Funny Holiday Site

If you've got a free couple of minutes and want to create some hysterical holiday video clips go to www.elfyourself.com . It's a site set up by officemax but has nothing to do with their products (just free advertisement for them. I created one of my family (http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1412382267) , take a look and enjoy.

Go to Picnik.org

I was just introduced (thanks Jenn C.) to an easy online image editing program: http://www.picnik.org
No registration necessary.
Useful for many quick editing jobs, including creating those 300 X 300 pixel images required for Podcast Album Art in FirstClass.

Skype Beta 2.7

For those of you who run Skype on your Macs the people at Skype have just released a new Beta version that is supposed to work better with Macs and Leopard. The image quality is supposed to be much improved (I haven't tried it myself). I'll let you know once I've played with it for awhile. Again, it's a Beta version so only download if you don't mind a few hiccups.

Adding Memory - Change of Date

One of the best ways to save money when you buy a computer is to get the smallest RAM memory available and then just upgrade it on your own. This Thursday, during Period 7, I'll be doing a RAM upgrade on my Macbook Pro. My computer currently has 2 GB of and I'm adding an additional gig. If you're interested in watching and seeing how easy it actually is - stop by.

Who said making a flow chart is boring?

For my first contribution I offer...Flowchart.com

This is a great online resources that allows you to create, share, and collaborate on flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, etc.

The makers allow you to work completely online, with a full set of tools, clipart, color gradients, and exporting options. In collaboration you and others can work on the same chart at the same time (taking turns) with a chat window for discussions.

It might not be flashy cool, but it is great for when you need it. Next time..I promise flashy cool.

zhare...flash and file hosting provider...

What is zSHARE?
In few words, zSHARE is a free image, video, audio, flash and file hosting provider, and it's mainly used to share files that are too big to be sent via e-mail.
With zSHARE you can host files, images, videos, audio and flash on the same place and as long as they remain active they can be downloaded unlimited times. This is great for those of you who create giant podcasts and need to post them somewhere without bogging down your website.

We're getting some help!!!

Ok, so I sent a link to our little blog to some other teachers and administrators in the building. The idea was to let them see what we're doing and to get some ideas from them - so if you start to see some posts by other people just know that they are doing it with my permission. Just to get the ball rolling, Ms. Cirino (Staples webmaster) sent me a link to www.picnik.com . It's a site that I'd never heard of before but after playing with it for a while, it's pretty cool. It allows you to edit your pictures with some pretty cool effects. And, as always on this blog, it's free. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I Want Sandy

This site is not what you think it might be by looking at the name. If you're life is really busy and you're always forgetting important dates, check this site out. It bills itself as a personal assistant. Basically you enter important dates and times into the website and it will send you e-mails and text messages when the time comes. Sounds pretty basic but it works well. If you combine that with Jott (a software package that allows you to add information to the site over the phone) you can set up a personal calendar and never forget a thing (especially that Bio test coming up). Try it out!

Cool Channels For Miro

As mentioned in an earlier blog, Miro is a great free app that allows you to set up video podcasts as separate channels. Here are a few channels that I watch regularly:

WebbAlert : A daily post that centers around technology news. It's usually only about 5 minutes every day and it gives you a good overview of what's going on in the world of techgeeks

Tekzilla: This is a half hour show posted once a week, they cover a wide variety of tech issues (a recent $500 PC episode inspired the build of my "GlassMac")

Apple Quick Tip of the Week: self-explanatory

GeekBrief.tv: If you can deal with the annoying host, the info isn't half bad

MacBreak: Mac related news

TEDTalks: A series of lectures given by the brightest minds of our time, maybe a little too nerdy for most of you

Experiment of the Week: I'm a science geek at heart and this guy reminds me of all my science teachers in high school

Check our Miro for other non-tech related videos as well.

Mac vs. PC

As most of you probably already know, I'm a huge fan of everything Apple. You've also probably seen those Mac vs. PC adds on TV. Here is a parody of that marketing campaign created by a group of students at Cal State Northridge. If you know of any more like this send me the link.

