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Whether you missed the news, don’t have a video-recorder or just would like to have that one certain video about a person you know, the media center of a TV-channel is a great source. But how to get those videos, especially since they’re most likely embedded with Flash?

For Mac it’s a straightforward process (at least for the following channels: ARD, ZDF, 3sat, NDR, SWR and WDR — German TV-channels)

1) Download the program ‘Mediathek’

2) Use the Unarchiver or any other unpacker of your choice and open the unpacked file

3) Search for the video you’d like to download, click Laden to download the file

4) Since it saves the file in the *.flv format, I suggest using Evom to convert the video

Finally having the official release of the new iOS running on my iPhone 3GS, I decided to find out more about the possibility of reading ebooks on my iPhone.

Generally, I think the screen is too small for this. It may be a different experience for owners of the new iPhone 4, but to me it’s simply to small to read a 400 pages ebook. No question though, that it will be a nice option for those long waiting times at airports for example.

But what if you really just intend to read once in a while and don’t want to spend your money on ebooks available in the iTunes store? Well, besides Winnie the Pooh, which is for free as of now, the iBooks app can read all ebooks saved in the epub format. This is great as you can add ebooks to your iTunes library and sync them with your iPhone, iPod touch and/or iPad.

One option is the Gutenberg Project, which offers a variety of ebooks in the necessary epub format for free. I just tried it and it’s working well, although files are claimed to be in an experimental status.

So simply go to the above page, download a book to your computer, add it to iTunes and sync it with your device. Enjoy reading!

In this post I explained how to set a schedule for the Time Machine’s backup function. While that worked great, I still experienced a noisy Time Capsule. The reason for that was that the hard-disk never went to sleep. Instead, it was running constantly as if I was making backups nonstop.

Searching the web I found a few tips on how to prevent that and how to speed up the backup process.

Time Capsule’s hard-disk is running constantly:

- Rename the TC’s hard-disk into something simple. One word, no special characters. As weird as that may sound, it has worked for many. (And either this or the whole package here helped me as well – thus far.)

Speed up the backup process:

- For the initial backup, connect your MAC and TC with a LAN cable. This speeds up the first backup drastically.

- Disable Spotlight indexing by adding the backup hard-disk to the Privacy settings: Applications -> System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy.

(I also added my external hard-disks, as I don’t use the search function, hoping they would have less ‘stress’, too.)

- For some it may be helpful to connect your TC directly to your router via LAN cable to prevent interferences, when many other networks are around you.

I’ve had my Time Capsule a while now and I didn’t once regret buying this quite expensive device. (A Wifi router and a hard-disk would have been slightly cheaper, but this way it’s cleaner on my table and I do like that a lot.)

One thing I really don’t like are the hourly backups. The choices given by Apple are switching the Time Machine on and backing up automatically every hour or doing it manually. Being honest, who backs up the system manually? And even if, what would be the right amount of time in between backups?

TimeMachineEditor is a nice little app, that allows you to set the Time Machine’s schedule. This may be important for example if you’re working with Lightroom. Apparently, LR really doesn’t like backups running in the background. Besides, why would I want my Mac to be slower, when it’s running while I’m asleep anyway.

Just switch off automatic backups in the Time Machine Preferences, download and install the app, set your schedule and you’re ready to go.

I couldn’t think of a better topic for my 100th post, than something that kept me awake until I found a solution. Updating from OS3 to iOS (4), I ‘forgot’ to create a proper backup of my files. I didn’t really forget it, as I knew I don’t care about save-games and have all my contacts etc. synced. Still, I forgot something: my photos.

Once in a while, when I don’t want to take my camera with me, or simply don’t have it close by, I take photos with my iPhone camera in order to fill my Project 365 with life. When updating my phone earlier, everything was deleted, which unfortunately, also included the photos I took. Luckily enough, I’m surrounded by backups: iTunes makes backups from my iPhone. These backups again are backed up with my TimeCapsule. This again is partly backed up with Backblaze. (I guess losing my photos I took during two months of traveling through New Zealand and the USA left a mental scar.) Anyhow, here is the solution to my problem (and hopefully yours, too) and other problems that may occur if you just need certain files from a previously made iTunes backup without the need to restore the whole iPhone:

1) Download the iPhone / iPod touch backup extractor (Windows user have a similar app, which is available here).

2) Click ‘read backups’ and choose the newest one, or the one that you think is right. (Mac version – for Windows version please follow the instructions from the link above.)

3) Select the content you’d like to have (for photos it’s iPhone OS files) and click ‘extract’.

4) Once you decided where it should extract these files to, your photos are available in the folder Media -> DCIM -> 100APPLE once the extraction process finished.

