Big Trousers, Web, Design, Photography and new media.

HD Video workflow

Posted on 18. Mar, 2010 by Philip in Big Trousers News, Digital imaging, Hardware, Photography, Software, Video

Bruce from benallaonline.com.au gets up to speed with HD video.
Includes 24 inch iMac, Canon 7D DSLR shooting 1080p video, loaded to Aperture 3 and edited in iMovie. Export at 720p and embedded from Vimeo upload.

Keynote on auto schedule shutdown-startup

Posted on 04. Mar, 2010 by Philip in Apple, Big Trousers News, Digital imaging, Hardware, Software, Video

A very recent installation job nearly went pear shaped when a new “feature” in iWork 09 Keynote stopped us from scheduling a shutdown of a kiosk style big screen sideshow on 3 screens.

The job is a display of news and coming events on 3 big screens for The West Footscray Neighborhood House. The screens run separate keynote presentations containing HD video and slideshows all with audio in 3 different locations within the center complex. Three Mac mini’s run the program files in full HD resolution and they could not be more happy with the quality of the presentations.

There were a number of hurdles to overcome however and in the interests of others trying to achieve the same result we will list solutions to some of the problems we encountered.

(more…)

Trojan in Woo Themes footer code

Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Philip in Big Trousers News, Software, Web design

Whilst trying to fix a WordPress install, I found some errant code in the footer.php for site files installed by a client. After a bit of sluething I discovered that the Premium Woo Theme used had come from a filesharing site or had come in via bit torrent and had been altered to subject the user to potentially dangerous callback connections for information carried within the site. Now at Big Trousers we have seen this sort of thing injected into shopping carts but never before delivered via a Premium WordPress theme over file sharing.

This is a word of warning to all those who attempt the ‘something for nothing’ route and again a warning to those using a bit torrent client.

My advice is to pay WooThemes for their fine WordPress Themes. The other advantage of owning a license to your Premium theme is that it comes with a lifelong upgrade so that new improved code and bug fixes are downloadable in order to improve your site functionality. Some Themes are available from Woo for free in any event but if you are reading this to find a solution this is it.

PDF Reader 2009 Update download

Posted on 14. Nov, 2009 by Philip in Apple, Software

A lot of folks are getting this email to download an update to Adobe PDF Reader.

It is Spam at least or a Trojan waiting if you click on the link.
A big tip, if you are on a Mac and do not have Windows installed then an update to a Windows application is sure to be a hoax. Also Professional Software updates for Adobe products come via the Adobe updater software and not via email. This one looks like a third party vendor trying to get you to download their version of a pdf reader.

Delete as Spam

Good news from Adobe

Posted on 31. Aug, 2009 by Philip in Apple, Digital imaging, Software

As of Monday 24 August we are lowering the price of the Student Subscription edition. For annual subscribers, the subscription will drop from $49 per month to $29 per month. And for students who subscribe on a month to month basis, the price will drop from $69 to $49.

With now up to a further 40% off Creative Suite Design Premium Student Subscription edition, it’s a great time to get students hooked into Adobe products, especially if they have been, um, borrowing a mate’s copy!

This is good news given the apparent lack of support for CS3 for its use under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
An upgrade to CS4 is now more affordable under this student subscription model.

MYOB frustration

Posted on 10. Jul, 2009 by Philip in Apple, Big Trousers News, Software

Due to MYOB’s current software licensing practices it is no longer possible to buy a new copy of MYOB Account Edge and upgrade your datafile unless you pay MYOB an extra $29 to remove the previous serial from your datafile. That is our current understanding at least, your experience may vary.

To do this you need to email your datafile to MYOB and sign a form with payment details included.

To avoid this procedure we recommend purchasing an upgrade to your software directly from MYOB.

Big Trousers will no longer sell MYOB software for installation on the Mac Platform as we consider this licensing model to be draconian and not one we would recommend being locked in to.

As rival software is available we will look into those alternatives.

Quickbooks has been around for a while and that may be an alternative.

Connected Precision Accounting Software may not be suitable for everyone but worth a look too.

We will continue to look for other, more Mac friendly accounting software packages and report back as they are tested.

UPDATE:

Perhaps there is a version of MoneyWorks that will prove useful and competitive?

Websites and Mail down

Posted on 06. Jul, 2009 by Philip in Big Trousers News, Software, Web design

We are currently experiencing a delay in upgrading the hardware of the web server.

When all the bugs are ironed out we hope that an improvement to services will be evident but the change over has not gone as smoothly as we had hoped.

Keep an eye on this page for up to date details.

UPDATE:

It looks as though there is a DNS problem inherit in our issues here as well. The new server needs time to be seen by various ISP’s for it’s new location. Some domains are working fine and others are slower to propagate. This will resolve itself over the next few hours.

If we look at the sites hosted over different connection they are starting to appear and the good news is that the sites load a lot faster.

UPDATE 2:

It also seems that when the server was down for repair your ISP cached DNS failures. For those wishing to access mail in the interim you can see your site via anonymouse.org and use the webmail service attached to your hosting service by adding /webmail to your domain url.

