Dramatic music underscores collaged video shots, photos and animations from and about the Cassini mission, Saturn and Saturn’s moons.

It’s exciting and inspirational, beautifully put together.

NASA seems to have hired some people who really know what they’re doing in the world of movie-making. It’s thrilling to see these high production quality videos flowing through the podcasts.

Apple® today announced that movies from major film studios including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM), Sony Pictures Television International and Lionsgate are now available on the iTunes® Store in Australia (www.itunes.com/au) and in New Zealand (www.itunes.com/nz).

With iTunes Movie Rentals, once a movie is rented, it starts downloading from the iTunes Store directly to iTunes or Apple TV®, and users with a fast Internet connection can start viewing the movie in seconds. Customers have up to 30 days to start watching it, and once a movie has been started customers have 48 hours to finish it—or watch it multiple times. iTunes Movie Rentals also feature over 100 titles available in stunning high definition, perfect for viewing on a widescreen TV with Apple TV.

iTunes movies in New Zealand start at NZ$9.99 for catalog title purchases, NZ$17.99 for recent releases and NZ$24.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are NZ$4.99 for library title rentals and NZ$6.99 for new releases, and high definition versions are priced at just one dollar more.

Considering I rarely actually go out to see movies, and even sometimes never get around to movies I even want to see, maybe I’ll give this a shot. Timing may be a problem: download could take a while and then only 48 hours to watch the movie.

Hmm, Stargate: The Ark of Truth is 1.05Gb. That’s quite a chunk out of a 20Gb per month allowance.

The Login Headache

Logging in to some site or other is something I often do. Usually each site requires its own username and password — remembering them all is a huge headache. Or at least, it could be if I didn’t have a wonderful piece of software called 1Password.

Choose from multiple logins

Sometimes you may have multiple logins on one site. In the case of this screenshot it’s various sites on my computer, but for some sites I visit I may have several usernames to choose from. I’ve installed the 1Password toolbar in Firefox. To login I’ve clicked on the Restore item in the toolbar and can choose from amongst the possibilities.

One thing I love about 1Password is that I can use it with all my web browsers (except Opera, darn it!). It stores passwords in its own file and makes them available to all the browsers, even NetNewsWire. I just wish other software would use it too: MarsEdit and Interarchy, I’m looking at you.

Login with a Keystroke or Contextual menu

The Toolbar isn’t the only way to use 1Password. Set a keystroke or use a contextual menu instead. The screenshot here shows the contextual menu at work.

The keystroke is even easier: set 1Password to autosubmit, choose your keystroke and then all you have to do is press the correct key combination and you’re logged on. If there are multiple possibilities you’re given a menu to choose from. Select the right login and press Return.

Fill other forms

1Password doesn’t just fill in usernames. If you’d like it to, it can store one or more ‘identities’ for you — things like your address, phone number etc — and also credit card information. I pay for a lot of stuff online, and using a couple of different credit cards — one for business and another for personal items. It’s a blessing to just call up the correct card from the ‘wallet’ and boom — all those numbers are entered for me.

Insecure? Nope. It has settings to require a master password to unlock it before it will fill any items.

The problems

OK, there are some problems. It doesn’t work with Opera and some other software I’d like it to work with (ScreenSteps, for another example). I wish it just worked with any program that accesses Internet passwords.

I have two Macs and each has its own 1Password file. It’s a pain when I’ve stored (autosaved) a password on one machine but need it on the other. They’re working on that though.

I made a big mistake: I imported passwords previously saved in a couple of different browsers. I now have many duplicate entries and some incorrect passwords thanks to the browsers letting me save passwords before I knew they didn’t work. I’m slowly whittling down the duplicates. In the screenshot above I’ve obscured most of the otherwise visible entries.

The benefits

I log in to a lot of websites: half a dozen of my own blogs, and their half dozen control panels, client blogs and websites, sites that want passwords, banks, affiliate schemes, book exchange schemes. Everyone wants a password. And with one keystroke, maybe two, I’m in.

1Password keeps me sane. It’s worth every penny of the US$35 it costs. But while you’re at the Agile Online Store increase your sanity saving with TextExpander too.

Thanks ScreenSteps

This post was experimentally created with the ScreenSteps software.

