Why Switch in the First Place?

The main reason I wanted a different monitor, was to have the ability to use it for other purposes than just work. The LED Cinema Display only has a Mini DisplayPort input, and I don’t know any devices aside from the latest MacBooks that use that. I was looking for a bit of flexibility, and was willing to sacrifice aesthetic quality and simplicity to get it, or so I thought. The Dell monitor I purchased came equipped with HDMI, Component, and even DisplayPort inputs. So, I was definitely covered in terms of it being compatible with other devices. Then I realized the HDMI port was bunk. And so the downward spiral began…

Image Quality

My first Mac was the last of the white generation iMac. It had a 24″ screen, and I found the image quality to be quite good. That was until I purchased my second Mac this past summer – a 15″ MacBook Pro and a 24″ Apple LED Cinema Display. The LED panel is simply glorious! Colours are extremely vivid and rich, and the brightness is outstanding. Even on the MacBook Pro – the brightest I can stand is 4 notches down from full. The glossy screen is not ideal, by any means. Especially on the MBP. But it does contribute to the beautiful picture, which was immediately evident when I first hooked up the Dell monitor. “What’s that bit of noise there?” and, “Is that as bright as it goes?” were questions I asked myself repeatedly over the course of the 2 weeks I was running it. That and, “These colours can’t be right.”

Colour Profile Hell

One of the great things about using an ACD with one of the new MBPs, is the ease of use. It has a combined cable which includes a power connector, Mini DisplayPort, and USB. There is no options menu on the ACD. Hell, there isn’t even a power button! You simply wake your Mac and it fires up. In System Preferences, there are options for managing the colour profile for each display – the MBP‘s built-in display, and the external ACD. I found the default profile for each to be spot-on. And since the default gamma was changed to 2.2 in Snow Leopard, there has been no need to create a custom profile.

The Dell monitor was a different story entirely. In fact, I don’t think I ever managed to get it right after 2 weeks of constant use, and fussing with. The fact that you have a colour profile for the Mac, and the monitor separately, does not help. Just when I thought I had it right, I noticed things rendering differently across browsers and apps. At best, colours still weren’t perfect. Red was not as red as it is on the ACD. And overall it felt more washed out and flat, compared to the ACD.

Built-in Goodies

While the Dell monitor included more options in the way of inputs. The ACD has a built-in iSight (webcam) and microphone, which I use more than I realized. Every time Addison comes down to my office, she hops on my lap and asks to, “See self, Dada?” all excitedly. It was a real bummer trying to tell her we couldn’t, as she bounced on my lap waiting for her adorable smile to show up on the screen.

A Quick Re-cap

Let’s have a look at the pros and cons of the Dell versus the ACD, shall we?

Lesson Learned

I’m not saying I’ll only be buying Apple products from here on. But I will definitely be taking all of this into consideration when I’m weighing my options in future. And of course, will avoid taking steps backward if I already own Apple products I’m happy with.

“Ohhh, What’s This?”

Then one day, while on a routine trip to the Apple Store, I noticed a lovely little box in the accessories section. It was the BookArc, from Twelve South – a perfectly designed stand for MacBooks that matches the style and elegance of the Apple hardware. The price tag was a bit steep, but I hadn’t found any other viable solutions, so I bit the bullet and returned home with a BookArc.

As soon as I had it all set up, I took a few photos, uploaded them to Flickr and mentioned my fun new accessory on Twitter. Within no time, there were piles of comments and faves on Flickr, and the tweet was re-tweeted dozens of times. It seemed people had been wanting something like this, and I happened to be the guy to “discover” it.

I’ve had my BookArc for just over 4 months now, and have nothing but good things to say about it. I have much more free space on my desktop, and my MBP runs much cooler than it did when I had it lying on the desk surface.

I guess word travels, and the Twelve South folks caught wind of my tweet. I heard from them directly, and they thanked me for spreading the word about their product, then asked if I would like to check out another of their MacBook products – the BackPack. Not one to turn down free stuff, I willingly accepted their offer. To my surprise, they sent a pair of BackPacks for me to demo. At first, I didn’t realize you could use more than one on a single Cinema Display, but indeed you can.

