OK, this one’s a bit niche, but some of you might find it useful. For the benefit who’d rather read than watch a video, here’s an explanation.
Many of you will already be familiar with OS X’s built-in zoom feature (which you can reach via the Mouse or Trackpad prefs in Snow Leopard). Hold down Control (by default; you can change it to Option or Command if you wish), then two-finger scroll up or down on your trackpad, or use a mouse wheel if you have one. Your display will zoom smoothly in and out.
And many of you will also have heard about the new QuickTime screencast recording feature in Snow Leopard, which offers does a fine job but lacks the bells and whistles found in full-scale screencasting apps like ScreenFlow.
Combine the two, and you have a neat way of calling out or highlighting details while using QuickTime to record a screencast.
Displaying an impressive level of tech savvy, Ice-T took a claw hammer to an old PowerBook he’s getting rid of.
In this 4-minute video, you can watch Ice-T smash his old PowerBook to bits. At first, it seems the former rapper is getting revenge on a glitchy machine.
“This Mac gave me a lot of hell,” he says. “It’s kinda like payback.”
But as the video goes on, it’s clear Ice-T is trying to remove and destroy the hard drive, which he’s afraid might fall into the wrong hands.
“I’m gonna get this hard drive out of here, make sure none of my secrets are in here, if somebody should find this computer,” he says.
In the comments, Ice-T takes a lot of flak for destroying the machine (and a bunch of racist garbage). The geniuses on YouTube rip him for not taking the machine to an eWaste facility and releasing toxins into the environment.
While the toxins criticism might be on target, Ice-T was right to destroy the hard drive first. Data is incredibly easy to pull off old hard drives, whether the drive has been erased or not, even in multiple passes. There are plenty of cases of identity theft from old machines. And just weeks ago, journalism students were able to buy a drive full of government secrets from a dump in Ghana.
As the actor knows, the one sure-fire way to destroy all data on a hard drive is to destroy the hard drive. “There’s probably a better way to do it, but i just said, ‘fuck it,'” the Law & Order actor says.
In fact, if recycling an old laptop, it’s a good idea to drill several holes into the case and right through the hard drive before taking it to an eWaste facility (Only if the drive can’t be easily removed obviously, which is the case with many older PowerBooks and iBooks).
The vertical video format presented Matt with problems when it came to displaying the video at 16:9, but here’s how he figured out how to use iPhone video with Final Cut Pro.
If you feel there’s no such thing as too much screen real estate, you might want to recycle your old Mac as a display for your laptop.
Popular Mechanics suggests downloading ScreenRecycler (there’s a gratis or $29 version) a driver that creates a virtual display that is then shared via VNC so you can multitask with two displays.
You can even use an old PC monitor (gasp!) for display as long as the main computer’s a Mac.
As someone who tends to keep old machines around long after they’re useful, I love this idea.
Complaining he hasn’t received Visual Voicemail on his iPhone for weeks, Siegler joins a growing chorus of pundits dissatisfied with AT&T, including Gizmodo, Wired and GigaOm.
But as some Techcrunch commenters point out, Visual Voicemail is bolloxed by a popular tethering hack, which allows the iPhone to share its internet connection with a tethered computer.
“I enabled the tethering hack weeks ago when it came out,” says one commenter. “It broke visual voicemail, so I reverted it. One heck of a coincidence if everyone’s voicemail spontaneously broke the same week that a tethering hack came out that breaks visual voicemail.”
Siegler didn’t respond to a query asking if he had tried the tethering hack, and he makes no mention of it in the comments to his post, where he engages in some back and forth with TC readers.
Either way, here’s a very simple fix to get Visual Voicemail back, while still enabling the tethering hack.
