http://www.ericbrodeur.com/journal From my head to yours : Mac, mobiles, media and other random bits Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:17:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The ability of the Mac to put internal and external drives to sleep is excellent to reduce wear and lower power consumption. Unfortunately it's not convenient while editing when your workflow is paused as drives spin up. I considered writing an AppleScript to automate the on/off of "put hard drives to ... http://www.ericbrodeur.com/journal/2008/06/17/keep-your-drives-awake-with-disksomnia/ It's hard to believe Stan Winston has left us for the great VFX studio in the sky. What I always loved about his work was the practical element. He created models, masks, and animatronics you could touch, not merely pixels glowing brightly on an LCD display. If you've seen Aliens you ... http://www.ericbrodeur.com/journal/2008/06/16/stan-winston-rip/ Over the six years our film project has been in post-production a number of hard drives have gone to "bit heaven." Clips had been logged and organized and once lost they weren't replaced; instead, portions of a fully rendered QuickTime movie were used as placeholders. Eventually the lost media was recaptured ... http://www.ericbrodeur.com/journal/2008/06/11/using-markers-to-create-subclips-in-final-cut-pro/ A short while ago I was researching an alternative to on-line backup because Mozy hasn't been reliable for me. Just after signing up for an Amazon S3 account I clicked a link to return to the home page and was greeted with this fine error message: Same result on another computer ... http://www.ericbrodeur.com/journal/2008/06/06/amazoncom-is-downsomething-you-dont-see-everyday/ During the course of a day, business or otherwise, I use many Mac shortcut keys. When working with Finder and application windows I'll often use Command ~ to switch from window to window. Often, in haste, I'll accidentally hit Command Esc which opens Front Row and disrupts my productivity. Turning off ... http://www.ericbrodeur.com/journal/2008/06/03/disable-the-front-row-hot-key/