March 7, 2012 – Today was an Apple Event Day. Always highly secretive, and there is always huge speculation about what will be released when an event is called. No major surprises today, the new Apple TV and the new iPad were launched.

Is Apple/Mac really a cult?

A quick search finds that a cult does not have to be religious, but it does imply some form of coercive persuasion that involves some key steps:

- People are put in physical or emotionally distressing situations
- Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized
- They receive what seems to be specific teachings and unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader/group
- They get a new identity based on the group

Well, people on PCs are put into emotionally distressing situations everyday, but Macs never do that. People’s problems can certainly arise from Microsoft, but rarely from a Mac. Macs take anyone from a terrible experience and wrap them in logic and ease, and they are now identified as “Mac people”.

Soooo, maybe….but they only meet two of the four criteria. Rather I’d say that Mac people are more like reformed smokers. Most of us are converts who have survived PCs and then realized there was an alternative to having the life sucked out of us, that we could own a machine that didn’t require constant upgrades and actually “worked” to a degree that doesn’t make us long for a new machine or curse the one we have within two or three years of ownership.

No, not a cult, just a nutty contingent of people who have made a computer company the hottest stock on the market  right now. If “only” we’d bought in 2008 when it was $79 a share….who knew?!?!

I do however know of other groups/organizations that I would say are close to being cults, Amway comes to mind, so do some other groups/organizations/”professions”.

But Mac people are just obsessed with simplicity, and that’s hardly a cult, even if we are annoying.

(Saw someone else do this sort of shot and it stayed in the back of my mind, figured today was a good opportunity, all things considered)

January 7, 2012 – I don’t know why the Newton came up in conversation the other day, but it did. And it still lives in the bottom of a drawer, and with some fresh batteries…It is ALIVE!

Everyone thought the iTouch was revolutionary, but most people never knew about this little wonder.

The Apple Newton.

Fabulous handwriting recognition that still outperforms anything on the iPad or iPhone today. Word processing, spreadsheets, email, fax capabilities, PCMCIA flash card expansion, useful apps, voice recording capabilities, a backlit screen, the ability to beam notes to another RF device, RF printing capabilities, an external complementary mini-keyboard…

My graduate supervisor and I each had one, and like a pair of geeks, on at least one occasion we were guilty of beaming notes to each other during a lab meeting.

And all that in the early-mid 1990′s. Almost 20 years ago! The first Apple Newton Message Pad came out in 1993. I started with the Message Pad 100 in 1995 when I finished my Master’s Degree, then upgraded to the Message Pad 2000 in 1998. Pre Palm-Pilot. Smaller than an iPad.

Apple has always been way ahead of its time.

278/365 – (Oct 5, 2011) _ Today is a sad day. I was out seining salmon on a river in Chilliwack all day and arrived home to hear the news that the world of technology lost a creative mind. Sadly, Steve Jobs lost his battle with pancreatic cancer at age 56 today.

The Cult of Mac has lost its leader.

R.I.P. Steve. Your products changed my view of computers from problematic machines to elegant and functional designs that “just work”.

“Things don’t have to change the world to be important.” – Steve Jobs

(Strangely enough, today’s Daily Challenge was ‘technology’)

236/365 (Sept 20, 2011) – It’s been three months at my new job now. The Federal Government is not “Mac-Friendly” and when I first arrived with my MacBook in tow the admin for the program was adamant that the machine could not stay. Guess what…it’s still there…she’s not though She retired after my second week and I just quietly kept on using it there. When the curious questioned me I basically let them know that the past 5 years of my work life – most of it working for them on contract – exists on Mac programs and it would be a ridiculous inefficiency to make me transfer everything over to a less efficient system. Not only that, but some of the intellectual property that I created for them I retain ownership of and don’t really want to exist on their shared drives. Seems to have worked. I have plugged it into the system as much as I can manage, and although I can’t access any shared drives or use the Exchange server on it, I can do pretty much everything else I need to do, and in a much more efficient manner. The rest of it I just have to turn my chair and I have access to on the PC.

Although I am grudgingly regaining some of my fluency in Windows when I am forced to, my MacBook happily sits on my desk and at least half of what I do, I do on it. lots of people still ask me questions about it, mostly because they either have Macs at home or are planning on getting one soon, and it’s become a normal part of the office landscape so for the most part most people don’t really even “see” it anymore.

