Monthly Archives: May 2017

Boy, I sure have been writing lots of tips about iCloud lately. Is it something in the water? Maybe its the cycle of the moon? Have I finally lost my mind?

No, no, and yes. But that doesnt have anything to do with this tip.

So anyway, Ive been uploading a ton of stuff lately into iCloud Drive. I finally decided that I like it enough to consolidate everything into the Desktop and Documents syncing feature and abandon some other services Im using. But Ive been noticing how supremely unhelpful the little pie chart progress indicator is when Im uploading a large number of files:

That icon, available in Finders sidebar during an upload, is way less info than I want to have sometimes. But how do you get more? Well, one way is toturn on Finders Status Bar, the option for which is under the View menu.

When you do that and click on the iCloud Drive option in Finders sidebar, suddenly youll get a lot more information about your uploads.

Well, thats about a billion times more interesting.

I leave the Status Bar on all of the time anyway, as I like how itll typically show me the number of items in a folder and the space remaining on the drive Im looking at.

In that screenshot, you can see right above the Status Bar that I also have the Path Bar on (View > Show Path Bar). This is helpful if youd like to have a trail of breadcrumbs, so to speak, leading back withinthe folder structure youve navigated through. Any of the location icons in the Path Bar are double-clickable, as well, to return youto someplace youve been. Useful if you tend to drill way deep down into folders and then forget where you came from! Not that I ever do that myself, oh no.

Wait, where am I?

More:

iCloud Drive: How to See the Status of Uploads - The Mac Observer

After years of upheaval, the music industry is still pulling itself out of the doldrums. News that music revenues grew 5.9% to 12.2bn in 2016 largely thanks to the continuing evolution of streaming was met by a howl of discord in many quarters (not least an article in the Quietus that stated, perhaps fairly, that for independent and small-label artists, the Valhalla of a Spotify-curated playlist is as distant a proposition as Simon Cowell signing Fat White Family). Nevertheless, there are plenty of independent musicians building enduring careers away from the limelight. Weve spoken to five soloists about how theyve grown outside of the label model, whilst receiving little to no exposure in the mainstream outlets normally seen as key to future success.

Shes got over a million YouTube subscribers, 477,000 Twitter followers, a Top 40 EP, Intertwined, that also went to No 5 in the iTunes album charts, plus one Shorty award for best musician on YouTube. But unless you have a teenage child with a love of pensive, cutesy folk, its unlikely youll have heard of the singer, serial vlogger and ukuleledon Dodie Clark. And the 22-year old is just fine with that: I like it! Weve been brought up in a world where mainstream fame separates you into black and white, and the celebrities are untouchable. Ive basically lived my life online through songs and vlogs and videos. Im not untouchable.

Though she counts herself as a musician she started uploading music online when she was 15 much of her income comes through brand work. In the past, this was writing songs for Kelloggs and Barclays; now its Chupa Chups sponsoring her tours and giving her thousands of sugar-free lollipops for her fans. Despite a slight reticence about how shes perceived outside of her YouTube bubble, she does profess to aspirations to go more mainstream. It would be interesting to document it, she says, I cant think of many people doing that.

Thirty-year-old Tom Rosenthal is about to release his third album, Fenn (named after his second daughter), and has been releasing music on the internet since 2005. Hes racked up Spotify streams of around 55m, 22m YouTube views, and been courted by major labels keen to release his gently epic ballads, which channel Brian Wilson-esque whimsy through the mind of the classic British kook. But why would I change everything to make just 20% of the money when I currently make 80%? Tom says. If you want to be the next Ed Sheeran, it might be beneficial. But I dont.

Tom puts his success down to several factors: a penchant for songwriting, obviously. But most crucial are a constant stream of content (hell be releasing a video for every song on Fenn), and building a granite-strong fanbase. This last year, Ive sent out thousands of personalised notes to people. Its nothing to do with songwriting, but it connects you to people in a (hopefully) lovely way. If you build the foundations of a strong house, its hard to knock down.

When we call the Shaolin kung fu-trained rapper ShaoDow (pronounced sha-ow-dough), hes about to leave south London to manage a pop-up shop in Gatesheads Metrocentre shopping mall. Retail work might not be that unconventional a sidejob for the budding musician, but Shao is different: hell be selling all his own-branded caps, hoodies and tees. He also has a range of branded headphones and wrote a manga book The Way of the Shao to go with 2016s album of the same name. Hes also a rapper, of course, selling around 25,000 albums independently and touring with the likes of Stormzy and Skepta. The temptation is to see him as an architect and gatekeeper of a brand, rather than a musician?