BackPack is a small, adjustable shelf that sits on the stand of an aluminum iMac or Apple Cinema Display. Naturally, it matches the aluminum finish and is made with the same love and attention to detail as the BookArc.

Personally, I don’t have a whole lot of use for the BackPack. I think it would be better suited in an office environment where desk space is limited, or where the back of your screen is easily visible. But it has made a great shelf for my camcorder dock, which is a big chunk of shiny black plastic. So at least it’s not in my line of sight any longer.

Want One? Take Your Pick!

Being the awesome folks they are, Twelve South have offered up a BookArc and BackPack for the taking! All that’s required is that you leave a comment letting me know which accessory you would prefer and why you want it. I’ll be picking 2 winners (1 for each accessory) at random, after 48 hours from the time of posting.

More Deliciousness

At this time, Twelve South have 2 other accessories for MacBook available. Surfacepad is a leather coat for 13″ MacBooks, and Bassjump, which was just announced last week, is a standalone sub-woofer that runs on a single USB cable.

Working With What I Have

I looked at many of the set-top solutions that are out there at the moment. There are many relatively inexpensive devices that will play just about anything you can throw at them, but adding another device to my entertainment setup isn’t something I’m thrilled about. Recently, my wife has been watching a few of her own shows and I thought it would be great if she didn’t rely so much on me and had a bit more flexibility in terms of when and where she could watch them. This is when I started looking into network storage solutions.

My router, an Apple AirPort Extreme supports hard drive sharing via USB. I had an old 200GB drive in a NexStar 3 enclosure kicking around from my PC days, which made for a perfect test candidate. Sure enough, it was as simple as plugging the drive into the router and enabling disk sharing via AirPort Utility. Now, not only can I access the drive from my iMac in the basement office, but Deanna’s MacBook can as well, along with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in the living room.

Having a network drive eliminates the need to manually move files around via USB thumbdrives, but there’s still the issue of compatible file formats and the hardware used to play them. Obviously, there’s no issue when it comes to our Macs, but the game consoles are limited in the codecs they support. As I mentioned previously, I download videos at 720p which are typically encoded in MKV format, which as you may have assumed, is not supported by the consoles. This is where I haven’t been able to shave any steps off. I still have to re-encode the files to AVI so the consoles can play them, which isn’t a huge deal, really.

Expanding the Reach

From time-to-time, my wife, daughter and I find ourselves all into games at the same time. And usually all of them being Xbox 360 titles. Picking up a second console is something I have thought about many times over the past year, but justifying the hefty purchase wasn’t the easiest task. But now we found ourselves with another reason for an additional Xbox 360 – watching TV shows. Having a second Xbox 360 in the bedroom means we can stream video over the network not only to our Macs and the TV in the living room, but to our bedroom as well. Suddenly, the whole house has access to all of our downloaded shows at any given time, and we’re no longer restricted by the limited storage capacity (8GB) of the USB thumbdrive.

When I put all of this together in my head, I had a feeling it was one of those “too good to be true” moments. But to my surprise, streaming 720p video to the bedroom worked like a charm right off the bat. The only catch, is that things get ugly when more than one device is tapping into the network storage drive.

New Hardware

Once the tests proved successful, I invested in a new NexStar 3 enclosure with SATA support (my previous one was IDE) and a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB hard drive. The next step will be to move to a RAID setup for peice of mind, but I wanted to ensure this was going to be a long term solution for us before going all out.

Ruling Out Options

BitTorrent

BitTorrent seems like the obvious choice, given that there’s no additional cost. Unfortunately, my ISP (Rogers) throttles BitTorrent traffic something awful, which renders it almost entirely useless. I’ve found grabbing music via BitTorrent is acceptable, but still takes longer than it should. Downloading a 1GB+ TV show episode would take a couple days, at best. The season premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica had over 3000 people seeding it, and I managed to connect to 2 of them, which resulted in an embarrassing 6kbps transfer.

