Store and stream your movies around the house — for FREE*!

This is a quick DIY procedure for Apple Mac users who want to create, store and stream movies (converted from DVD, downloaded online or from TiVo etc.) to their Macs — or at some very nominal cost, to iPod Touch, iPhone and/or iPads too. I do this to time-shift videos in a format that works for me, so I can watch them on demand — whenever, wherever and however I find the time to enjoy them.

When streaming a movie from server to client the movie is not downloaded — it plays on demand. No need to take time out to copy videos to the client device before watching them — using up valuable disk or RAM space in the process. The videos are stored in one location, the server, and are available for playback on one or more remote clients — on demand (just wait a few seconds for the initial buffer to set up). In lieu of the video being locally stored, you need to have a good network connection to your server.

Twelve more inches of snow: January 2011 Tue 1/11 through Wed 1/12

The Snow Storm of January 2011 Tue 1/11 11pm through Wed 1/12 8am: 12″ of snow falls — mostly in the space of 6 hours. 49 of our 50 states have snow on the ground today. So which state is holding out on us?

MacBook Air fails to sign in to the App Store …

Having trouble signing into iTunes or the new App store using your Apple ID? Get an annoying “MZFinance.NoGUIDTokenFailureKey_message” error message? Still won’t work after you reset your password? Join the club. We’re mostly MacBook Air users here.

Staten Island Rock Sculptures

New York’s little Stonehenge is to be found just south of the Lemon Creek Pier in Mount Loretto State Park on Staten Island. The GPS location is 40.506552,-74.213588. I’ll be adding this to the list of day trips we’ll do this Spring, hence this post being still under construction.

Still to research: urbanspoon.com for a local brunch and geocaching.com for some local caches to find. Unfortunately the old orphanage on this property burnt to the ground in 2000, so there is no urban exploring to do — that I’m aware of yet.

Facebook: How to “unlike” a page …

Some rogue Facebook pages you “like” may end up spreading spam messages to your friends via your Facebook news feed — feigning your endorsement. You can easily be tricked into liking a page by getting sucked into some incredible offer, story, video etc. that you have to click through to reveal — you just got suckered, they call it “likejacking”. Typically the message comes with a viral link to a bad app — which wants to get at your private information and then post spam to your friends, abusing your credibility, and then similarly trick them into liking the page so that all of their friends get the viral message. Ouch!

Facebook: How to remove unwanted spammy apps …

Is some rogue Facebook app posting unwanted status messages to your wall, to your friends’ walls, or commenting on photographs or other posts — typically with a viral link to bad app (which wants to get at your friends’ private information and the right to post in their name)?

How can you revoke the rights unwanted apps have over your account?