Maria’s Guides

Apple revises its Podcaster Tech Specs document to provide information on Apple TV compatibility.

Although I haven’t published an episode for a while, I am a podcaster. My Maria Speaks podcast has about 30 episodes published over the past two years or so.

Because of that, I’m on Apple’s mailing list for information about podcasting. And today I got an e-mail message from Apple that provides some useful information about formatting video or enhanced podcasts for better compatibility with Apple TV.

Here’s part of it:

Recommendations for Formatting Video Podcasts

1. If you’re encoding your video podcast at 320×240, please increase the resolution to either 640×480 or 640×360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Why? Because video podcasts at this resolution look great on Apple TV and still port to video iPods. Lower resolution podcasts might also work on both platforms, but they don’t look nearly as good on a widescreen TV. As always, make sure to test any encoding changes you make to ensure device compatibility. QuickTime 7.1’s “Export to iPod” function will ensure that a video file is encoded at a width of 640 and is iPod-compatible.

2. It’s best not to create two different podcast feeds for different resolutions. By doing so, you dilute the popularity of your podcast and reduce exposure in our charts. It’s better to have one feed high in the charts than two that are lower.

3. If your source files are 16:9, stick with that aspect ratio. Don’t add letterboxing to make them 4:3. By doing so, you prevent the video from expanding to fill a 16:9 widescreen TV and instead end up with black space on all four sides. Also, your original source files should be at least 640 pixels wide.

Of course these are just recommendations. We understand that there are good reasons for 320×240 (bandwidth bills) and 720p (looks fantastic). Do whatever makes the most sense for your show. For more information on formatting video, see the recently updated spec:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html

To see a sample of excellent podcasts that also look great with Apple TV, check out the Apple TV Podcast Showcase.

This is interesting because one of the few complaints I’ve heard about Apple TV is the video quality of podcasts. It appears that Apple is trying to prevent this from being a problem by providing podcasters with detailed instructions for making their podcasts look good on Apple TV.

I do a “video” podcast for Flying M Air called Come Fly with Us! It’s basically an iMovie slide show of images taken on various flights and day trips throughout Arizona. Although I don’t want to go back and fix existing episodes so they meet these requirements, I’ll probably release new episodes with these specs on a go-forward basis.

As mentioned by Apple in the quoted e-mail above, a higher resolution will lead to bigger files. Not only will this affect bandwidth, but it can discourage potential subscribers from subscribing. For example, since moving from my downtown office back into my house, my download speed has been cut from high-speed DSL (5-7 M) to medium speed cable (512 K if I’m lucky). A 70 MB podcast has to be pretty darn good for me to further slow down my Internet access speed with a lengthy download. Right now, each episode of Come Fly with Us! is about 15 MB; I’m curious to see what the higher resolution files will be.

Just something to keep in mind.

How I deal with comment and pingback spam.

I start each morning pretty much the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, make a scrambled egg for my parrot, and then sit down at the kitchen table and check the comments that came into my blog overnight.

About Spam

The main thing I’m checking for each morning is comment and pingback spam. These are similar but different.

• Comment spam is a comment that exists solely to provide one or more links to another Web site, usually to promote that site or its services, but possibly to just get links to that site to improve Google rankings. Comment spam ads nothing to the site’s value. Sometimes disguised as a guest book entry or general positive comment — for example, “Great blog! I’ll be back!” accompanied by a link or two — it simply isn’t something the average blogger should want on his or her site.
• Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from this site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.

Lucky me: I get both.

Tools to Fight Comment Spam

Fortunately, I use both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 (many thanks again to Miraz for suggesting both of these), so the spam comments that get through their filters and are actually posted to the site are minimized. On a typical day, I might just have 3 to 5 of them. Compare that to 3,400 potential spam messages stopped by Bad Behavior in the past week and the 51,000 spam messages deleted after posting by Spam Karma in the past year since its installation. Without these two forms of protection, I’d be spending all day cleaning up spam.

Anyone who doesn’t use some kind of spam protection on a blog with open comments is, well, an idiot.

Neither program is very effective against pingback spam, although Spam Karma seems to be catching a few of them these days. Although I’m pretty sure I can set up WordPress to reject pingbacks, I like the idea of getting legitimate links from other blogs. It helps form a community. And it provides a service to my readers. For example, if I wrote an article about something and another blogger quoted my work and added his insight to it, his article might interest my readers. Having a link in my comments right to his related post is a good thing.

