LAUG 2.0 News

This product is described as a “TiVo for Radio.” It consists of a striking shark-fin-shaped USB device and software. When I first heard of the radioSHARK, over a year ago, it was just what I was looking for. I placed an order on the Griffin Web site and was told that the product would be shipped within the following month.

Apparently, the development of the product took a little longer than anticipated and I didn’t receive mine until a whole year later. I plugged the “fin” into my Indigo iMac G3 (running Jaguar) and installed the software. It was fun to play with but I had trouble with the scheduled recording function and setting the target directory preference. Just recently, however, I upgraded my iMac to Panther and ran the Check for Update… option within the software. Now, everything works swimmingly. I’m not sure which update made the difference but I highly recommend you run the updater as soon as you install the software.

The software has many features including AM/FM listening, station seeking, instant recording, scheduled recording, audio equalizer, time shifting and multiple preset options. The system records radio broadcasts as audio files in either the AIFF (uncompressed) or AAC formats. The interface is as easy to use as a car radio and can even sport custom colors. Recording in the AIFF file format uses about 10MB per minute and the ACC option provide you with several quality/compression options. Now I can zone out to my favorite space music program and capture a recording of it for later.

Just about all of the maintenance utilities you would ever need are already on your Mac. Unfortunately, they are not all be initiated within the same program. There are many utility programs out there, in various price ranges, that perform most of those maintenance functions within one program. My favorite shareware utility is YASU. It is very simple to use and will perform the following tasks:

• Daily, Weekly and Monthly CRON jobs
• Repairs Permissions
• Updates Prebindings
• Clears system and browser caches.

Of course it doesn’t do “it all” but I’ve found that running this simple little utility solves just about any problem that I’ve run into.

The June meeting opened up to yet another full house at the Signs of Life meeting room. Names were added to the mailing list as new visitors settled in.
We discussed news from Apple referencing the upcoming developer’s conference where something good is usually announced. A new version of iTunes is on the way with podcasting built in.

Board Member Dave Greenbaum gave the introductions, handed out index cards for the door prize and asked for those who hadn’t submitted their email for the email list to do so. He also pointed out the swap table at a corner of the room, where club members can swap Mac items they no longer have use for.

Then Dave introduced the keynote speaker, Brian Best, who has been doing Mac consulting for over 5 years, and has a new storefront on 6th street. Brian presented Tiger to the group. Initially he steered away from Dashboard, and Spotlight. He focused instead on Automator. If you ever played with Applescript in the past, Automator takes it to a new level. The process he demonstrated was to make a sequence that would go to a website and download photos to add to a iPhoto library. He said it’s not hard to build Actions. Applications are listed on the left side in the Library column of the program and functions are listed in the next column to the right. In the example he presented, Brian demonstrated how Automator would utilize Safari to visit a .Mac website, and instead of pulling down a group of thumbnail pictures, it would go to the links that the thumbnails offered and pull down the full resolution photos, then add the photos to iPhoto in a new album. (Automator Actions can be downloaded from the Apple web site.)

Brian also showed off the Dashboard and the Widgets. He described them as tiny one-shot simple programs that add power to your desktop. He showed how you can add your own choices to the ones supplied by Tiger. He let the water effect woo the on-lookers, then demonstrated one using the Phonebook widget.

Spotlight was next. A search engine that takes files and gets info from metadata, going in and searching deeply into files for indexing. He called up all files on his laptop that had to do with baseball. PDF documents, emails. He said that Spotlight’s system is built-in. He opened up a Finder window and showed how Spotlight is part of the Finder interface as well.

The meeting moved on to tips and questions. To make a widget escape from the Dashboard screen, add a new copy of the icon you want to have on your regular desktop, Click and hold down as you pull it from the Widget line, When the widget is drawn,use the hot-key, F12 is default, to turn Dashboard off and your widget will be the only widget displayed. We talked about the Dictionary built into Tiger, and how the Archive and Install method of installation was works well. We also talked about how cache files should be purged from OSX if flaky things are happening. One program mentioned was CacheOut.