PVR

When I bought my first HDTV, the first thing I did after setting it up was trade in my old cable box for an HD PVR. This seemed like a great option, not only for myself, but for Hannah as well. She’s always missing shows she likes while she’s doing homework, or eating dinner, etc. This gave her a chance to schedule some shows to record and watch at a later date. Unfortunately, the hardware was less than stellar and proved to be more of a source of frustration than anything else. Scheduled recordings were regularly missed, the last couple minutes of certain shows chopped off, and managing recorded shows couldn’t have been more tedious. I’m not sure if I lasted the month before trading the PVR in for a standard HD cable box.

On Demand Cable Services

Our cable TV provider (Rogers) offers their own On Demand channel, as well as The Movie Network On Demand, and a few other specialty channels. Aside having a horrible out-dated and terribly slow interface, the service is completely unreliable. At peak times, it will crash, stall, or be unavailable all together. On rare occasions where I’ve been able to get a show or movie to actually play, I’ve experienced problems such as audio cutting out momentarily or all together, or not being able to resume after pausing. Not to mention, there is still a great deal of content that’s not available in HD, despite it airing in HD initially.

iTunes via Apple TV

When Apple announced TV shows finally coming to iTunes Canada, I couldn’t have been more excited. That was, until I saw the line-up of supported channels and shows. Even now, a year after its introduction, there isn’t a single show I would pay to watch. The iTunes movie service is much better, but with rentals only being made available a month after their release, there isn’t much of a reason to consider it. To be able to watch content downloaded via iTunes, I would need to pick up an Apple TV, or buy the necessary cables to hook Deanna’s MacBook up to the entertainment system.

Xbox Live Marketplace

Xbox Live Marketplace now offers movies in Canada, but no TV shows. I already own the hardware and the service is fantastic – very fast downloads, you can start watching after only a few minutes of downloading, and the quality is great. Problem being – it’s the most expensive of the bunch. With HD movie rentals coming in at over $9, I would much rather drive out to the video store and pay under $6 for the same movie on Blu-ray. But again, there are no TV shows here, which is the main concern.

Why not just watch TV shows when the air like normal people?

• Commercial breaks are out of hand in some shows (LOST, I’m looking at you), and completely dampen the experience.
• Some shows run over their time slot (LOST, you son of a bitch!) which means you miss the beginning of another show if it happens to air directly after.
• With having children in the house (and a baby to boot), it’s really hard to plan times for Deanna and I to both sit down and watch. Normally, we’re not able to until after 9pm and some shows air earlier.
• Still no way of obtaining episodes if we happen to miss them, for whatever reason.
• Being in Canada, we’re behind in the times on many levels. There are still a number of shows that don’t air in HD here. Battlestar Galactica is a good example. Since it airs in HD on other channels in the US, we get a letter-boxed version within the 4:3 frame of our 16:9 TV = gross.

Current Process

I don’t really have any major beefs with the steps I take to bring TV episodes to my living room television. While there are quite a few of them, the end result is exactly what I’m after – HD quality episodes that I can watch at my leisure. What I’m doing now, is this…

1. Download recent episodes via Usenet. I subscribe to Giganews, which costs me $12.95 per month which allows up to 35GB worth of downloads. Given that most episodes at 720p weigh in between 1.1GB and 1.6GB, that allows for a fair amount of downloading each month. Best of all, download speeds are maintained at 1mbps to 1.4mbps, so it really doesn’t take long to download a single episode.
2. Unpacking and repairing files. A single-click process which takes a couple minutes, at most.
3. Rename and move unpacked file.
4. Re-encode file via Visual Hub. MKV seems to be the codec of choice for high definition video, which looks fantastic, but is limited as far as where you can play the files. Obviously, my desktop iMac has no problems, but my Xbox 360 and PS3 don’t support MKV, and as such, I’m left with having to re-encode. Cooking an AVI from the MKV takes about half an hour and is a very CPU intensive process.
5. Transfer file to USB thumbdrive. Streaming HD files over a wireless network just isn’t feasible. Even from my N compatible iMac to my wired Xbox 360 – the result is a choppy file that ends up stopping to buffer every few minutes. Moving files via USB thumbdrive has proved to be the easiest and quickest way to get files from my iMac to the consoles in the living room.
6. Watch file on console via USB thumbdrive. For a while, I was moving and copying several files to the PS3′s harddrive, but that just proved to be an extra unnecessary step. Watching the files straight from the thumbdrive works just fine.