I’ve been using Gmail for probably a year now as my main email channel. I also surprised myself by preferring the web interface.

I seldom read emails directly in the Inbox. Most emails are filtered to their own labels - especially those from mailing lists, and then I tend to read emails listed in a specific search that locates unread emails that don’t have a certain set of labels.

Gmail Archive button.

Gmail archive menu item

Gmail remove label

The trick is not to try typing in content, but instead to modify the template. This article shows you how— Peachpit: Web Design Reference Guide > Customizing WordPress 2.5.1: Using the Links and Archives Pages:

The default Archives and Links templates provide adequate but unsophisticated listings. Previous articles showed you how to create a custom page template. Now you can add modifications to the default archives or links coding for fine control over your blog’s templates.

Create customized archives and links page templates with tailored listings to give your visitors many more possibilities for finding your words of wisdom.

A lot of tools these days try to protect people from HTML — that’s the coding that turns text into a web page. But even if you’re using an easy publishing system, or a blog, having a bit of a grasp of some of the basics of HTML gives you more knowledge, more power and a greater ability to produce great results. And the basics are not hard. If you can follow a recipe to make scones then you can use some basic HTML.

The Basic Starter Kit

Here’s the world’s most basic web page. Copy the following text and paste it into a document using a text editor such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Macs — both programs are supplied free with the Operating System. Check the settings on both programs to check they save files as plain text, not as RTF or any other format. Mac users see Use Plain Text options for TextEdit when writing HTML files.

Save the file on your desktop with the filename: page01.html. Do not under any circumstances use a word processor such as MS Office, because it inserts invisible weird characters that later show up in odd places.

<html>
<head>
<title>My first web page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>My first paragraph. </p>
</body>
</html> 

And yes, most of it is lower case.

Now, a real web designer will fall over laughing at this and probably expostulate that you need all kinds of other coding for even a minimum web page. That’s what I’d do, if I were reading this instead of writing a 600 word article. But this is the bare minimum you need, to start understanding HTML. The stuff that’s important for us is what comes between <body> and </body> — the body of a web page. Just ignore the rest (but don’t leave it out).

Open the Web Page

Now that you’ve saved the file page01.html on your Desktop open up a web browser: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or whichever one you use. Go to the File menu and choose a command like Open File. Choose page01.html and open it into your web browser. [The screenshot shows the page after adding a second paragraph and emphasising some text, as described below.]

Your first web page will be displayed. It’s a bit plain, and bland, and raw, but it’s a start, and you made it. It should say: “My first paragraph.“. If it doesn’t, double check what you’ve typed against what’s written here. All those angle brackets and things should be identical.

Change the Web Page

Go back to your text editor where page01.html should still be open (or open it again). The HTML tags (codes) <p> and </p> show where a paragraph starts (<p>) and stops ( </p>). The slash in the second tag shows that you’ve ‘closed’ the paragraph. Click after </p> and type another pair of paragraph tags: <p> </p>
.

Now click between the two tags you’ve just added and type another paragraph. Here’s how that section of my page looks now:

<p>My first paragraph. </p>
<p>My second paragraph uses fake words
to make it stretch over a few lines: Lorem ipsum
dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
Curabitur gravida. Donec rutrum. Nunc interdum
lorem eget nibh ullamcorper vestibulum. Integer
nisi. Pellentesque id orci vitae sem dapibus placerat. </p>

Check your coding

Save your document and go to your web browser. Either click the Refresh / Reload button or follow the earlier steps to open the saved file. Your web page should now have two paragraphs.

Emphasise a few words

Just one more thing for this starter recipe. You may feel it’s pretty important that this is your first web page, so let’s emphasise that word. Bold may leap to your mind as formatting that shows something is important, but other techniques sometimes feature on websites too, such as red, or upper case, or larger text, or italics. How you show a word or phrase as emphasised is between you and your web designer. What you need to do in the HTML is show that the text should stand out somehow on the grounds that it’s emphasised.

You need to code it as being ‘strong‘ (emphasis). Most web browsers will automatically use bold for that, but a web designer can make the web browser use another technique.

Here’s what you do — you use the <strong> tag, like this:

<p>My <strong>first</strong> paragraph. </p> 

Save your web page again and again refresh your web browser. You should now see that the word ‘first‘ stands out.

