But are they really? We assume that companies will be responsible with our data; that they will protect it from malicious people who might abuse the information to their advantage. We also tend to forget to read the fine print about ownership of said information. Does Google own my spreadsheets since I store them on their portion of the cloud? Or are they just storing them for me? I better go back and read the terms of service…

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The speculation is that Rogers may have introduced the flat rate as a precursor to the iPhone being released in Canada. I think Rogers is testing the waters to see how the flat-rate plan is adopted across it’s subscriber base. The problem is that they have excluded arguably their largest subscriber populations - Blackberry users and customers with smartphones. The plan is tailored to a specific phone (Rogers Vision). The fine print for the flat-rate plan reads (bolding is my own):

Important: This plan includes unlimited on-device mobile browsing only. Plan is available on select phones only (PDAs such as Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices, PC cards and non-Rogers certified devices are not eligible). Data usage incurred on ineligible devices, incurred while tethering (using device as wireless modem for laptop) or incurred using non-Rogers (3rd party) applications downloaded to your device will be subject to pay-per-use charges of 5 cents/KB.

So, if you own a smartphone or Blackberry, you aren’t any further ahead. You still pay $0.05 / KB for ad-hoc data usage. And even if you could apply it against your Blackberry account, you would not qualify for the unlimited data for external applications that reply on always-on internet connections (Google Maps, Google Talk, etc).

Why bother introducing the plan at all? The plan is a step in the right direction, but until it is mated to a device that is useful (iPhone?), it won’t be too appealing to me.

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Mac OS X has many great features, and the next release of the operating system has many more that look to be amazing. One great thing about the current version, Tiger, is something called Finder Smart Folders.

Smart Folders appear in many Mac applications, from Apple Aperture to iTunes. They typically represent an automatic grouping or search of content based on a certain criteria set by the user. In iTunes, this can mean a smart “album” of music from the 1960’s and 1990’s. In Aperture, a smart “album” can mean photos that span the year 2006, have particular keywords assigned, and are from a certain area of the world. They can be as simple or as complex as the user wishes.

Smart folders in Mac OS X Tiger’s Finder are similar to those described above - they search various sources for particular content and display it in a grouped fashion. Continue reading to see how you can use Finder’s Smart Folders to find files that are up to 1GB is size on your drive in a few simple steps.

To create a smart folder from Finder, select “New Smart Folder” from the Finder’s File menu, or use the shortcut key defined by the operating system.

Finder’s File Menu

In the dialog that appears, you are presented with some options for building your smart folder. The options are in the form of search terms and criteria. You can tailor the smart folder’s content by setting the criteria to match your expected outcome.

Smart Folder dialog

By default, the smart folder will search your computer’s hard drive. This is denoted by the word “Computer” that appears selected in the first criteria bar of the smart folder window. You can change this to search servers that may be on your network, your specific Home folder, or “Others” whic can be networked drives, etc.

In addition, you are given two rows of search information to work with. The first row is set to search for a “Kind” of file. Next to this option, you will see “Any” in the menu control. All together, these two lines and the search location bar above them tell the smart folder to look for “Any Kind of File on this Computer”.

Type of Content to find

Search Criteria

If you feel constrained by the number of displayed search terms, choose the “Others…” menu option and you will be presented with a window containing hundreds of other search terms.

“Other” search terms

As a simple example, let’s find the files on your drive that are less than 1GB in size. Define a few search criteria lines as follows: for the first line (below the “Kind” and “All” line), choose “Size” as the first criteria, and “Greater than…” as the second criteria. In the small text box that appears, enter the number “100″, and select “MB” from the menu that is to the left of the text box. So, your first line should read “Size - Greater than… - 100 - MB”.

Add an additional criteria line by clicking on the “+” symbol to the right of the last line you entered. In the new criteria line, select the appropriate values so the line reads “Size - Less than… - 999 - MB”. The smart folder will automatically start “finding” content that matches your criteria as you update the details. The end result should be something like the following:

Final criteria specified

If this smart folder is one that you will be referring to again and again, it’s useful to save it to the Finder’s sidebar. To do this, click on the “Save” button in the top-right corner of the smart folder window. You will be presented with a window asking for a name and location. Enter a name that suits the smart folder’s content (”Files 100MB - 999MB” is fitting here), choose a location to save the smart folder, and make sure “Add To Sidebar” is checked. This ensures the smart folder is saved to the sidebar, where it’s accessible by a single click of the mouse.

Save the smart folder

Smart folder in the sidebar

Now, you have a smart folder that will be always up-to-date with your system’s content. You will always be able to find large files with a single click, and decide whether they need to be deleted to save space on your hard drive. The smart folder will group the files by content type (Music, Movies, etc), so it’s easy to distinguish where the files are used and if they are critical or not.