To a degree you have to be, nowadays, he says. My income split is about 60% music and 40% merchandise. But I want to get to a point where I can hire people to do the other stuff, so I can be in the studio making music.

A lot of people recognise me in Hackney, says 24-year old Paige Mead, AKA Paigey Cakey, though half the time its because we went to school together.

Cakey might not have the mainstream profile of other Hackney musical alumni like Rudimental, JME or Professor Green, but that doesnt mean the MC couldnt sell out the Hackney Empire in 2013. That show was dope, but that was in the early stages of my career. If I did it now, it would be so much better.

Paigeys media career started on screen. She was in cult ghetto sci-fi film Attack the Block, and then a role in BBCs Waterloo Road helped raise her profile and drew attention to her music. Both careers now feed off each other, though shell freely admit the role that social media has played in her success: Social networking is the best thing. Dont be shy. I try to engage with everybody so they know Im a human being. And always put your music out there time waits for nobody!

For every star, theres a hundred broken dreams, says the virtuosic guitarist Jon Gomm. Ive seen too many of my friends sign major deals, then have their lifes work left to rot, owned by a corporation who wont release it or market it.

Jon started having ukulele lessons at just two years old and has a mind-skewering method of playing his acoustic guitar, retuning the strings as he goes to create bass, and using the body of the guitar to generate drum, bongo, bass and snare sounds. Hes toured full time since 2004, and album sales are now in the tens of thousands for each release (theres been three). Also, uniquely, none of his music is on Spotify.

Jon has a fervent belief in social medias importance, saying: Its almost everything now. This perhaps isnt surprising, since a 2012 tweet from Stephen Fry about his song Passionflower helped fire him into a wider consciousness. Elsewhere, he says dont be afraid to put your money where your talent is. It drives me crazy when my musician friends dont want to spend money on advertising or hiring a PR person. You have to invest in your own music, as any business has to invest in itself.

Read more:

How to be a DIY pop star: lollipops, kung fu and other fail-safe strategies - The Guardian

Shay Carl Butler came to fame and fortune via a unitard .

In August 2007, after a video of the father of two dancing in his wife Colettes workout outfit went viral, he realized there might be a business in domestic antics. The former granite-countertop installer, who says he didnt even own a computer until 2004, began recording his life and posting the videos and didnt stop for almost a decade, through weight loss, the birth of three more kids and the ever growing wealth of his family.

Shaytards , as Butlers main channel on YouTube is known, became wildly popular. Collectively, its videos have been watched more than 2.6 billion times. The most popular videoat about 23 million views, titled WE GOT A SWIMMING POOL! is typical; it features 15 minutes of wholesome family fun, in which the most noteworthy thing that happens is that one child reports that another got hit in the nuts by a water balloon.

Vloggingthe frequent recording and uploading of personal videos, usually on YouTubehas become a big business, or rather a sea of businesses, with operators as small as one person and as large as a massive production company. (Butler was one of the co-founders of Maker Studios, a conglomerate of YouTube channels that was sold to Disney for $500 million in 2014 but absorbed into the company on May 4.) And family vlogging is the ultimate family business: you literally get paid for raising your kids. The more fun a family has, the more viewers and, ergo, money they get. Popular clans can attract sponsorship, advertising and, at the very least, a lot of free stuff to play with on camera. Brands seeking a PG-rated YouTube outlet have flocked to family vloggers like the Mormon-raised Butlers, who now live on a huge property, complete with a studio and horses, in Idaho. YouTube metrics firms estimate that the Shaytards channel brings in anything from $2,000 to $38,000 every month just in ad revenue.

Thousands of these families live out their lives in the lens of the webcam: from the megapopular folks at Family Fun Pack a family of seven Californians, including parents Kristine and Mattto We Are the Freemans! , who have just 400 subscribers after five months of daily uploads. And its a growing genre; YouTube says that time spent watching family vloggers is up 90% in the past year.

But recently, several prominent YouTube families have got into strife, some in the way families often do, only with a lot more spectators, and some because the pressure to get spectators seemed to muddy their judgment. With a camera and an Internet connection, any parents can put their home life on YouTube. But its becoming clear that a childhood in which a part of every day must be given over to public consumption and commentary is not ideal for every kid, or even every adult. As family vlogging matures, some of its perils are beginning to emerge.

In February, Butler, who had previously said he would leave YouTube in March, abruptly stopped vlogging. A webcam girl by the name of Aria Nina released an explicit series of direct Twitter messages the father of five had sent her over the course of a few months. Then Butler announced that he was struggling with alcoholism and needed to rehabilitate. Its been impossible to keep up this perfect happiness is a choice mentality, he wrote on Twitter . Since then, Shaytards has gone silent.