Web Browser Wars

A few of you have asked why I use Firefox as my web browser of choice instead of Safari. Tough question. I have recently begun to use Safari 3.0 which was released just prior to Leopard. I find that it's faster than Firefox (although it is not the "twice as fast" as apple claims) and integrates well with many of the other features on my Mac. I still use Firefox on occasion because old habits die hard. Firefox was one of the first browsers to challenge Internet Explorer and it's security is hard to beat. Try each of them and use what works best for you. You may also want to try Camino, which is a Firefox like browser created by the same people who brought us Firefox - the difference being it's suppose to be more Mac-friendly.

Google Docs

Hopefully you are all familiar with this app by now. Google Docs is a great way to collaborate on projects with your classmates and teacher. I created the video to give you a quick intro to Google Docs.

Can't Wait for this game.

Will Wright, the guy who created the Sims, has been working on an evolution based interactive game for years. I don't play computer games but I've already pre-ordered this, can't wait. It is scheduled to come out in the spring. Check out the video.

Apps List, Part I

I love trying out new apps on my mac. There is so much stuff out there to choose from, if you can think of something that your mac doesn't do, try to find an app (application) for it, I bet you can. If you have found something you like, add a comment and I'll check it out. If you cant find what you're looking for on the short list below click here for a list of over 400 freeware apps. As always, keep it legal. Here are a few that I use and recommend:




Quicksilver is an app that I could not live without. It's hard to explain what it actually does but here goes: it improves productivity and ease of system use. It can find applications and launch them with a few keystrokes, reducing icon clutter. Any file found with Quicksilver can be manipulated however you like, whether it be emailing that file, compressing it or uploading it to your server. Quicksilver’s collection of plugins and modules allow you to do things like display iTunes info, find a del.icio.us (more on this later) bookmark, perform command line tasks, integrate with any other app or browser you might have. Trust me with this one, download it, google "hints for quicksilver app" and watch as it changes how you use the computer.



Adium is a great tool to have if you have a bunch of friends who all use different IM services. Adium supports instant messaging protocols like AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, iChat, Google Talk, and more. If you like to chat with several people at the same time, you’ll appreciate Adium’s tabbed messaging feature, where a single window can contain several conversations in separate tabs. A lot of the preferences and appearance can be enhanced via the library of add-ons that can be found here.



Safari is great but Firefox’s amazing archive of valuable extensions, themes, and toolbars makes it king of the web browsers. Firefox’s search function is also far superior to that used by Safari (I won't even discuss Internet Explorer). If you don't have an e-mail service that you like, try Thunderbird. We also suggest that you take a look at Camino and Flock for alternative browsers. I'll have a blog post later on comparing internet web browsers.



Senuti is a free application for OS X that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod back onto your Mac (no, it's not impossible). It reads information from the iTunesDB file located on your iPod in order to retrieve information on all of the songs. I personally don't use this one but I know many people who swear by it - especially if you want to get stuff from a friends iPod.


Miro is a free application for OS X that downloads, manages and plays the latest videos on your Mac in fullscreen mode. You can set up channels, choose from over 2,000 presets, save YouTube videos. Download this app and never watch TV again. "The revolution will not be televised, it will begin on YouTube" In a future post I'll suggest some great tech channels to add.


So what do you do if you download an App and never use it or don't like it? Don't just leave it on your hard drive eating up space. Get AppDelete. It's a way to delete an application and all of it’s associated items. Just drag and drop an app and off you go. I like that it puts all of the items into a folder and puts it in your Trash. That way, you can still take a look to be sure that it didn’t take anything it wasn’t supposed to take.

Internet Radio

Check out www.pandora.com. It's a free site where you enter a song or group that you like and they create a website based upon that preference. Cool thing is, there are many groups and bands you may have never heard of and might like.

First things first

If you're reading this then you probably have a pretty good idea what a blog is. I've created my blogs using Blogger. The entire process is easy and creating new posts is painless. Create your blogs, add some posts and send me the link.
If you want to get rid of the navbar (that thing that runs along the top of the blog) let me know and I'll give you a piece of code to remove it.