I hope this helps you as much as it helped me!

Update: @ischack mentioned in the comments that it appears as if the program crashes, but he adds that the ‘beachball’ rather is an indicator for the extracting process working. Thanks

HDR(I) stands for High Dynamic Range (Imaging) and describes ‘… a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques …’. This may sound weird, but it isn’t. A photo that was taken, doesn’t always picture the scene as the eye has seen it. There will always be a part in a photo that is either too dark or too bright for the camera, never mind how well exposed it is. And this is where HDR kicks in.

HDR is based on a very simple idea: take three or more pictures of the exact same scene (two will do as well), varying from under- to overexposed and merge them on a computer. This way, a dark space on a photo will get enough detail because of the overexposed photo, while a really bright space will get more detail because of the underexposed photo. Merging the photos will therefore not only give you great color, but also detail. I might add though, that the result is a photo that depicts a mixture between substantiality and fiction. Depending on your settings, the result has the tendency to be the latter, with overly bright colors and extreme details.

A really nice read and how-to from Markus Urban is available at abuzeedo.com.

To achieve this, you have quite a few software alternatives to choose from. The one mentioned in the article: Photomatix Pro, if you don’t mind spending a few € or $ that is. I can’t promise great results, but this program is widely used and it even has a Lightroom plugin, so that you can just select the images, export them, create a HDR-image and re-import them directly. Another possibility is Photoshop. If you know your way around, this should serve you well. But there’s also a free program available, which is called Qtpfsgui and is waiting to be downloaded from here. One great thing about this software besides being free, it’s running on all platforms (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows).

Flickr offers various groups, where people may help you on how to get the perfect HDR-image done. This is an example from me:

Photos as taken:

Underexposed:

‘Normal’

Overexposed:

HDR-image result:

This and more photos from me are available at www.flickr.com/photos/blogable/.

Starting to work with a comprehensive software like Lightroom can be daunting at first, but it can also be annoying. I’m sure that a lot of people find it a good idea, that deleting a file will only remove it from the catalog, instead of completely wiping it off the disk. I beg to differ.

This example should show you, that Lightroom can’t do everything you may wish for and therefore keyboard shortcuts are a great alternative, if you – like me – can’t be bothered to press and click multiple buttons on order to get the result you aimed for.

Here you’ll find the shortcuts that may make your life easier – with Lightroom that is.

If you’d like a downloadable version for both Lightroom 1 and/or 2, visit this website.

While importing to Lightroom, I came across an issue that almost ruined my day: I imported files via the move button and got a failure message. After that, I could neither find the files in Lightroom nor in their old folder. Luckily, I realized that they actually were moved, but not added to Lightroom. From now on, I will only copy my photos and once they’re safely imported, delete the folder of origin.

Having made this mistake, if you want to call it that way, I found this website about other mistakes often made when working with Lightroom. Hope this will help you as well avoiding problems.

One more thing though: I don’t agree with the need for DNG files and prefer using RAW+XMP. Reasons for this will be posted here soon in a comparison of file types used for photography. My main reason for this decision though: having to backup a small XMP sidefile, rather than a multi-megabyte file when changes are made.

Sometimes I use great things like the smart playlist function and don’t tell anyone. Well, at least not publicly. Now TUAW did this for me and since I find this a useful feature to know about and use, I wanted to share it with you.
Why would you want to read that article? If you’re always short of space on your iPod and miss all the great songs from your collection when you’re on-the-go, then smart playlists will help you. That’s why.
I generally started to use things that are smart. Next to playlists there are smart folders to name just one example, which is great when you’re sorting your photos in Lightroom for example, but that’s another story.

Back when I was still using Windows, I used a program called MP3Gain to adjust the volume of my MP3 collection. If your collection, like mine, consists out of iTunes and Amazon purchases, as well as MP3s you created from CDs you bought, different volume levels aren’t news to you.

I was happy to find the same program for Mac here. On my Mac, iTunes may deliver a tool already to cover this, but whenever I listen to my music on-the-go, I still discover different volume levels. This may be because iTunes doesn’t write the information for the volume into the MP3 and therefore every player outside iTunes will ignore this ‘normalization’.

MP3Gain instead adjusts all MP3s to your preset volume and will save this into the file. This way all players will accept the information and behave accordingly. Are there any downsides? I’m sure there are and you’re warned on their web site to remember making a full backup, but it all went smoothly for me. An issue I encountered that may be annoying for people using Backblaze is, that the changed files are now considered new and Backblaze will want to back them up again. Not really a downside, but I wanted to warn you.

Good news for Windows - and Linux users: MP3Gain is available for those systems, too. The Windows version is available here, Linux here.