Dave’s Answer:

You teach cooking classes? Do you teach classes on Indian or Chinese cooking? We should talk. I’m definitely interested in your videos, needless to say, as I enjoy cooking myself, and those are my two favorite cuisines to tackle, albeit with mixed results. Hey, that’s why I need your classes or videos, right?

Meanwhile, what was it you asked me?

Oh yeah. how do you update the picture on your YouTube account or channel.

I didn’t forget. I swear I wasn’t sidetracked by thought of a fresh vindaloo or some perfect fried rice!

To change your account profile information or channel information on YouTube, you’ll need to log in, then… well, let me show you…

Yeah, first step really is to log in. When you’ve done so, click on your account or channel name on the top right and you’ll see a lot of options show up in a drop-down pane, notably including the following:

Select the “Settings” option from this list and, again, you’ll see a surprising number of different possibilities:

At this point you’ll choose “Profile Setup” and see the picture that’s currently associated with your ID, your description — if any! — and a Website URL:

Scroll down and you’ll find that there’s even more you can tweak, quite a bit, actually. To change your profile pic, however, click on the “Change Picture” button.

This is pretty cool, actually. If you want to be lazy, you can look at a series of pre-selected images captured from your videos and if one of them works, just click on it and you’re done. For me, I’d rather have the same standard graphical icon I use in all my social media profiles, so I’ll need to upload it. That’s done by clicking “Choose File” and finding it on my computer.

Once uploaded, the same profile picture will be displayed as the upload:

Looks great, so I click on “Save Changes” and I’m done. That’s all there is to it.

Want to follow my YouTube channel so you can see the new profile photo? Just go here: http://www.youtube.com/askdavetaylor, and thanks!

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Dave’s Answer:

I was also baffled when I started using Pinterest and realized I could add my own images or photos, but couldn’t figure out how to have them “clickable” to help people find my site or a specific article I’d written that related to the image. If I added a URL to the comment, it’d become clickable, but that wouldn’t make the image itself clickable. What the deuce?

Then I stumbled across the “Pin It” button — the “pinmarklet” — which you can find here: Pinterest Goodies. Knowing that exists, the secret to having an image point to a Web page is that you have to be on the Web page that contains the image you want to pin and click on the little Pin It button that you’ve previously installed on your browser toolbar.

In Chrome, I always have the bookmarks bar displayed, so it’s easy to literally drag the “Pin It” button from the Pinterest page onto the bar. Now, with that installed simply go to a page you’d like — you can try this one if you want — and click on the button.

All interesting images on the page will now be displayed in a grid:

I’m going to link to a different article on Pinterest I wrote here on my blog, so I find that particular image and move the cursor over it:

As you can see, the overlay “Pin This” shows up automatically. That’s the right one, so I’ll click it to pin it.

The result:

As you can see, it’s a pretty standard Pinterest “add an image” window. At this point you can specify what board you want (I have “Random” shown here) and add a description as appropriate. Here’s what I wrote:

Click on “Pin It” and, if it works….

Success! Want to now share it on Twitter? Click on “Tweet your Pin”. If you’re good, just close the window and get back to work.

Or, if you want, go to Pinterest and you’ll see how it came out:

Click on it once and you won’t actually go back to the other Web site, you’ll get the bigger picture on Pinterest…

Now at this point if you click on the picture it’ll go back to the other Web site you were viewing when you first clicked on the “Pin It” bookmark button. Oh, and you can see that by the comment on the top right: “From askdavetaylor.com”.

Done.

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Your timing is impeccable, dear reader! As you sent this in, I was busy migrating my new WordPress blog — GoFatherhood — to a new server so I was able to capture all the steps needed.

Coincidence, or serendipity? You decide.

Anyway!

This example is also taken from WordPress 3.2, so if you’re running an earlier or later version (like 3.3) then it’s possible that things will look slightly different. Still, the basic steps should still prove accurate.

