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This is the personal blog of Don McAllister, the host and producer of ScreenCastsOnline.

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Thursday
May142009

Back Home...

Well as expected, I didn't really get the chance (or have the inclination if I'm honest) to blog during the trip. However, I did twitter extensively, along with @podfeet and @spsheridan (that would be Allison and Steve Sheridan) my partners in crime during the Star Trek portion of the trip. If you followed us on twitter you would have been kept right up to date with developments.

Can I just say thank you again to Allison and Steve. I doubt very much if I would have made the trip if it wasn't for their generous offer to pick me up, put me up and travel with me to Catalina. Not forgetting traveling back, a scrummy Sunday dinner at their home and dropping me off at LAX for the transfer flight. I'd already met Allison a couple of times at various events but I'd not met Steve before, what a fantastic couple. I won't forget their kindness in a hurry and I'm sure we'll be best buddies for a long time to come.

The day I arrived in LA, Allison treated me to a Taco Bell - Yum! Well it was a Thursday! We spent the evening chilling out and then on the Friday, I ended up spending a few hours on Santa Monica beach whilst Allison had a meeting. I think I got the best part of the deal!

Friday afternoon Steve, Allison and myself headed off to Catalina Island for the special Star Trek screening as guests of Rod Roddenbury. What a beautiful Island! I'd never even heard of it before and was amazed to find such a gem, so close to LA. We basically kicked around in the sun on the Saturday before the event at the historic Avalon theatre in the company of the original Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and Mr Sulu (George Takei). Allison managed to snag an interview with Rod and she's just posted it here - Actually, Allisons photo tour has a lot more photos!

The screening was, how shall we say, unique! But very enjoyable.

Sunday morning, we caught the early ferry back, most unhappy

Sunday morning was spent in the company of an old friend of mine now living in Beverley Hills, with a second breakfast at Mels Drive In and a trip around the usual tourist spots and up into the Hollywood hills in his open top Thunderbird - very cool!

Back to @podfeet HQ for the Sunday afternoon and a live appearance on the NosillaCast with Allison. Finished off the day with a slap up steak dinner with Steve, Allison and Kyle - Phew!

The rest of the trip went very much according to plan with lunch at the Apple HQ on the Monday, staying over in Sausalito on the Monday evening, then traveling up to Petaluma on the Tuesday.

Again, more kindness extended by Dane Golden and Leo Laporte over at the TWIT cottage, a setting worthy of any "Man From Uncle" episode - if you don't know the address, you'd never guess it was the TWIT cottage. I was over there for a live episode of MacBreak Weekly and also met up with Alex Lindsay live in the studio and Andy Ihnatko beaming in from Skype. Actually being in the Studio was slightly surreal as I'd seen it so many times, and in reality, it's a tiny place, packed to the gills with all sorts of equipment. There is a small Flickr set here.

Lots of support from my Twitter friends who tuned in to see the live broadcast and live video stream - so no pressure there then!

Following the MBW, it was a drive back to SFO (stopping to take some photos of the Golden Gate bridge) and then an overnight flight back home. I've now had an overnight sleep in my own bed and feeling OK (albeit a little "spaced out")

The only thing now is I'm in catch up mode with some tasks I'd left to tackle on my return, plus just about to start putting the 200th show together.

Of course, the next big adventure is the trip to MacMania9 which kicks off in seven short weeks from today. That's a two week trip to China, South Korea and Japan with myself, Leo, Andy and Derek Storey as presenters on the cruise. It also included a pre-cruise visit to Inland China. I suppose I really should get the presentations in order and start preparing the ScreenCastsOnline shows I need to do in advance to cover my time away.

Busy, busy......


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Friday
May082009

Made it...

Finally made over to the US following a long and pretty much uneventful journey. By the way, if you can afford to upgrade to World Traveller Plus on BA for long haul flights (basically Premium Economy) it's well worth it. Huge difference in comfort and space.

My plans on documenting the creation of this weeks show as the basis for the show next week didn't quite go to plan as things all went a bit "pair shaped" during the encoding stage. Despite having both Mac Pros configured as normal, I spent the best part of Wednesday afternoon and early evening trying to get the encoding to run properly. I finally managed by reverting back to a single Mac Pro, but considering it was around 8pm before I stared uploading the various versions to Libsyn and I was due to get up at 5am the following morning. The post product tasks had to wait.

I'd planned to do them on the plane and was successful, but I wasn't able to record those stages so will do them retrospectively when I get back. So still on track for next week.

Plans for today include a visit to Santa Monica to try out the new camera and GPS, then traveling across to Catalina Island with Steve and Allison in the afternoon. The Star Trek screening isn't on until Saturday evening, so that gives us a day to explore and chill out. That's if it's possibly for three geeks to ever chill out!