What Are My Options?

I’m looking for suggestions here. I know there are many devices similar to Apple TV, that allow you to stream video files of many formats over a wireless network, or transfer files directly to the device. I would love something like this where I didn’t have to convert the MKV files and could transfer files to the HDD over the network. I would like more than anything to make use of the hardware I already have, but I realize that’s likely not an option if I’m looking to cut down on steps without sacrificing quality or flexibility. Here are a few requirements I have if I were to get a new device, and some that need to be met for my current setup.

• I have an Intel iMac and MacBook in the house, both running Leopard. No Windows machines.
• Wireless N compatible network. The router is actually in the living room very close the entertainment system, so wired connection is do-able.
• New device should have on-board harddrive of 160GB or more. Preferably very large (500GB+) or ability to upgrade.
• Supports MKV file format, or allows for installation of new codecs.
• Network connectivity which allows transferring files directly to the device.

So, what do you think? What are you doing to get TV shows from your download queue to your television?

After bumping up the box art size, I noticed that the Blu-ray case is merely overlaid on top of the image itself. Most Blu-ray covers come with the case already on them, so I suppose this is the best approach. But in some cases, the Blu-ray logo was off by a few pixels, and some others seemed to seep through the transparent bezel more than others. Problem being, I’m wicked anal about little details like this and simply couldn’t leave it alone. I cracked open the app, pulled out the Blu-ray case image and created myself a nice little template. By simply masking the case portion an exporting a transparent PNG, I was able to significantly clean up my Blu-ray movies. Yes, now I’m a happy camper!

Here, Have My Template…

It’s a simple PSD which contains a masked folder. Simply paste your cover images into the folder, resize them accordingly, and “save for web” as a transparent PNG. Drag them directly onto the movie you want to replace in Delicious Library and you’re done.

Download (607 KB)

NOTE: This template also works for HD DVD movies, since the case dimensions are exactly the same.

Email is a Massive Time Waster

When I was doing freelance design work, I used to shut down my mail client all together while I was working, so there was absolutely no distraction there. I loved it! But when I made the switch to Graphics.net, it was required that I kept it open while I was on the clock and also necessary. Instead of working for one client at a time, I had a couple managers and multiple clients all reaching in my direction at any given time. To add to the barrage of incoming mail from work, I have my personal inbox and my old freelance box in the same mail client. During the day, the only thing I needed to focus on was work, yet I was constantly distracted by new blog comment notifications, Twitter follow emails, Facebook friend requests, etc. For the longest time, I didn’t really need to worry about it as I saw a little preview of the incoming mail via Growl. That was, until I upgraded to Leopard. Growl has been updated a couple times with versions that are compatible with Leopard, but it seems every time Apple releases an update, it’s broken again. So I needed to find another way to have the mail still coming in, but without taking away my focus from the task at hand.

Rules to the rescue! The only email that reaches my personal inbox and triggers the dock indicator is legit email. All web service notifications, newsletters, etc. are now directed to subfolders which display a “new” count in the sidebar, but aren’t reflected in the dock. The folders I setup are titled, Blog Comments, Notifications, and News & Press. I can’t tell you how much this has relieved the distraction by that little red icon in my dock, and it’s crazy easy to implement. For example…

To filter out the blog comment notifications – these are emails sent by WordPress every time a new comment is added or one is waiting in the moderation queue. Simply add a rule that says, “if sender is equal to wordpress@yourdomain.com, move message to Blog Comments folder.”

