Tongfamily Website

Isn’t this a bizarre way to say, you can’t (at least in the latest version of iMovie 11 have special characters in the file name). Hope they fix this bug someday…This appears to happen when you say Export Movie…

This has got to be one of the most useful but obscure tools for working with Tivos, but I’ve finally gotten it basically working, now I get highly compressed MP4 files and automatic file naming the right way. Here are the tricks:

1. The user interface is a bit wierd, but you have to go to File/Configure first and make sure that the file names are set right. Plex and other applications really need to see the right directory structure to work correctly and prefer to see the TV Shows in separate directories and also the season and episode numbers in the titles. So in the File name field, you have to incant because the defautl which just has the show and episode title and the date of recording is useless.

[SeriesTitle][/][SeriesTitle] – [EpisodeNumber] – [episodetitle]

2. The thing has transcoding built in and you run the background applications to do this.

I’ve been trying to get a movie out for days now with iMovie. There is a strange interaction with Time Capsule backups where with something as long running as an iMovie creation (in my case 7 hours to make an hour plus HD movie), so that Time Capsule tries to backup the file and thus you end up with a conflict. The fix is to either turn Time Capsule off with iMovie is creating or run

This requires using the Terminal app, in your Applications/Utilities folder

 

To turn off Time Machine snapshots type in the following command:

 

sudo tmutil disablelocal

 

The Mac will likely ask for your password, so type it in and hit the return key. The type the word, exit and hit return. Quit Terminal.

Well if you have an old dimmer system, you can’t use the new CFLs, so trying to find the best PAR38 light bulbs. There aren’t many good review sites, so here is a summary. Right now you have a choice of a few technologies:

• Incandescent. The original, cheapest but last the last
• Halogen. More efficient and last long. About $5 a bulb
• CFL. If you don’t have a dimmer, this is the one for you.
• LED. These are supposed to last years and years, personally, I’ve had bunches of early failures with them, so maybe not worth the $40 a bulb

When you pick them, try to get the lowest wattage you can stand, usually 75-90 watts and the 130 volt ones last much longer (5000 hours vs 2500 typically), so that essentially halves their cost.

Other issue is the beam width, there is spot, flood and wide flood. Flood is the normal case.

Besides home depot, I’ve also ordered from 1000bulbs.com, so we see how they do with the Sylvania 14577 90 watt, 5000 hour, flood for about $5 each. 

Proving once again there is an application for everyone, someone wanted to do a stick figure animation and of course Stykz exists to make it easy!

This isn’t super well documented, but here are the things you can do with this photo-quality portable printer:

Installing the BU-30 Bluetooth Adapter

It is an extra $30, but worth it because then there is no USB wire needed, but it comes with instructions on installation at all and this is one thing Google doesn’t lead you to. It is buried deep in the electronic manual. Amazingly, this is some sort of strange help application that has to be installed. It isn’t a PDF. But here is the excerpt on how to slide out the side panel and stick the think into a USB slot that is buried in the machine. The photos don’t print either, but here is the text of the online application

Remove the Side Panel from the side of the AC adapter connector

(1) Insert a screwdriver or something similar into the hole on the side of the printer as illustrated bellow.

(2) Unlock the end of the Side Panel by moving the screwdriver that was used in Step (1) as illustrated bellow.

Do not bend the Side Panel too far; otherwise, the Side Panel may be broken.

(3) Slide out the Side Panel as illustrated below.

Detach the Side Panel carefully not to break the Side Panel protrusion.

Attach the Bluetooth unit.

Align the head of the Bluetooth unit to the Bluetooth Unit Connector with the “Canon” logo at the front and then insert the Bluetooth unit until the line  can be seen as illustrated below.

Attach the Side Panel to the printer.

(1) Fit the five protrusions on the back of the Side Panel, and then slide the Side Panel as illustrated below.

(2) Fit the Side Panel protrusion into its corresponding hole on the printer.

Make sure that the whole Side Panel is correctly attached to the printer.

Printer paper profiles

 When you ask Photoshop to manage colors for the Canon iP100 on your Mac, you get a bunch of inscrutable profiles with three letter codes. Here’s the decoding. Make sure the photos are done in Adobe (1998) color profile by the way before you use this. So in general for great photos, you want the 3 version of each and it sounds like it should work with GL3 which is their latest glossy. Or if you can afford it their very fancy PR3, Photo Paper Pro. You should also set the thing for Relative Colormetric and Black Point compensation as well.