You can use this same technique to search for files larger than 1GB (to expose those space hogs!), particular file types (Where did all those downloaded PDFs go?), or the location of any file on the network drive containing the words “cool feature”. The possibilities are endless!

Final Smart Folder

Enjoy this tutorial? Leave a comment to let me know!

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• First, you need an idea for a site design. Use Smashing Magazine to get great ideas on what other people and companies have done, and what is possible these days. It’s worth checking the Design Showcase section, as well as the Best of the Month list.
• With a design in mind, you need some content. What’s your site’s primary focus? Who is the intended audience? Questions like these will help you write content that suits your site. At the most basic level, a personal website should have a primary page with an introduction (index page), a page that describes you to the world (about me page), and some kind of contact page providing email links and/or address information. Company sites are similar, except they describe the company! Provide a good mix of text and graphic content to keep the site interesting to the visitor. You can add pages as you see fit - for example, showcase some of your photos using a viewer like Airtight Interactive’s SimpleViewer.
• Content in hand (er..on disk), you need to be able to create it. You can go old-skool and use a plain-text editor like TextMate, SubEthaEdit or BBEdit, or you can try a more user-friendly (ie: don’t have to write any HTML code if you don’t want to) tool such as Adobe Dreamweaver, Coda or RapidWeaver.
• By now, you should have yourself a well-designed website, complete with useful content. But you need somewhere to put it so that people other than yourself can see it! That is where hosting comes into play. A web host will “host” your web pages (for a fee) and serve them up to people who visit your website. Most hosting companies offer a basic plan that includes a domain name, but if you already have one you can usually do some simple configuration to associate your domain name with your host’s servers. Hosting companies like Dreamhost, Webserve.ca and Servage.net all offer introductory hosting plans for those starting out.
• Now that your website is live, wouldn’t it be nice to know who is visiting? You can add detailed statistics about your visitors by using Google Analytics. It’s a free service that offers very detailed information about your visitors, including who visited, from what part of the world, what pages they viewed and how long they stayed on your site!

Do you have any good tips on website creation? Share them in the comments!

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In a related vein, I recently came across a blog hosted by the National Post Blogs site.  The blog recounts artist Richard Johnson’s experiences and efforts while working as a news combat artist in Afghanistan.  Combat art as news is a First World War tradition, and it’s one that seems to affect me more than regular photographs do.  The sketches seem more real, more human.  They fit really well with the written account of the blog, and are done with an amount of detail that instantly creates that personal link between you and the subject.  Johnson also sketches the locals, which provides an interesting view of the Afghan people.

The unique insight into the activities of our troops in Afghanistan provided by Kandahar Journal makes it well worth a read.

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Since taking possession of my MacBook Pro, I’ve had the opportunity to try the trial versions of Apple Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but this article will focus on the printing functionality of Lightroom alone. I will detail Aperture’s functionality in another post.

Lightroom has a very flexible print module. It allows you to create templates for various print layouts. You an do the same with the Web module, defining your own web templates to upload to your web site. By default, Lightroom has a very limited set of print templates - mostly contact sheet and full sheet-specific. But with a little customization, you can define your own template for printing photos at home.

Click below to follow along with a short tutorial on setting up a simple Lightroom print template.

Update: I just checked the settings again on LR 1.4.1 and it does not accept 0.13 as right/left values.  Try setting the values at left 0.25, right 0.25, top 0.25, bottom 0.56, and make sure to set the cell size height to 5 and the cell size width to 7.  This will produce the correct template.  Thanks Julia!

Lightroom is composed of modules. These modules represent the different actions you can take against your digital photos. The module we’ll work with is the Print module. For this tutorial, we’ll work with two images.

Select the images you want to print. The default preview will show the first selected image occupying the entire printed page.

Now, we’ll start to create our template. Click the “Add” button in the left template panel. This will create a new template with the a name in the template list. Click the label to rename it, and use a descriptive name that so you can remember what the template does at a quick glance.

Next, we’ll focus on the right-hand panels. The first is Image Settings. These settings affect the appearance of the image when it’s printed on the page. Check the “Zoom to Fill Frame” and “Auto - Rotate to Fit” checkboxes - this tells Lightroom to zoom the image to fill the entire area we will define, and rotate the image so that it fits the orientation of the paper. If you want an outline printed around your images, check the “Stroke Border” checkbox and set the line with and colour accordingly.

Next, the real meat of the template - the layout. The Layout panel is located under the Image Settings panel, and directly affects how the print areas are defined. I chose to operate with Inches as the unit - if you have another preference, the settings I’m using will need to be adjusted accordingly.

