How To Record A Nortel VoIP Call On A Mac

OK, I probably have a weird scenario which is why a solution was a bit more difficult to come by than I expected. But it turns out that the solution is a lot cheaper than I expected too. Here is the problem. In the next few weeks I'll be doing some online classes that are going to be lengthy. My voice will be heard by the students over the phone and the reception on my phone at home isn't so good. My company uses a VoIP solution so I thought I would try to go that route. But the phone system is from Nortel and the IP soft phone software runs only on Windows. AND I have to be VPN'ed in for it to connect. This is a problem because my main machine is my MacBook Pro.

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How to make it look like you tweet often….while actually sleeping

I go through phases. The last two weeks are not a good example, but for a while I was tweeting like a madman. Every hour I would say something….most of it was even interesting. I got comments from others wondering how I was doing it. Was I really awake and thinking interesting things throughout the day AND at 2AM and 5AM and 11PM?

Well, some of those days I was, but most of them was ….MAGIC! OK, maybe not Magic. My secret was an incredibly cool tool called BufferApp. It acts like a buffer for the cool things you say. Say a bunch of things in the morning, and it automatically spreads them out across the day. Like MAGIC!

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How To Wake Up Every Day When I Want To

Alarm clocks have always been a problem for me. I have an alarm clock one day, then it gets left behind in a hotel room. Or I rely on the alarm on the Blackberry and the phone crashes that night (that happened way too often). I try to use the hotel alarm clock and I get AM and PM swapped around. It wasn't until I had a reliable phone platform as well as an easy to use alarm app that this problem went away. EasyAlarms from Rogue Sheep is that app for me. Its just so damned easy.

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How To Do a Real Pause in a Batch File On Windows

Ever wonder how to put a 20 second pause into a batch file on Windows? I had that problem today. I was setting up some virtual machines on a virtual machine hosting provider and needed a way to launch 2 virtual machines from a batch file. I knew that the Windows Server 2008 domain controller took 75 seconds to boot, and I didn't want the member server to start until after the DC was completely up and running.

The command, PAUSE has been available to batch files forever, but it waits for an enduser to press a button before it continues. I want to just wait for a certain time interval. Well, it turns out there is another command available in Windows that does exactly what I needed. The command is TIMEOUT and I think it first showed up in Windows Vista. Add timeout /t 75 and your batch file will wait 75 seconds before it continues to the next step.

Perfect!

How I Finally Clued In To How Amazing ScreenFloat Is

This morning I was trying to read some docs for a cool little command line utility called XMLStarlet. Unfortunately the docs were written so that the sample commands referred to sample content defined a few pages earlier in the document. That meant that I needed a lot of scrolling back and forth to fully understand what I was reading. Thankfully just a few weeks ago I had bought a great little app called ScreenFloat from Eternal Storms. I was able to take a quick shot of the sample xml docs, then refer to it very easily while reading the example commands further down the page. Its kinda hard to describe, so I recorded a quick little demo for you to watch instead.

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Shipping from the Netherlands Isn't So Great Either

I think I almost implied something yesterday but it was not intentional. In fact, I have to write this to say it definitely is not the case. I was talking about shipping from the US being painful. Well its not much better when it comes from the country I live in. One of the reasons for this is that the main shipping company, TNT, is mostly incompetent. Yesterday I ordered something from Coolblue.nl. They say that if you order by 10 or 10:30 PM, you will get it the next morning. They get the package to TNT by about 11 that night and its up to TNT to go the rest of the way. After all, that is the main function of TNT. But in my case, they will do that maybe 60-70% of the time. The rest of the time, they don't. Whats their excuse?

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Shipping from the US Is Painful

Ugh, whenever I find something that I need, I hope that I can get it in Europe. Sometimes I can't and that means dealing with shipping from the US. Its always painful and its only made worse when you try to go with a cheap shipper. The US Postal Service is one of the worst for any international shipping. I have never received anything shipped by them anywhere close to on time. Usually take the estimate, multiply times three, and hope for the best.

To make things worse, if you ship with USPS, the receiver WILL have to pay duties for the package coming in. Usually (not always) when shipping with FedEx, UPS, and other similar companies, the shipping is quick, and the duties aren't required.

