a MAC mind

Over the past couple of years I have had the honor to serve as a tech consultant for the new website ProductionYak.com . On the surface ProductionYak.com is an amazing tool for finding businesses to help you hit the ground running when on location.  Think of it as a Yelp for the Production mind.  The creators have been adding businesses that are used year in and year out by the production industry. On the site you will find articles about production and life after production, ProductionYak produced videos, and a bag of other information and tools.  One of the best tools on ProductionYak.com is the I Need It NOW! Tool.  First you have to be a Yak Pak Member. The Membership is free, after you have been reviewed by the site.  The review checks to see if you are working in one of the many production areas from Production Assistants to Coordinators to  Producers, and everything in between.  Once active you can send calls of help to your specific category or everyone with the click of only a few buttons.  In most cases the site is effective in getting help back to you right away.  So if you ever find yourself in need of a ice cream truck that serves lactose tolerant ice cream bars for a very special actor, in the middle of IOWA, then this could be your savior!  You can use the service to post jobs as well.  The site has boards for random ideas, movie reviews and anything else you want to talk about with your fellow production folk.  Definitely check it out if you are in production of any sort, this could be your golden ticket.

There are a lot of PDF Viewers on the market.  An equal number of expensive PDF Programs to make changes to the PDFs. Now you have a way for free to make changes to PDFs and do it from the comfort of your browser!  PDFVue does it all for you. You can even download a extension to force all PDFs to be opened in PDFVue. Enjoy.

A dream come true… you can now type in your own handwriting. Go to YourFonts.com and you will be able to in a matter of minutes. Print out 2 sheets of paper from the Web site… hand write out your letters. Make sure to stay within the lines.  Be creative… put a heart when you dot your i.  Then you can add your signature as well.  (This part made me nervous… but my signature is a little messy anyways…)  Then scan… upload… and whammo.  In seconds you will be able to download your font.  It’s an amazing way to get a font for free.  Experiment making an all symbol font.  Or crazy faces font.. Anything you draw in the box under the letter will be assigned to that key.  Good luck and have fun.

Well its finally here. The first newsletter. You can download it and read it in APPLE PREVIEW or in ADOBE ACROBAT READER. Please send me comments. I can’t wait to here what you think about the NEWSLETTERa Mac Mind NEWSLETTER 1:1

If you’re like me you wait to put in entries to your Quicken because you are either not close to a computer or you have better things to worry about.Well the good people at Intuit have heard your plight and they are offering a new solution. Its called Quicken online . Its a new service to replace your desktop version of Quicken. Its PC and MAC compatible and it allows you to do all of your entries to a secure Quicken app online. It does automatic backups to their servers. But its biggest feature for people like us, is its made for the IPHONE. It allows you to use your iphone to do entries on the go. Imagine all that wasted time in lines at the amusement park, grocery store, Sephora line. You could be entering everything you just spent. Then right there on your iphone you can see how much you have left to spend. You can do all of the same reports, graphs, etc you do on the regular Quicken. The big plus, if they update the software it gets updated online automatically. Its $2.99 a month and is automatically charged to your credit card.

Webb Alert is a great site to get caught up daily on what is happening in the Tech World. Morgan Webb has been a part of Tech TV and G4 TV for many years.

She has a very sarcastic delivery style and can make even the most boring information seem accessible. She makes sure that you have a good laugh while making sure you have talking points at the water cooler. You can go to the site and watch it on the site, or you can subscribe to it in your itunes. When you subscribe (for free) to the podcast itunes does the work for you. Whenever Itunes is launched it will download the latest episodes and place them under the PODCAST section. You can watch these inside ITUNES at your own leisure, or sync them to your video ipod or iphone to watch on the go.