General notifications can be a bit more tricky, but you can catch just about everything here if you get creative. Things like Twitter and Faceook emails are easy, since they’re always address from Twitter and Facebook. Some other things, like Flickr friend adds are a bit trickier, but still do-able. If part of a subject line is consistent with each messages, you can use that instead. So now the rule becomes, “if subject contains [Flickr] you are, move message to Notifications folder.”

That’s all there is to it, and it makes a world of difference.

Bulletproof Backups

Admittedly, I’ve been lazy with backing up my system since moving over to the Mac side. It’s easy to get comfortable knowing that you don’t have to worry about viruses and spyware destroying your system at any given moment, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to run into problems somewhere down the road. Doing proper, frequent backups has been on my mind for months, and when Leopard was released I figured Time Machine had me covered and I left it at that. That was, until I read Shawn Blanc’s article on Bulletproof Backups using SuperDuper and Time Machine. That was a total eye opener and I acted immediately.

Less than a week after reading the article, a second MiniStack backup drive arrived in the mail, and by the following weekend I had myself a bulletproof backup solution. I can rest easy now, knowing that I’m covered if I need to recover a lost file quickly, or if my hardware were to fail.

With the baby coming in just a few short weeks (due January 28), we got ourselves a video camera. Deanna‘s parents live on the other side of the country and my Mom’s about 5 hours away, so we don’t see each other as often as we’d like. Obviously, they’re going to miss out on a lot of the great baby moments that are yet to come, and we thought we could fill the void a bit by filming lots and getting the videos online so everyone’s in the leap, one way or another.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to get myself out there a bit more, and start publishing some videos of my own. I know it’s not face-to-face, but it’s one step closer and a hell of a lot more personal than reading a pile of text on screen. I joined Viddler and have posted a couple videos so far. I actually did a MeToday and rambled on a bit, about nothing in particular.

Clearly, I’m a bit rusty – I used to co-host a weekly show on MuchMusic (Canadian music television channel) a few years back. But I’ll get better, and my videos more interesting with time.

If you’re on Viddler, toss me a friend request. Online video is the next best thing to actually meeting in person, and I love learning more about the people I connect with so often but have never actually met.

Hardware Requirements

Before we get started, there are a few things you’ll need on top of your iMac and game console.

• Capture Device: Elgato EyeTV Hybrid.
• S-Video Cable/Adapter: Sold separately, an S-Video cable/adapter is available for all consoles.
• Composite to 1/8 Headphone Jack Adapter: Can be found at most electronic stores or easily online.

Setting up the Hardware

Assuming you have already installed and configured the EyeTV Hybrid.

• Connect the break-out cable that comes packaged with it.
• Connect the S-Video cable from your Xbox 360 to the S-Video input on the break-out cable.
• Connect the Composite to 1/8 Headphone Jack Adapter to the Composite audio cable (red and white).
• Plug the 1/8 Headphone Jack into the Line In port on the back of your iMac. Note: The newest EyeTV Hybrid’s break-out cable has both left and right channels directly on it. If yours does, plug the Xbox 360′s audio cables into those.

Configuring the EyeTV Software

While it’s not the greatest capturing software I’ve used, EyeTV is very simple to setup. Before we started, go ahead and turn on your console.

• From the Controls menu, select the S-Video input source at the bottom. You should now see the Xbox 360 dashboard in the EyeTV preview window.
• Open the Preferences window and go to the Display tab. Turn Overscan on and set the Deinterlace mode to Progress Scan.

You should now see the Xbox 360 Dashboard in the preview window.

We’re not actually going to use EyeTV to record the video, so no need to bother with the recording preferences. The reason we’re not using EyeTV to record is quite simple – it can’t keep up. The product website used to boast that it could capture game console footage with “virtually no latency” (I’m paraphrasing here), but “virtually none” is not the same as none what-so-ever. And unfortunately, even a half-second delay makes the game unplayable while you’re capturing.

“Hold Up, I can’t Hear Anything!”

