Baggas’ Blog

Ok time for me to knuckle down and get started studying, before I get too far behind. This is challenging for me in a number of ways :

 

• never done serious university study whilst working full time and having a family before
• never studied externally before - seems harder to find out just exactly what I am required to do. There has been little information forthcoming from the uni thus far
• it’s over 8 years since I’ve been at Uni and the technological landscape has changed considerably. Over the course of my 6 year medical degree in the 90s the internet gradually emerged from being completely non-existent to being a useful, but still quite peripheral, adjunct to our studies. Few students had laptops and they were rarely seen in class.

So in view of the third point especially, does anyone have any advice for me? I sat down this morning to start reading and taking some notes and then wondered if I should actually be putting these notes into my laptop instead of my awful handwriting. Should I be using a simple word processor (eg Word, Pages etc) or is there other software out there which is better suited to study and note taking?? (only Mac software please!)

 

Like many, I’ve been watching the release of the iPhone 3G with interest. At present I have no definite plans to get an iPhone although I’m sure I will end up with one in the next couple of years. The main thing holding me back is that I’m less than halfway through my current phone contract and I’m fairly happy with my current HTC TyTnII phone - but if I found a way to get an iPhone cheap without having to pay huge contract fees I would jump at it. The other thing is, even in it’s second iteration I’m still not convinced the iPhone is a complete product - as a phone it lacks simple things like a decent camera, video capabilities, and MMS - I still cannot fathom why it won’t work with MMS. So for now I shall continue to bide my time, whilst still envying those cool people who have the iPhone already.

The other new release from Apple is their MobileMe service, which is an upgrade of .Mac which allows automatic over the air syncing of calendars, contacts, email and more between your Macs, PCs and iPhone. I’m quite excited about this one, having tried to achive similar things previously with Google with limited success. If I had an iPhone I would sign up for this in an instant but even without one I am quite tempted to do so anyway. Will be nice to have synchronized calendars on my Work and Home PCs and my MacBook Pro, which I can then sync to my phone with Missing Sync. I’m also planning to invest in a MacBook Air in the next couple of months to use for my Masters degree study and travel (just booked flights for my first Uni trip over to Townsville in October) - so keeping that in sync as well will be great. In fact, I think I’ve just talked myself into trying MobileMe. I’ll sign up for the free trial and let you know how it goes.

• The Exigent City - this is a fascinating in-depth article from the New York Times on the history, sociology and architecture of refugee camps around the world. They also have a good article on the groth of new cities.
• Ben Witherington writes an excellent post on God’s freedom, love, and human free-will. I’ve been pondering some of these issues lately so this is very timely.
• On the US election, this article compares the online presence of Obama and McCain, and this article looks at McCain’s strategy in searching for a Vice President - Google!
• Apple News from the WWDC conference. A better, cheaper iPhone with 3G and GPS, coming to Australia soon (wonder how long I will be able to resist?). An upgraded .Mac service (no trouble resisting that) and a new Mac OSX ‘Snow Leopard’ next year. Read a summary of some of the buzz here. My only disappointment is that I was hoping to see an upgraded version of the MacBook Air with more storage and RAM - guess I’ll keep waiting for that one… until the next Stevenote..

So ob1 is raving about Apple again, specifically how much of a pleasure it is to use the Apple store.

My latest Mac win is another piece of great software I downloaded last night. After the fire the other day (which actually didn’t even come close to threatening our home - my brother’s house was much closer to his fire) I got to thinking a little bit about insurance and replacing all our stuff if it was lost. Aside from the fact that the insurance probably wouldn’t come close to covering it all, I was reminded of the need to keep track of things - specifically all my books, CDs, DVDs etc. Well books are already taken care of by my online catalog at LibraryThing (which I have recommended a number of times already - awsome site). Unfortunately I couldn’t find any comparable online catalog for my DVDs and CDs - if anyone has any suggestions I’d be glad to hear them. So I decided to go with a software solution.

After looking at a few alternatives I settled on the ‘pedias’ from Bruji. They have a suite of four programs CDpedia, DVDpedia, Bookpedia, and Gamepedia for cataloguing those things. Very powerful software with a host of options I haven’t explored yet. Data entry is easy - you can scan the barcodes of your CDs using the iSight camera on your Mac - which works quite well, just takes a few goes to get used to. Or you can use a handheld scanner like a cuecat (which I have and works reasonably well). It then uses the barcode data to look up your CD, DVD, book etc on an online database like Amazon (or many others) to retrieve the cover art and lots of other info. You can customize your library with various custom fields and of course tags. All of this is integrated with spotlight for easy searching. There’s plenty of other features which you can check out on their website but already I’m finding this software a joy to use.

One feature I’m yet to try is the web export function which lets you export your catalogs to a website. I’ll do this once I’ve entered all my data and will post links in a few days. But this is perhaps my one disappointment with this (and other similar) software. What would be really great would be if you could somehow dynamically synchronise your library from this software with an online catalog (akin to LibraryThing) so as to have your data permanently available on the web and up-to-date. Maybe this is possible somehow but I’m yet to see it. If not perhaps they could look at making this part of a future version.

But overall, yet another very useful piece of Mac software

I’ve begun using Apple’s Time Capsule as my network storage/backup solution and thought I’d make a few comments.

