Know How...

May 8th 2014

Know How... 92

Cognitive Radio, OS X Tips, and Make a GIF

Will Cognitive Radio be the most advanced form of wireless, OS X tips, make a .gif using Adobe Premiere, and a better way to monitor your camera.

Although the show is no longer in production, you can enjoy episodes from the TWiT Archives.
Category: Help & How To

Will Cognitive Radio be the most advanced form of wireless, OS X tips, make a .gif using Adobe Premiere, and a better way to monitor your camera.

Cognitive Radio

DARPA aims to create a software-based communications system called Cognitive Radio, combined with old drones as wireless hotspots. It could provide un-jammable High-Speed internet to the battlefield or in areas with no ground infrastructure. Article Link Here.

OS X Tips & Tricks

Record Video / Audio
Using Quicktime you can easily do a screen or audio recording.

Animations & Zoom
Hold the "Shift" key and close a window. Wooosh! Silly i know, but hey you can do it. If you use "command" and "+" or "-" you can zoom in or out. Pressing "command" and "0" puts the screen back to normal.

Force Quit
Apps freeze and or crash. You could force close and app using "command" "option / alt" and "esc", but there's another quicker way. If the app in question is selected, simply click the Apple logo and hold "shift" this will force close the app without the second "Are you sure?"

Hidden Options
Once again clicking the Apple logo brings a drop down, if you look closely you'll see some have "..." which are called ellipses, if a option has and ellipse next to it, that means it'll open a dialogue box. Say you'd rather just skip the dialogue box, hold down option and it will perform the action right away.
Also "About this Mac" switches to "System Information", moving over to the volume option, if you just click the volume button, only a slider appears. But if you hold down "option" it'll display your audio options. If you hold the "option" key while clicking on the WiFi logo, you'll be presented with details about your connection.

Move Menu Icons
It doesn't take long for the menu bar to get cluttered, but you can fix that and organize it to your preferences by holding "command" and dragging the icon where'd you like. If you drag the icon off the bar, it'll disappear in a puff of smoke. One note is that 3rd party icons can't be moved. If you accidentally delete an icon, don't worry in the settings you can still re-enable.

Login Items
Open up Settings, and go to Users & Groups, in your User, click on "Login Items". Here you'll see a list of programs load on boot up. Here you can get rid of programs by hitting the "-" button at the bottom. You can also add programs to launch at start by hitting the "+" button.

Permissions
Without getting too deep into it, if you're getting some weird errors and your Mac seems to be running sluggish one thing to try without having to alter any hardware is to Verify and Repair your Permissions. In Spotlight search for "Disk Utility" or navigate to "Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility" here you click on your HD, and press the "Verify Disk Permissions" this can take a few minutes. Once finished you'll see a list of permissions needed to be fixed. Click the "Repair Disk Permissions" this will also take a few minutes.

CCleaner
Here's a program that I've used for quite awhile on the PC, CCleaner is a program that can help streamline cleaning, uninstalling, startup programs, and also repairing permissions. Running the cleaner will clear out your cache of cookies, download history, trash and whatever else you have selected on the list.

Create a GIF in Premiere

Export as a animated .gif

Monitor for Your Camera

Marshall M-CT5 5 Portable Camera-Top Field Monitor

Connect with us!

Don't forget to check out our large library of projects on this site.

If you want to search for a topic, try this custom search engine.