HowTo trim a Flip Video clip with FlipShare

If you using FlipShare to manage your video clips shot with your flip camera, then you have probably run across the need to trim the video clip down to extract a section of the video.

Trimming a video using the FlipShare application is very easy as I'll show in this post.

• Start up your FlipShare application and select the video clip that you want to trim
• To trim the video, click on the scissors icon at the bottom right of the video clip

•  Once you click the scissors, you will be presented with a small edit window that has two tabs on the bottom of the video slider.  Move the left tab to change where the starting position of the clip will be.  move the right tab to change where the ending position of the clip will be.  You can slide the whole tab or click the arrow buttons to move one frame at a time (there are approximately 30 frames per second, so clicking the buttons can be slow).   Play around with the tab positions to get your clip just right.

• Once you have the clip just right, select the Save button, which will over-write the original clip with your trimmed clip, or select Save As, to save a copy of the clip.  If you wish to cancel the operation, just click the Close button without saving the clip.
  

Howto Upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard

I completed my upgrade to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) on Friday (driving by the Apple Store twice was more than my restraint could take) and it is very easy to say that writing this HowTo will take more time than I spent on the install of Snow Leopard.

The total install time was about 1.5 hours, but I less than 3 minutes (including screen shots).  I started at 22:26:55 per the first screen shot and entered the admin password to start file copying at 22:28:16.  A blazing  2 minutes and 15 seconds.  And if you are wondering, those screen shots are the actuals from the install, not ones taken afterwards for this post.

Here are the step by step instructions.
1. If you don't use Time Machine (shame on you) then make sure you have a good backup.  If you use Time Machine,  you should be covered.
2. Insert the Snow Leopard Install DVD.  You will be presented with the following window.  Double click the Install Mac OS X icon to start.

3. At the next screen, you can simply press continue, unless you want to access any of the utilities (including Disk Utilities) which you may need if you are doing a clean install, but for Snow Leopard, an Upgrade over your current operating system is the recommendation from Apple and is what this HowTo assumes.

4. After pressing continue, the installer will search for your hard disk.

5. You may want to check out the optional components to install.  To display the optional components, select the Customize button.  For my install,  I deselected Language Translations to save some disk space.  If you have older Mac applications, you may want to select Rosetta.

6. Once you have chosen your options, you can go back to the install screen.  Select the Install button and you will be presented with an authentication box.  Type in your administration user name and password, click OK and the install will proceed without further input required from you.  At the completion of the upgrade, your mac will reboot and you will be running Snow Leopard.

Post Install Notes.
For the most part every application I have works, except Microsoft Sync, which does not seem to be able to connect to the Microsoft Sync Web Site.

Some applications, such as Mail, will perform an upgrade the first time you start them, and certain other items (for example the iPhoto based screen saver settings I use) may need to be tweaked.

But overall, you can expect a simple, painless upgrade that leaves you with a faster, more robust operating system and a few (only a few) handy features.

HowTo Reboot a Mac when all else fails

So, I'm off using OpenOffice 3.0 (which seems rather buggy compared to 2.4.x) and it locks up ... even Forced Quit application is just sitting there. Now one option is to pull the plug, but that is never the best choice, so here are the steps that I followed to resolve this situation.

1. Stopping Open Office: Since Forced Quitting the application didn't work, I launched the Application Monitor app (found in the Utilities folder in Applications). From there Open Office was shown as not responding. Selecting it in the list of processes and clicking the Stop Sign (kill process) was effective in taking care of Open Office.
2. So ... Now a reboot, something pretty easy one would expect, but after selecting reboot from the Apple Menu, the desktop cleared, but the machine didn't reboot and eventually an error message popped up and said it timed out waiting for Finder to kill itself.
3. Clicking on the Finder in the Dock (which was still visible) started up Finder again. So I tried to do the Reboot from the menu a few times ... repeating steps 2 and 3 here. That didn't work. So when all else fails, it is time to use the Terminal for some command line triage. This is not something that most Mac users will do often, and most will be uncomfortable with it, but it is not that tricky and better than just pulling the plug. To start the terminal App, go to the Utilities folder in Applications and double click on the terminal application.
   
4. Rebooting from Terminal: In general, I don't use the admin account for day to day activities (and neither should you), so the first step is to set the SuperUser (su) to your admin account (the first account you created when you set up your Mac). This is accomplished with the su command. For some help on Mac terminal commands, check out http://www.ss64.com/osx/. From the bash$ prompt, type the following
   

home$ su admin_account (where admin_account is your administration account)
password: (enter your password for the administration account)

Now, to force the reboot. From the bash$ prompt type the following

bash-3.2$ sudo shutdown -r now (translated: "super-user do shutdown and reboot rightnow")
password: (enter your password again)

Rebooting this way is quick and safe, meaning that the system cleans up before rebooting. It is not "pretty" since everything stops immediately. I would say that the prefered method is to use the Apple menu, but when you need it, rebooting from the terminal is better than pulling the plug on your Mac.

See the screen shots below for additional help.