Tech Tips for the left brain challenged

Start­ing today we will have another reg­u­larly sched­uled series. This series will be focused on tech­nol­ogy tips and short cuts that can help artists. We will include tips for begin­ners as well as expe­ri­enced com­puter and inter­net users. The series will be called  Tech Tips ( pretty cre­ative uhh?).

The idea for the series was one of those light bulb moments( actu­ally more like a DUHHHHH! Moment) that occurred while help­ing a client. This client along with many who were not born with geek blood often don’t know enough to know what to ask and many seem con­sider their com­put­ers as a place where majikal lit­tle grem­lins run around  mak­ing things dif­fi­cult. Also many in the 45 + age cohort are intim­i­dated by those young­sters who came out of the womb with a mouse as an appendage.  So…the main goal of this series is to make get­ting and ask­ing geeky  infor­ma­tion with­out being embar­rassed, intim­i­dated or turn­ing your­self into a geek.

A lit­tle self dis­clo­sure here…I am well into the 45+ age cohort and every­thing I know I have taught myself. How­ever, I did have an advan­tage I was born with Geek blood as the son of an engi­neer and an artist, I know what a mix. I started using com­put­ers in high school and no they weren’t hand cranked but they were huge and they did have to be fed with cards some­times thou­sands just to get any­thing to come out. Later in another life I worked with the For­est Ser­vice as a grad­u­ate design stu­dent to develop ways to map visual cor­ri­dors through forests as a way to con­trol clear cut­ting. Any­way you get the idea it sort of came nat­ural to me but I know it doesn’t with most.…so this is a way for me to share what I’ve col­lected over the years.

And it is not my inten­tion to hog the con­tent either so this series is VERY open to read­ers and their tips, tricks and gen­eral hacks so please feel free to share using the com­ment form.

Also don’t be afraid to ask a ques­tion I am not guar­an­tee­ing an answer right away but sooner or later some­body here may have one. Oh.…almost for­got if you are afraid of being embar­rassed feel free to use an alias!!

Here are just a few of the cat­e­gories the tips may fall into:

• Hard­ware work arounds or secrets
• Twit­ter techniques
• Soft­ware recommendations
• Web site recommendations
• Cre­ative uses of tech­nol­ogy to mar­ket your work
• Tips & tricks
• Blog design reviews & tips

Today’s Tips

Three of my favorite Mac apps that can save time:

1 Pass­word

If you have ever got­ten tired of try­ing to remem­ber all your online stuff  or worse yet you can’t find that super-secret note book where all your on-line stuff resides encoded by using your super coder/decoder ring well save your hair… 1Password is the answer. Here’s what you can do with this frus­tra­tion savior…

Set up your own pro­file infor­ma­tion ( as many vari­a­tions s you want) and with one click on your browser select the right pro­file and 1Password will fill it in auto­mat­i­cally AND you don’t have to worry about tak­ing up space in your brain with such trivia. Because this lit­tle gem will gen­er­ate a pass­word for you and then store it. So next time you log into one of your pass­word requir­ing sites you can save your hair along with the scream­ing and stomp­ing and just click…1Password does the rest.

Guess what is even more cool…it works with both the iPhone and that other one that Obama likes to carry.

Skitch

Ever won­der how I get all those super cool graph­ics of my desk top? Well there are hard ways and there are sim­ple ways to get them. Until recently I was suf­fer­ing through the ago­niz­ingly slow process of cap­ture­ing and anno­tat­ing screen cap­tures. First the click then the save then to Pho­to­shop to add the text and the arrows then flat­ten then…you get the picture.

One day dur­ing my morn­ing wake up surf­ing rou­tine I ran across this pro­gram that let me do every­thing ya every­thing with­out all the putz­ing. Now you may ask why do I need that? Well remem­ber that friend’s photo you always wanted to add a mus­tache and gog­gles to quickly and then post it on your Face­book page or e-mail it to them…now you can very easily.

One More Tip

Help…my com­puter is bro­ken it is sooo slowwww I could take a nap while the screen refreshes! Well don’t toss it out the win­dow yet unless of course it runs by hand crank.

The prob­lem may be just molasses in your tubes or a huge traf­fic jam! Ya see even if you have the most blaz­ingly fast souped up modem thingy  it doesn’t mean didly if  you’ve been surfin’ all day and night along with every­body else in your liv­ing arrange­ment. So try to remem­ber …If the phone com­pany sent a brown box with another box inside and lots of wires with funny things on the ends of them you have DSL and at least the first step is easy peasy. Just reach around the back of that modem box find the power cord and yank that sucker out, count to 60 then plug’er back in, watch the light show and once the green light labeled “inter­net” is a steady green you’re good to go.

Now if the cable guy came by and hooked’er up that’s a dif­fer­ent story cause besides hav­ing tubes filled with molasses you may be in the mid­dle of a traf­fic jam! See, cable net­works are all webby like a spi­der web and if you and every­body else on your block or  in your neigh­bor­hood are all surfin’ together…all I can say is ya gotta wait your turn ‘cause you and your neigh­bors are all fightn’ to get on that super high­way. So first thing ya need to do is the same thing I said for the DSL folks…find that power cord give it a yank and count to 60 before ya plug it back in. If that doesn’t work well you could.…

Go all nut­case and run up and down your street yell at your neigh­bors to get offf the party line ‘cause you got impor­tant busi­ness to tend to.

Or…

You could just get up and come back at 2 AM when all your neigh­bors are snoozin’

Or.…

You could just decide your stuff isn’t that impor­tant any­way and go grab a beer and watch some of the other kinda tube.