I formatted my USB flash drive with NTFS – I was a little disappointing it could not be written too from OSX. Back to FAT.
As USB flash drives get bigger this could be more of an issue as people do like to move their data between operating systems.
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Samsung SC_HMX10 and IMovie
I bought this a few days ago, charged it up, took a minute of video, and plugged it in to the USB port. IMovie recognized and imported the video clips with warnings. The clips were comprised and unusable. I was worried I would have to take the camera back.
Fortunately, the camera mounts as a block device as well. The clips work fine when they are imported from the block device (i.e. bypassing IMovie’s automatic import of video).
I wonder how many people will be confused and return their cameras because they don’t appear to work on their Mac?
Buying Bento?
I’ll probably buy Bento because by the time I make time to play with it, my trial will expire so I will need to trial the full version.
Story Behind Unusable Outlook Contacts
How much time is wasted in frustration by computer users who receive from or attempt to send contact information with Outlook. People naturally try to drag an Outlook contact into an email to send as a contact to others who may or may not be using outlook? Most of the time the recipient can do nothing with the attachment received. I’d love the hear the story from someone who worked at Microsoft as to why so many versions of Outlook work that way. It could be incompetence in understanding users and how they use the program, but it seems to me like it was designed to frustrate communications between Outlook and other email programs. Anybody know the real story?
Impressed With Daylight Integration With Pages
MarketCircle’s Daylight now supports mail merge with Pages. This is great! In the past I was either exporting my contacts to CSV and emailing that to my assistant to merge on a PC with excel and word (however long that took) or exporting to CSV and merging with NeoOffice (this is painful). I’ll be springing for a full version of IWork once my trial runs out.
It is very easy to merge to a Pages document in Daylight once you know how. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader!
Disintermediate SmugMug or Flickr?
With services like S3, I wonder if someone will eventually successfully disintermediate photo sharing services by providing an inexpensive or free product or service which basically takes care of the organization of photos, comments, tags, etcs. on S3?
Productivity Boost By Reducing Filing
I receive a number of bills electronically through epost. If I don’t intend to use the information for tax purposes, I am just going to leave the bill archive there. The chances of me needing a copy of my terasen gas
Bottle Deposit System Out Of Control
In BC, the deposit on returnable drink containers is relatively small – nobody in my circle of acquaintances actually returns their deposit bottles – they put them in curbside recycling. It is not just worth anyone’s time and fuel to drive to a return depot. In some areas of town, there are people for whom it makes economic sense to collect and return deposit bottles. These people will remove them from curbside recycling. Apparently in an attempt to deny these people an economic existence or at least keep them out of some neighborhoods, it is now no longer allowed to put deposit bottles in curbside recycling in parts of Victoria.
A longer post on the Shaw->Telus Saga
8 days ago the shaw tech came to make the switch. It kind of worked, but we weren’t getting voice mails and didn’t hear the phone ring often. One day I picked up voice mails remotely and it worked – it didn’t twig I was using Telus’s voice mail system and not Shaw’s. It turned out Shaw’s and maybe Telus’ customers would be routed to our shaw service, but all other providers were being routed to Telus and went straight to voicemail.
Tuesday night I figured out what was going on when Lisa didn’t receive the message I left during the day. I called Shaw, they said the would look into it. I called shaw again Wed. morning. They said call Telus. I called Telus, they said shaw missed a step. I called Shaw, they said it was Telus. I said Telus said Shaw missed a step and didn’t port the number over. Shaw agreed and said they would port the number over within 24 hours. I said how about 24 minutes. They said it can take up to 24 hours. 18 hours later and about an hour on the phone on hold, I now have local phone service.
I should call them up and ask for a years free service and see what I get. All this work so I have one less transaction to worry about a month (and saving about $100/year on my phone bill).
Telus to Shaw Phone Switch Fubared
Somebody missed a step when we switched our landline service from Telus to Shaw. As a result we get a fraction of the calls going to our shaw service and the rest to our old telus voicemail. I didn’t realize this was broken for a week, since calls from Telus landline to go through
corrrectly to our shaw phone service.