Start out by logging in as the admin on your WordPress blog, then looking on the left side of the admin control area for “Posts”. Underneath that heading should be a group of options, including “All Posts”. Choose it:

Now click on the box just to the left of the “Title” column heading and it’ll automatically select every blog entry on the current page:

Everything checked? Good. Click on “Bulk Actions” and choose “Edit” instead…

Clicking on “Apply” shows you the selected entries and a bunch of things you can do, including apply new categorization, tags, change author, etc:

Most importantly on the right side is a menu “Comments”. Click on it:

Choose “Do not allow”, click on the “Update” button on the lower right of this section and…

Good job. Now you just need to duplicate that for all the blog entries you have.

Tedious? Yes. In fact, I surmise that there’s a way you can really select every single post before you take an action, but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps one of you readers can enlighten us? Thanks.

In any case, I hope this helps you migrate your WordPress blog from one server to another.

Dave’s Answer:

I’m a relative newbie to Pinterest too, so your n00b secret is safe with me. Well, with me and the people who read this blog now, right?

Pinterest is fun because it’s simple. Everyone who participates can “pin” images onto a thematic or topical “board” then others can “like” the images or even leave comments. Follow enough people and it’s quite a fascinating blend of what multiple people are finding interesting enough to pin, in a very visually oriented fashion. So to some extent, I suppose it’s like Digg and related, but way less geeky and way more fashionable and styling…

As with everything I do, I’ve been experimenting with Pinterest to see how it works and while I find the interface pleasantly uncluttered, I have to say that I cannot seem to get image uploading to work. I’ve tried multiple times and it invariably ends up with a broken image link on my board. Disappointing.

So for this, I’m going to kill the proverbial two birds with the same stone: I’ve uploaded an image to Flickr, and am going to “pin” the image to my Random board on Pinterest. If you found an image on another site that you wanted to pin, the process would basically be identical.

To get started, log in to your Pinterest account and locate the top navigational bar:

Click on… wait for it… wait for it… “Add +” and a window pops up:

To include a photo that’s elsewhere on the Web already (as we’ll have with the photo we uploaded to Flickr) click on “Add a Pin”. If you want to try your luck at uploading your own photographs or images, click on “Upload a Pin”. Want to create a new thematic or topical board? Click on … you guessed it… “Create a Board”.

I’ll click on “Add a Pin”, then, in a different browser window, pop over to Flickr and grab the URL of my image in its largest size by command-clicking (PC users should right click) on “Download the Large size of this photo” and choosing “Copy Image URL…” from the context menu:

Now that the URL’s loaded into the copy and paste buffer, switch back to the Pinterest page and copy it into the appropriate field on the “Add a Pin” window:

A click on “Find Images” and you’ll see a lot more, including a thumbnail of the image in question:

Pick which Board you want — I’ll choose “Random” — and add a description of some sort. Done? Click on “Pin It” and it’s now part of the Pinterest image stream:

Nice and easy.

As to uploading your own images? Lots of people tell me that they have no problems with it, but so far I haven’t been able to make it work for my Pinterest account. Perhaps I’m using bad image formats or a browser that’s not 100% compatible? I’ll keep digging…

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Dave’s Answer:

If you’ve been paying close attention to your Mac, you’ll realize you’re wrong when you say that “nothing happens” after you insert the sdcard into your computer. What happens is that the card shows up as an external device, basically looking just like an external hard disk (which it really is, just very tiny). That means you can use just about any program to dig through the pics and find those you want, including simply using the “Attach File” feature in Apple Mail to find and include the images.

I never send raw images to other people, however, partially because the files tend to be way bigger than needed and partially because I always like the chance to adjust, tweak and crop them to emphasize what I want them to see.

For these sort of tasks, I turn to a long-time favorite shareware app of mine: GraphicConverter. If you don’t have it, download it and register it. It’s terrific!

Here’s how I would work within GraphicConverter to find and open up an image from my camera’s sdcard… starting with choosing “Open” from the “File” menu:

Now look on the left side of the Open File dialog window and you should see your sdcard. It might be listed with the vendor name, as mine is with CANON_DC:

Click on it and you’ll find that most cameras have things set up in a completely obscure and confusing fashion:

My secret tip for dealing with this is to click on “Date Modified” so that you can have it sorted most-recent to oldest. With that done, you can see that the DCIM subfolder “106__12″ contains my latest photos.

DCIM, by the way, is supposed to stand for “digital camera image management”, but that’s probably neither here nor there for this process!

