Syncing Apple iCal with Google Calendar

Now that I’m back to using my Palm Pixi smartphone, I’ve got to re-evaluate my personal and work calendar syncing options. I’ve got my Apple iMac (running the iCal app), my Palm PIxi smartphone, and two different calendars to sync (along with my contacts). So, what’s the best solution?

After exploring several different options, it seems my best solution is  product called SpanningSync for the Mac. This app runs in the background on my iMac system and periodically syncs my personal and work calendars in the Apple iCal app with two different calendars in Google Calendar in the cloud, of which my Palm Pixi has the ability to sync with. What’s nice about SpanningSync is that I can control which specific calendar in Apple iCal will sync with which specific Google calendar. I’ve setup 2-way syncing, so wherever I make an addition, deletion, or change all the calendars are updated. SpanningSync also will sync my contacts between Apple Address Book and Google Contacts, and subsequently the contacts on my Palm Pixi.

This system works surprising well. I’m currently running the 15-day trial version, but if all continues to go well I’ll pay for the $25/year subscription.

Calendar mayhem!

I have trouble remembering appointments, family events, birthdays, etc. so I rely heavily on a calendar to keep my life in order. This is true for both my personal and business life, so like to keep two separate calendars to keep things compartmentalized. The issue I’ve been struggling with is finding the most efficient way of dealing with these two calendars and keeping them synced with my computers and mobile devices.

So here’s what I have available:

1. Personal calendar for my personal appointments and events
2. Business calendar for my work appointments, travel dates, etc.
3. An iMac at home running Snow Leopard Mac X OS
4. A Dell laptop running Windows 7 for work
5. An Apple iPhone 4 as my smartphone
6. Microsoft Exchange Server for my work email, calendar, and contacts
7. Apple MobileMe for Calendar, Email, and Contacts
8. Google Calendar and Contacts

My goal, is to be able to view and edit my calendar appointments (personal and business) on my iMac desktop computer, Dell laptop, and iPhone device. I know there’s all kinds of 3rd-party freeware and commercial software for syncing calendar data between applications and the cloud, but I wanted to minimize that as much as possible to eliminate any chances of “foul ups”.

I ended up using this solution: Create two calendars with my MobileMe account that allows me to create,view, and edit appointments. If you’re unfamiliar with MobileMe, it is Apple’s cloud-based system which allows for centralized email, calendar, contacts, and offline disk storage. Using this method, I can always access my calendars via a web browser with an Internet connection. Because the majority of my devices are Apple-based, it made sense using this method for syncing purposes. So, I now use the Apple iCal application to access both MobileMe calendars on my iMac desktop computer, and the built-in Calendar app on my iPhone for doing the same. For my Dell laptop (running Windows 7), I use the Microsoft Outlook application along with a MobileMe syncing utility (provided by Apple) to sync my two MobileMe calendars with Outlook for local access. This method seems to work well so far, but I need to always make sure I’m viewing the two MobileMe calendars in all my apps and not the default local calendars (which should be empty).

Watching live TV on my iPhone 4

At home, I’ve got an EyeTV HD device connected to a Comcast digital cable box for recording TV shows on my iMac desktop computer. The system is entirely automated, where scheduled shows are recorded, commercial removed, and finally converted to iPhone format and placed in iTunes for syncing. This allows me to watch my favorite shows at my leisure, usually at night on the couch or in bed. A few weeks ago I was on a business trip and I forgot to schedule my EyeTV to record an episode of Stargate: Universe, and it was not playing on any local station in my hotel room. What was I suppose to do?

Luckily, I have an app on my iPhone that allows me to control the EyeTV HD software on my iMac at home and also watch live TV through it via the Internet. So, I decided to give it a try, even though the hotel’s WiFi connect speed was incredible slow and virtually unusable. So instead of trying to use WiFi, I decided to just use my cellular connection via Verizon to stream the Live TV from my iMac at home to my iPhone.

Surprisingly, the video stream worked great! I was able to watch my show with no pausing or dropping of the TV streaming image. On a few occasions the image got a bit grainy (heavy pixels), but for the most part it looked just like watching an mp4 video file on my iPhone.

If I do switch to an Android phone in the near future, this will be one thing that I’ll miss. I don’t use this feature a lot, but when I do it works great.

Apple Trackpad vs. Magic Mouse

For Christmas I received an Apple Magic Trackpad for use with my iMac desktop system. I decided to get one after playing around with one at the Apple Store when I made my original iMac purchase several months ago. The Magic Trackpad basically operates like a trackpad on the Macbook Pro laptop, but is physically bigger in size. I’m normally not a big fan of laptop trackpads (as I usually use a mouse), but I did like the responsiveness of the Magic Trackpad for the iMac.