This was a rather unpleasant surprise which lead to a decent amount of frustration until I found a simple solution in the form of a freeware app. For whatever reason, you can’t actually hear the audio from a Line In source on the iMac. You can record it and play it back, but you can’t hear it live. LineIn acts as a pass-thru and sends the input source directly to the output. In most cases, you will need to set your options to…

Navigate through the Dashboard – you should hear the sound effects coming through your speakers now.

The Tricky Part

I’m pretty sure this is where most people get stuck. You get the hardware, figure out how to get the audio to come through your speakers, then try to record and realize it’s virtually unplayable. Now what? EyeTV can display the Xbox 360 in real time when it’s not recording, so taking that into consideration – why not capture the capturing software which is displaying the video? Sounds tricky, but it’s not, really. There are lots of screencasting apps that could probably do the trick. I chose iShowU, as it seemed to be the most straight-forward and decently priced of the bunch. Once iShowU is installed, create a new preset using the following settings…

Open iShowU’s preferences window and set the following…

• Options: Disable “Show video in Quicktime after recording”
• Capture: Change capture guide colour to something bright that isn’t used on your desktop or Dashboard so it’s easy to see. I use bright green.
• Storage: Set the directory where you want your videos to be saved.

The last thing we need to do before we can hit that record button is set the capture guide in iShowU. Click the “Edit recording area” button along the bottom of the app window and a 640×480 overlay should appear on screen. Carefully place it over the EyeTV window so that the guide is only around the video portion of the window – you may need to do a couple test captures to get it perfect. But breathe a sigh of relief… that’s it!

Where to go From Here

Once you have some footage captured, there are many options for editing. The new iMovie which is part of the iLife ’08 bundle is pretty stellar and the MPEG4 codec I suggested for compression in iShowU outputs a compatible file that you can simply import into iMovie.

After all of this, you may be wondering why I haven’t published a gameplay video since I switched to Mac last December. Honestly, all of this is too much work. For something as trivial as capturing video, it’s a hell of a lot of steps which took me months of trial and error to find a solid solution. I think the tediousness of this whole experience put a huge damper on something I used to love doing and I now I have little to no interest it in any longer. It’s not all bad, though. I have more time to play games now.

And finally, I figured this all out a few months ago and haven’t really touched it since. There may be a few other settings that need changed in the apps, so please point them out if so and I’ll update my article.

I’m Pretty Sure the HD Movie Format War is Over

A couple weeks ago I picked up the Xbox 360 HD DVD player – actually, what I bought was the Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel. But the wheel itself was off-centered by about 10 degrees, which didn’t render it useless, just sucky. I did a quick Google and found that it’s a pretty common issue and read tales of people going through 2 or 3 wheels before getting one that wasn’t broken right out of the box. I said to hell with that noise and got my money back. I thought it would be a good idea to ignore my better judgement (that being to stay away from HD DVD and Blu-ray until their is a clear winner of the format war) and pick up the HD DVD player add-on.

There’s nothing wrong with the player – in fact, it’s great! I love the fact that you don’t have to remove game discs to watch a movie as you end up with a dedicated drive for each. And of course, HD movies look fantastic! But there’s only one local shop within reasonable driving distance that rents them (which happens to be a Blockbuster) and Rogers VideoDirect service sucks for HD movies as they seem to have very limited supply.

Then the news came that Blockbuster are stocking their 1,450 locations with Blu-ray and only carrying HD DVD at the 250 outlets that currently have them. That is an absolutely massive blow to HD DVD and unless a rival video rental service does the complete opposite and dumps Blu-ray, I don’t see HD DVD recovering from this. The second I read that headline, I was filled with anger, which was fully directed back at myself for putting myself in the middle of this stupid format war in the first place. Fuck it! I’m selling my HD DVD player.

The Wii Was a Massive Waste of Money

Xbox 360 was the first console I bought within a year of being released since NES. I picked up my Xbox 360 in early March of 2006, just 4 months after its release. Since then, there’s barely been a day gone by that I haven’t played it or at least turned it on to use it for other purposes (movies or music). The Wii on the other hand, has been a complete waste of money at this point. The only time it sees any action is if someone comes over who hasn’t played one before. Even my 8 year-old daughter has grown tired of it.

