Scraps of My Geek Life » mac

WD TV Live Hub Brings All Your Media To One Central Location

Michele — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:58:59 +0000

It’s great that we can access most of the TV shows and movies we watch from our computer, tablet or phone, but what about when you want to sit down with your family to watch a movie on that big screen TV in your family room? Or you want to show off your vacation pictures (that are on your computer) to a group of people? Ahh! Western Digital WD TV Live Hub to the rescue!

WD TV Live Hub

Digital Storage

Not only can you watch internet TV with the WD TV Live Hub, but it has a 1 TB hard drive to store video, photos or music. I decided to back up all of my family photos to the WD TV Live Hub drive and now we can look at photos on our TV. My kids love being able to access the photos themselves.

We connected the WD TV Live Hub to our home network and now we can access all our digital files on any computer (Mac or PC) in our home. My kids often needs pictures of themselves for class projects. I have given them all access to the photos from every computer they use. That saves me from having to search through all the photos for them.

As you can see from the photo above, the menu is easy to use and you can customize the photo. My kids didn’t have any problems figuring out where they needed to go.

Watching Internet TV

We subscribe to Netflix streaming and Hulu Plus, so having access to both services (plus many more) on the WD TV Live Hub is a huge plus. And if the movie or show is available in HD and you are watching on an HD TV, you will be able to watch in HD!

WD Mobile Apps

The WD TV Live Hub works with two WD mobile apps, WD TV Remote and WD Photos.

WD TV Remote – Download the remote and control the WD TV Live Hub from your mobile device. This makes it easier to search for movies to watch or use the keyboard.

WD Photos - With the WD Photos app on your mobile device, you have access to all the media on the WD TV Live Hub and you can take photos or video and upload directly to the Live Hub.

Central Location

The WD TV Live Hub is small enough to easily add to your home media system and make it the central place for all of your digital media. Imagine being able to go to only one place to get access to any media to want to watch whether it’s personal media stored on YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo or the latest episode of Glee on Hulu Plus

To check out all the digital formats that are supported on the WD TV Live Hub, go to the website.

Be sure to check out the full WD TV Live family of products. Follow WD TV Live on Twitter.

Disclosure: I received the WD TV Live Hub media center in exchange for this review. All opinions are 100% my own. Affiliate links within post.

Let’s Talk About The WD TV Live Hub Media Center!

How do you store your media now? Do you have videos, music and photos on several hard drives and online?

WD TV Live Hub Brings All Your Media To One Central Location originally posted at Scraps of My Geek Life.

Apple Brings Apps To Desktop With the App Store

Michele — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:07:40 +0000

Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPad is about to hit 10 billion apps sometime soon. Apple recently decided to bring the apps to the Mac desktop with the App Store.

You will need to update your Mac iOS to version 10.6.6 if you would like to use the App Store. You will find the App Store under the apple in the upper left corner of your desktop as seen in the screen print here:

It will open up and you will see something similar to this:

There are both paid and free apps and they are split out by categories. There are not anywhere near as many apps as there are for the iPhone, but it has a very good start.

Evernote

If you have not tried Evernote (link to App Store), I recommend you download it now. It’s free!

I have an article at MyBlogalicous about how to use Evernote.

As you can see below, the newest and most popular are first. You can search by category or see lists of Top Paid, Top Free and Top Grossing apps.

iWork and iLife Purchases

One of the coolest things about the App Store is that now you can download iMovie, iPhoto and GarageBand separately (links are to the App Store). I never use GarageBand, but I’ve always had to buy the full iLIfe version so I can update iPhoto & iMovie. The same goes for the iWork applications.

You can buy Pages, Keynote and Numbers (link to App Store) separately now. A lot of Mac software developers are offering their software here at the App Store for easy purchase, download and updates.

App Store Updates

At the very top of the App Store, you’ll see Updates (last icon). Whenever there is an update to software you have downloaded, you will see a number there (for the number of apps that need updating). You can click on “update all” and it’s a very easy update.

I like the App Store because it makes it so easy to find software for the Mac. It is all categorized with reviews. If you have a Mac, go check it out.

Apple Brings Apps To Desktop With the App Store originally posted at Scraps of My Geek Life.

My First Thoughts on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Michele — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:52:07 +0000

I read all the articles that said I shouldn’t install Snow Leopard until I cleaned up my computer, but I couldn’t wait. I dug right in as soon as I got it. The install went really easy on both my iMac and my MacBook.

Here are the changes I noticed:

Hard drive free space -I didn’t take note on my Macbook, but on my iMac, I gained about 15 GB of space on my hard drive. That alone, made the upgrade worth it.

Speed – I noticed a difference in the speed of everything on my computer. My mail, calendar and address book opened faster. Firefox seems to be running faster.

Restart – Definitely faster

Finder – You can change the size of the icons in the finder and get a large preview of the document/picture without opening it up. This makes it a lot easier to find that one document or picture you are looking for. That is the control in the lower right hand corner (inside orange circle) that you slide to control the icon size.

This is the view of the finder in the pictures folder on the largest icon setting.

And this is the Documents folder on the largest icon setting. It will be much easier to find the pdf or Word documents I need now.

Dock – The orange arrow is pointing to the scroll bar that now appears when you open the Applications or Documents folder in the Dock. Now you don’t have to click on the Arrow that opens the Finder window to find the apps that start with a ‘Z’.

None of these changes are earth shattering, but they have made my life a tad easier and that is worth the $49 upgrade for both my Desktop and Laptop.

Snow Leopard’s Beautiful, Giant, Obsessive Icons (cultofmac.com)
David Pogue’s Review of Snow Leopard (q-ontech.blogspot.com)

My First Thoughts on Mac OS X Snow Leopard originally posted at Scraps of My Geek Life.

iLife '09 – This excites me!

Michele — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:00:54 +0000

Yes, I am a geek (hence the blog name, scraps of my GEEK life). I get really excited when new software or gadgets come out. I do not care if I need them. Apple announce iLife ’09 today and it has some really really cool features. Check it out here – iLife ’09.

iPhoto ’09 – I like iPhoto, but I don’t love it. I do like the event stacks and how you can quickly scroll through it without having to open the whole folder, but since I’m used to using Picasa for Windows, I miss a lot of features. But the new faces and places features for iPhoto excites me. I am always looking for photos of certain people when I’m scrapbooking. I can’t wait to try it out and see how accurate it is. The places feature will tell you exactly where the picture was taken if your camera has GPS. I guess that will mean I may need a new camera. I told you…I love gadgets and I’m a geek. But I guess my iPhone can do that so I’ll have to make do with that for now. You can also upload directly to flickr and facebook which are the 2 places I always upload to so that is exciting.

GarageBand will teach you the piano and the guitar. Since all my kids like to play both and do not know how, that is pretty cool. I guess they use celebrities like Sting to help teach you.

I don’t use iMovie and iWeb much. Mostly because I haven’t found a use for them. I have tried iWeb and it doesn’t do enough to satisfy my needs, but this new version looks like it might work better. I want to use iMovie, but I just haven’t made the time to do it. And to be honest, I have no idea what iDVD even does. I’ve only had my Mac for a few months so I haven’t tried everything yet.

But I do know, I will definitely be upgrading to iLife ’09.

Technorati Tags: ilife 09, apple, mac

iLife '09 – This excites me! originally posted at Scraps of My Geek Life.