Category: Mac

RAv3 and VNC

One of the joys of LGfL 2.0 is that a lovely firewall is installed in your school, which by default blocks nearly anything getting in or out. One of the things that is blocked is Log Me In, a remote access tools used by schools to log into servers etc when offsite. This has not been enormously popular, but thankfully there is an alternative which is in many ways better. It’s called RAv3.

RAv3 is a service offered by Atomwide, which uses some clever Cisco back-end to allow secure remote access. I don’t really understand it all completely, but there’s quite a lot of information on their support site. Once it’s turned on, you can set up which servers or computers you want remote access to and then which users get which access. There is a web-based portal at rav3.lgfl.org.uk with various different options.

One of the technologies is called ‘any connect’, which basically opens up a secure VPN tunnel into the LGfL 2.0 network, using your USO to authenticate. For the Mac, it involves downloading a bit of software, but that means you can also go in direct from the app rather than using the web-based portal.

Once you’re in, you can then use Screen Sharing to view any servers using VNC (such as a Mac server in our case). At first I was at a bit of a loss to know how to do this, as obviously all the servers don’t appear in the network browser in the Mac. But then I discovered I just needed to use Finder’s ‘Connect to Server…’ and then type vnc:// followed by the IP address of the server. Amazing! Now I can check my server wherever I am…

In real iLife

Yesterday was fun and got to see a bit how useful iLife apps can be with children.

In the morning I was teaching music with Year 3, where we were doing some preparation for making a radio show all about saving the environment. I had pre-chosen some songs with an eco-theme and then got children listening to some of them to try out work out the environmental message and to decide if they liked them or not. To do this, I got children to search for the songs on the iTunes Music Store and then listen to the 90 second previews you can now get. It would have been more ideal if we had headphones for everyone as it was a little noisy, but that will have to wait until the next financial year.

After school, I had another instalment of iMovie club. We ended up having a go at using the ‘trailers’ feature of iMovie 11, which groups of 3 deciding which film genre they wanted to do, printing off a storyboard and then starting to film their footage using Flipcams. The final product may not make a huge amount of sense, but it’s definitely giving children the experience of sequencing shots together and trying to tell a story. We’ll see next week how good the final product is.

Updating to iLife 11

Due to some training I did today that made use of the ‘Trailers’ feature of iMovie 11, we needed to finally upgrade our iMac suite to iLife 11.  I hadn’t fancied buying 18 retail boxes of iLife discs when the upgrade first came out and was instead waiting to see what volume licensing Apple offered.  The educational price is about 2/3rds of the App Store price, which is nice, but still requires an App Store download code for each seat.  However, Apple do suggest that you just download it on one machine and then use Apple Remote Desktop to copy the app to the required machines. This seems to work fine!

I was slightly concerned that I would have to copy across any iLife related files in /Library etc., but it seems that all the sound effects and loops now live within the app itself (I hope!).

The advantage of doing it this way is that the apps now update themselves using Software Update rather than through the App Store, which makes managing them using Munki much easier.  I’m not quite sure what will happen come Mountain Lion though, as Software Update is being folded into the App Store.  Hmm… we shall see!

LGfL Staff Mail on OSX and iOS

WordPress is wonderful because it tells me all kinds of fascinating information, such as what people were searching for when they ended up on this site. And one quite frequent enquiry is regarding LGfL’s Staff Mail settings on a Mac. It’s really easy to set up and here’s how…

  1. You need to be running Snow Leopard (10.6) or higher.
  2. Open up Mail and add an email account. Enter your name and email address etc.
  3. On the next screen, select ‘Exchange 2007’ as the type of server.
  4. Put in mail.lgflmail.org as the server. Then put in your USO username and password.
  5. It’ll ask you about adding contacts and calendar for the account. These can be handy for auto completing addresses of your colleagues
  6. All done!

The settings are pretty similar for iOS. You just need to select ‘Exchange’ as the type of account when adding it in Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars. The domain is lgflmail. Easy!

Do post a comment if my instructions don’t make sense…

SMART Notebook 11

Whilst I am not the greatest fan of Smartboards, they certainly do have good customer service! After sending an email to them in Canada, asking of OSX 10.7 Lion would ever really be supported, they emailed me back to inform me of a soon-to-arrive Notebook 11 software. Amongst its other features, it has full Lion support (yay!). Hopefully they will still support 500 series Smartboards too, but that may just be wishful thinking on my part.

Sarbanes–Oxley Act and Lion

Ok, take that back.

Apple probably do have to charge for Mountain Lion because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which basically means you can’t add additional functionality to something you’ve already sold.  They get around this with iOS devices because Apple account for them over 2 years in a subscription model – you get free updates because Apple treat it as if you’re still paying for it!  The Mac isn’t accounted for like this so thus they can’t do free updates.

Rats. Maybe it’ll just be a token cost?

Mountain Lion

So, Mountain Lion is coming this summer.  Woo!  I personally like how they’re unifying different ideas and sorting out weird inconsistencies between iOS and OSX (like making Notes separate rather than part of Mail, creating a separate Reminders app, and renaming iCal to just Calendar). Messages also is pretty handy, and now available in beta form.  The way it was announced was also interesting: no press event, but instead one-to-one presentations with key Apple writers.

My prediction is that it will be a free update to all users of Lion. The benefits of having everyone on the latest OS release far outweigh any revenue they may get from the update. iOS updates are free for this very reason.

iMovie haters?

I’m probably alone in this, but I find software like iMovie amazing. As a teen making films on a Hi-8 camera, we had to edit either in camera with some judicial timing of the record button or try and stitch clips together with a hopelessly inaccurate VHS machine. We then graduated to using a two-deck VHS assemble editor when at Sixth-form college, which gave us the semblance of accuracy. The pinnacle of control was filming with Super-8 and then manually splicing together film, holding up frames to a lightbulb (hello burnt retina!) to find the perfect cut. So the fact you put together a video in iMovie insanely quickly is pretty insanely great.

When Apple ditched the traditional timeline with iMovie ’08, there was much uproar. Admittedly iMovie ’08 lost quite a lot of features and was a bit confusing, but over the next few updates it regained its skills and took things further. Tools like the precision editor and the advanced ‘cutaway’ option when inserting a clip let you do things that would be fiddly and confusing when using an older ‘timeline’ editor. I’ve never used Final Cut Pro X, but I can completely see why they’ve taken the iMovie ideas and extended them.

It ‘Just Works’

The latest point update to OSX 10.7 was released last week and I was pleasantly surprised today to discover that all of the Lion machines had already updated themselves thanks to Munki.

I know this is not the most exciting news in the world, but I was happy to see it as our Mac server is only running 10.6 and had to be fiddled with to get it to dish up Lion updates. I followed Apple’s instructions on how to do this but at first I didn’t think it had worked. Now I guess it was just caching them all as Lion clients now seem to be happily updating themselves. Yay!

I guess that now frees up my half term to do the LGfL 2.0 switchover with our trusty IT technician Ji. Looking forward to that job…