So, I’ve been using it for the last 3 days with my iMac, and it seems to be working well. It does take some getting use to after using my Magic Mouse for so long.

Like with any trackpad device, you move the mouse cursor by sliding your finger on the trackpad surface. To do a left-click, you press down on the trackpad surface with your finger to physically active a pressure switch in the base of the device. The same goes for double-clicking, and you can assign a region on the trackpad (bottom left or right corner) to act as a right-button click. It does take some effort to do this kind of clicking action, so I’ve adjusted the preference settings for my Trackpad to use a single tap as a “click” and a double-tap as a “double-click” (just like with most laptop trackpads).

For a right-click you can do a two-finger tap. For scrolling, you can use two-fingers to swipe up, down, left, or right. There are several other options to fine tune the trackpad operations, but these were the basic ones that got me going.

For general clicking, moving around on the screen, and scrolling through documents and web pages, the trackpad works well. Zooming in and out of images also works nice, as well as zooming in/out of the main display. What’s tricky, is doing a click-n-hold with the left mouse (as when you drag a window around on the screen or highlighting text in a document) when using the one-finger tap method. So to move a window I need to do a quick double-tap on the window header, then drag the window on the screen to the desired location, then do a single tap to get out of drag mode. Also, to highlight text in a document I need to move the cursor to the beginning of the text, do a double-tap with my one finger, drag the cursor across the text to be highlighted, then do a single tap. Kinda cumbersome, but required if I use the one-finger-tap method for “mouse” clicking. Of course, this would be easier if I used the physical switch option but again that just seems too awkward for me.

It is obvious that using a traditional mouse is much easier for document editing than the trackpad (as you probably know by using any laptop trackpad). What would have been nice, is if this trackpad was angled completely flat on my desk instead of at an angle as that would relieve some hand strain that I’m noticing after several minutes of use. Normally you rest your hand on the mouse as you’re using it, and with the trackpad I’m noticing that my hand is hovering above the trackpad which can introduce some fatigue.

I haven’t fully decided whether the Magic Trackpad will permanently replace my Magic Mouse, so I’m going to give the trackpad another week of experimentation. I might also use both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad together as both can work simultaneously.

 

Some hidden Apple keyboard shortcuts

When I switched from a Windows 7 desktop PC over to an Apple iMac, I missed certain keyboard features from my old system. For example, my new bluetooth Apple keyboard has no DEL, HOME, END, PAGE DOWN/UP keys. It’s the HOME, END, and DEL keys that I really miss the most! Here’s a few keyboard combinations that can make up for those missing dedicated keys:

Command + delete is equal to the Windows DEL key

Command + (left arrow key) is equal to the Windows HOME key

Command + (right arrow key) is equal to the Windows END key

Command + delete is equal to the Windows DEL key

Here are also a few more keys that are useful:

Command + I (gives file info when a file is selected in Finder or on the Desktop)

Control + Command + D (shows a popup dictionary definition when a work is hightlighted)

Command + Q (Completely quits the currently active program)

Now armed with these cool keyboard shortcuts I can continue using my iMac without skipping a beat.

My Dead Quiet Office

I normally work from home in a small but well appointed home office. As a computer professional (and geek) I’ve got numerous computer systems activated at any given moment. I have my big 27″ iMac which handles my personal business, my Dell 17″ laptop for use with my primary job (checking emails, running simulations, etc.), a Dell Netbook for occasionally running PC-based applications (e.g., Microsoft Visual Studio 2005), and my old Quad-Core Desktop PC which I fire up sometimes to do some heavy video processing in batch mode.

Before I purchased my iMac, I used my Quad-Core Desktop PC as my main workhorse computer system. Being a desktop it can become quite loud in my office, but I tried to minimize that by installing a power supply with an oversized fan (quieter) and a variable CPU fan which I can turn down to also minimize the noise. Nevertheless, there was a constant humming in my office that just became the normal background noise as I worked throughout the day.

Since switching from my Quad-Core machine to my iMac desktop, my office has been dead quiet. I’m not sure how Apple did it, but the Quad-Core CPU in my iMac Desktop doesn’t seem to need the same airflow as my PC desktop machine. I don’t hear a thing while I’m working with my iMac. Only on some rare occasion I’ll hear my iMac hum as the internal fans are cooling the CPU during some intensive video processing action, but this happens rarely. The only sound I hear is the hard drive whirling every so briefly when I’m saving a file to the drive.

