Uninstall xCode

Use this command to uninstall Xcode form Mac OS X:

sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

Use Dropbox iPhone/iPod Touch app to read offline PDFs

The other day I started writing an iPhone app for the new Priesthood/Relief Society manual for this year, "Gospel Principles" because a free, offline one does not yet exist. For many reasons, I decided not to go through with it, but I found an alternative that may just be even better. The Dropbox app for iPhone allows you to select favorite files for offline viewing. This, of course, only works on files that are viewable by the iPhone (pdf, doc, ppt, xls, txt, etc.), but it does those very well. So I went ahead and just downloaded the pdf for each chapter in the manual, put them in a folder in my Dropbox on my computer, and then used the iPhone app to favorite the chapters I want to have available for offline viewing at church on Sunday.

There are really only a few downsides to this (but they are not outweighed by the task of writing an iPhone app). First, you have to download all of the chapters individually, which is about 50 files. Second, the file naming scheme that they have isn't ideal (GP_2010_Unit05_15_13_ThePriesthood__eng_.pdf) so I went through and renamed them (13_ThePriesthood.pdf). Third, you have to go through and favorite each individual pdf on your dropbox app. Fourth, the favorites view in the app only uses sections for the first letter of filenames and doesn't allow any sort of manual grouping, so if you have many other files in your favorites it can be hard to find what you are looking for.

How to restore iPod Touch when won't pass Apple logo

If your iPod won't get past the Apple logo without powering back off it may be time to do a firmware restore. Hold the square button while plugging your iPod in. iTunes should start and detect your iPod even if it wasn't detecting it before. It will then allow you to do a factory restore and upgrade. After that you can restore a backup to it.

DVD import to iMovie '09

Recently I found myself needing to record some old home videos from VHS to DVD. Ultimately I wanted to be able to go through and organize the recordings of different events onto a few DVDs, but only had time to put the videos onto DVD in a simple and disorganized fashion. I needed a way to get the DVD video onto my Macbook in order to organize video and write it to a new DVD. After messing around with Handbrake for a while and finding that the conversion time for each DVD was unbearable, I looked around online and found out a few bits of information that helped quite a bit. There are two methods of getting home video from DVDs into iMovie '09.

First (fastest):
Open up Disk Manager and create an image of the DVD as an uncompressed read-only .dmg file or as a Master CD/DVD .cdr image file. Then mount the image. iMovie should automatically detect it and it will make fast work of importing the video.

Second (slowest):
Use Handbrake to import the DVD as .m4v or .mp4 format, but make sure that "Create chapter markers" under the Chapters tab is unchecked. If it is checked, iMovie will not see it as an importable file. Not only will the Handbrake conversion take some time, but the import into iMovie will as well.