How to record streaming video to your Mac …

Caption: This video walks you through the steps described below — it’s mostly silent until the audio output is restored to the speaker for testing/playback …

One of my perennially popular blog posts is a movie review — Symbolism in “The Ninth Gate”  with over 100K views to date — which could benefit from a few video clips lifted from the movie. I recently wanted to record a few clips from a movie streaming on Netflix for another review — only to find that Mac’s QuickTime Player and Safari conspire to prevent me from screen recording. So I futzed around until I got it to work. Today a friend asked how it could be done, so having to write it up for her, I thought to share the process in this post …

How to make your Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 work on Apple Mac …

Even though Macs are not listed amongst the system this webcam will run on and in spite of Amazon reviews suggesting it works with Mac, I found that it didn’t work for me on my Mac, not without some additional software — I have an 11″ MacBook Air under OS X 10.10 Yosemite. So why buy it? For the purportedly awesome HD quality and H.264 audio compression. I’ll speak to those claims when I have more experience with the camera. For now I want to quickly help you get the camera working on Mac.

Where’s Harry?

2014 was an adventurous year interrupted with some back surgery — which conspired to keep me away from my blog for a while. I built myself a laptop stand that worked in conjunction with a zero gravity garden chair and hacked an Ikea standing lamp into an iPad stand to use bedside during my recovery when mobility was painful and limited. The laptop stand has since found its way into storage but the iPad stand is a firm favorite of mine, waiting to serve me in the dark of night …

 

Mac: Blocking websites like pulse360 in the admin account …

On my Mac, MSNBC seemed to be throwing a popup to annoying low-rent ads served by http://content.pulse360.com/. There’s a delay between navigating to MSNBC and the popup launching — which helps blur the connection between the two sites.

Solution: Simply bock popups and this site in particular, right? Not so easy!

• One of our corporate sites requires popups to be enabled.
• Mac’s Parental Controls won’t let you block sites on the admin account.
• There might be browser specific options, but I prefer something global.

 
What to do? Here’s one solution, by editing your Hosts file …

What’s your alternative to iDisk storage?

With .mac’s iDisk going away soon, what to use instead? I’m liking DropBox, only 2Gb free, but you get 500Mb extra (as do I) when you accept an invite from a friend.

So, if you need a great way to store files in the cloud which you can access from your iPhone, please take this link — and help both of us. Thanks!

You can get up to 16Gb free through referrals. Remember both the referrer and the invitee get the extra credit.

http://db.tt/9dFN1VQa

How to download video in Safari 5 …

After upgrading to Apple Mac’s Safari 5 browser I found that I could no longer double-click to download video files in the Activity window as I was able to do in earlier versions of the browser. It’s an option+double click now.

Anticipating a slow iPhone/iPad iOS5 update?

An iOS 5 update to your iPhone or iPad can take an hour — or three, or four. I recommend you choose to “download only” first and then “update” later. In so doing you can untether your iPhone/iPad and leave iTunes to take its time downloading the file. If you choose “update” you cannot untether the device from your computer and you may be in for a very long wait.

R.I.P. Steve: You made life so much more interesting …

Steve Jobs
February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

Our paths crossed a few times, I wish there would have been more.

Ugh! My iPhone is spying on me …

There’s a Mac desktop iPhoneTracker.app which displays which cell towers your iPhone was in communication with — on a map, by date.

Making Time Machine work on a regular NAS volume …

So by now you may be aware that Apple only supports Time Machine on internal, directly connected or volumes shared wirelessly via AirPort, right? Why not regular Network Attached Storage (NAS) volumes? Because they’re unsupported at this time. So let’s run with that risk here and experiment with using an unsupported NAS volume.

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.

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.

Problems with MobileMe and Find my iPhone using legacy @mac.com logon …

In December I experienced a slew of problems related to using my legacy me@mac.com email address. Find my iPhone stopped working and mounting my iDisk and MobileMe became erratic. I could find nothing on the net suggesting there was a problem — let alone addressing it. Long story short, I had to change all my logins, on my mac and on my iPhones to me@me.com (the fully qualified email address, not just my account name) to resolve the problems.

Possibly answers the questions “Why did Find my iPhone stop working?”

Find my iPhone: It worked for us today!

We traveled back to New York earlier today — from dropping our freshman daughter, Bo-Ashely, off at the University at Buffalo. On the long way back we pulled in to use the loo at a McDonalds in the little town of Cortland, NY — and then promptly left without my wife’s purse, a pink leather backpack. In it was, according to Carolyn, “her life”. In effect a wallet, a bunch of credit cards and her iPhone. We hit the road again and about forty minutes into it she got to wondering where her bag was.

DRM Workaround for your Audio Books

This article describes a fairly simple method of using iTunes and free software on an Apple Mac to convert DRMed audiobooks into .mp3s that you can either burn to disk or use on players that are not compatible with DRM schemas. A method which does not involve decrypting, removing, reverse engineering or breaking the DRM — a questionable practice fraught with legal complications and consequences.