Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Cameron Chang seeks a simple movie editor. He writes:
I have some video clips that I’d like to lightly edit. For instance, I want to cut the sound track from one and replace it with a different sound file. On another, I want to copy 12 seconds and turn that bit into a separate movie. iMovie seems like overkill for these jobs. Can you recommend something simpler?
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Fred Hendricks wishes to be respectful of others’ privacy but isn’t quite sure how to go about it. He writes:
I’m working on a just-for-fun movie in iMovie ’11 that I’m going to put on YouTube. In one scene you can see a car’s license plate in the background. Is there some way I can cover it up?
As long as the camera or car don’t move, yes. Like so.
Occasionally, maybe once every few weeks, TextEdit refuses to save any documents I currently have open. Any changes I have made to these documents seem in danger of being lost. When this symptom appears, any new documents that I open in TextEdit will similarly refuse to save. It’s as if TextEdit decided to go on strike. I’ve seen this happen with a couple of other applications, but most often it’s TextEdit.
Selecting Duplicate doesn’t work around the problem, as you can’t save the duplicate copy. Similarly, trying to use Save As is also fruitless. It just doesn’t work.
Others have reported a similar symptom that appears due to a permissions glitch, but a permissions issue is not the root cause here. Happily, the short-term fix is a simple one. Select “Quit TextEdit” from the File menu. TextEdit should quit immediately, without any prompts to save open documents first.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Forum member DeathRobot (who is probably nicer than his or her name implies) is interested in FTP and Automator. It writes:
I’ve created a folder action in Automator, where any files I drop onto it upload to a favorites folder on my FTP server via Panic’s Transmit. I would like to change the workflow so that when I drop a file on the folder a dialog box comes up that asks me to input a folder name. It would then create a new folder on the server with that name, and drop the files in it. Is this possible?
Sure. Transmit installs a few Automator actions. Among them is Mount, which you can use to mount a directory on your FTP server. But you can save yourself some trouble by instead using Transmit’s Transmit Disk feature that lets you mount an FTP directory as if it were a local disk. Then configure Automator this way:
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Patricia Whitney has done the Bad Thing to her iPad and wonders if there’s a way to make it Good. She writes:
I dropped my first-generation iPad and now the screen’s colors are all wrong. Blacks are green and there’s a lot of “static” in all the images the iPad displays. Is there anything I can do to fix it?
In the days of classic sitcoms there was an old wheeze where Main Character A would suffer a bump on the head, causing said A to lose his or her memory. After the ensuing hijinx, the arrived-at solution was invariably to bean them again, thus restoring their memory. Those penning today’s sitcoms avoid such advice, understanding the litigious society we now live in.