My most recent example was shipped on August 1. I finally received it today. The cost of the item was 79 USD (54 Euros). The customs duties I had to pay for that was 33 USD (23 Euros). Its always painful. Ugh.

My Favorite iPad Apps

My colleague, Lubor Ptacek posted an article on his blog about the 10 coolest and most useful iPad apps that he uses. I agree with some of his choices but not so much on others. So I decided to come up with my own list of most useful. But I had such a hard time with keeping the most useful list down to 10 that I made it my top 14. So here they are:

Top 14 Most Useful iPad Apps

OmniFocus - I have had such a hard time finding a good way to manage tasks. It was easier to do before when I was able to rely on Outlook. Tasks in Outlook worked pretty well most of the time. Sure, they weren't perfect, but they were good enough. And then I got this Mac. And I use the Mac all the time. Now Outlook 2011 syncs tasks, but due to the version of Exchange at my company, I have to stick with Entourage 2008 which does not sync tasks. Thats really the only issue I have with Entourage. So I started looking around for a better tasks app. I looked at all sorts of stuff, even online alternatives. I finally settled on OmniFocus. It may seem costly at first, but it would be a bargain at double the cost. Having the app on my iPad and my iPhone as well makes having a single list of tasks so much easier than ever before. Now if you are thinking you don't want to go that route because you are on a Blackberry, then let me tell you this. I didn't buy OmniFocus because I had an iPhone, I bought the iPhone because OmniFocus was helping so much and it didn't exist on Blackberry. The iPad version offers some features that aren't available elsewhere, making the 3 apps work really well together.

iThoughtsHD - I thought a mind-mapping app would be worthless on the iPad. While mind-mapping is great on a Tablet PC, the lack of a serious pen interface would be limiting (and don't even try to convince yourself that the styluses available provide a decent pen interface). After I spent a few minutes with iThoughtsHD, that opinion completely changed. Although its still better on a real tablet, the iPad interface for mind-mapping in iThoughtsHD is genius. I have been able to fill out so many ideas and lists using this app that have help me on a wide range of projects at work.

Reeder - I have been a big fan of news readers for a very long time, having been a paying customer for NewsGator when they still had paid customers. Reeder is the best of the news readers I have seen on the iPad for going through my top feeds. It doesn't present it in a newspaper or magazine format, but when I want that I use Zite which is also pretty amazing.

Instapaper - I often find stuff online that I want to read, but don't have time for right now. So I save it for later with Instapaper. Having this app on the iPad means I have that list of reading material where ever I am.

Teleprompt+ - This is a pretty specialized app, but when I record my videos, its truly invaluable. I no longer have to edit out the sound of rustling paper when I read from my script. I keep meaning to build a teleprompter mount, but even without, this is still magically useful

Notesy - I started with SimpleNote, but have moved on to Notesy. I can't remember why. It probably was something I heard Merlin Mann say. But I use Notesy, synched with DropBox for all my ongoing notes. I use the same app on the iPhone, plus Notational Velocity on the Mac, all looking at the same list of text files. I keep notes on things I said to people, books I read, gifts I bought, measurements of furniture I need to buy, future blog posts, translations of Dutch articles I am working on, instructions for apps, scripts I am working on, and more. Notesy handles it all without a problem.

LastPass Tab - I tried using 1Password to manage passwords, but since the app on iPad is so pathetically useless, I switched to LastPass. LastPass Tab is a tabbed browser for iPad that has access to my LastPass password store as well. I find I use it almost as much as Safari on the iPad

Squarespace - My personal blog is hosted at Squarespace. The Squarespace iPad app (and the iPhone app) means I have the quick ability to respond to comments, report spam, and see visitor stats.

Wordpress - My work-related blog is hosted by my employer and uses Wordpress. Everything I said for the Squarespace app applies to this Wordpress app as well.

Tweet Library - I have used Twitter for a long time. Well, for a long time in Twitter years. Tweet Library makes it easier for me to maintain a library of my tweets going back to almost the beginning. Because occasionally I say something good, and 6 months later I need to find that. Tweet Library makes it easy to find those little gems.

Tweetings - Tweetings is the ultimate iPad Twitter app for me. I have tried plenty of others, but I keep returning to Tweetings. It does the basics, like my timeline, mentions, and DMs. I can create buttons for my favorite searches (right now they are FCPX, Blender 3D, and Timelapse). The best part is the window for creating a new tweet, with quick access to recent hashtags, url shrink utils, scheduled tweets, lists of contacts, and more.