Now you’re coding!

In the next Tip I’ll show you how to add some headings and a link. (Headings tip for the adventurous: experiment with these: <h1> </h1>, <h2> </h2>, <h3> </h3>).

Written by Miraz Jordan for, and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, August 2008. This article may have been modified for publication here.

I suggest the following choices for the Preferences. The screenshots below are from Mac OS X 10.5.4 (Leopard). If you use a different version of the Operating System some things may be different.

The important choices under New Document are the Plain Text format and not to check the Smart Quotes option. Wrap to page is a good choice to stop long lines of text from dribbling off to the right so you have to scroll sideways. Window Size and Font are purely a matter of taste — set them how you like.

For the Open and Save preferences check the box for Ignore rich text commands in HTML files. If you follow the brief ‘recipe’ in my next post choose one of the XHTML types for HTML Saving Options, rather than one of the HTML (no X) types.

A domain name doesn’t just exist in thin air — it has to be ‘tied’ to an Internet address, and someone has to manage that Internet address. Some companies do this for free, others charge a small or large amount. You could even do it yourself, if you have the kind of knowledge that makes Tips like these redundant.

Buy a domain name through Google Apps

If you haven’t yet bought your own domain name it’s easy to do through Google Apps as part of the Gmail setup process. A domain name through Google Apps costs US$10 and in fact is a lot easier than buying a domain name separately and then setting up Gmail to use it.

Google Apps

Google, the search engine company, offer a free email service called Gmail as part of their Google Apps package. It includes sophisticated and effective anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing filtering. It also ties in with a calendar and Google Docs, as well as free web pages.

Gmail is available to individuals, businesses, educational institutions, community organisations — anyone, in fact. Those who choose to pay US$50 per user per year (as I do — it’s worth it) for Google Apps Premier Edition also have access to a further layer of spam filtering, increased storage, and some other features. But many people will be perfectly happy with the free service.

Recently both Waikato and Auckland universities have been in the news for switching to Gmail. At Auckland that involved 50,000 users.

Use IMAP for email

One specially useful Gmail feature is IMAP. IMAP stores all your email on the Gmail server so you can access any email you’ve sent or received from any Internet computer, cellphone or handheld device at any time. If you like, you can also download copies to one or more computers so the emails are also available offline. The free edition offers 6 gigabytes of storage — hundreds or even thousands of times more than most email providers.

The paid Premier Edition offers a whopping 26Gb — after a year I’ve almost used 1% of it.

Use your own domain

A free Gmail account allows you to use your own domain name. There are details and an introductory video.

Set Gmail to collect from other addresses

Until you’ve told everyone about your new domain name and email address they will still be sending to your old email address. With Gmail that’s not a problem: in the Settings tell Gmail to collect email from up to 5 other addresses. It all just turns up in your Gmail In Box.

Personal experience

It’s been around a year since I moved a web page and my main email address to Google Apps (Premier Edition). My experiences have led to this Tip.

1. Everyone should have their own domain name and tie it to their email address.
2. Google Apps (free or paid) offer a US$10 domain name registration service, set up for use with Gmail.
3. Gmail is an excellent email service.

Explore what Google Apps and Gmail can do for you.

Written by Miraz Jordan for, and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, August 2008. This article may have been modified for publication here.

The bigger colossal squid will be moved from its preservation tank into a purpose built display tank on Wednesday 6 August.

There are various live video feeds available, whether you have fast or slow Internet.

Now we’re offering a Wellington conference — 4 September 2008, Wellington at Massey University: Engage Your Community - a web conference for community organisations:

If you’ve ever wondered how the web could be better used by your organisation; or know what a blog is, but not how it could be useful; or are a little nervous about opening a Facebook account, then this is a conference for you. If you think the internet is for geeks, or young people, or those with nothing better to do with their time, then this is a conference for you. And if you want to move beyond using email and having a simple website, then this is a conference for you.

Once again I’ll be doing the keynote, and offering a workshop called Keeping up with the Joneses. Spread the word amongst local community groups and encourage them to attend!

The Internet’s here to stay and it has a whole lot more to offer than just email and web pages. We’ll take you through the looking glass and show you a whole new world.