I think maybe I have a little too much storage space. Between Amazon S3, the two 500GB G-Drive Q external drives and the 500GB Apple Time Capsule, I have over 2TB of storage. I don't think I have that many photo and family videos and my iTunes library isn't that large either. The Amazon S3 is used to backup photos from our iPhoto library stored on the G-Drive Q Media and documents stored on the G-Drive Q. The Time Capsule is for backing up the three Macs via Time Machine.
Month: March 2009
Using iChat with Google Talk
I bought my wife (and myself) a white MacBook last week. Her birthday is next month, and with Apple's newly updated aluminum notebooks the previous model white notebook was put on sale. Her previous laptop, an 8-year-old Dell Inspiron, was a joke and a pain in my neck. It was held together with duct tape. The battery held no charge, so it had to be plugged in all the time. It could only connect to the Wi-Fi from one or two spots in the house. I spent a lot of time troubleshooting one problem after another. So this laptop was two gifts in one; an expensive birthday gift for my wife and lots of free time for me.
I spent about 30 minutes setting things up. I created an admin account, created her non-admin account, connected the laptop to the network, set up Mail.app to read her Gmail, linked her Gmail contacts to OS X's AddressBook, installed one software patch, linked her iTunes to the Mac mini's media library, and finally, set up iChat to use Google Talk.
iChat Video and Google Talk
Google Talk uses Jabber, an open instant messaging protocol. Apple built support for Jabber into the Leopard version of iChat. I added the account via the Accounts tab in the Preferences pane and was given a pleasant surprise once I logged in. A little camera style icon appeared next to my wife's name in the contact list. I excited clicked it to find that I could initiate and conducts video chats via my Gtalk account. Audio and video quality were excellent with very little of that delay I've seen when using Skype. I can not find any official documentation on Google site about this, but others have been doing this for some time. I take my MacBook to work each day, and it would be nice to video chat with my wife during the day.
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Whenever a trade association raises the barricades and tries to lobby their way into maintaining the status quo, they are doing their members a disservice. Instead of spending time and insight and effort reinventing what they do and organizing for a better future, the members are lulled into a sense of security that somehow, somehow, the future will be just like today.
Seth’s Blog: Beware of trade guilds maintaining the status quo
