Category: Misc
A Fix for MacBook Sudden Shutdown Syndrome
No product is ever perfect, even Apple’s wildly successful MacBook line. A small number of vocal MacBook owners have been experiencing annoying random shutdowns. Fortunately, according to Apple, a fix is finally at hand. Today’s release of MacBook SMC Firmware Update 1.1 promises to fix the problem by adjusting the MacBook’s internal monitoring system. Apple ...
Make Money from Your Videos
Scott Kirsner at CinemaTech has been compiling a list of Web sites that enable video producers to get paid for their work. Some of these will be familiar to you (Revver, Atom Entertainment), others less so (I hadn’t previously heard of Panjea). Some are geared to short-form content, and others will support selling a full-length ...
Back up Photos on the Road
Traveling for the holidays? Or just travel in general? Digital cameras let you shoot lots of pictures, but where will you store them? Glenn Fleishman and I co-wrote an article for Macworld about how to deal with an abundance of digital photos, with an eye toward traveling without a laptop in tow. It’s now available ...
Recent Writings
I’ve been doing a fair bit of article writing lately (with five assignments I’m working on currently, and at least two articles that are written but haven’t been published yet), so I want to point out a few pieces that might interest you. My latest Practical Mac column was the 9th most read article at ...
New 24-inch iMac: Ultimate iMovie Mac?
Woke up late this morning to discover that Apple has released a new iMac with a 24-inch screen. That’s 1920 by 1200 pixels of resolution. That’s almost native HD resolution for editing 1080i HDV (which is 1920 by 1080 pixels); you have to give up some of those pixels for iMovie’s interface. Still, that’s a ...
iMovie HD 6 VQS Free Chapter
One of the aspects of the new book I’m most excited about is that it’s full color. Although the previous black-and-white editions still conveyed the same information, having color photos and screenshots really makes the examples pop, and enabled me to show things like color temperature without pointing readers to the Web site for examples. ...
Apple iBook/PowerBook Battery Recall
Apple instituted a voluntary battery recall today for Sony-manufactured batteries sold between 2003 and 2006 for the 12-inch iBook, 12-inch PowerBook G4, and 15-inch PowerBook G4. The company’s servers are being hit hard (it’s getting wide press coverage), but in writing it up for TidBITS, I noticed that there are three different sets of serial ...
Book Review: Ken Stone’s FCP Site
Steve Douglas reviews iMovie HD 6 & iDVD 6: Visual QuickStart Guide, and says some very nice things: Jeff Carlson has written and published a superb book designed to get the editor in either of these applications up and running in very little time and as painlessly as possible. The writing is clear and easy ...
iLife ’06 Performance on New Mac Pro
Anandtech has an in-depth look at the new Intel-based Mac Pro, including performance results from iLife ’06 applications. Things are obviously speedier, but especially with iDVD 6, where even on fast machines video encoding seems eternal (or maybe I just burn too many projects on deadline). (Link via Camcorderinfo.)
Preserving Home Movies
The Preservation Project blog is documenting Ashley Maynor’s efforts to digitize and preserve a stack of 79 home movies that her family owns. Though the old labels gave me a rough idea of what was on each reel, I was hesitant to put the films through a projector to see what material was actually there. ...
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 