I click on the “106__12″ folder and there are my three photos within:

In GraphicConverter, I can easily select all three with a combination of click and cmd-click, then click on the “Open” button and they’re all displayed on the computer. Easy.

Oh, and one handy hint. In any GraphicConverter window, you can always see the full path of the image you’re viewing by using cmd-click on the image name in the title bar, as I show here:

Done with the images? Just save it to the desktop and you’re ready to email!

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Here’s how I got started with Google Music…

First off, an explanation: like many people, I have a lot of music on my computers and gadgets. Most of it’s duplicated from server to laptop to iPhone to iPod, but there are some tracks that appear on one but not another. Sometimes it’s just an issue of space: with dozens of gigabytes of content, some of my devices just don’t have the available space or I don’t want to allocate so much of their capacity for music.

Other times I’m using a computer away from my office, a loaner or public system, and I’d like to listen to a particular artist, genre or even a song that’s stuck in my head. What to do?

That’s the idea behind cloud music services: you upload (or, in the case of Apple’s iTunes Music Match service, simply identify your music and gain permission to access their own copy) all the songs you own, then they live in “the Internet cloud”, easily access and enjoyed from any connected device.

Yes, there’s huge potential for abuse and I’m sure that plenty of people will set up new accounts so they can share massive libraries with their friends and family, but the terms of use prohibit that, so it’ll be interesting how it evolves and what measures end up in place to minimize large scale sharing.

Anyway, does it work? Here’s what I found…

First step was to log in to my Google Account (the same credentials as your Gmail account), then go to music.google.com to get started:

No surprise, you need to click on the button ingeniously labelled “Download Music Manager”:

It’s a typical Mac OS X app, so once it’s downloaded, a virtual disk image opens up and you’re tasked with copying the actual program, confusingly called Music Manager rather than something that has the word “Google” in it:

Copy it, launch the new version from your Applications folder, and it’ll offer a nice welcome screen:

As I referenced earlier, note the disclaimer: “you represent that you will use Google Music only for personal use with your legally acquired music.” Not sure if that’s enforceable, per se, but it’s still necessary. After all, few musicians are going to keep recording if they never earn anything even while everyone seems to have their songs.

Click on “Continue” to get started with Music Manager.

At this point, you’ll want to sign in to your Google account, so it’s probably an @gmail.com email address and your account password. If you’ve set up 2-step verification (a smart idea, see Setting up 2-Step Google Verification for details), you’ll need to use an application-specific password here as it’s not 2-step enabled yet.

Once you’re connected to your Google account, you’ll need to identify how the music on your local system is organized:

Fortunately, I’m on a Mac and have my 9,000 songs in iTunes. Google Music Manager knows how to deal with it:

A surprisingly short while later, I get some stats and find out that my entire library is well within the limitations of the cloud service:

Alright, I have 8971 songs, not 9000 songs. One CD with 29 tracks and I’ll be spot on. In fact, I have Kate Bush’ new CD on pre-order, heading my way on Tuesday of next week, so perhaps that’ll take me over the top?

In any case, pay attention to the middle choice: “Select songs to upload by playlist”. That’s very slick, and means you could — within iTunes — create a playlist like “Google Music” and only upload and sync those tracks, rather than your entire library.

Me? I want it all. So I keep the default and click “Continue”.

As my Mum would say, “in for a dime, in for a dollar”, so, sure, let’s automatically upload any new iTunes purchases to the cloud storage too. Never know when I’ll want to listen to it…

Now Music Match installs a menu with a tiny headphones icon, as it explains:

Enough with the installation. Time for the long, long, really long slog of uploading:

Progress continues:

The phrase “may take some time” is an understatement, actually. “Incredibly long amount of time” might be more accurate. In fact, 24 hours after I started my upload, Music Manager reports 857 of 8859 have uploaded. So it’ll take at least ten days of full-time uploading to get my library there.

Why it’s dropped from 8971 to 8859 is an interesting puzzle too, one that suggests Google’s up to its usual tricks of estimating values rather than having completely accurate data presented. Or… something’s happened to some of my library?

