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Murphy is out for the rest of the week. A little vacation, and a little work on an entry for the Tutorama tutorial contest. Get your entries in, there are some good prizes at stake!
In the meantime there’s plenty to do. Browse through Murphy’s archive of screencasts. You can use the categories in the sidebar to find what interests you.
We’ve got some good stuff coming up next week. Have a request for a screencast? Post it in the comments for this post.
Check out some other tech sites, but don’t forget your old friend Murphy on Monday.
Enjoy your week.
-Murph
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Are you constantly fighting a battle with the files strewn across your desktop? Do you get them cleaned up only to have a new batch of eyesores littering your display the very next day?
There are plenty of utilities, like Camouflage, to help hide your mess. But what about an offbeat Murphy-style solution?
How about making your own Desktop image, complete with “wells” for storing different groups of files? This solution relies on the honor system. Promise yourself you’ll only store Desktop files in the designated areas. Files that won’t fit belong somewhere else.
You don’t want too many files on your Desktop anyway, it’ll gum up the works. OS X has work to do for each item on your Desktop, every time it gets refreshed. The less stuff you have there the better.
If you make a really cool looking desktop image, post a link in the comments.
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No screencasts on weekends, but Murphy’s got a tip to keep you busy. If you haven’t done it already get yourself a 30 day trial of Adobe Lightroom. The download is less than 40MB so it shouldn’t take too long.
If iPhoto leaves you wanting a little more when it comes to storing and archiving (or anything else for that matter), Lightroom might fill the void. You can learn more about it on the Adobe Lightroom site. The application competes directly with Aperture with features designed to help you organize, adjust, print, and publish to the web.
Make sure you read up on the keyboard shortcuts. Like L (lights) to dim everything except your photos, and G (grid) to return to the library.
If you buy Lightroom now you can get it for $199. Adobe says this price is to thank the beta testers and the regular price will eventually shift to $299.
Murphy has been using Lightroom since the first beta. There is some crossover with Bridge, which comes with Photoshop. And there’s some crossover with Photoshop too, including the ability to tweak your raw files. But in terms of work flow he found it intuitive for the most part, especially since you could move rapidly through a large shoot without using the mouse.
Bottom line: It doesn’t cost anything to take a look. And you might just love it.
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A few people have written in, asking how to remote control a Mac. It couldn’t be much easier, especially if you’ll be doing the controlling from a computer on the same network as the machine you want to control. The server component is built into OS X. The client component (on the computer you will do the controlling from) can be downloaded here.
Click here to skip ahead to the screencast.
If you plan on controlling a machine from across the Internet there’s an extra step. Let’s look at both scenarios:
Both computers on same network.
- Configure the machine you want to control (the server) to allow VNC access. See the screencast for details.
- Open Chicken of the VNC and connect to the ip address of the server. Instead of the ip address you can have Chicken of the VNC use Bonjour to show you servers on your network.
Controlling a machine from across the Internet.
- Configure the machine you want to control (the server) to allow VNC access. See the screencast for details.
- From the server, go to the web site http://whatismyip.com and make a note of the ip address. This is how your home network is seen on the Internet.
- Go to the router of the network your server is on. Configure port forwarding to allow port 5900 through to the server. See the screencast for details.
- At the coffee shop, Open Chicken of the VNC on the client and connect to the ip address noted in step 2. Bonjour won’t help you across the Internet - you may as well turn it off. And you can’t use the server’s actual address. You have to use the address of the router. The router will pass the request to the server, based on the port forwarding you set up in the previous step.
If you don’t have a router at home your Mac is probably connected directly to the DSL/Cable Modem. In that case, the server’s address and the http://whatismyip.com address are likely the same. (Some modems act as firewalls, in which case they could be different!) Use that address from the coffee shop.
Consider getting a router. For forty dollars you can add an important layer of security and the convenience of wireless access.
More to think about:
- VNC is not notably secure. You’re relying on a single password to keep intruders out.
- Consider running third party VNC server software, like OSXvnc. It allows you to run the server on a port other than 5900, helping to hide your service from hackers.
- You can use RealVNC on Windows computers to remote control your Mac instead of Chicken of the VNC. There’s a free Personal Edition.
- There are other ways, using far more secure tools, to remotely control your Mac. Murphy will cover tools like ssh next week. In the meantime, brush up on your Terminal skills!
More on ports: A port number is what an application uses to identify itself to the network. There is all kinds of traffic flowing to your networked computer. The port directs the traffic to the proper application. Traffic finds the computer by its ip address, then goes on to find the right application by its port address.
More on port forwarding.
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Murphy was afraid to even look at Yahoo! Pipes. It’s one of those tools that can make a whole day disappear. But he gave it a once over, and today’s screencast will give you a peek too.
Pipes is an advanced tool for manipulating web data. A simple example would be fetching an RSS feed and returning the articles about a certain subject or written by a particular author. But Pipes can do much more. You can create a pipe that searches for pizza places in a zip code, automatically excludes the Dominos, and displays pictures of nearby parks (where you can eat the pizza) from Flickr.
In the screencast we’ll combine the New York times Technology section rss feed with the David Pogue Blog. We’ll filter the Technology feed to only return Pogue columns. We could add his personal blog too, but we won’t. Then we’ll add a search field to filter his articles.
Take Yahoo! Pipes for a spin, or at least look at some of the pipes others have published. You can see David Pogue’s New York Times column and blog combined in this pipe.
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