If you are in a hurry, you can just copy the settings as shown in the image at left and be done with it. Otherwise, follow along as I explain what each setting does. The first section to change is the “Page Grid” section - this defines how image will appear on the page when they are contained in a grid layout. Set the “Rows” slider to “2″, which means there will be two rows on the page. Leave the “Columns” slider at “1″. So, we end up with one column with two rows. Great. If we look at the preview, we see there are now two boxes appearing on the page, but the size and spacing are off, so let’s make some more adjustments.

In the “Cell Size” section, click the numeric value at the far right of the “Height” line. Enter “5″, then click on the numeric value on the “Width” line. Enter “7″ here. Now, the preview should show two boxes, one on top of the other, each 5×7 in size. To decrease the amount of space between the images, click the numeric value to the right of the “Vertical” line in the “Cell Spacing” section, and enter “0.20″. Next, we’ll play with the margins. In the margins section, enter “0.13″, “0.13″, “0.40″, “0.40″ for Left, Right, Top and Bottom respectively. Now, the preview should show two boxes, one on top of the other, each 5×7 in size, and nicely spaced on the page.

Once you’ve made the adjustments, you can assign them to the template you created a few minutes ago. Right-click on the template name that you created, and select the “Update With Current Settings” menu item. NOTE: Be careful not to Left-Click on any other template, or the adjustments you just made will be lost. You will have to re-enter the adjustment values. This is one quirk of the template functionality.

One final option is to remove the identity text that appears between the images. To remove the text, simply uncheck the “Identity Plate” checkbox in the “Overlays” section to remove the watermark. If you want to add some text between images, check the same box and update the values of the “Overlays” panel accordingly.

By now, you should have a new template defined! It should show two 5×7 images, evenly spaced on a page, ready for printing! You can add another template for landscape printing, or if you want to display two 4×6 images instead.

I hope this tutorial was useful to you. If you would like to see other tutorials or have input related to this tutorial, leave a comment or email me.

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I rely on Gmail quite heavily.  It’s my primary email client, and my primary email address is an @gmail.com address.  I remember getting an invite way back in the day when Gmail was invite only.  It was cool to have a Gmail account!  Now they are free for anyone, and it makes sense to have one for various reasons (2+ GB of space, 20MB attachments, Gmail Drive, web-based, etc).

One great feature of Gmail is labels.   Labels allow you to assign words to your email messages that help describe them, and make searching through your email very easy.  You can have as many labels as you can imagine.

After the jump, see an example of using a label in Gmail.

You can be clever with the use of labels by assigning a label to incoming email, and having that email automatically archived on receipt.  This way, the email doesn’t clutter your Inbox, and you can see at a quick glance what new email you have by looking at your labels panel.  For example, in the image above, you can see the “!facebook” label shows a (1) beside the text…this shows me that I have one new email from facebook.com (either a new message notification, newsletter, etc) that bypassed my regular inbox. 

To view the email, I can click on the label and Gmail will automatically perform a mail search with the label name as the query, returning the results in a custom “inbox” for that label.

 To setup automatic labeling of incoming email, do the following:

1. Click on “Create a filter” on the main Gmail page.
   
   
2. Enter the name (or email address) of the person your email will come from in the “From” field, or choose another field to use as the filter.
   
   
3. If you already have email from the person who you are labeling, you can click the “Test Search” button to see that your search returns the correct results.  Once you’ve verified the filter, click “Next step”.
   
   
4. On the next screen, check the “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” checkbox.  This means the email will not appear in your inbox, but instead will be archived.
   
   
5. Check the “Apply the label:” checkbox and choose an existing label from the drop down menu (or create a new one by scrolling to the last item in the menu “New label…”
   
   
   
6. Click “Create Filter” and that’s it!  Now anytime you receive email matching your label’s criteria, the email will be archived and it will update the count in your label panel!

If you have any other tips regarding labels and Gmail, please post a comment or send them my way and I’ll be sure to let everyone know!

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• Sun Safety (www.kidshealth.org)
• A Parent?s Guide to Sun Protection - Protecting your Family (Health Canada)
• Sun Safety For Kids
• Sun protection for kids important this summer (Sympatico Health and Fitness)

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After downloading and installing plugins for Wordpress that I didn’t need, and reading many Google search results, I figured it out. Windows Live Writer provides a quick and easy way to create a logical break in your post text.

The Wordpress rich text editor allows you to add breaks by clicking the “more” button on the “code” tab of the editor.

This is great if you use the new post editor from the admin side of Wordpress. But what if you’re using another tool to post? With Windows Live Writer, you can use the “Split Post” feature.

Splitting a post inserts a More link that Wordpress will understand and display as a “Continue reading” link. The link leads to the full post on a new page.

Once you publish your post, everyone can continue reading at their heart’s content!

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See details here: Apple MacBook Pro

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