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Recorded the one hundred episode yesterday and today. I was pleased that Chris Marshall came on the show to talk about his experiences with his Macs and his new iPad and how it fits in with what he is doing with his writing. Chris writes articles for a newspaper here in Spain and also makes an appearance on the radio talking about things to do with tech and living in Spain.

Chris still has his Harley thing going and him and his wife are keen to save abandoned animals mostly cats. Last time he was telling me that the animals get shipped to northern countries like Germany to get a good home.

The iPad is giving Chris the freedom to do some of his work away from the computer, things like checking emails, looking at the RSS feeds for the news that is of interest to the radio show. Seems like a perfect complement to a workflow that he has perfected using his Mac Pro.

I talk about using Scrivener compared to using Bean or Pages from iWork. I like the corkboard metaphor in Scrivener. Bean is a bit simple and pages has everything to be able to do Desk Top Publishing

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SwitcherMark tells why he is called that even though he is now more SwitchedMark, having been a Mac user for a few years now. We talk about his love of photography and how he uses his DSLR which he bagged at a closing down sale at Circuit City. He also has a Flip Mino, well he has the use of the Flip and has to hope the daughter doesn’t notice.

Mark was at the MacWorld 2010 and had a great time there. He met with a pile of his mates and enjoyed meeting many face to face to face for the first time. Mark bought a few toys there, not least a photography application which he got for $130 instead of the usual $180. Mark attended the Nosillacast castaways party, which must have been fun, especially meeting the venerable Allison Sheridan.

He is taking it step by step with the photos increasing his knowledge and skill while also using the camera to take sport shots of his girls playing football (soccer) and the camera being in a mode Canon have set for sports.

Back ups are all well taken care of with a system that includes, DVD’s, BackBlaze, Carbon Copy Cloner and Time machine. Something that a photographer really has to do to protect the portfolio or archive of photos. Using a To Do list is not a good idea for Mark as like me the items on the list are less likely to get done than noting things on a piece of paper.

Mark was a super bloke to talk to on the Mac20Q Podcast and I know that you will enjoy hearing what he had to say about how he uses his Mac, a 20 in iMac. he would like an iPhone but can’t switch away from Verizon which doesn’t have the iPhone available. Mark is sorely tempted by an iPad though and can see many uses for it in his daily business.

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This interview started over at Video20Q blog and podcast and seeing as Phil is a Mac user it is only right that I publish here on Mac20 Q also. I have cut out some of the interview that was more specific to film making and if you would like to get the full skinny on Phil, then you can listen to the interview in full at Video20Q.

Phil is working with an older Mac at the moment and is aware that he will have to trade up to a newer Intel based Mac soon.

Phil made the film short ‘Honest work’ using his editing skills with FinalCut Pro on his Mac and the video is to be found on YouTube. Nice idea for a short movie. I actually like the was he did the titles at the start of the movie too.

His advice to people that are thinking of doing film or video work is to get training first if you can but mainly the advice is to get out there and just DO IT. No point waiting around doing nothing because that will get you no where.

What Phil did was to buy the computer and software he needed to do the work he wanted which was to edit in TV and movies and learn how to do it well and found work from that. Excellent way to go.

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Phil Holbrook goes by the name of Philontilt on Twitter and also has a web site called CreativeJinx. He works in the TV business editing footage and during his free time he makes films.

Phil runs a film festival entitled EgoFest Films and will be working hard on that up until February.

One of Phil’s’ films is ‘Honest Work’

I used this technique when I was making the Hunting Boar movie, because using the mic on the camera is a bad idea because the sound is always rubbish. Far better to use an external mic and the put the sound in after. I used the sound off the camera to help me line up the audio from the Zoom H2 recorder. In this video I show the steps I took to line the sound up in AmadeusPro, which is my preferred audis editor. I could have done it perhaps in FinalCut Express but I can see the wave form of the audio better in AmadeusPro. That way I get a better alignment of the sound with the video. At some point in time I will have to try and match my voice again with the video in the ADR way of working. The actor has to repeat over the short pieces of dialogue to match them with the lip movement. Lip syncing….

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Today I am talking to a guy that nearly confessed to being a makeup guy, you know lipstick and blusher and all that, but did confess to being a geek. Unfortunately his wife is not a Mac person yet but he is working on her, I tell him to get out the thumbscrews. His son aged five though is a computer user with a laptop of his own.

David does have an iMac 20 inch model and is a recent switcher. He got drawn into the Mac world with iPods and moved into it with a white Macbook, he has moved on to a later model MacBook though. He is a firm believer in AppleCare. I have not had AppleCare on any of my Macs but he has got his moneys’ worth out of it.

We talk about Boxee and Plex, I don’t use those because I can’t get the best out of it because I live in Spain. I just wish I could use the BBC iPlayer, I may have to get something that will hide my IP address.

I talk about getting a satellite box from Elgato which will allow me to save things to watch later. He has a Sanyo Xacti video camcorder and loves using iMovie to make professional looking DVDs for the family.

He has his own podcast and is on episode 14 at the moment. He said the latest was going to be about Christmas presents for the Geek in your life.

