Road to Macstock 2017

Source: MacVoices #17142: Road to Macstock: Melissa Davis and Jodi Spangler On Delivering Remote Support

#SeniorMoments

Macworld iWorld 2014 Wrap-Up

Join Michael Portis and I in our Macworld/iWorld 2014 Wrap-Up discussing what and who caught our eye at the Expo this year.


Products Reviewed
Square Jellyfish
PoweRocks
Pocket Tripod
Contact Patch
Studio Neat

and a BIG personal thank you to:
Michael Rose
Jack Hollingsworth

If you would like to join our community, please visit http://smartphone-photographers.com/ 

Smartphone Photographers Point and Shoot Weekend Edition for 11-23-2013

Check out this lively discussion on sharing your photos online. We discuss apps, services and philosophies along with tips for integrating them with your photo sharing needs.

Smartphone Photographers Point and Shoot for November 7, 2013

Join my comrades and I for an informative discussion on smartphone photography tips.

My Toddler Loves Photo Booth on iPad

And here I was wondering why the iPad was running out of space! Attack of TheKeaganator!

Tech Tuesday Hangout No. 5

Today I covered for Benjamin Roethig who normally hosts the Tech Tuesday Hangout live each week. (to be populated soon with video) It was a fun learning experience baptism-by-fire-style on how to host, broadcast, record, edit and publish a Google Hangout! I was joined in discussion by Patrice Brend'amour, Doc Rock and Steve Sande. We talked about a wide range of topics including but not limited to: iOS Game Center leader boards, gaming consoles, apps, Steve's revised book release, Doc's funded Kickstarter project, Patrice and Ben's new website as well along with several other topics that came up. You can even learn how to avoid being eaten by a shark with one simple tip! You don't want to miss it, so watch our discussion unfold and do come back and join us next Tuesday!

Show notes with links are on their way and I'll revise the post once I enter them all.

Hand Made iPad Tip: Label - Case - BubCap

Got a new iPad? Protect it from getting scuffed and maybe even lost. In this Hand-Made iPad Tip, I discuss labeling your iPad using clear labeling tape, securing your home button with a BubCap and making your iPad more functional and protected.

HatTip: +Knight Wise of KnightWise.com for recommending the rooCASE. I love it! 

Product Links:

  A note about BubCap: yes, you can go into Settings and enable Guided Access, but a BubCap is still faster!

The MacJury Has Spoken: Holiday Gift Ideas from The MacJury

I was a MacJuror last week. Watch to see what stocking stuffers my friends and I recommend for the geek in your life this Holiday Season!

View The MacJury post

Hanging Around & Dropping Down

a.k.a "How To Sprain Your Ankle"
featuring my 2.5 year-old daredevil son, Keagan and his fabulous big brother, Lucian v6.0

(in the background you can hear the hissing noise of our Arizona Apache Cicadas during our Monsoon)

Music credit: The New Mastersounds
http://www.newmastersounds.com
from the album - Keb Darge Presents The New Mastersounds - "Drop It Down"

Recorded from my home office window using my iPhone 4S and the native Camera app. Edited and produced exclusively on my iPhone using the Splice app available from the iTunes App Store.

We'll see what our pediatrician has to say about this fall. My poor little dude :( Hopefully he'll heal soon and get back to his monkey business! (and that my boys won't be too mad at me for making this video!)

Knightwise.com Podcast S3ep2 : Macs and Mommies

It's been so long since I've recorded but something about the summer time just seems to kick things off! (Perhaps it's that the Hubby is soon done with school for the summer - yay!) Here is a rare video version of me podcasting/vlogging with my BIB (Belgian Internet Boyfriend), Knightwise. You must check out his stuff. He and his wife are crazy geeks like us - minus kids, plus dogs. (These are my people!!)

If you know me, fast forward through all the boring parts where I talk about myself and say stuff you've probably already heard. The meaty discussion is actually entertaining to listen to and I hope it gets you thinking about how you incorporate tech into your family and in your daily lives.

Share your thoughts in the comments! I'd love to hear from you!
You can follow us on Twitter if you want to geek out across the globe.
@Knightwise and me, @TheMacMommy

Also check out my Google Plus. I plan on interacting over there more too!

Brotherly Love

...because brotherly pestering just doesn't have quite the same ring to it

6 Week Smile

6 Week Wiggles

Fun With iGlasses

Hand-Made Mac Tip No. 7
Give your webcam a different point of view!

I've been having some fun with a piece of software called iGlasses and a piece of hardware called a Huckleberry. Here is an example of a response in a video conversation using seesmic. If you watch Freida's post, (embedded below mine so you can see the post to which I was replying) she demonstrates many of the settings available in iGlasses for use with your webcam. (Alternatively, you can click on the arrow icon inside the video or view the other videos in the conversation underneath the video to see more of the dialog we had in seesmic.)

