Messages on the Go with Jott

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I found this great service at Jott.com. The way it works is you set up an account with them and tie it to your phone number. When you then call Jott’s toll free 866 number, it recognizes you. You can tell it who you are sending a message too (including yourself) and then dictate your message and hang up. The software converts your message to text and sends it off via email to your recipient.
This is a great task list capture tool. I can add tasks from anywhere and they show up in my inbox for processing into OmniFocus. The service is in beta and free. Check it out and let me know how you are using it.

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Schoolhouse for Students

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My sixth grader has, for the first time, multiple teachers. I was a mess in school as a kid and it took me years to reverse engineer myself into any sort of organization. I’m hoping to help out my daughter and went sniffing for something that would make it fun. I found this great application, Schoolhouse, that really does the trick. It has everything she needs and is fun to use.
The developer explains the application at his website:
“With the ability to sort and organize your assignments, exams, and projects quickly and easily Schoolhouse is a must have for any student on-the-go. The power of smart notebooks allow you to interact with your work as simply as your iTunes library.
Classcasts give the ability to publish your assignments to the web automatically for anyone to subscribe to. A newly redesigned grading system allows you to chart your scores over the course of the term to keep an outlook as you go. All of this works to ensure you will never be in the dark at the end of the semester.”
This was put together by a single developer and looks great. As useful as it will be to my sixth grader, it would be even better for those in high school and college.

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iPhone Friendly MacSparky

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One of the upgrades I made to the website with the new server was a very cool plug-in called iwphone. This allows readers on iPhones to see a customized presentation for the iPhone screen. It detects when an iPhone plugs into MacSparky and loads a different iPhone optimized theme just for them. I was amazed at how easily it installed and worked. This thing is going to take off for all us Wordpress folks.

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From Jobs’ Lips to Her Ears

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So I promised my 10 year old that if she helped out my wife with her internet business over the summer, I’d buy her a video iPod. It worked out. She worked all summer and was a big help. A few weeks ago I said, “Okay, lets go get your new iPod”. She says “No.” She has been “reading” on the intenet and thinks new ones will come out. Like she has got some inside angle on it all so I’m all … “Okay … lets wait” From Jobs’ lips to her ears a few weeks later Apple announces the iPod touch. It gets better.
I’m sitting at my desk last week trying to deal with a case when she calls me again. “Hey Dad. They are refunding you $100 on your iPhone. You can use that on my iPodTouch.” Welcome to fatherhood. But there is more.
I’m sitting at my desk at 7:30. (Yes .. I work early) She calls again. “Dad, I just got an email. iPod Touch is coming out early.”
What a kid.

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Downloads Galore

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One of the benefits of having plenty of server space is I no longer have to rubber band and scotch tape together ways of getting large fils to readers. I’ve been doing lots of back-end work on the site the last few days rebuilding links and restructuring pages. It is not completely done but getting closer. The good news is several items are much easier to access now.
Screencasts – All Resolutions, All Day
I now have the screencasts formatted for HD, AppleTV, and iPod and all conveniently available on the screencast page
Humpty Dumpty Revisited
I’ve edited the Humpty Dumpty entry. That was where I gave the law talk and Keynote to my fifth grader’s class. For all those teachers and parents interested in using this, I now have the PDF file, the Keynote and (for those OS X challenged) a clickable quicktime file for the Dell boxes. Who knows, when they see the fantastic Keynote transitions, maybe a few of them will come to the light side. Gone are the days of me sending these files to people via Pando. Now you can find them right here.

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Server Transfer Complete!

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I decided to change the server Friday night and here I am on Sunday night with the new server live. I’m actually quite impressed with myself. Like all great feats however (and this is a quite an accomplishment for me), there were many people responsible for this happening. Especially the following:
Gabe Wilson
My pal Gabe Wilson, convinced me it was actually possible for someone as clueless about internet servers as myself to pull this off. Gabe also turned me on to a Dreamhost.com which leads to big helper #2.
Dreamhost.com
This web hosting service rocks. They are very cheap and offer tons of bandwidth and storage. Not only that, they increase over time. They are giving me an additional gig of space per week. Most importantly, these guys are super helpful. When I was having that “Oh c*^p, what have I got myself into” moment Friday night, I emailed them and they completely took over. They got my wordpress blog transferred onto the server and helped me through all the tweaks. Quite often my emails were replied to in less than thirty minutes. Frankly, I can’t imagine any better customer service.
Darren Rolfe
Darren is my graphics Sensei. The new three column format didn’t jive with my old banner. No problem, Darren fixed it in about thirty minutes. If you ever need a graphic artist, or just want to have a fun, go visit Darren at MacWingnut.
The Rest of the Gang
I received some very helpful emails and comments from readers. Thank you all. Also, my family let me spend the day on the couch, watching football, and tweaking the new site. Thanks Gang!
For those of you who read me via RSS please make sure to reset your feed. Now that I’ve got the basics up I’ll continue to refine it a bit. I am also going to be moving the podcast feed to this site and off Podbean. I’m getting requests for different formats of the screencasts (i.e. Apple TV, etc..) Now I have the bandwidth to pull it off.  Anyway, I’ll continue to try and make it better for everyone.

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Server Changing Madness

I am in the midst of moving the Blog off the wordpress.com site onto some server space I purchased from Dreamhost.  I have a few observations here:
1.  The site may act a bit funny while I make the transition but hopefully not.
2.  It should be illegal for someone with a political science degree to do this.  My brain hurts and none of the “simple” steps are simple.  If any readers feel pity, email me and I’ll share the gory details and beg for help.

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iDVD Wonkiness

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About every four months, I take the most recent crop of family videos and burn them to a DVD along with a slideshow of some of the better snapshots. This way the kids can always go back and watch themselves on TV , which they love, and I have a way to torture and chase away unwanted house guests. “Have you seen our latest DVD?!”
Anyway, the time came and I assembled all the various files and fired up the new iDVD. I got the little bouncy icon and got the start up window. I clicked “New Project” and iDVD thought about it for a bit and then just winked out of existence. Huh? Okay lets try that again. I fire up iDVD, click new project, and again the icon poofs on me. This is getting ugly. I’m having flashbacks to my days behind a windows machine when this type of glitchiness was the norm.
So I reverted to many years of drilled in windows training. I rebooted. Following the reboot I got the same problem. So I shut it down and then started it again. That is right, the Old Schooler’s “cold boot.” Again it failed.
At this point I was getting pretty frustrated and just a bit concerned that my machine may be having issues so I did a google search that came up empty and sent an email to one of my favorite Apple Genius pals. Then I went and worked in the yard. Nothing like pulling a few weeds to get things in perspective. I came back that evening to find an email from my Apple friend explaining there was a bug with iDVD and pointing me to a full explanation on the Apple boards. Sure enough, iDVD 08 does not play well with some of the old iDVD themes. I removed the offending themes and things worked great. Several of the new themes are, by the way, outstanding.
All is well that ends well but I must admit I’m disheartened that Apple would ship software that is not compatible with its own files. I mean it wasn’t some third party application that caused this but Apple’s own prior themes for the exact same program. Ummm … who, exactly, was testing this?
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