If you’re unfamiliar with it Time Capsule is a network hard drive (500 Gig or 1 terabyte) and wireless router. It’s designed to work seamlessly with Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard and the Time Machine software to backup your Mac, but also works well with Windows as a network attached drive and print server.

Basically I’m using it as an extension of my existing network. I plugged the time capsule WAN port in to one of the ethernet ports of my existing router/ADSL modem. I shut down the wireless radio on my old router and am now just using Time Capsule’s faster 802.11n for my wi-fi connectivity. Through the Time Capsule’s USB port I connected a USB photo printer and another external hard drive (via a USB hub). After running the AirPort setup program on my MacBook Pro and my Vista PC both computers spotted the Time Capsule drive straight away, although for some reason it took a few restarts of the capsule before the USB printer and hard drive would show up. Aside from this, setting up and using Time Capsule has been a breeze. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get my network running the way I wanted to with it.

I decided to use the USB hard drive as my backup disk for my Mac. The first Time Machine backup took several hours but now it does a quick background backup every hour. I have not yet had the chance to look back into the history/restore features of Time Machine but from the demos it looks pretty good. The 1Tb Time Capsule hard drive I’m using as a media server and backup for all my music, movies, photos, home videos etc, and for any other content I may want to access from either my Mac or PC. I’ve now created a second library in iTunes on my Mac which contains my complete MP3 collection so I now have thousands of songs which I have rarely or never listened to before. Expect to see an eclectic mix of tracks in my “Recent songs” list on this site (which is generated using last.fm by the way)

So Time Capsule is great. Combined with Time Machine it is an incredibly easy and effective storage and backup solution. Gives me even more incentive to consider switching my desktop PC to a Mac when I next come around to replacing it. Imagine a 100% Mac household… I wonder if I can?

If you’re a musician then this piece of software is almost reason enough to consider switching to a Mac. GarageBand is my new favourite piece of software. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this program can do but basically it’s a powerful multi-purpose recording studio that can be used for anything from podcasting to creating a demo CD or just jamming around. We started off with some simple vocal stuff (Jenni recording some stories onto CD for the boys to listen to) and then mucking around with the boys using various vocal effects (like echoes, monster, mouse, and chipmunk voices). Now I’ve got myself some decent quality digital/analogue interface hardware so I can connect my guitars to my MacBook Pro. Even the basic level guitar effects included are not bad. The nice thing is you can lay down your raw guitar tracks and then change the effects after so as to experiment with different sounds.

For those instruments that I don’t possess and/or can’t play myself, Garageband fills the need, with a huge range of software instruments and a nifty “musical typing” keyboard for adding piano or any other virtual instrument. Of course you can also plug in a Midi piano but I’d have to work on my keyboard skills to make much use of any of that. One of the coolest things is that there is a huge database of pre-recorded loops to jam along to or I can create a “Magic Band” in moments in a range of styles - an instant backing band! It also integrates well with other iLife software like iMovie and iTunes so any tracks I record are instantly available to download to my iPod or mobile, or to use in any video projects - watch out YouTube!

As I said I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this software can do but so far I’m having a lot of fun

This week’s been a little quieter at work - no babies born so I’ve managed to keep well away from the hospital. Taking advantage of the odd bit of free time I’ve been working on getting my office a bit tidier and better organised. Now my office is by no means that bad - some of the other doctor’s rooms are incredibly messy. Even so, it’s been good clearing out the shelves and drawers and getting rid of all manner of odds and ends - mountains of drug company post-it notes, pens, out-dated drug samples, old books, drug information sheets, referral pads for services/specialists I’ve never used, various useless gizmos and other drug company paraphenalia, amazon.com boxes, and much more. Some of this stuff was 5 or 6 years old, from doctors who are long gone. I now have all this empty space that I can start filling up again - it’s wonderful.

On the subject of organisation, I’ve been doing some similar stuff at home - getting the garden tidied up, organizing the garage a little bit, tidying my study, organizing my music, doing 6 months worth of filing. Maybe it’s some sort of nesting instinct

I’ve also found an awesome piece of software to help get me organized on my Mac laptop. After trying a few similar options I’ve settled on a program called Together, for Mac OS X Leopard. Basically this is a great way of organizing my thoughts and various pieces of information, documents, pictures etc that I find as I surf the web from day to day. If I find something on the web I like, I just drag the URL to a little tab at the side of the screen, and the Together software will store an archive of that web site for me. Or I can just cut and paste a bit of text and store it as a note in Together. All this can be done through the little tab without needing to open the main window of the software itself so I can keep my focus in the browser or whatever else I am doing. When I do open Together, I can easily categorize webpages and notes etc through various Group and Folder settings, as well as tagging. For example in planning our trip to Denmark tomorrow I was browsing various websites and came across some good information and maps etc - I’ve just dragged these into Together so I now have an offline archive of all this info that I can easily retrieve, even if I am down in Denmark with no net access. I’ve also decided, with the aim of making my book reading more effective, to start typing the odd note or quote into my laptop - Together looks after this for me too. It also handles a large range of other file types, including email (handy to drag an important email across from mail) and media files. Another way of sending info to Together is using the Print command in any other application, and “printing” as a PDF file directly into the Together archive - very neat. I like the way Mac OS is so well integrated with PDFs. Anyway it’s a great piece of software. I don’t think I’ve really done it justice here so if you are a Mac user I’d definitely encourage you to check it out.