(Sorry if my audio is a little blown out in some spots. Adjusting your volume before playback might be a good idea.)

Dancing for Hope

LDObamaDance from TheMacMommy on Vimeo.

The hope we had back on August 28th, during The Democratic National Convention, has paid off and we now have Barack Obama as our 44th President of the United States of America. Here is some home video footage from that time. We are overjoyed that Mr. Obama with his lovely wife and daughters are now our new Presidential family.

From our family living room to yours, here is our goofy son expressing his happiness at seeing Obama on TV at the DNC. That time seems so long ago and now the day has finally come to see the first of our hopes already being fulfilled.

Let's keep on giving our children a reason to dance and sing.

Geeking Out with iGrandma

Check it out! I was a guest on the "Call Your Grandma" show tonight with Patti Serrano. It was a lot of fun and I hope you might join us next week.

The show runs every Friday night at 10:00 pm ET.
Mark your iCal with a pop up reminder. The show is simulcasted using UStream and TalkShoe so you get it from different angles using audio and video streaming while also being a podcast to which you can subscribe.

What's the show about? Go ask your Grandma and find out!
Patti has invited me to do a weekly Mac Segment. Tonight's show was just an introduction. This is NOT a "Mac Show." Some people have already asked me, so I thought I should point that out. It's a show about having some fun using social media to talk about anything and Patti is brave enough to pull all the strings to make it happen. She also happens to be a grandmother who uses a Mac to do it. If you know anything about me and have been reading my blog and twitter, then you know that's right up my alley.

For the audio portion of the show, it's best to listen to it from the TalkShoe feed for better sound quality. Click this TalkShoe graphic to play it or go directly to the page where you can listen there or subscribe in iTunes to the show.

What Do Worms Eat for Lunch?

I found a little inch worm in our kitchen today and thought it might interest Lucian. I brought it out and put it on our front door step along with a small leaf. I took some photos and this little video of him eating his lunch with the little worm. He calls it a "nake" (since he can't quite say "s" yet. He offered it a cracker and I thought that was really awesome that he is learning to share. It's a lesson we're working on right now since he keeps saying everything is "mine! mine! mine!" I'm sure this would be much more interesting if he had a sibling. (We're working on it.)

It was fun to get down on our bellies and study this amazing little creature.




Lunch With A Worm from TheMacMommy on Vimeo.

The S Report

This is Lucian and Mommy reporting to you from Seesmic on The State of the Nap.

It's late.

Tune in next time.

What should we report on next time?

The S ReportLucian came out with 2 megablocks pretending to be a reporter so we decided to have some fun with it

Grandma.app

Let me elaborate
I finally updated my website so I could integrate my blog into it. Now I can just tell people to go to 'themacmommy.com' and I don't have to worry about whether or not they'll remember the dot blogspot dot com part. The only thing I'll have to worry about is if they remember the 'the' part of the address.
(PITA, but macmommy.com is already registered so I had to put 'the' in front. Just in case you thought I was really that conceited.)

I've tried to lay out my home page as a sort of one-stop virtual business card. (Inspired by Dave Taylor, thank you Darling.) I'm still tweaking the rest of the site and pages, but the bulk of it is done. I'm pretty happy with the layout despite the fact that I barely know anything about building websites and that I made the whole thing in iWeb. On the blog I just kept tweaking numbers and code and previewing it till I figured out what changed what. My OCD must have kicked into overdrive and this probably explains why my eyes are so dry lately. I still wonder sometimes what would have happened had I studied web design in college instead of print graphics and advertising. Oh well. I'm having fun now and that's all that matters, right? There are lots of cool things I'd like my site to do, but this will suffice for now until I learn more. Baby steps. Goo goo ga ga.
(What baby ever says that anyhow? Just wondering.)

<--- You can use the page links on the left hand side of the page to explore other pages on my external website and social network.

It's always a work in progress because I love to tweak. It keeps my mind off of my allergies and gives me something to do (instead of cleaning the house) while potty training my son. (not that it hasn't been just so much fun hanging out stuck in my living room with a nekked kid running around who isn't me) Eventually I want to create a better page on my site to display some of my artwork and creative photography. I just have stupid links there for now. Don't click them. It's more of a reminder or placeholder for myself as to what I'd like to put there. I have all of my older photography all backed up on archive and I just have to dig it out and arrange it better. (An OCD attack for another time perhaps.)

I could never be a good scrapbooker. Thinking about it just makes me twitch.
And it's not like I don't have all the supplies sitting in my closet either just in case all the computers in our house ever break down and I have a nervous breakdown along with it.

I've also added some enhancements to my blog here. I hope you like them. You'll notice there are little icons after outgoing links. If you roll your cursor over those tiny icons, you'll get a preview of what the website looks like without even having to click over and leave the spot where you're currently reading. I find this helpful for those times when I may add a link that points to an image to illustrate some vague concept inside my head. Like this one.