Sonos - I bought into Sonos before I moved to Europe 6 years ago. I thought it was braindead easy to use then and its still that way. Having the apps on my iPad and iPhone mean that I now have my remote with me all the time. The main beauty of Sonos for me is being able to hear my music everywhere in my apartment, without having to blast it from a single speaker in one room, annoying all my neighbors. Now the music plays from 5 different zones at a level you cannot hear through the walls, but it sounds perfect to me. And the apps work well.

Goodreader - This was the first PDF reader I found on the iPad and I see no reason to change. It syncs easily with specific subfolders on dropbox so I always have whats important and not the rest of the stuff I share in Dropbox. Goodreader has great features for annotations too.

DayOne - I have blogged now for a little over 15 years. It wasn't called blogging then and the tools were terrible, but its still the same idea. Ever since the beginning, I blogged because I wanted to record something that I would have forgotten otherwise. If others want to read it, great, but thats not really my goal. I have always known that everything on the Internet is NOT private, no matter what you do to secure it, so sharing more…um….intimate things was always off limits for blogging. DayOne is kind of a private blog for me, stored on my machine. It syncs to my Mac and my iPhone so I can always record what I did that day, who I met, etc. Its a beautiful app I really enjoy working with.

Maybe later I'll work up my list of coolest apps on the iPad. Do you have any favorites?

Whats In The Bag

Every now and then I see one of those posts that shows what someone is carrying in their bag. I love those posts. I love seeing what people carry every day. I love comparing what they carry to what I carry every day. This is not one of those posts. This is the worst-case scenario, I don't carry this every day. This is what I was carrying in my carry-on on a plane from San Antonio, Texas to where I live in Amsterdam. While the bulk of it was on a 777 from Chicago, the first few hours were on a Canadair jet which means I couldn't carry any big bags for carry on, and yet this was all with me.

So here is whats in the bag, this time:

Panasonic GH1 with Really Right Stuff L Bracket
Panasonic GH2 with Panasonic 20mm/1.7
Panasonic 14-40mm lens
Panasonic 7-14mm lens
Panasonic 100-300mm lens
Nikon 20mm/2.8 mounted on Novoflex Nikon to MFT adapter
Nikon 50mm/1.4 mounted on Lensbaby Tilt Adapter
Cokin Filter Holder and various filter step-up rings
3 Singh-Ray Graduated Filters
Singh-Ray Vari-ND, Singh-Ray Polarizer 
Hero GoPro HD with a few mounts
Really Right Stuff Rail and Panorama Head
Really Right Stuff BH-25
Extra GH1 battery (wish I could find the GH2 batteries)
2 96-LED lights
Zoom H1 Audio Recorder with Red Head Windscreen
Zoom H4n Audio Recorder with Red Head Windscreen
AudioTechnica Lavalier Microphone
Moleskine notebook
Gitzo 1541t Traveler Tripod
Manfrotto 428 Leveller
Weifang WF-717A Video Head
GorillaPod (the big one and the small one)
Pixel Intervalometer for GH1/2
Chargers for GH1 and GH2 batteries
3rd Gen Kindle
Akai LPD8
Akai LPK25 
Various drugs (all legal: Benadryl, Nytol, etc)
Various USB keys
15" MacBook Pro
Mac SuperDrive DVD drive in external housing (since I have 2 internal drives)
2+ TB in various external drives
iPod Touch (used as remote for teleprompter for iPad, etc)
Zune 80 (since the iPod sucks for music)
HueyPro ColorMonitor
64G iPad
Various cables
Headphones (including DIY custom fit ear pieces) 
TideToGo cleaning stick

In case you are wondering, yes, this was way too heavy and yes, TSA made me take almost all of it out of my bags.

Is the iPad perfect?

Today a friend of mine asked me what I thought of the iPad. Well, I think I love it. It really is a cool device, as long as you understand what it can do and what it cannot. In the two or three weeks that I have had it, I have seen that most of the thoughts I had about the device were confirmed and there have been a couple of surprises as well. I am using it at work as well as for fun and it definitely has a place in both scenarios. And I am writing this blog entry on the iPad as well. It seems to be working out really well.