The pressure of being the perfect family wasnt what prompted Mike and Heather Martin to shut down DaddyOFive, which had attracted hundreds of thousands of subscribers and was their chief source of income. In April, the Ijamsville, Md.based couple were called out by other YouTubers for appearing to be particularly cruel to their younger children Cody, 9, and Emma,12, during their prank-style videos.

In one video, Cody is blamed for mysterious ink stains on the carpet in his bedroom. He crumples in a confused heap as the elder Martins shout obscenities at him, before they let him in on the joke: its invisible ink, and they put it there! In another video, the kids are encouraged to flip water bottles with the added twist that if their bottle doesnt land on its base, someone will hit them. Thats how Emma gets slapped hard across the face by her stepbrother. The kids insisted that they enjoyed their rough-and-tumble on-camera life, but even with that and an apology from Mike and Heather, Frederick County Circuit Court granted the youngest two kids biological mother emergency custody.

The Martins are now under a gag order, and through a spokesperson, they declined to comment for this story. But Heather told the Baltimore Sun that things simply got out of hand. What started out as family fun crossed the line, she said. When I stepped back and reflected and looked at how this would appear to other people, I was able to take myself out of character andme just being MomI put myself in other peoples shoes to see how bad that some of this looked.

Child psychologists say that most kids are very resilient and can adapt to the circumstances in which they are brought up, including fame, but they warn that there are danger areas in family vlogging. All children want to please their parents, says Harold Koplewicz, a psychiatrist and head of the Child Mind Institute , who adds that the DaddyOFive pranks were clearly abusive. We trust the caretakers in our lives that theyre looking out for us. If theyre not, it makes us very anxious and uncomfortable. As they grow into adolescence, he adds, kids need some privacy to be able to make mistakes, and they need parents who are their protectors, not their employers.

YouTube says it took down the DaddyOFive videos that violated its standards and stopped feeding ads to the Martins as soon as viewers alerted it. Malik Ducard , global head of Family and Learning at YouTube, says the vast majority of family vloggers find it to be a positive experience. I see a lot of true family love in these families, he says. I feel like theyre families I know down the block. Most of them, he adds, dont need to be told to prioritize their loved ones over their viewers.

Some vloggers are well aware of the dangers. No one knows what the implications [of family vlogging] will be in the future, says Rossana Burgos, matriarch of the megasuccessful Eh Bee Family channel. And so for us, every single step, we think, How is this going to affect [our kids] in 15 years? The family has tried to conceal their two kids real names, calling them Miss Monkey and Mr. Monkey online, but they get recognized almost everywhere they go. They also dont work every day. We dont think putting up videos every day is a good idea, especially when you have children involved, Burgos says.

Of course, YouTube fans dont have to meet their idols to interact with them. The company, which is owned by Google , actively encourages its families to engage in the comments section. This can mean that kids could be exposed to a lot of opinions that even adults find hard to negotiate. Even in the beginning, people would leave really rude comments, Kristine of Family Fun Pack has said. Really disturbing things. She never knew how seriously to take them. Is this a kid or a legitimate adult? You never really know. The Eh Bee parents dont allow their kids to be online unless they are in the room with them.

Even when parents nurturing skills are perfectly appropriate, anonymous commenters can make painful situations worse. After Caleb LeBlanc died in October 2015 of an undiagnosed heart condition at the age of 14, the Internet swirled with speculation about the real cause of his demise. His family, known on YouTube as Bratayley (2.4 billion video views), not only had to deal with shock and grief, but had to process why so many people were suspicious of the parents. (The Maryland state medical examiners office confirmed that the death was due to a previously undiagnosed heart condition.) The family still vlogs regularly, because, they say, they want to be celebrating life.

Despite the drawbacks, experts are cautious about criticizing what could just be family scrapbooking writ large. The effect of fame on children is hard to discern, says Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center , pointing to the social and material advantages that come with it. What famous families sacrifice may be worth less than what they gain. Many of them eventually post a video of their new house. And the Eh Bee family is about to set off on their second trip around the U.S., courtesy of an allergy medication.

And perhaps that, in the end, is what makes family vlogging so irresistible, despite the potential downsides. It forces people to create a more interesting life for the camera. As Missy Lanning, a mother of two and the matriarch of Daily Bumps said in a video of her familys many adventures, Because we daily vlog, we have chosen to live our life to the fullest, and its awesome.

Excerpt from:

The YouTube Parents Who are Turning Family Moments into Big Bucks - TIME