Apples & Oranges first meeting of the year
Well, it's that time of year again; time for me to be the big man and head up the Apples & Oranges group for GVSU. Apples & Oranges, in case you didn't know, is the Apple User Group for Grand Valley which I am president of.
Last night we had our first meeting and it was pretty good. I bought some ice cream chips and pop and at about 8:45pm, I ended up at the meeting. The usual suspects (ie. Nick, Rob and Beckey) showed up with probably 10 more new people along with our advisor, Eric. Jeff, my house-mate was there for the free food and pop, and Dallas and Samantha showed up for a moment. From how I saw it, it was actually a pretty damn good turn out. I got e-mails from two or three other people who wanted to be there but were either busy or just forgot, so I see that as a good sign for next week's meeting.
This week, I kind of stood around like a professor and tried to help people with their Apple issues by talking them through the process. We got onto som crazy topics like torrents, converting movies for your iPod and ripping music from your iPod (specifically the iPod Touch, ugh). Nick and Rob had comments here and there and by the end I was sitting down trying to fix Mail problems which sucked (I absolutely hate Mail).
Outside of having no structure and me not having my damn mini-DVI to VGA adapter to show people how to do things on the projector, it was a pretty good meeting. Next week I'll have to take a more commanding lead and keep the discussions focused. We drifted a lot.. but I'm not going to go further than that. As I said, next week will have to be more focused.
I have plans to show off how to rip music off of your iPod (specifically the iTouch, but also any other iPod) as well as maybe showing how to transfer your iTunes library. Nick wanted to show off Transmission and how to use BitTorrent so we may have 2 mini-meetings going on. After next week I want to definitely show people how to use Handbrake and iSquint, then maybe one day I'll show off the greatness that is Quicksilver. All in good time though.
Here's to hoping next week is just as successful as this week.
The Alkaline Trio, Wizard World Chicago, and Wall-E
This weekend was pretty much 100% bad ass: I attended an Alkaline Trio concert, had the privilege of going to Wizard World Chicago and meeting Brian Michael Bendis (the whole reason for going to the ordeal) along with doing some other awesome stuff throughout the whole convention, and I saw Wall-E with Dallas.
Sweet right? Well, let me elaborate:
Friday:
I worked my normal schedule until 5pm and met a friend of mine to head to Yesterdog. One hot dog was all I needed from that landmark place in Grand Rapids to be ready to go see The Alkaline Trio. Come 7pm, we were let in the doors of the show and stood around for about a half an hour just goofing around until The Fashion made their way to the stage. They were a psudo-pop-punk band with a strange techno feel that was neither good nor bad, but still a listen. They played a 35-minute set and took off leading straight into the band Bayside. They too had an iffy sound, something along the lines of pop-punk, but a tad slower. My friend Tori was very into them, yet they didn't really hit for me (like a lot of pop-punk bands usually do, if only for a moment). They finished their 45-minute set and after a very boring 35 minute wait, The Alkaline Trio made their way to the stage. Let me tell you, it was fucking incredible. Song after song of perfection and amazing Alkaline Trio-goodness ensued for a little over an hour. They played songs from their last two albums, Crimson, Good Mourning (more notably: "This Could Be Love", "Mercy Me", "Time To Waste" and "This Could Be Love"), a few new songs from their album and finished their encore with "Radio" from their album Maybe I'll Catch Fire. For any Alkaline Trio, such as myself, it was seriously amazing (especially "This Could Be Love." Boy do I love that song).
Despite being tired, I ended up staying up until 2:30am talking about comics with my buddy Jeff Lanning once I got back from the concert.
A cool AppleScript to resize your wallpaper
I'm a total wallpaper whore. Seriously. I have nearly 1GB of wallpapers (766MB) and I need them to work with my MacBook completely. In order to scale a mass amount of wallpapers at a time, I was trying all sorts of methods to do so... Photoshop, Automator, Skitch, and a few other programs until I ran across some information almost a year and a half ago about the Image modifying tools built into Mac OS X. After some reading up on some AppleScript how-tos and browsing some forums I started to work on my original imageresize.scpt and for a while it worked for me.
The original concept was to just scale the images and move the original files to the trash then have me move the modified files to my wallpaper folder, and it did just that, plan and simple. But given my need to make things more and more complicated to make life easier and less complicated I decided to take my AppleScripting to the next level.
What my AppleScript now does is scales the images you drag onto it, moves them to a specific folder based on the month (I seriously have a ton of wallpapers and need to sort them by month...), then moves the original image to another folder. From how I see it, I may want the original image at some point...
To get things set up, download one of the two versions below (or copy the source, it's up to you), and then drag your pictures you wish to resize to the .app version of the imageresize/imageresize-original script and it will do the rest (as I described above).
So, given how happy I am with my new AppleScript, I thought I'd offer it to everyone... hell, I'll even offer my original AppleScript for those who just want to scale an image and delete the original.
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Source of imageresize <- the new one that moves files and such
Download imageresize.app and imageresize.scpt as a ZIP
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Source of imageresize-original <- the old one that deletes the original file and such
Download imageresize-original.app and imageresize.scpt as ZIP
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I hope you can enjoy and find as much of use of these AppleScripts as I do...
Let me know what you think or if you have any questions in the comments!
-Mike