As soon as the first song’s uploaded, however, I can start exploring Google Music itself. I’ll start with the basic Web interface:

Meanwhile, an hour’s passed since I started and 38 of “about 200″ tracks have uploaded. Why “about 200″? Because apparently the menu utility doesn’t share numbers with the main Music Manager:

A closer look at the display and you’ll see that it shows you the exact track being played with a neat little meter indicator:

Because Google Music is so new, there aren’t any good utilities yet to work with it, you’re stuck with their crude Web interface. Soon enough, I imagine there’ll be Droid apps, including for Droid tablets like the Amazon Kindle Fire, along with an iOS app that will make Google Music 100x more useful for us Mac users.

Tip: There is a surprisingly well done third-party iOS app called gMusic that lets you access your Google Music data from the iPhone or iPad, but if you want to wait, I’m sure that there’ll be an official Google app for the task in the very near future…

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Dave’s Answer:

You’re right that the old trick of double-clicking on a network entry in your Networks system preference no longer works in the latest generation of Mac OS X, 10.7 Lion. I expect that it’ll also be true in 10.8, so it’s time to learn the new, fancier way to recover a wifi password.

As with the original approach, this only works if you already have the password to the desired network stored on your computer. If you don’t know it, you won’t be able to recover it. I know, sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at the email and questions I get, the requests to point people to hacking tools, etc.

The new place to recover the wifi password is in an Apple utility called Keychain Access, and you can find it — ingeniously — in the “Utilities” folder within your “Applications” folder.

Launch it and here’s what you’ll see:

Use the built-in search function to enter the ssid or name of the wireless network whose password you want to recover. I’ll recover the password for a local café called Tod’s by searching for “Tod”. The results:

Clicking on the “i” info button on the bottom of the page brings up a full Keychain record for Tod’s:

Now all you need to do is check the box adjacent to “Show password” (though it’s a bit confusing that the field adjacent to that is blank. Don’t worry, Keychain has the data stored, it’s just not showing it yet. Bit of a UI gaffe, but you’ll see, it’ll show up!)

Right. For security reasons you’ll need to enter your Mac administrative password. Do so correctly and suddenly that blank text field has the Tod’s network password:

And that’s how you recover a lost wifi password on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Not quite as straightforward as in earlier versions of Mac OS X, but now you know how to do it, you’ll realize that there’s quite a bit of password information in Keychain…

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Dave’s Answer:

Oh heck yeah. Google Maps has a ton of untapped power and capabilities that incredibly few people know about and use. I use Google Maps a couple of times a week (and a lot more if you count my iPhone usage) and am constantly experimenting to see what it can do and how I can have it even more helpful.

When your question came in, I was also faced with a similar dilemma. My pal Joel and I were planning a lunch and agreed that meeting somewhere along the Interstate 25 corridor north of Denver would be approximately midpoint and convenient for my later schedule both. He suggested an exit, but neither of us knew, top of our heads, what was there.

Here’s how I figured it out with Google Maps…

First step is to enter the address. Since it’s an intersection, use the “street & street” format, as I have done here:

Notice that even as I type in the abbreviated address Google Maps is trying to expand it to be more accurate (that is, “I-25″ is better written as “Interstate 25″). Still, I ignore it and press Return to search. Maps complains that it’s found two matches for that intersection:

Kind of weird to have two dramatically different zip codes at the same address in the same city, but I figure since they’re both in Colorado, they’re probably both going to work. I click on the first and…

That’s the desired intersection. The photo sure makes it look like it’s in the middle of nowhere, doesn’t it? Welcome to most of Colorado. Lots of space!

I’ve highlighted a leftward pointing triangle at the top of the screen. Click on it and all the information on the left is hidden so you can see a lot more of the map. Useful in many cases:

To find what’s near a specific spot, simply click on the marker icon. In this case, the “A” bubble. A window pops up with some information and options:

Click on “Search nearby” and the window expands to add an input box:

I enter the word “restaurant” and click “Search” and the map changes quite a bit, adding a bunch of markers and information on the left side about each:

You can scroll down the left side to see if any strike your fancy, or you can just move the cursor over one of the markers, in which case a tiny summary of that particular venue appears:

Gunther Toody’s sounds okay, but not so much for a business meeting or an intimate date. So maybe it’s worth looking a bit more.

