Articles by Dave Strom
By day, Dave Strom is a technical writer who makes short goofy videos and likes his Macintosh, coffee houses, comic books and cartoons (just the good ones!), Keith Knight’s “The K Chronicles,” Pho, boogie boarding in San Diego, and living in the San Francisco bay area. By night, Dave uses his mutated super-sarcasm powers (gained from a radioactive iced mocha) to save the world from a continuous invasion of mind-controlling alien spider-slugs on a weekly basis. He never misses Macworld Expo or the San Diego Comic Con.
Import MiniDV Tapes with Broken Timecodes
October 2, 2007
Video cameras and camcorders have become standard equipment for every barbecue, wedding, and family reunion. Unfortunately, these devices can sometimes screw up in a big way. One of the more common problems is known as the “broken timecodes” - a problem that results in your MiniDV tapes not reporting the correct timecode. If you record on a new MiniDV tape, rewind, play back what you recorded plus a little bit extra, and then record again, you leave a non-recorded section between your recorded sections.
Make a Movie with iMovie and a Digital Camera
April 25, 2007
We’ve used iMovie for a couple of years to make movies (well, short videos). It’s a great tool: Easy to use, and inexpensive! Here, in a nutshell, is how you can do it too. We’ll show you how to do it without an expensive camcorder – from start to finish, and on the cheap. We’re slanting our tutorial to those of you who have digital cameras (use the movie mode – you won’t regret it!
How to Use Bluetooth Headsets With Your Mac
March 28, 2007
Forget the iPhone. You can make free Internet phone calls with your Mac to anyone in the world! You don’t need anything, really: Most new Macs ship with iChat AV, a built-in microphone, and an iSight camera. In fact, all you need is another friend with a Mac and iChat AV. But if you’re as serious about Internet phone calls as we are, you’re going to need some serious equipment. That’s where the bluetooth headsets come in.
How to Print Borderless Photos with iPhoto
February 9, 2007
We use iPhoto for our digital photos. (Who doesn’t?) For this tutorial, we wanted to perform two iPhoto tasks: print 8.5x11 photos, and crop a portrait photo from a landscape original. We used iPhoto ‘06 on Mac OS 10.4, with a Hewlett-Packard 7960 Photosmart printer. Differences in printers and in the iPhoto and OS versions should not make for too dissimilar of a process, provided the OS is in the 10.
How to Create Slideshows Using iDVD
February 5, 2007
Do you want to show off your photos on something besides your Mac? Then you need to create a slideshow and burn it to a DVD! You’ll be able to play your slideshow on any DVD player. Why do we use iDVD instead of iPhoto to do this? We tried creating slideshows using iPhoto with our 800MHz G4 iBook (1 GB of RAM and a SuperDrive), and with a 1.5 GHz G4 desktop.