UPDATE 3:

All should be getting back to normal now and the new server is a much better unit.
Twice the ram, dual SATA raided drives, faster dual multi threaded CPU – should be a noticeable difference in performance.
Still waiting on upload permissions to be sorted.

Easy Time Machine Setup with the Netgear ReadyNAS

Posted on 16. Apr, 2009 by Philip in Apple, Big Trousers News, Hardware, Software

In a recent firmware upgrade for all Netgear ReadyNAS units a simple interface for configuring for network Time Machine backup under Mac OS X 10.5 has been revealed. Untill now only a complex 15 step solution was available for this unit.
Many had opted for the Apple Time Capsule solution for network backups.

This is great news for those with plenty of room on their ReadyNAS and a small number of Macs to backup.

To use the system simply reboot your ReadyNAS and it will have the firmware upgrade done with a page available with set up instructions.

Read more here.

wp-eCommerce spam fixed

Posted on 30. Mar, 2009 by Philip in Big Trousers News, Software, Web design

So after 5 days or so of ongoing sales spam the guys at Instinct have released a fix.

Good to hear.

Here is a full list of changes:

• More fixes to stop the spamming of purchase logs
• New dashboard widget
• Donations widget now refreshes the cart when on the checkout page
• Fixes to remove backslashes from product names with single quotation marks
• Admin purchase log RSS feed fixed
• Paypal Express shipping module fixed
• Target Markets feature added

Download now and upgrade your installation

wp-eCommerce attacked

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by Philip in Big Trousers News, Software, Web design

From the 22nd of March wp-eCommerce plugin installations have been attacked by some zombie robot attack. The attack bombs an account with hundreds of false purchase’s with no product listed and $0.00 sale price.

Not a huge dilemma in a security sense but the false entries would take a user all day to delete through the backend.
We are looking at deletion through the database just to clean things up but we will wait till the version 3.6.11 proves not vulnerable to such attacks.
Here’s hoping..

Woopra site analytics

Posted on 27. Aug, 2008 by Philip in Software, Web design

Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. And it’s free!

We will report back on how the system performs as we get approval for further sites we control.

So here is the interface after a few days of tracking. The thing that is most impressive apart from the User Interface is the live tracking and the speed with which it works. A hit registers in around half a second on screen as a blip on the global map and in a number of other areas.

Jungle Disk

Posted on 04. Feb, 2008 by Philip in Big Trousers News, Software

At Big Trousers we have been trialling the offline backup and storage solution provided by Amazon S3. Jungle Disk works very much like the iDisk, a service offered by Apple.
A hard drive icon appears on your desktop with the server based files at your disposal from any Mac or PC.
The backup application costs $20 but you need to set up an account with Amazon as well. The Backup utility is quite straight forward to set up so that files are automatically uploaded at some predetermined time at a frequency that suits. For our purpose we have the files we print photographs from and also the current working files for graphics projects backed up every night.
You can leave older files versions on the server as a backup of versions if you choose and have them deleted after a predetermined time if you wish.
The best news is that this is a no contract service and you only pay for what you use.
In fact there are no limits to the size of the backup and you pay 15c per Gig per month.
Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability and security. Your data will then be available via any computer that has the appropriate login details. This feature also gives distant co-workers not on your network a way to collaborate on projects just as if they were on the same local server.

Mac OS X Trojan

Posted on 06. Nov, 2007 by Philip in Software

“On Halloween, professional Ukranian online criminals were found using Trojan-horse software to target, for the first time, computers running Apple’s OS X operating system — just as they have been doing for years on the more ubiquitous flavors of Windows.” Wired news.
This on the surface sounds like the first of what could be a flood of Windows type security concerns on the Mac. It is however an example of how the Mac is a very different beast when it comes to this type of exploit.
Firstly one must be looking for porn online, then one must see the link for a new Quicktime codec and download the dmg. One must then double click to mount the disc image and install the application. Also you need to type in your admin password as you do for all new apps.
Once installed, the Trojan hijacks the system’s domain-name service. Internet-connected applications use DNS to translate the domain part of an URL, such as www.Wired.com, into the numeric IP address of a server. By hijacking the DNS, the attacker is able to replace search results with links to sites that he controls, in hopes of making money from online purchases.

Now this sounds like a security issue but it is more an issue for users to be aware of, not a security flaw that Apple can do anything to fix. So be warned, security is mostly a user issue not an OS problem. OSX has always been as secure as could be managed but until now Mac users have not been targeted specifically and this is an attack on users not the operating system.

Pixelmator 1.0 released

Posted on 27. Sep, 2007 by Philip in Apple, Digital imaging, Software

The great Photoshop killer Pixelmator was released on Tuesday this week and it packs a punch.
As a 20mb download for $59 US, you can experience how Photoshop should have been made or how it may look in the future. As the worlds first GPU image processor it applies filters almost instantaneously in an interface that looks like something from the future. It is almost identical in layout to Photoshop with a few interesting surprises.
Listen to us discuss pixelmator at PhotoGeek and download the trial now. Available only for Mac OS X.

MarsEdit for blog creation

Posted on 05. Sep, 2007 by Philip in Software

This week I am going to test the new features of “MarsEdit” as a desktop writing tool for the various blogs I write for.
So far so good but if you have content to write have a look at the 30 day trial from Red Sweater software.