This is so unlike my Windows PC where the hard drive will thrash away constantly and for no apparent reason. I could never figure out why was my system’s disk drive thrashing away so much. What was it doing that required so much disk reading and/or writing? It just didn’t make any sense to me. On my iMac, I don’t have any of that crazy nonsenseical disk thrashing. None.

My Dell work laptop, however, is the biggest noise maker in my home office. I can hear the internal fan spinning constantly with Microsoft Outlook being the only application open and the disk drive thrashing fiercly whenever I do any activity. So whenever possible (like on the weekends) I’ll turn off my laptop and just have my wonderful iMac Desktop running silently in my office, allowing me to work in peace and quiet…

 

Command + Delete is my friend

When I switched from a Microsoft PC over to an Apple iMac, it took a bit of “relearning” to become totally productive with the new environment. Here are a few glaring differences I found:

With an Apple keyboard you don’t have a HOME, DEL, or END key. It is amazing how much I relied on those keys without knowing it. So if I’m coding and I want to move to the beginning or end of a line, I don’t have a HOME or END key to help me out. The Mac has a DELETE key (which is equivalent to the BACKSPACE key on a PC keyboard), but it doesn’t have an equivalent DEL key (which removes characters behind the cursor). That’s another thing I sorely miss.

On my PC I was able to delete a selected file or folder by just pressing the BACKSPACE key. If you try to do the same thing on a Mac, nothing happens. What I discovered is that you need to press the Command key + Delete key to delete a selected folder or file. At first I thought this was a pain, but in hindsight it seems to be a good thing as it minimizing unintentional deletions by just pressing the Delete key alone.

Also, pressing the RETURN key after highlighting a file will not open that file in the Mac OS (nothing happens).

And finally one big one: When you click the small red “X” ball in the upper left corner of a Mac application window the program appears to exit but it is actually still running in the background. The only way to fully exit the application is to do a “Force Quit” which can be done a few ways:

1. Select “Quit” or “Force Quit” from the application’s menu bar.
2. Press COMMAND + Q keys to quit the application (when the app’s title bar is active at the top of the screen)
3. Right-click on the app in the Dock (at the bottom of the screen) and select “Quit” from the popup context menu.

I usually do option (2) as it seems the fastest for me. So there are a few differences between Microsoft Windows and the iMac OS, but I’ve adapted very quickly and am actually more productive with the addition of Applescript for the Mac!

Comskip fine tuning

As mentioned in my previous posting, I’m using several freeware utilities on my Mac to identify and remove commercial segments from recorded TV shows. Comskip is the tool I use to identify the commercials, and it has numerous setting configurations that you can change to help fine tune the commercial identification process.

Now, these settings can vary based on where you made the recording. For example, settings for USA broadcasts may not be optimal for European broadcasts. As such, fine tuning is required if you want Comskip to catch all (or most) of the commercials without cutting out good TV show content.

There several postings regarding tuning on the Comskip forums which I’ve read over. The basic process is trial-and-error, making logical changes to the Comskip settings file and examining the results. It is a lengthy process, but well worth it if you want to get Comskip working at peak performance.

In my case, I spent a few hours getting Comskip tuned for two typical programs that I record. One is Fringe, and the other is Design to Sell. Fringe is a good example of a typical mainstream network TV show that I like to watch, and Design to Sell is a typical HGTV home improvement show.

For fine tuning, you need to change some set values in a file called comskip.ini (located in the same folder as the comskip.exe program). I changed the following three lines:

detection_method = 255

Adjusting the detection method to 255 has Comskip use all of the various commercial detection methods.

verbose = 1

Changing the verbose setting from the default 10 to 1 reduces the amount of analysis information written to the Comskip log file for the analyzed video. I could have changed this value to zero (to not write any data), but I left it at 1 so I can try to figure out why Comskip identifies certain block segments as a commercial vrs show content.

max_volume=50

The max volume setting defines whether Comskip marks a segment block as commercial or show content by the volume level. If the suspected commercial segment has a volume level higher than the max_volume setting, then Comskip marks it as show content. The idea is, when a show transitions to or from a commercial you may have a brief black-screen with very little volume being played (this will mark a commercial segment). The default value of 500 works ok for my system, but it didn’t catch the commercial segments quite right. Since I’m recording a digital signal, the creator of Comskip recommended using a value of 50 since the audio signal is clearer.