My Routine

So my morning routine consists of checking Spam Karma’s “Approved Comments” and marking the comments that are spam as spam. Then I go into WordPress’s Comments screen (Dashboard > Manage > Comments) and marking pingback spam as spam and deleting it.

Why do it both ways? Well, I’m concerned that if I keep telling Spam Karma that pingback spam is spam, it’ll think all pingbacks are spam. I don’t want it to do that. So I manually delete them. It only takes a minute or two, so it isn’t a big deal. If I had hundreds of these a day, I might do things differently.

The other reason I delete the pingbacks manually is because I want to check each site that’s pinging mine. I collect URLs of splogging sites and submit them periodically to Google. These sites violate Google’s Terms of Service and I’m hoping Google will either cancel their AdSense accounts or remove them from Google’s search indexing (or, preferably, both). So I send the links to Google and Google supposedly looks at them.

I’m working on a project to make creating a DMCA notice easier — almost automated — and would love to hear from anyone working on a project like that.

This morning was quiet. Only three spams to kill: one comment spam and two pingback spams. I’ll get a few more spams during the day and kill them as they arrive; WordPress notifies me via e-mail of all comments and pingbacks as they are received. (I don’t check my e-mail at the breakfast table anymore.)

Do you have a special way to deal with comment or pingback spam? Don’t keep it a secret. Leave a Comment below.

A look at the Mouse preferences pane.

Well, I finally broke down and bought one. A wireless Mighty Mouse.

Because all new desktop Macs come with a Mighty Mouse, I need to be able to write about it for my upcoming Leopard book. So I bought one from Amazon.com last week and it arrived on my doorstep today. I wasted no time opening the box and setting it up.

That Mousy Feeling

Before I go into some detail about Mighty Mouse settings, I want to comment about the feel of this mouse. Anyone who spends a lot of time at a computer gets used to the feel of the mouse he uses. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’ve been using the standard Apple USB mouse that came with my Dual G5 since I bought the machine in 2003. I’m familiar with the way it feels under my hand and I have grown to like it — even though it only has one button. I have two other mice that I use with my laptops; I reviewed and commented on them in one of this site’s most popular articles, “Mouse Wars: Microsoft vs. Logitech.” Although I have hooked up one of these mice to my Dual G5 in the past, I went back to the original mouse after a very short time.

Now I’m getting ready for my next desktop Mac purchase, which is likely to be a 24″ iMac. I plan to buy that with a wireless Mighty Mouse and wireless keyboard. So figured I may as well start getting used to the feel of the mouse by using it on my G5 now.

In general, the Mighty Mouse feels good under my hand. It has much the same shape as the old USB mouse, so it’s familiar. Apple didn’t try to go ergonomic (like Microsoft and Logitech did), so it didn’t fail miserably (like Logitech did). Instead, Apple stuck to the same basic design, which should make longtime Mac users like me happy.

Once configured (as instructed below), you can set up a Mighty Mouse as a two-button mouse. That’s what I did. Although the mouse has just one physical button for your fingertips, the mouse can somehow sense which finger you’re using to click. So far, this seems to work pretty well, although I have managed to display a contextual menu more than a few times with what I thought was a left click. Looks like I can’t be sloppy with my clicking when using this mouse. I’ll need some motor skill retraining.

I like the silly little roller ball. It makes it possible to scroll on two axes — horizontally and vertically. It feel tiny and insignificant under my finger — so tiny, in fact, that it tickles. But it works a lot better than I expected it to.

Configuring the Mouse

You configure the Mighty Mouse by setting options in the Mouse panel of the Keyboard & Mouse preferences pane. Choose Apple > System Preferences and click the Keyboard & Mouse icon in the System Preferences window that appears. Then click the Mouse button at the top of the preferences pane. It should look like what you see here.

If the options don’t look like what you see here, here are some things to check:

• Is the Mighty Mouse attached to (if USB) or paired with (if Bluetooth) your computer?
• Is the Mighty Mouse the only mouse attached to or paired with your computer?
• If a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse, is it turned on? Are the batteries properly installed? Do the batteries have power?
• Have you installed the software that came with the Mighty Mouse and followed the installation instructions?

The settings are pretty straightforward.

