HowTube hits the big one-oh! That's right, double digits. It's all set to become an unruly tween. The podcast HowTube I hinted at is still in the works, but to keep your whistle wet in the meantime, we take a look at how gosh-darn easy it is to use the new Mac Pro RAID Card.

I'm a little bit underwater, recovering from SXSW last week. HowTube will return next weekend with some cool podcasting tips that let you podcast to yourself!

This week, I'm out at SXSW in Austin, TX, attending the Film and Interactive conferences. I spoke to Bre Pettis earlier today, and got inspired to get something out today, so I've put together this short and sweet guide to surviving at SXSW. Enjoy!

In the words of its creator, John Gruber, “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).”

I’ve known about Markdown for quite some time, but for some reason, I’ve always just stuck with writing up my blog posts in plain ol’ HTML. Since I’m now trying out MarsEdit, and it has preview functionality for Markdown, I thought I’d give it a shot. Turns out, I love it, especially the human-readability of it, which I suppose is really the entire point.

I had a really hard time, however, finding a good cheat sheet. Several links to one made by Ollieman indicate he had the best one, but as his site is currently down, I ended up making my own. Please share and enjoy!

Since I use WordPress for my blog, and I have installed PHP Markdown Extra as a plug-in, I have also included an addendum on the second page of the cheat sheet noting the additions and changes in the “Extra” version.

I would also note that several popular text editors have support for Markdown translations, such as my much beloved TextMate, in which I am writing this very post. In fact, there is an excellent screencast which demonstrates use of the Blogging Bundle for TextMate, and gives a good overview of how Markdown can be used inside the editor, and how to export to various formats.

Many thanks to John Gruber and Aaron Swartz for creating Markdown, and Michel Fortin for creating the PHP “Extra” version.

This one is formatted especially for your iPhone. More iPhone tips coming soon...

UPDATE: Re-formatted for much better viewing on iPhone, and got rid of the annoying interlacing issue.

Also added experimental 3G version that you can download over EDGE. Let me know if you try that, and how it works out (although I suspect it starts to get to small to be useful).

We've shot the new iPhone tips episode (HowTube 007), and plan to have it edited and posted tomorrow night. In the meantime, I'll leave you with the tip that contrary to the assumption of the Genius at the Apple Store I visited earlier today, you can, in fact, sync info from one Mac, and your media from another Mac. In fact, it seems that I have successfully synced the info and Photos from my laptop, while the music, videos and Podcasts continue to sync from the "jukebox" Mac mini in the office. All you have to do is check or uncheck the sync preferences in each tab of the iTunes sync display for your iPhone on each respective Mac. We'll show this in more detail in HowTube 008, iPhone Tips 'n' Tricks #2.

I heard Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte on MacBreak Weekly this week bemoaning the fact that once they hit apple-space to open the Spotlight search box on Mac OS X, they have to sit there and wait until it comes up with at least one result before they can hit enter (on the default selection of "Show All") to open the Spotlight window so they can go back to whatever they were doing while Spotlight churns away, finding more search results.

Thankfully, there is an easy way to get around this. Just hit apple-option-space to bring the Spotlight window up directly, type in your search and go, and then you can get back to whatever you were doing while Spotlight works its magic. If that doesn't work for you, just open System Preferences... > Spotlight > Search Results and check the bottom of the window to make sure the box for "Spotlight window keyboard shortcut" is checked, and look at the pop-up menu next to it to check which shortcut it's set to. Instant productivity!

This week, Mark is sick and lost his voice, so he lets his Mac speak for him, and shows you how to do the same.

This will work with any version of Mac OS X, and the upcoming "Leopard" (10.5) promises to include even better, more natural-sounding voices. we can't wait.

Let me start with how Mac OS X deals with removable drives. When you plug in a FireWire or USB drive, or even toss in a CD or DVD, those drives pretty much just appear on the desktop, right?

Sure, but underneath the glossy Mac surface, the Unix system does something else. It creates an alias to the drive, and puts it in the folder at the root of the drive you start up from (your boot drive). That folder is known as /Volumes. You don't see it? That's because Mac OS X hides it from you--- it's a special folder that normally the system uses just fine on its own, thankyouverymuch, and doesn't want you mucking about in it.

However, you can get to the folder by going to the menu item Finder > Go > Go to Folder...

...and in the dialogue box that pops up, type "/Volumes" (capitalization counts):

Then it will pop up the folder in question, and you can see what's in it:

Now, you can see here that my startup drive, Stone, is listed, as well as my 2 extra drives, Boulder and Pebble. Even DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER, a disc I burned on my living room DVD recorder shows up in here. Those little curved arrows in the lower left mean they're aliases, which aren't real folders at all, but just a pointer to the original drives.

You can also see that there is a real folder that is called FireWalkWithMe. Well, that's the name of my portable FireWire drive, but that's not connected to my Mac right now--- so what happened?

Some of the apps that run on Mac OS X are much more in tune with the Unix side than the Mac side of things, and so if, for instance, you have set your removable drive as the default place for it to save things, the app may just assume that drive is always going to be there, instead of checking to make sure that it actually is.

In this case, the app I had been using was Azureus, which while being an otherwise great BitTorrent client, was negligent in this way. I had foolishly set the default save directory to my FireWire drive, and according to Azureus, that meant it was saving things to:

/Volumes/FireWalkWithMe/saved_files.zip

So what happens is the next time I download something with this app, it tells the system to write to that path, first the hidden Volumes folder, then the FireWalkWithMe folder, then the saved file. But if my drive isn't attached, Azureus doesn't know, and so the system, not smart enough to know otherwise, takes that directory at face value, and when it encounters a folder in that path that doesn't exist, it goes ahead and creates it, hence the creation of the real FireWalkWithMe folder that is not an alias to my portable drive.

So, now I get this folder that Azureus has saved files into that has the exact same name as my FireWire drive. So, what happens the next time I connect my drive? Well, most of the time Mac OS X is smart enough to create an alias with a slightly different name, like FireWalkWithMe1, and still mount it on your desktop. However, sometimes it gets confused enough to not mount your drive at all, thinking since there's already a folder in there with the same name, it must already be mounted. Even if it does mount okay, there still the issue that the app that mistakenly created that folder will go right on saving into that folder instead of your drive, because it's still telling the system to look for /Volumes/FireWalkWithMe and not /Volumes/FireWalkWithMe1.

So, how do we fix this? Pretty simple, now that we know what to look for. If you Go to the /Volumes folder, and there's a real folder in there, first check to make sure there isn't anything inside you want to save, and then chuck that folder in the trash. The next time you connect your removable drive, it should mount with its proper alias name again, and all will be right with the world. Yay!