259/365 (Sept 16, 2011) – Isn’t technology amazing? When I was a kid, headphones used to look like construction ear-muffs and the only way to take your music with you (before the invention of the Walkman) was by carrying your ghetto-blaster. Now headphones wrap up to the size of a matchbook and you can carry 50,000 songs with you in something the size of a deck of cards, but a third as thick.

It’s really incredible when you stop and think about how fast we got here.

243/365 (August 31, 2011) – Did you know that if you hit the Fn+Command+left arrow keys all at the same time it takes you to the top of an open document in Word? I knew that, because I use a lot of key strokes rather than the mouse where possible, it’s faster. But I have been forced backwards in time and efficiency to use a Windows based machine at work. And when I automatically hit what would have been those three keys on my Macbook, I discovered that they do something quite different in Windows. Those three keys on a PC correspond to pressing Ctrl+Alt+left arrow keys all at the same time. But I didn’t actually realize what keys I had pressed since I did it without thinking. And it took me about five minutes to get back to where I’d been before I hit those keys, mainly because I wasn’t totally sure what keys I’d hit.

If you are on a PC, do it… c’mon go ahead, press Control+Alt+the left arrow key and see what happens, you won’t be disappointed unless you are on a really old machine where the chipset doesn’t support the function. I dare you!

I can see the value in it with some machines, but it caught me totally off guard!

I am slowly regaining my Windows literacy, slowly and grudgingly. But that really was entertainment for a few minutes.

225/365 (August 13, 2011) – OK, to qualify, this isn’t ALL mine. In fact, I’m the one who first adopted Mac, and now Kirk officially has more Apple products than I do. I have the early 2008 MacPro desktop, a first gen aluminum MacBook Pro, and an iPhone 3Gs. Kirk has an aluminum 2nd gen MacBook Pro, an iPad 2, iPhone 3Gs, iPod Classic (I sold mine), the first gen iTouch, first gen AppleTV (better than the 2nd gen) and Airport Extreme (OK, so we both have those, but he wanted them so they are essentially his toys). The MacPro tower, the Apple TV and the AirPort Extreme didn’t fit in the space, but they are in behind the scenes too.

Quite the little family we have acquired over the past few years.

I love the fact that the Apple technology seems to outlast other products for so long. Who would have thought I could take an iPod purchased for $250 in 2005 and sell it for $100 (easily) in 2010! I’ve never encountered electronics and computer equipment that holds its value before entering the world of Mac.

The next additions will either be an iPad for me (maybe) of a new 15″ MacBook Pro (more likely). But there is no hurry, all of this stuff, even at 3+ years old for my two machines, is still working without a hiccup.

Have I mentioned how much I love Mac?

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

The infamous words of Johnny Rotten, spoken at the end of the last Sid Vicious-era Sex Pistols show, in 1978, came to mind recently. The context was my laptop, a year-old machine that had left me feeling more than a little swindled.

In February, 2010, I bought the laptop for $529.73. It was a great price and I was thrilled to have wireless capability at last. As a freelance writer, I’d be freed up to work anywhere, instead of being tethered to my ancient, slow desktop computer.

For several months my laptop worked as it should. Then, one day, my wireless capability turned off. Upon investigation, I realized it didn’t just turn off – my laptop would no longer recognize that I even had wireless capability. It was as if communication had broken down between the laptop and my wireless card. Not a good sign.

I called the manufacturer – I was under a one-year warranty – and after a bit of remote poking around, the IT technician told me to send my laptop back to the company for repair. He figured I probably had a bum wireless card.

I wasn’t thrilled to be without my laptop for a week, but I needed it fixed, so I packed it in the padded cardboard box they sent and waved goodbye.

Several days later, the laptop came back. The company had replaced the wireless card, and everything seemed to be functioning properly again. But a few months later, out of the blue, boom. Once again my laptop was telling me it was not equipped with wireless capability.

I made another call to the manufacturer, angrier this time. After more remote poking around, the service rep decided I should send my laptop in for a second time. He thought it was a malfunctioning wireless card again. I was dubious.

“Isn’t it strange that I ended up with a bad wireless card twice?” I asked. No, no, he assured me, these things do happen. So, once again, I packed my laptop in a cardboard box and off it went.

Back it came a few days later with another new wireless card. Just like last time, it seemed to be functioning properly. A few more months went by, then bam! The old problem reared its head once again. Meanwhile, I was getting very close to the end of my warranty.

