Phil’s Blog

ShuttleXpress

I recently purchased a ShuttleXpress. £29.95 delivered from EnhanceYours.com  and it arrived the next day.

The ShuttleXpress is a small “mouse sized” USB device. It features 5 buttons, a Jog wheel and a multi position shuttle wheel.  You can assign different functions to each control, and can even have different set-ups for every application.  

As a university student I frequently listen to recorded lectures which I need to take notes on.  As well as my own recorded lectures, I’m also working through the Stanford iPhone Application Programming course which is currently available via iTunes U.  

Whilst annotating my lecture notes, I became really frustrated trying to control the media recordings using the mouse and keyboard, but with the ShuttleXpress its now really easy to quickly stop, rewind and replay sections of the audio or video.    iTunes doesn’t have very good controls for fine movement, so I tend to download the lectures and then play them back with VLC.  I’ve set-up the ShuttleXpress with a set of controls for VLC which has made reviewing the lectures so much easier.

The ShuttleXpress and its big brother the Shuttle Pro v2  are probably aimed more at video and audio editors, but I’ve found it a really useful device so far.

RSS Readers

I’m trying to get into this blogging lark, by that I mean reading other peoples & companies blogs, rather than me actually writing one.  I need a way to get  the feeds to appear on my iPod Touch.   At work I’m cut off from the Internet and so I want  to update my iPod Touch in the morning and have all my feeds on the Touch to view offline later in the day.

NetNewsWire

The first app I’m trying is the free NetNewsWire this came with good recommendations from several people. Setup was a little weird though. To add feeds you need to create a NewsGator account online.  It is on the Newsgator account that you subscribe to all the feeds, NetNewsWire then sync’s the Touch, based on the settings on NewsGator.  This is quite good, in that it keeps your Home computer and iPod Touch/iPhone in sync,  if you read something on one device, the other devices will know you’ve already read the article.

After setting up my feeds everything looked good.  I entered my NewGator account login info into NetNewsWire on the iPod Touch and my first sync was quickly done.

One problem I did noticed was all the posts disappeared from the iPod Touch as soon as I had opened them. In the settings I did have it set to leave read posts on the Touch for 3 days, but for some reason this morning I have also noticed that all the feeds I read last night have now disappeared off my list on the Touch.

So at the moment NetNewsWire has been a big failure on my system.  I’m in the process of trying to fix it.

This blog post started out as a quick test post to see if it would appear on my iPod Touch, but I’ve ended up getting carried away

Update
Success, it has now appeared on my iPod Touch,  I guess I’ll have to wait for the other blogs to add new posts and see if they also show up

Finally an Update

I’ve not used this blog in a long while,  my original plan was to use it as a way of logging what I was up to on my Degree Project.  However due to work commitments I ended up deferring my project and having a year out.  I’ve now recently started back on my course and so I am back looking to use this as a log of my project.

This is really just a test post to check everything is still working.

Refreshing iTunes Podcast Listings

This is a tip to allow you to re-download a bad episode in a podcast.

First expand the podcasts episode listings and delete the bad episodes.

Collapsed the podcast by clicking the triangle, so only the heading is shown.

Whilst holding down the option (alt) key, expand the triangle.  

This will cause iTunes to totally update the podcast.

Any missing episodes will be back in the podcast list and you should also have the option to click ‘Get’ to re-download the podcast.

MacBook Pro Screen Problems

My Macbook Pro is suffering with a screen related problem where the LED backlights misbehave from time to time.   Looking on the apple discussion board this seems to be a common problem with the new MacBook Pro (March 08).  

Temporary Fix

Press control-shift-eject, to force the display to turn off and reset.

Press any key to restart the display.

My MacBook Pro Arrives

My new MacBook Pro finally arrived today.

Specification

Apple MacBook Pro
Model MA896B/A
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
15.4″  1440×900 TFT Widescreen (Matte)
200 GB Serial ATA HDD  7200rpm
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

First Post

Just having a play with WordPress to see what it can do.  

I’m hoping to use it to post diary entries for my final year University project, which will help in the writing of my dissertation.   Most of it though will probably be kept private, if I can do that in WordPress.

I might also use it as a means of clipping articles that interest me on the internet, as I usually end up never being able to find them again.

I’m also a fairly recent Mac switcher and loving it, I currently have an iMac & Macbook Pro so there may be the odd Mac related info from time to time.