Thursday, March 14, 2002

Crashes are rare, eh? iMovie just crashed on me. Now, admittedly I'd imported the entire tape, which I am pretty sure is not the best way to go about things. But still. I was trying to import a CD track. But nevertheless, it appears that two things are true: 1. iMovie is, as promised, a doddle to use. 2. I have no particular talent for video editing. Nevertheless, we now have a short movie of kids doing, well, cute kid things. It only takes me up to just before Christmas, so I'm about to start another one. The next one will cover Christmas, New Year, and Marianne's birthday, and then a third will do the Trip to the Farm. Including, of course, the marvellous section of footage that Steven, long-time still camera user that he is, shot in portrait. The big project, though, is to refilm using the DV camera all of my father's ciné film from the sixties and seventies. Much of it is very poor quality, and much of what he chose to record for posterity is of little lasting interest. But the film of family members just doing ordinary things is priceless, and I want to be able to ship DVDs all round my family. So we're going to head back up to Lincolnshire with the kit and a tripod, and get my parents to record an audio commentary. I want to do titles for each year with decade-appropriate fonts and dodgy contemporary music. 11:38:20 PM  comment []     The iMac crashed! I didn't think that happened. But it wouldn't log me in this morning when I went on to write this post. A reboot and everything was fine. Meanwhile, I realised that I hadn't explained how I'd sorted out the network and the encryption, and other people might be interested. This is terribly neepy, so if you're not interested in the guts, just move along now. First, the shares. A websearch found a single reference to someone who had opened Netinfo Manager in the utilities ("you won't need this unless you're a network administrator") put in entries for each of the PCs, with the properties "name" (value <machinename>"), "serves" (value "./local") and "ip_address" (value the ip address). Mounting the drive from the finder using samba (the construction is "smb://<workgroupname>;<machinename>/<share> ") (note; while I know I'm rubbish at HTML, I have absolutely no idea what to do from preventing it from thinking that smb:// above indicates a URL) then works properly (it couldn't find the shares before). This is a bit of an ugly approach, because although IP addresses are fairly stable on my LAN, they are dynamically assigned by the router. So every so often I'll have to reset the values. For the wireless encryption, the trick was to use WEP Key Maker to construct a key and then paste it into the router from an Ethernet-connected computer (never try to configure wireless encryption wirelessly) and then into the Airport password field with a $ in front of it to tell the card it's a value and not a passkey. 9:10:17 AM  comment []

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