you find yourself routinely sending files that won’t fit in an email, you can’t go wrong with FileChute.

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Public Speaking Tips

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I have been lucky in that public speaking has never bothered me. In a lot of ways, I’m more comfortable with 50 people than one. But that is a discussion for another day. The Public Speaking Blog recently posted an excellent list of 250 public speaking tips. While I’m usually not all that excited about “lists”, this one is worth a read.
There were a couple I particularly liked . . .

The more you prepare, the less nervous you get.

So true. One of my favorite “tricks” here is the commute. I have given more opening and closing statements in traffic than I can count. You can know in your head exactly what you are going to say but until you go through the process of getting the words out of your lips a few times, you are not ready.

Tell a story, make a point.

Amen!

Start strong (always).
Look at ONE person at a time when you are delivering your speech.

I once had a juror tell me that she never trusted the other lawyer in a case because he never looked her in the eye. Not once in a two week trial! How is that possible?
Anyway, you can read the entire list right here.

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OmniFocus iPhone Dreams

Ethan Schoonover, one of the Omni folks writes …
For what it’s worth, we at Omni are all very interested in getting OmniFocus content on the iPhone (The Omni Group is pretty much 99% iPhone users, so we have a dog in this fight). Rest well assured that as soon as we have options for doing this in a way that allows reasonable functionality, we’ll be on it.
It just warms my heart. I’ve played with their sync system through Leopard Mail and some of the ingenious scripts that turn your Omnifocus list into a Safari bookmarklet that lets you see your tasks. Neither solution really blows my hair back though. Hopefully the Omni wizards will come up with something fantastic … soon.

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Default Folder X is Getting all Spotty

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I have been corresponding with Jon over at StClairSoft.com about the upcoming release of Default Folder X version 4. There is no secret about just how much I have come to rely upon this application. I’ve been running the beta of version 4.0 for the last week and can report that when it releases in December, you won’t be disappointed.
The additions to your save and open dialogue box now look … well… more “leopardy”. Even more important, however, is the quicklook style box below that previews whatever image, document, or file you are contemplating opening. It doesn’t allow you to page through documents. Apparently Apple has not opened that particular part of quicklook to the development community. The upgrade price will cost $14.95 but free fro those people who bought Default Folder X after June 1.

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