Still, you can see that with just a few clicks there’s quite a lot of information you can glean from Google Maps, even if it’s an area that’s hundreds or even thousands of miles from your current location!

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Dave’s Answer:

You’re smart to not want a copy of their credit card information: it’s an unnecessary liability for your business and you can only imagine that if any time in the subsequent six months if they have fraudulent transactions show up on their account, you’ll be one of the first people they call up to talk. Not good.

I also commend you for realizing that Paypal charges a premium for credit card transactions (along with their usual transaction fee). The credit card companies themselves charge merchants 2-3% of the transaction so it’s quite reasonable for Paypal to pass that expense on to the user: they’re a for-profit business, after all.

Paypal explains this fee thusly: “Money transfers are free when the money comes from PayPal balance or bank account, and have a transaction fee of 2.9% + $0.30 USD when the money comes from a debit or credit card or PayPal Credit” For a $500 transaction, therefore, it’ll cost $14.50 + $0.30 or $14.80 in fees. Not too bad, really.

To send a money request, log in to Paypal. Now, along the top you’ll see this:

Click on the “Request Money” tab and you’ll see that you have two options:

If you’re going to be doing this with multiple clients or more than once with this particular client, you might want to explore the “Create an Invoice” option, but if not, just click on “Request Money” for the easy path through…

The two critical fields are the receipient’s email address (your client) and the amount requested. Notice that you can choose other currencies so if you’ve a client overseas, the money request could be in their local currency. Very nice!

If it’s not a specific tangible product (like an eBay sale) then choose “Services” to make your life easier, then click “Continue”.

Looks like we’re ready to go, but hold on! You want to scroll down to where it lets you specify a subject and – more importantly – a message to include with the money request.

This is where you should include an invoice number, detail your business, etc, whatever you feel is appropriate to help the client differentiate your legitimate money request from some tricky spammer!

Got a nice message entered? Great. Now click on “Request Money” and….

Done. Nice. And now, with any luck, you’ll get the following message shortly thereafter:

And that, my friends, is the proverbial happy ending.

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Dave’s Answer:

Ah yes, the never-ending entertainment that is Facebook. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually some sort of twisted video game and that our challenge as users is to be able to find our way through the shifting maze that is its interface so we can reach the areas that are of most interest to us. I envision the shifting staircases of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the Harry Potter series.

Whether it’s an interface that only He Who Shall Not Be Named can appreciate or not, however, the fact is that we’re all fans and we’re all trying to figure out how to make it work for us. If there was an API we’d have third party tools — a la Twitter — and could ignore changes in the interface, but so far that’s not arisen in the Facebook ecosystem and instead we get to spelunk.

What you’re asking isn’t actually too difficult in the latest interface updates, actually, and like much on Facebook, success comes from being willing to experiment and poke around to see if you can figure things out. But I’ll show you instead.

I’ve already done a bit of customization of my Favorites, as you can see in this first illustration:

(Notice also that I’m using “English(UK)” which is why it says “Favourites” not “Favorites”)

Below the groups section notice where it says “MORE” with a small downward triangle. Click on it and it opens up a couple of additional sections, including “APPS”:

Move the cursor to the right and another “MORE” shows up (fun, eh?). Click on it and you’ll actually have a big display of the various Facebook applications you’ve used in the recent past, organized by most-recently-used to least-recently-used:

Find “Photos” or whatever App you desire to add to your Facebook Favourites. Uh. Favorites, and move the cursor just to the left of the app icon, where there’s a tiny pencil graphic. Move the cursor over the pencil and – surprise! – a little menu pops up:

To add the App to your Favorites click “Add to Favorites”, as shown, and, voila! it’s now on the list:

Not too thrilled with the order of entries? Here’s another useful tip: You can reorganize your Favorites by moving the cursor to the left of any of the icons and having the invisible pencil icon appear again:

Choose “Rearrange” and a new icon appears on the right side of each Favorite: click and drag the icon and you can reorganize things to your heart’s desire:

Done? Click “DONE” and you’ve just tamed the wild Favorites list. Congratulations!
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