What makes this device special is that it's portable, has a great screen, and the battery life is spectacular considering what it is. I am using it as a notetaker, an RSS reader, a PDF reader, a magazine platform, a music maker, a remote control, a cookbook, a gaming platform, a timer, and a mail tool. So I think one of the really great features about this device isn't really a feature of the device but the fact that Apple has built such an incredible application marketplace which 3rd parties have joined.

But it's not all perfect. While it's battery life is amazing, it's battery life is one of it's biggest weaknesses. 10 hours on a charge means that the Kindle will always be with me for fiction, long reads, and newspapers. Plus reading on the Kindle is just a nicer experience for most things. Another major problem is that the USB cable only gets a slow trickle charge when plugged into the Mac. Although the power brick is tiny, it means another thing to pack (and accidentally leave behind in the hotel room). While the device is small, it's not quite thin and light enough to compete with the Kindle, which is another reason I won't be leaving the Kindle at home for any trips. And while it's overall design is gorgeous, the one mistake they made was not including a hardware switch for adjusting the brightness. I guess they could have skipped that had they made it sense the brightness in the room, but they forgot that too.

As I mentioned, I think it's the apps that make this thing really shine. So what are the apps that I am using? Obviously there is Safari and Mail. And unlike their counterparts on OSX, these don't suck. For some reason there is no ToDo list on the iPad, but IMExchange2 does a wonderful (free) job of showing me my tasks from Exchange. I love Manton Reece's Tweet Library to get a handle and search through all my Twitter traffic, although I often use Tweetdeck for more day to day usage. Reeder is my current RSS reader and it's integration with Instapaper (which is also installed) makes it even easier to skim through my feeds. GoodReader is an almost perfect PDF reader and it's integration with DropBox, GMail, and other cloud services makes it easy to get documents onto the device. In fact I think this app means I won't be carrying my Kindle DX anymore.

But wait, didn't I say that the iPad is not a replacement for the Kindle??? Well, yes I did. And it's not. I have two Kindles: a DX and the newer smaller device with 3G and WiFi. I get the New York Times on that smaller device and that will continue to be with me where ever I go. But the larger DX is something I thought I would still use for larger PDFs from work. Although the Kindle is great for longer reads, those work PDFs are more for reference. And searching them from the Kindle is a bit more painful than on the iPad.

So what else do I use? TeamViewer is a great way to access to my home machines remotely as well as the parental tech support duties I have. SimpleNote allows me to see the same notes on my iPad that I see in NotationalVelocity on the Mac and Notes on the PC. I now even have an app on the Blackberry that syncs with that system. And I am writing this blog in it too. The Sonos remote app is an absolutely incredible way to control my music at home. I hadn't used Zinio in years but it's now on the iPad and it's a beautiful way to read full color magazines. World Clock Pro HD is a wonderful multiple time zone clock app I use to figure out when i can call my manager in Seattle. And Digits Lite is a delightful free calculator app with a nice history on the left. Those are all the apps that I use almost every day and are on the home screen on device.

Other apps that I use a fair deal include Epicurious, USAToday, Marvel Comics, BubblesHD, Cut The Rope, iSequence, iElectribe, ThumbJam, and Kayak. And then a whole lot of others that are on there but not getting used everyday. In all, there are 100 apps and counting.

As for accessories, there is one that is absolutely required: a case that props the iPad up at an angle. I got the MacAlly Bookstand and it's perfect. Yesterday I couldn't have typed this out since I didn't have the case yet. I am amazed at how much different typing long texts can be when it's angled on a sturdy platform. The SD card adapter is also absolutely required for getting files off my card from the camera and audio recorder.

You might have noticed that I did not mention the iPod app. Well, that's because I haven't really used it for listening to music. My main music platform is still the Zune because the whole music ecosystem on the Zune is just so much better. I would love to see that change, but I am not holding my breath. That said, I have started using my iPod Touch recently because the Connect system in the new Nissan Qashqai that I got does a great integration with the iPod. Because of that I am making my way through all the back episodes of Core Intuition during my drives.

I really enjoy this iPad and am very glad that I picked one up. Unlike the Mac, this is something I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone and everyone. Apart from the downsides I mentioned above, it's nearly perfect and I look forward to using it for the next few years.