Great Stuff

An industrious Murphy Mac visitor has taken two posts and run with them. Things that would have taken Murphy weeks to unravel have been hammered out in mere minutes.

First, Chris at millshalligan posted a widget for converting a single file into an encrypted file. (After seeing Murphy’s post here!) So if you’re a Widget kind of person and not really interested in the Terminal take a look.

After that, Chris posted a solution for having your WordPress site contact your Mac via Growl when a comment is posted to your blog. Murphy had wondered about the plausibility of such a feature in his own Growl post. Maybe Murph should wonder about some other stuff and see if Chris keeps cranking out answers.

It looks like Bluehost doesn’t allow the outbound Growl notification - unless you pay an additional $30 annually for a dedicated IP address. Check with your own host before trying this out.

Thanks to Chris at millshalligan for some great stuff.

Growl

Growl is a utility that throws notifications up on your screen when an application tells it to, or a system event occurs. What events? Which applications? That’s up to you. There’s a substantial list on the Growl site of applications that support it, along with AppleScript.

Murphy has known about Growl for a long time, but had never gotten around to installing it. It’s definitely a cool utility, and the notifications are pleasant eye-candy. Murphy’s not sure what he’s going to do with it yet. He’s still playing around with GeekTool, which can display information on your Desktop. The two utilities are very different, but there’s definitely some crossover.

Growl notifications can be configured as “sticky” - you click to clear them. But the default is to fade in and out quietly. Murphy likes this unobtrusive behavior.

You can choose from a variety of styles for your Growl notifications. The smoked style might look familiar if you use Google Reader shortcuts, Google Notifier, or Skype.

You can also receive notifications from a remote computer. Murphy plans on digging into this feature for another screencast. A while back there was an effort to make a Wordpress Plugin that could send Growl notifications to a remote machine. That would be very interesting.

There’s also a Mail plugin that displays the contents of new mail messages. Another can display the track playing in iTunes.

How do you use Growl? Tell us in the comments.

Memorial Day. Remote Remote Reminder.

Holiday. No screencast today. But here’s an update for our friends not observing Memorial Day…

Murphy got an Airport Express last week. It’s hooked up to a downstairs stereo and wired via ethernet into the home network. A while back we covered Remote Remote and Murphy is finding it ultra-handy these days. The G5 upstairs hosts the music collection. Using a Macbook Pro ($150 rebate at post time) and Remote Remote Murphy controls the action on the G5.

Songs can be easily added to a playlist - maybe as a reminder to take action later. You can update the ratings too. Check out the Remote Remote screencast for more details.

So far the Airport Express has worked like a charm. Murphy hasn’t tried all the features, but using it to play iTunes music over the stereo works fine.

Borderless Quicktime Playback

Making your movie play back without borders is a little simpler than creating a skin. All you need is a solid black image file, at least as large as your movie. And a text file. And your movie.

Why would you want to do this? That’s a good question. Maybe you want to play a movie back while you’re working and screen space is tight. Maybe you’re using a computer for some kind of demo kiosk and you’d like the video playing back as part of your demonstration. Maybe you’re a minimalist. Maybe you don’t want to do this…

To be honest, Murphy stumbled into this Quicktime behavior when developing the screencast for creating a Quicktime skin.

In the screencast you’ll see the text file is the glue that holds the movie and the image file together. To make your production portable you’d have to export it into a self-contained movie.

If you want to take this a little further see the screencast on Quicktime skins.

You can also download the files used in the screencast.



SuperDuper: The Basics

A program like SuperDuper is a rare find. It covers your backup needs with a simple interface. It’s got a fair price. And it’s meticulously documented. Next week we’ll look at some of the more advanced features - today we’ll hit the basics.

Your Mac doesn’t come with a backup program. You need to subscribe to Apple’s .Mac to access their backup tool. On the other hand, SuperDuper provides a free version that can create a full, bootable backup. After seeing how easy SuperDuper is to use you’ll want the full version which can update your backups in a fraction of the time.

Backup can be a complicated science. SuperDuper’s interface confirms your settings with clearly-worded summaries. The extensive documentation provides further guidance.

Depending on how you use your Mac you might want to maintain multiple backup versions. You could run a full backup once a week. You could run a changes-only backup every day that runs quickly and backs up the day’s work. SuperDuper can also create a mirror-type backup that deletes files in the backup that you’ve deleted on your working disk.

How you use your Mac drives your strategy. You have to ask yourself how far back you might need to go. Do you need to recover important files you’ve deleted? Or go back to a previous day’s version? Consider those kinds of questions as you develop your strategy. Disk space is less expensive all the time. A 500GB drive can hold multiple backup versions of your Macbook’s drive.

SuperDuper suggests using a dedicated disk to store your backup. But you can also store your backup in an image file that can be restored to a disk and booted from. If you plan on using an external disk consider Firewire for its flexibility and speed.

Your disk could fail any day. Murphy’s Macbook Pro died without warning. A few weeks later the G5 wouldn’t boot. If you haven’t been backing up you should at least download the free version of SuperDuper today and make yourself a full backup.