First of all, you can use pop-up menus to indicate what each button on the mouse should do. While I keep referring to a Mighty Mouse as a “two-button” mouse, it really has four buttons: left, right, scroll, and sides (two buttons counting as one). You can program each of them for specific tasks:

• Primary button is normally the left mouse button on a two-button mouse.
• Secondary button is normally the right mouse button on a two-button mouse. This is usually used to display contextual menus.
• Exposé - All Windows activates the Exposé feature, displaying all windows. This is the same as pressing F9.
• Exposé - App Windows activates the Exposé feature, displaying all application windows. This is the same as pressing F10.
• Exposé - Desktop activates the Exposé feature, displaying the Desktop. This is the same as pressing F11.
• Dashboard activates Dashboard. This is the same as pressing F12.
• Application Switcher activates the application switcher. This is the same as pressing Command-Tab.
• Spotlight activates the Spotlight menu. This is the same as pressing Command-Spacebar.
• Other displays an Open dialog that you can use to choose an item that should be opened when you press the button. This makes it possible to launch applications or open documents by pressing a button on the mouse.

The Scrolling Options menu enables you to specify how the scroll bar should work when you move it (not when you press it). The options include Off, Vertical Only, Vertical and Horizontal, and 360 Degree.

Three sliders at the bottom of the window enable you to set speeds for:

• Tracking is the mouse’s speed across the screen.
• Scrolling is the scroll ball’s scrolling speed.
• Double-Click is the amount of time between clicks to be recognized as a double-click.

At the very bottom of the screen is a check box that, when enabled, activates a program’s zoom feature when a key you specify is held down. You can further fine-tune the zooming feature by clicking the Options button and setting a few extra options.

Make the Most of It

Although you can configure a Mighty Mouse to work just like a regular one-button mouse, doing so would prevent you from getting the most of your mouse. Play around with the settings. I have mine set with primary and secondary buttons, Dashboard on the scroll button, and Exposé on the sides. (I don’t use Exposé much, but I also don’t like squeezing the buttons together.)

If you’ve been using Mighty Mouse for a while and have some tips to share about using it, please use the Comments link to share them. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be interested in learning more about getting the most of this device.

• The allure of Twitter, the latest Web sensation.
  A great article about Twitter. By Michael Agger, Slate Magazine.
  (tags: twitter slate web)

Information from an Apple Press Release.

I was wondering when Apple was going to get some interesting new content for use with its Apple TV. The answer is, today.

From Award-Winning MGM Films Now on the iTunes Store:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM) and Apple® today announced that MGM is now offering titles from its prestigious catalog of feature films for purchase and download on the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). Beginning today, iTunes customers will be able to purchase legendary films such as “Dances With Wolves,” “Mad Max,” “The Great Train Robbery” and “Rocky,” with other titles to be added in the coming weeks….

A solution for Vista network connection to Macintosh problems.

Back in December, 2005, I wrote an article titled “File Sharing: Tiger & Vista,” in which I reported my efforts in getting my Dual G5 running Tiger to talk to my Dell laptop running Vista. As that article explains, I was able to set up Vista so Mac OS could connect and access the Dell’s files. But I was unable to get Vista to connect to the Dual G5 to access the Mac’s files.

I won’t bore you with my attempts to resolve this problem. It was very frustrating. Microsoft claimed it was an Apple support issue and Apple claimed it was a Microsoft support issue. You know the drill.

In reading through my feeds today, I stumbled across a post on macoshints.com, “Fix a Vista to Mac failure to connect problem.” The author of the article, shoutdown, had found a thread on the vista64.net forum with instructions for fixing the problem: “Will not accept my password when connecting to WORKGROUP computer.”

I read the thread and followed the instructions. Not only was I able to [finally] connect to my Mac from Vista, but Vista had remembered the password I’d used on all my attempts and just connected me without prompting for a password. What’s even more amazing is that it also allowed me to [finally] set up my shared printer, an HP LaserJet 2100TN directly connected to my G5 via Ethernet, on Vista and even — can you imagine? — print a page!

The problem evidently has something to do with Vista security (what else is new?). From robg on macosxhints.com:

…it seems the problem is that Microsoft has disabled LM and NTLM authentication, which is what OS X’s version of Samba uses. Microsoft’s preferred solution is to upgrade to Samba 3, which supports NTLMv2, as does Vista.

rogb thoughtfully provides the link to the fix for folks running Vista Home versions, which don’t include Administrative Tools. (I’m running Ultimate, for reasons I’m still unclear about, so shoutdown’s link worked fine for me.)

The bottom line: If you want to connect from your Mac to a Vista machine, read my original “File Sharing: Tiger & Vista” article. If you want to connect from Vista to a Mac, start by reading “Fix a Vista to Mac failure to connect problem.”