Apple just released QuickTime 7 that has support for the H.264 codec, which provides a good compression format for video. They even have posted some movie trailers in HD to show off their new version of Quicktime.
On my 800Mhz PowerBook G4 the HD Batman Begins trailer does not play that well. Maybe it would have if I had a faster computer.
Also, this process doesn't work well if you don't convert a single album. You can burn tracks from different albums onto a single CD. But when you rip the tracks, all of the track numbers and album names are incorrect.
JHymn is a java application that allows you to convert the music that you purchase from the iTunes Music Store, into a unprotected format. In addition to converting it to a unprotected format, you can also have the audio file converted to mp3.
Ars Technica has a great review of Mac OS X 10.4. I am looking forward to using Spotlight. I wonder if it will be a replacement for QuickSilver as my application launcher.
I have noticed the some people are accessing this site though Google Cache. I don't know what people are doing this. I understand the case where the web site is inaccessible, but in these cases this web site is up.
I am curious, if you are browsing here though Google Cache, please leave a comment and let me know why.
A while ago, I was looking at streaming mp3 servers, and I looked at the SlimServer software. There are a couple of java applications that implement the slim server protocol. SoftSqueeze is a java application that emulates a Squeezebox. The TripleFat is a java application that emulates a SLIMP3.
Since the TiVo Home Media Engine runs applications written in java, I am sure that it wouldn't be too hard to take one of these applications and remove the interface, and replace it with a HME interface.
About 2 months ago, our 2 year old son gave us a scare. He started to climb over the loft wall in our master bedroom. The loft overlooks our livingroom. We decided to install shutters to cover the opening.
We called Larson Shutters and the owner came out to do the measurements. That was about eight weeks ago. Today, the owner came out to install the shutters. I think that they look great.
I just found the plogeshi plugin for pLog. It implements the Generic Syntax Highlighter for pLog posts. It will do syntax highlighting for many different languages like C++, PHP, or Perl.
It will convert:
$str = 'one|two|three|four';
// positive limit
print_r(explode('|', $str, 2));
// negative limit
print_r(explode('|', $str, -1));
to:
$str = 'one|two|three|four';
// positive limit
print_r(explode('|', $str, 2));
// negative limit
print_r(explode('|', $str, -1));
Rich Wareham has written an good article on revere engineering Mac OS X. He writes Desktop Manager, and has needed to reverse engineer some of the undocumented APIs in Mac OS X.
[via TUAW]
One downside of this is that it gets its power from the USB port, so it will have to be plugged into a computer to be run. It doesn't look like it can be used as a standalone device. I would love it if this has an ethernet port, where the content could be copied over across the network, and this could just be connected to a TV.
[via Gizmodo]
The problem comes around when we put him to sleep. Often we put some music on so he can listen to while falling asleep. But when we happen to pick a CD that has been scratched, the music skips and may even stop, and he wakes up.
I was thinking that the Squeezebox would be a perfect solution for his room. We would have set up some playlists for him to listen to when he goes to sleep. When he is fully asleep, we could turn off the music remotely, from the web interface.
I just found Sidenote yesterday. It is a little program that puts a drawer on the side of your screen. When you move the mouse over to that side of the screen, the drawer opens up. Then you can type or paste your text into a note.
I lost the script that I used to use to convert mac line endings (returns) to unix line endings (new lines), so I did a search on the web to see what scripts I could find.
There are a lot of implementations of this script. Some using perl, shell script or the flip program. The one that I like to use is an alias in my .bashrc. I found this at macosxhints.
alias mac2unix="perl -pi -e 's/rn?/n/g' "
A while ago, I looked into Desktop Managers for my laptop. I tried a few of the Desktop Manager in their demo modes, but I didn't find any that I really liked, and then deleted the demos.
Yesterday, I got an email from You Software, announcing their You Control: Desktop software. I figured that they just came out with a new version, so I wanted to check it out. After I downloaded the demo, and tried to launch it, it claimed that my demo period had expired, even though I just installed this new version.
I seems that they use the date that I checked out the old version as the start date of my demo period for the new version. Maybe this was unintentional, but I am really unlikely to purchase this software, especially if I don't know if it will work for me.
I have modified the validatetrackback plugin, that I wrote earlier, to include an option to hook into the Bayesian spam filter that plog has built into it. Now, when enabled, this plugin has two options.
For the past month or so, I have been listening to podcasts. I have found that they are great to listen to at work. The ones that I enjoy the most are Geek News Central and Coverville.
Here is the opml file with all of my subscriptions.
I wonder if other artists will start to do this. This would make it easier to come up with remixes.
[via Boing Boing]
The Harmony 688 is just like the Harmony 659, except they claim that it is meant for use with DVRs like TiVo. The 688 includes some addition hard buttons that the 659 did not have. I have set up a pair of these buttons to be Thumbs Up/Down, one to be "instant replay" and one for "skip ahead"
It is funny how many implementations of move don't support moving a file across different partitions. First, I wanted to use some of the AppleScripts described in the comments of this hint on macosxhints. But since I use FileVault, my home directory is a disk image, and AppleScript's move will doesn't return an error, but doesn't do anything.
And, I just discovered, that php's rename has the same problem. It looks like versions of php prior to 4.3.3 do not work across different partitions. This is also a problem for move_uploaded_file, but they don't call it out in their documentation.
It seems really strange that these problems are just being fixed now.
I have finally reinstalled all of the software on my laptop after my hard drive crash. Luckily, I had a backup of all of my data files, and all I had to do was reinstall my software from CD. TurboTax was the one CD that I couldn't find, which can at a really bad time.
On Saturday, I went to the Apple Store and bought TurboTax again. Since we signed for the TurboTax Automatic Renewal plan, Intuit knows that we have a valid license to Turbo Tax. It would be great if software developers allowed customers to download software that you have already purchased.
I just found this cool (but pretty pointless) application that will display maps from Google Maps on your TiVo. It allows you to enter a zip code, zoom in and out, scroll, and switch to the Satellite view.
It would be cool if they hooked up Google Sightseeing to this.
[via Google Weblog]
I just found this new Podcast client, and it works pretty well.
The thing that is really interesting to me is that this application is implemented in AppleScript.
A while ago, I upgraded to PostNuke 0.750 and my theme stopped working. It looks like PostNuke 0.75 uses the Xanthia Theme Engine for themes. The theme that I modified was using the old theme engine. I had to remodify the theme that is included with the release.
This page has a good description on advertising Rendezvous service on linux. I am using this to advertise my afp shares, web server, Webmin server, and TiVo Music server.
I've been pleased with my Home Assistant setup for some time now. One of my main focuses has been achieving local control. This ensures...
