Making the web work for you
At feedback.dxo.com, Roseblood asked about an article on my workflow in DxO PhotoLab. I know I've written one but couldn't find it in my archives there. As I've spent countless hours improving that workflow to process artistic, football and family photos, I'm happy to share it, this time in a more permanent format.
Keep reading DxO PhotoLab: How to Build an Efficient Processing Workflow
I've just had another very poor licensing experience with independent software. It's encouraged me to share some general guidelines on how to license open source software.
Keep reading How to build user-friendly software licensing: The Newsletter Plugin vs FV Player
We're looking at long term newsletter, marketing automation solutions now. Preferably open source. Mautic came up but there's no Wikipedia article on Mautic.*
I decided to quickly put one up. Alas, I can't stand writing wikitext, it's very slow. I can edit it on other people's articles slowly and carefully. I wanted to write in Markdown so I did. It turns out there are no usable conversion tools. At first I was directed to Pandoc. We've got an online version which handles unlimited characters. I didn't have much success with our version. I tried the official version. No luck there either. Other people were facing Markdown to wikitext Pandoc conversion issues as well.
There's some command line utilities which have to be installed (no thanks) after installing npm first. Or there's online utilities which are no longer available. Finally I was redirected to our own Pandoc converter.
Keep reading How to convert Markdown to Wikitext
So you now have a website with all your videos encrypted with FV Player Pro using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elastic Transcoder or Coconut.co (full FV Player integration coming soon )? Or perhaps your video platform is Vimeo and you can just put up FV Player Vimeo Security and stop at least the known video download tools. Bravo!
Now you want to post some of your videos to Facebook. Are your videos protected from download there? Not really, not even in a private group. Using FV Player Pro with independent hosting is not really an option. Facebook doesn't play well with independently hosted videos, you really have to upload to their platform, which we don't control.
Here's some good strategies to minimise your risk.
Keep reading How to Protect Your Facebook Videos from Downloaders
Choosing a Cloud Hosting to store all your videos on and stream them to your website may seem like an easy-to-do thing but the reality is often a totally different story.
Keep reading Cloud Hosting Providers where videos cannot be stored for playback on your website: OneDrive, ADrive, Dropbox
The Mac Silver Tower 4,1 and 5,1 remain one of the most powerful Macs ever made, depending on your processor. Even the eight core 2.26 GHz version is incredibly powerful and fast, outrunning any MacBook Pro and most iMacs, as will a hexacore 3.33 GHz or 3.46 GHz. Certainly they are more expandable, repairable and upgradeable than any other Mac built since, with SATA SSD and PCI cards and graphic card upgrades readily available and easily installed. For video editors, the Mac Pro Silver Tower is one of the best computers ever built.
In terms of cost for performance, no current Mac whether iMac or iMac Pro can touch the 4,1 and 5,1 Silver Towers. What's especially wonderful is that both of them will still run the latest Apple OS and software perfectly, with just a bit of preparation. I'll take you through the steps of a successful deployment of a 4,1 Silver Tower with High Sierra.
The first thing you should do is test your hardware. This is easier said than done on older hardware. Apple has some lovely software called Apple Hardware Test a.k.a. as AHT. There's no joy in suffering through crashes which are hardware related, trying to debug your OS (software).
Normally you find AHT at this path /System/Library/CoreServices/.diagnostics
Unfortunately, recent versions of the OS have not included AHT or at least not for older computers. Happily some enterprising Apple fans have collected all the versions of AHT out there for all kinds of Apple computers including Powermac, Powerbook, iBook, iMac, MacMini, MacPro, MacBook and MacBooks Pro.
Keep reading The Definitive Guide to Deploying Apple OS X 10.13.5 High Sierra on Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 Silver Towers
Apparently IBM has made USD $780 million building a payroll system for the Canadian Government which does not work.
The idea was to save money by eliminating jobs. Canada has about 260,000 public servants. Over 1200 people were working on payroll (accountants, bookkeepers and managers mainly with some IT guys thrown in to make it work). This is about half of one percent on payroll. Payroll is about one third the cost of accounting in our company. I'm unable to bring our accounting costs much below 3% of turnover on a sub-million dollar turnover despite strong efforts and automated software like Freshbooks.
Keep reading A billion reasons never to buy IBM services