• PR3, 2, 1
• GL1, 2, 3
• SP2/SG2
• SP3/SG3

Here’s the decoder:

MP = Matte Photo Paper
PR = Photo Paper Pro
SP = Photo Paper Plus Glossy
GL = Photo Paper Plus Glossy II
SG = Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss

Numbers appended to the name, e.g. Canon Pro9000 PR1 or Canon Pro9000 GL3, refer to the print quality, with 1 the highest quality.

Printer Cartridges and Paper

I need to test it, but we need to print about 300 images and there is no where on the web that says how much you get a from a set of their PGI-35 and CLI-36 cartridges. You can get a value pack of two black and one color for about $33 which is a pretty good deal. And the color one is about $14. After all that searching, Amazon seemed to have the best prices.

Happy Mothers Day. Spent a day watching the Avengers and printing lots of photos (worked well on i9900 with Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl, big change settings were to use Pro Paper Glossy, Saturation and on black point compensation so as to maximize dynamic range and then create a custom profile with SpyderPrint).

Anyway, the regatta was fun and had time to look at some cool nautical terms:

• Ropeyarn. A term from Sunday’s off when sailors would mend their clothes with “rope yarn”
• Bitterend. The end of the rope attached to a bitter (a knob of wood on an old ship)
• Coxswain. Swain means a keeper and a cock was a small boat kept on British ships.
• Carry on. Means to that when the wind is group, to drop all the sails to take full advantage
• Devil to pay. The devil is the long seam of the ship and pay is the ptich used to seal it. Dirty work in other words.
• Ditty bag. Originally a ditto bag and referred to the days when it was used to carry two of everything.
• Fathom. from the old english means faetm (Anglo Saxon means embracing with your arms). The six feet is about the distance of outstretch hands.
• Horse latitudes. 30-40 degree north latitude in the Carribbean where the winds would die and (sadly) horse transported on board would have to be thrown overboard to conserve water.
• Mind your Ps and Qs. On pay day, the number of pints and quarts you drank at the local tavern was deducted from your pay. 

This used to work on me.com, but now with icloud.com, I haven’t been able to make it work. Turns out it needs to be 7.6.1 or better to run BAck to my Mac with icloud

Well Mothers Day is almost here and the perfect geek present is to get an easy to use computing thing for a mom who doesn’t like technology, so the iPad actually offers some pretty amazing features particularly when paired with an AppleTV and a stand. Here is how we set it up:

1. Picture Frame. I’ve always wanted to be able to easily push photos to the parents of the kids and have them get it automatically. It takes some work for the sender, but with one button you can do it. Here is the process. Create an iCloud account, use it to the run the iPad. Then create a separate account on your Mac for your mom and turn on Photostream. Then you just drag the photos you want into the Photostream and they will automatically appear. I just wish that the iPad would automatically go to slideshow mode. This happens with the AppleTV which is great. Net, net, you get pictures on your TV an don your ipad.
2. FaceTime. Just like star trek, I’ve always wished that from the picture frame, it would just ring and you could just say, “Spock here”. We are not exaclty there, you still have to hit a button, but otherwise you are pretty close The main challenge is that it requires a Mac (there is no PC FaceTime), so I may swap this for Skype. But FaceTime definitely does work in full video mode.
3. AppleTV with iPad as remote. With the iPad, this is an easy way to have a remote control so that they don’t have to figure out too much. With the new Airplay Mirroring, this is wonderful way to get started there.

The channel selection is pretty key as well

1. Netflix. They really do have an easy to use application that you can just click on to view which is neat. 
2. Xfinity TV. Another pretty easy to use applications.

The big change was to take away most of the icons, so that they only see FaceTime, Safari, Mail and Photos on the bottom and then a collection of TV channels on the top.

I have never had this happen, but when trying to start our old Volvo, you couid hear the starter motor turn, but there the engine didn’t turn over. The AAA guy called this a carbon lock, the Daisywagon folks called it carboned up valves. Not much on the web about this.

But apparently, if you’ve run a car relatively slowly or just for a short period, then the gasoline (which is injected behind the valves and then it flows into the piston) builds up behind the valve and they stick open.

When this happen, the start motor spins, but since the valve(s) are stuck open, there is no compression. The preventive fix is:

1. Make sure to run the car regularly and get it up to high operating temperature so that the gas burns cleanly

2. If you have this condition where the starter spins and there is no turning over, then make sure your battery is good and has lots of charge and you then have to push the gas pedal down and crank for a long time, this puts lots of fuel in and hopefully, the valve will then unstick.

3. Be careful when it starts though as you will have the engine racing along, not to mention buckets of fuel in the car. When the AAA started it finally, there was lots of smoke from the unburned fuel and plenty of raw fuel coming out of the exhaust!