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Wednesday
May062009

Mad rush...

Less than 24 hours before I leave for LA (a 5am start!) and I'm frantically trying to get this weeks show finished and uploaded to Libsyn.

The RSS feeds and website updates I can do from the road as I've transferred both Feeder and Rapidweaver to my MacBook Pro, but the encoding really needs to be down from home via the Mac Pros. One encoded, there's usually 800MB or so of video files that need uploading for each weekly episode, so I really need my broadband connection here, to ensure the files get uploaded.

This weeks show has been interesting in that I've decided to do an updated "Behind the Scenes" show for next week, to celebrate the 200th episode. I had a few requests for something different for the 200th show, so as I've been creating the show this week, I've been recording small snippets describing the process as I go along. I may end up finishing the recording in LA at this rate. Should make for an interesting show next week.

Anyway, must press on and start work on creating the free version of the show!

PS Not sure how the blogging is going to go over the next week. You should be able to catch me on twitter though.


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Tuesday
May052009

GPS update....

Thanks for all the comments on the previous post, extremely useful!

I think Chris and Jonathan have hit the nail on the head with respect to the particular device I have (Wintec WBT-201) in that the main barrier to its use is the terrible instructions provided with it. It transpires you don't really need to run the supplied Windows software as it just works out of the box.

First, make sure the battery is fully charged and the press the Power key and it will come on. Top red light means GPS is activated and once signal is acquired, it will blink. You need to be outside or in clear sight of the sky for this to happen. If the blue light is on, bluetooth is enabled. Press the power button again to switch BT off. Go about your business and when you've finished tracking, switch the device off by pressing Power again.

Switch on the device so BT is enabled (blue light lit up) and pair the device with your Mac using the BT preference pane (it uses the passcode 0000).

Once paired, HoudaGeo will see the device and pull off the data. I also used GPSBabel+ using BT to extract the tracking data in various formats.

So really, not as painful as I first thought, just difficult to understand what to do with such poor documentation.

All I need to know now is how long the battery will last, will the devices ever get "full" and do I need to delete anything off the device (I think it uses circular logs).

We'll see how it behave in real life later this week.


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Monday
May042009

Serious GPS logging...

You may have seen the ScreenCastsOnline show where I used the iPhone for GPS logging to allow me to geotag my photos.

As I've a fair amount of travel planned for this year and I've got a new shiny camera to record it all, I'd love to be able to properly log all my photos and assign geotags.

Following on from discussions on the ScreenCastsOnline forum and various emails, I decided not to rely on the GPS tracker applications on the iPhone and go with a dedicated GPS tracker. One that I could just switch on in the morning and just forget about. The theory being I could forget all about GPS signal acquisition and not worry about running the battery down.

I toyed with the idea of getting a camera with GPS built in but they are very few and far between and the one I did consider, the reviews I found indicated that the GPS would have an adverse effect on battery life on the camera.

So what to do?

In the end I decided to get a dedicated GPS logger and went with the Wintec WBT-201, the recommended GPS tracker to work with Houdah Geo, the application I'll be using to merge the GPS data and photos. I figured I'd get one for the trip to the US later this week so I could put it through its paces.

So the device has arrived and after fiddling with it for a couple of days, I've decided that GPS tracking is not for the fainthearted and certainly not ready for prime time! The issue may well be that the device has no native Mac software supplied with it and the instructions are very poorly written, but I consider myself fairly tech savvy and have to admit, it's been a struggle trying to work out exactly what I need to do to set it all up. I even resorted to installing VMFusion on my MBP to run the Windows based software to see if that helped but even that is problematic and extremely complex.

There are some open source cross platform applications that allow you to access and configure the device but when I tried to download some of the apps and image files, I'm finding missing DMG files, broken links and even if I find the files, do I really want to build and compile code?

Perhaps I've been spoiled with all these easy to use Mac apps?

Eventually, I've been able to connect to the device using USB via Windows but I've no idea if I need to change any of the default settings. I've taken a walk round the block and managed to record a GPS track, load it into Google Earth and look at it on a map, but I seem to have waypoints all over the place but at least, they appear in the general vicinity of the walk I took.

It now looks like I can use HoudaGeo to import the track information via USB but I doubt I'll have much time to play further before leaving on Thursday. I'll try and play/research a bit more but I've no idea how or if I need to reset the device, how often to download the data to the Mac and just really if I'm doing all I need to.

Fingers crossed it will all work out but if anyone has links for the definitive guide to using the Wintec WBT-201 with a Mac or some simple hints and tips, I'd really appreciate it!

Update: After reading the really useful comments below, checkout my update


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