This time, the rep decided it couldn’t be the wireless card again (I should think not), but decided it was likely corrupt files. To remedy the problem, he would send me recovery discs that would restore factory settings and should fix my problem. Fine.

The discs came in the mail, and I sat down one night to start the recovery process. I’d never done this before, and quickly realized that I would need to back up all the data on my laptop before using the recovery discs, which would erase everything.

At the time we were renovating our house, so we were in a condo temporarily while the work was being done, with most of our belongings packed away. We owned an external hard drive, but it was somewhere in a box. I also needed to have a conversation with the iTunes service rep, as I was deathly afraid of losing the 4,000 or so tracks I had ripped or purchased over the years.

By the time we had moved back home and unpacked our stuff, two months had gone by. Finally, I went through the recovery process. The outcome? My laptop was still telling me I had no wireless capability. Obviously it hadn’t worked.

I called the company, knowing full well my warranty had ended a month and a half earlier. As I feared, they told me they couldn’t help me, and I should contact one of their business partners.

“So you’re saying I need to pay to get it fixed myself,” I asked.

“Yes. I’m sorry, ma’am.”

Now, I know I could have spent a lot of time on the phone, complaining vociferously that this was an ongoing problem that they never really fixed while I was on warranty, and get them to go at it again. However, the thought of sending my laptop off so they could perform another temporary patch job didn’t work for me.

So I took the laptop to my local computer repair guys. They suspected it must be a problem inside the laptop in the connection with the wireless card. Their suggestion? An external wireless adaptor.

I paid $131.40 to see my problem go away, and I now have wireless capability again. I’m hoping it’s a permanent solution.

Is it unjust that I paid for wireless capability in my laptop and it didn’t work? Yes. But I did what I suspect many people do (and what computer companies probably count on): I chose the quickest and easiest option in order to get my work done. I settled for injustice to save myself from a serious hassle and waste of time.

Next time, maybe I’ll get a Mac.

Shelley White blogs for Home Cents at globeinvestor.com

126/365 (May 6, 2011) – The weather was horrible today, and I had to go out and do a lot of running around…. on my scooter. Because I chose to not have a second car…. sometimes I wonder at my sanity. I felt like a drowned rat by the end of the day. We ended up at our favourite pub for a late dinner and a glass of wine when we got a call that actually made us happy.

We were supposed to go out on a friend’s boat in the morning for our Yacht Club’s SailPast. Not a fun prospect when the weather is for more downpours. He called and was in a crabby mood too, we said “It’s OK, we understand if you want to bail out” (secretly hoping he would say he didn’t want to go) He said “Great, let’s call it off”.

Can’t say I was sad. I feel like I need a few days to dry out.

Cheers!

(Last minute photo taken on the iPhone and processed with the Plastic Bullet App)

iDentify 2 is an OS X application for tagging iTunes compatible MP4 video files. Normally, when you convert a video file to the format used by iOS devices such as the iPad, iPod, iPhone or AppleTV, all the information about the video is missing! The only thing you see is the name of the file where the title of the video should be. iDentify 2 looks at the name of files as they are added to it. Based on the name of the file, iDentify determines wether it is a TV Show or movie based on common naming conventions. From the file name, a lot of information can be gleaned, such as movie title, show name, season number, episode number, year of release, and imdb code. iDentify can then automatically look on The TVDB, The Movie DB, and tagChimp to gather more information about the title, such as description, rating, chapter names and more! iDentify also inspects the file and can automatically turn on the HD flag on the movie when the resolution of the file goes above a set minimum!

Want to change the tags of multiple files in one fell swoop? No problem! Add the files to iDentify, select all the ones you want to edit from the list, and click edit. All changes you make are now applied to all selected files! When you are done, just click “Process Files” to write the new information to your files, and when iDentify is done, you are ready to add your videos to iTunes!

And since all the movies are already in my iTunes library, iTunes automatically updated them all after things were finished.

And all that tagging, effortless, and for the low price of free (or $6.99US) if you buy from MacUpdate right now – ($9.99 regular price). It never ceases to amaze me how inexpensive, and good, Mac software is. I used to download hacked software (yes, it’s true), but since moving to the Mac platform I don’t bother with the searching, finding serial numbers, dealing with viruses….why bother when everything is so inexpensive and I can get the support for anything, or ask questions, directly from the developer.

Yup, looking for a program to tag videos? This is it!