There’s still nothing good to play! There are hardly any exclusives and the games that are available on other platforms are best played on them. Out of the last 10 games to be reviewed at GameSpot (excluding VC games, it would have been a lot lower had I counted those), the highest received a 7.5. Many of which are cited as having bad control schemes – and what does the Wii have if not a unique control scheme? Terrible graphics, extremely limited support for widescreen resolutions and no multiplayer. Whoo! From the last 2 Wii games reviewed – “…the gamepad-to-Wii Remote transition has made this lackluster game play even worse.” “…but the Wii control scheme isn’t ideal.” Just when I thought we were out of the drought and Mario Party 8 hit, it proved to be just more of the same. Hannah (daughter) has been a big fan of the Mario Party series since number 5 – I rented Mario Party 8 for her and she played it for a total of 1 hour out of the 5 days we had it. Well, I guess there’s still hope for Super Smash Bros Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3. Those games better be good.

Giving Up on Myself as a Freelancer

At the beginning of March I wrote about my departure from the freelance world as I joined the team at the newly formed Graphics.net. Full time status only lasted about a month as I wasn’t thrilled on the work I was doing which was mostly due to the company being so fresh and things being put into place as the days went by. I decided to go back to freelance part time and continue to work with Gnet in the afternoon. Knowing full well that I would be struggling with the workload of only having 4 hours a day to dedicate to freelance, I asked for some help. The response was tremendous and I received more help than I could even make use of. The problem there, was managing subcontractors and coordinating workflow took far longer than I had anticipated. I found myself doing more managing than “working” which resulted in a pretty significant back-up, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

A couple months in, I was feeling so worn out. Buried under a pile of work and emails that never seemed to stop coming. Just when I was discussing my next move with my wife, the bossman at Gnet made me another full time offer. This time, going into great detail on the work I’ll be doing and role(s) I’ll be fulfilling with them. And of course, the proposed wage is a significant increase over what I’m making freelancing, so I decided to give it another go.

I’m definitely going to miss the nature of the work I’ve been doing as a freelancer, along with some of the people I’ve worked closely with over the past year or so. I’ve actually still got a few freelance projects that are yet to roll out that I’m really excited about – I feel a couple of them are my best work to date, so be sure to watch out for those. But that’s not to say the work I’m doing at Gnet sucks. For the most part, the work is a little different as we’re catering to business as apposed to the individuals that I normally work for.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I totally sucked at handling everything that is required of a freelancer. Had I allotted more time for managing leads, networking with other freelancers, handling money and all that business type stuff, I would have been able to carry on doing my own thing as a one-man-show. But that’s not the case, so here I am, moving on…

Last week a client of mine who runs a few large sites asked if there was a way to substitute WordPress email notifications for comments pending approval with a feed. A good idea, one that crossed my mind a couple times but I never pursued. A quick search returned some promising results, but no solution. But as you do with Twitter, I posted an update stating what I was up to. Soon after, Dean Robinson (who you might know for his WordPress theme, Redoable) posted an update of his own in reply to mine. A couple hours went by and Dean posted another update. And finally, by the end of the day, he released modMuch – a plugin that replaces comment moderation email notifications with a feed.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, either. A few other instances of Twitter greatness that come to mind…

• I was looking for a Mac back-up solution for only selected folders and files. Jeff Smith emailed me an Automator script he had created to do just that.
• Coda 1.1 was released but for some reason I wasn’t able to hit the Panic website. Luke Dorny uploaded the update to his server and sent me a link.
• Jon Christopher complained about his Xbox 360 crashing on him to which I replied in an email explaining some reasons why it might have happened and how to prevent it.

Surprisingly, Twitter has actually become some what of a news service for me as well. In more cases than not, I hear about “breaking news” and the latest happenings on Twitter first. Something else I didn’t expect when I signed-up.

So, for something that seems completely useless at first glance, it can really come through for you.