I've also added a new commenting system called Disqus. Now you can leave me text comments as well as video. (go ahead, I double, dog dare ya!) If you don't have a Disqus account, you can still leave comments, but Disqus is pretty cool and free to sign up. So is seesmic. Just sayin. Sometimes it's a bit funky to be able to read everyone else's comments to each other — kinda like you're spying on them and reading their mail — but I suppose you could be all ninja about it and leave yourself annonymous or "unclaimed" somehow so no one would know it was you who talked about your mother-in-law out in the open. I'm looking forward to seeing comments using this new feature. I hope someone leaves me a video comment sometime. That would be a lot of fun. If I could get my friends and family on board with these free services, it would be a really great way to keep in touch through my blog. Ahh, the power of web 2.0 — if only I could get people to use it now! (Hint: the more people who participate with me on my blog, the more examples I'd have to show them.)

Thanks to help from friends on twitter, I FINALLY got the favicon thingee working on everything including my spot on the Alltop Moms page. (Tip: there are lots of awesome blogs on that page, so if you are looking for someone specifically, just press command-F and type in parts of their blog name and Firefox or Safari will highlight the link for you. If you want to search for me, for example, type 'the' 'mac' 'mommy' with spaces and it will take you right to it.) w00t! Thanks for all your help guys! You rawk! (and contribute to my OCD, thankyouverymuch)

The only time the favicon doesn't load is if you type the url into the browser. For example, if you type 'themacmommy.com' and load the pages, then the favicon doesn't load and the url locations don't change either. This has to do with the fact that I'm cheap/poor, take your pick a stubborn frugalista and trying to stretch the outer limits of free content hosting wherever I can. My blog is hosted for free here on Blogger. My website is hosted for free with Cox, my ISP. All of my photo and movie sharing needs are hosted for free with services like Picasa, YouTube and Vimeo. I've taken all of these free services and stitched them all together using a combination of embedded code and links on my blog and website; you know, "internet glue." Google is my favorite type of "internet glue."

So, to professional web designers, I'm sorry if all the under-stitching looks like crap, but the fact is, my 80-year old Nana who lives 3000 miles away — doesn't care. She just likes to click on stuff and I like to imagine the smile that melts across her face when she sees her great grandson in movies and pictures that she doesn't have to fumble with in her mail program. (So long as her Windows box loads the correct plugins - I keep my fingers crossed or walk her through it over the phone.)

I guess you could say that my grandmothers are my driving force when it comes to doing what I do online and how I create content using my Mac. My paternal grandmother, Nana, has a computer and is pretty savvy when it comes to being organized. She knows how to check her email and forward virus hoaxes, because she cares about me, ya know and respond to messages. She can navigate the web. She finds joy in simple things and that really inspires me. My maternal grandmother does not have a computer and is a traditional artist. (She would rather put ink to paper and I don't think she's ever even touched a mouse. She only knows of the mammal kind and would keep it as a pet if she could.) I respect her unwillingness to embrace technology and it challenges me that much more to find simple tools she might possibly consider. I get the creative influence from her. Both grandmothers are in their eighties so anything I create online or offline has to be easy to use.

My sole motivation for learning how to use iMovie is so I can someday create a collection of videos and make a DVD using iDVD to send to my grandmothers so she they watch it on their TVs. Now I just need to get my optical drive fixed and I can move forward with that project.

Every time I sign up for a new social networking service, I have my Nana and other family members in mind. I always wonder if it would be something they could use or would like. Most of the time, sadly, the answer is no for several complex reasons. I continue to look for ways in which families and friends can network and keep in touch using the web. Just a few days ago I walked my Dad through the installation and setup of a Skype account and the result was awesome and we had so much fun. (iChat is fun too, but has been having some quality issues lately.)

Most of my friends and family live on the other side of the country. The distance always keeps me reaching out to them in new ways.

So far, the best way I have found is to try it all out, use it for a while and then incorporate the best parts of it somehow into my online space in such a way that I can just email one simple link to a friend or family member. That's what I'm hoping to achieve with my website and blog and I hope it will inspire others.

Smooch Gone Awry

That's it! No more dog cartoons for this kid. I suppose he's into the "imitating dogs phase" of toddlerhood because the other night during dinner at Oma & Opa's house he ate his food off his plate by mimicking how "Ooooh" does it. ("Ooooh is his pet name for Joschka, the Siberian Husky) This morning he climbed up to snuggled on the couch with me while watching Clifford and acted like he was going to kiss me. As you can see, I got duped!

Don't Need a DogI don't need a dog, I've got a toddler! I don't know what's up with the licking but I suspect it's this stupid dog cartoon he's been watching.