David confesses to being an inbox zero type and also to having been outside the Milton Keynes Apple Store at 4am in the morning to get an iPhone. He uses Tweetie two and uses Brizzly which is a web based twitter client. There was a Twitter client in the latest MacHeist, Twitterific

Hooray I finally got my hands on Final Cut Express, Only took 2 weeks to get here from Birmingham to Spain. There is a chance that it was in the post office here for a few days because I didn’t get the note to say it was in the post office to collect. Often the post person is completely useless putting the post in the wrong box. Some of the house owners don’t check their post for months because they don’t live here – they live in Holland or Germany. Then when they do check and find a letter or whatever that is not theirs, they just dump it rather than put in the right box

Grrrr !!

Ah well I have it now just because I called to correos and asked if they had anything for me, or it would have probably sat there for a few more days or weeks. I still am happy to have saved 70 euro by buying off the Apple Store site in the UK rather than getting from the Apple Store Spain.

As soon as I had installed FinalCut Express I had to download a 180 mb  to update it to the latest. I will talk more about how it is going in a blog post and podcast.

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I had some time to use and I wanted to do an interview for the Podcast and so I asked on Twitter if there was any Mac user ready to get started with an interview straight away. Up pops Joshua Rodriguez who is a student from Canada. We had a super chat about how he uses his Mac and maybe I was able to give him a tip or two as we were talking also.

One of the things I was wondering was, what do students in schools do regards taking computers into schools. Joshua wants a MacBook. They do cost quite a bit of money and you know what kids are like with other people’s property. Maybe with a computer you could expect a higher level of care, but it only takes a couple of mad minutes doing something silly and everyone says “It wasn’t me.” Maybe by bringing this up here I am showing my age and bringing out the dad of three lads part of me or the ex teacher part of my life.

Does anyone have any experience of how portable computers get looked after by school children? Let me know fill in the contact form below.

Seeing as he is a poor student, mind you – all students are that way, I remember it well, I suggested that he might use Mozy for his back ups. Like my son has no money to buy an extra hard drive to be able to use Time Machine or SuperDuper to make a back up, so what can be done is have all of the important files being backed up automatically with Mozy to the Cloud. 2 GB of free space is not to be sneezed at, for sure.

I have been using Mozy for about a month now and I am impressed. It just does the backing up I have set it to do and I forget about it. There is an icon on the bar at the top of the screen and if I click it I can see when the last back up happened and how many files and how much data was backed up to Mozy. It really is ttransparent in use.

The show sponsor for this episode as usual is ScreenFlow. Here is a page with more information. I use it a lot and it is impressive. Don McAllister of Screencastsonline was the person that told me about it when I met up with him in Barcelona last September.

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My son came to visit for my birthday and seeing as I gave him my iMac 17″ to use and also a Wacom A5 wide tablet to use also, I thought it would be fun to interview him. I don’t think he took it totally serious, but what can you expect from a young art student being interviewed for a podcast by his dad. We had some fun anyway.

This is a short interview and makes me think that I should spend some time with him showing a bit more of what you can do with a Mac. last time I went to visit him though in his student flat in Dublin. I spent the time watching him do drawings in Photoshop with the Wacom that would take him a few minutes which would I would have to spend ages drawing. I used to be an art teacher and now I think I used to be OK at drawing.

I suppose at some point in time I will have to buy him an external USB hard disk so that he can make use of Time Machine. I did tell him though that he should get a dropbox account and also a Mozy account so that he can have some offline back up and also be able to share him files. he is obviously keen to show off his drawings.

I would be pleased if he would start to learn to some Flash animations, but I think that he prefers the drawing of the traditional way with a pencil and a sketchbook.

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This Podcast is with John Ashton from Bronte country in Yorkshire. John used to be a teacher and re trained to get involved in web design and graphics. He is working on a Web  site which is about the history of Bradford City Football club, called Bantams Past.

John has his own website called Ickledotco and he blogs on it about various interest and you should go and have a look. It contains all sorts, something for everyone. Radpidweaver,
Projects,television, Radio, Music, News, Food, swimming, travel, Art, local politics, Bradford, letters, Animals, Bookmarking, history, Macs, Blogging, sport, Politics, geese, education, creativity, social Networking, crime, language, twitter, WordPress, Writing, sleep, Blues, cats – all categories from the blog so that must give us an idea of the eclectic nature of the blog,

Suffice to say that Macs play a big role in all of this. John satisfies his creative urges using an iMac. He also has a recent post on his blog wishing the Mac a happy 25th Birthday.

Here is a taster from that post:

In 1994 I moved house, had a bit of spare money, and bought my first new Mac, a Performa, for around £1200. I loved it. Looking back it now seems quite limited with its floppy disk slot and lack of PC compatibility. Apple’s beautiful design specs had not yet arrived. Amazingly though, it did allow one to watch TV and by then I was beginning to dip my toe in the exciting world of the internet. I was also buying all the Mac publications I could lay my hands on: The Mac magazine, MacFormat and, of course, MacUser. My ‘toy shop’ of choice was (and still is) Hi Tec of Bradford (they too have an interesting Mac story – starting out in a parent’s bedroom and becoming a successful local company).

Amongst other things we talk about Fon and how you can use it to have wireless all around the world.

John - Self portrait

Enjoy the podcast….