So with these settings the commercial detection for the Fringe show is very, very good. There’s only one spot in the show where the Comskip misses a commercial and that’s because the TV Network changed the location and style of the broadcast “logo” on the screen (why, I don’t know). These same settings did a very good job with the Design to Sell program also (but not perfect).

So for now I’m going to stick with these settings and see how well they work out. If they miss a few seconds of show content I’m ok with that, however, if Comskip misses several minutes of good show content I’ll have to do some more fine tuning.

Other settings that you can change are:

max_brightness
test_brightness
max_avg_brightness

If Comskip is not identifying commercials in your show, you can increase the value of these variables (by increments of 1) and see how much improvement you can get.

Another cool feature that Comskip has is the ability to look for defined words in the Closed Caption (CC) text for a TV show. You can define individual words in a file called comskip.dictionary (found in the Comskip install folder) . The words above the “——-” line identify good TV content while words below that line identify a commercial segment. I think this is a brilliant method for helping Comskip identify commercials, however, I unfortunately can’t make use of it. The reason being, I can’t seem to get EyeTV3 to store the CC text in the MPEG file. It’s either an issue with the EyeTV3 software or with my Comcast digital set top box.

Update: So far, Comskip has been able to identify the correct commercial segments using theses settings for the following TV Shows:

Fringe, Design to Sell, The Walking Dead (AMC), Stargate SG-1

What nice, is that all of these shows have a slightly different broadcast and format, yet Comskip is able to catch the commercials quite effectively. I’m actually very pleased, as I was expecting to have fiddle with the settings a bit more to accomplish this accuracy. Thanks to the author of Comskip!

TV show commercial cutting – Part 2

I’ve had a few people ask about my Applescript which I use to post-process TV show recordings created by my Elgato EyeTV HD encoder, so here’s some more details.

First, I have this basic configuration:

1. Comcast digital signal fed into a Comcast RG110 digital set top box
2. Video/Audio component output from the Comcast set top box are fed into an Elgato EyeTV HD encoder
3. EyeTV HD encoder is connected to my Apple iMac desktop computer via a USB 2.0 cable
4. The EyeTV3 software on the iMac controlling the recording of scheduled TV shows
5. IR Changer (Blaster) connected to the Comcast set top box allowing the EyeTV HD encoder to change the TV stations appropriately

I also have installed the freeware tool called ETVComskip which is used to identify commercial segments in a recorded MPEG file and saves them to a text file (with an .edl extension). This is the primary tool that I use for commercial detection, so I’ve spent a lot of time tuning the settings for this application to get good commercial detection (which I’ll describe in a future posting).

Luckily, the EyeTV3 software is able to run two specific Applescripts when a recording has just started (RecordingStarted.scpt) and when it has finished (RecordingDone.scpt). When you install the ETVComskip application it will automatically modify both of these scripts to support the commercial detection process.

Now, the ETVComskip tool is basically a Python script that uses a program called Comskip to detect the commercials in an MPEG video file. The Comskip app is actually a Microsoft Windows application, so the Python script is setup to use Wine (WIN32 emulator) to run the Comskip windows executable on your Mac. You don’t need to worry about all of this, as the makers of ETVComskip have taken care of everything. The only thing to note, is that you will see the X-Windows App icon appear in your Dock so don’t try to kill it or remove it while Comskip is identifying commercials in a MPEG file.

I Love my Mac!

I’ve had my 27″ iMac desktop for a few months now, and I really love the fact that the Mac OS X is Unix under the hood. I’m an old Unix user from the 1990′s and it’s great that I can pop open a terminal shell window on my Mac and type in standard Unix/Linux commands to do my dirty work. For example, I had some video files in AVI format that I wanted converted to MP4 format for my iPod Touch, so I downloaded and compiled GPL source code for Mencoder and AtomicParsley on my Mac. I then typed in this command line line entry in a terminal shell window to do the conversion process:

mencoder stargate.avi -ovc copy -oac copy stargate.mp4

And off went the conversion process. I then used AtomicParsley to add in metadata information so that it would appear in iTunes properly:

atomicparsley stargate.mp4 –stik “Movie” –title “Stargate” –artwork sg.jpg –overWrite

I then copied the stargate.mp4 file over to the “Add to Itunes Automatically” folder to have the movie file placed in the proper directory for iTunes syncing with my iPod Touch. Sweet!

In this case, an alternative to using mencoder in a terminal shell window is to use the freeware product called Handbrake which has a GUI and works really well for converting videos. I tested it with a few AVI files and they converted over flawlessly to MP4 format for my iPod Touch.