Of course I had to import that particular iPad from the U.S. (thanks Alex!) – actually it was the first time I imported something that expensive. Beside some fun with the shipping company everything went fine. Since Apple just announced to delay the launch of the iPad in Europe for a month it’s nice to have a gadget just a few weeks after it was available in the U.S.

It’s called Air Video and it’s frikin’ awesome! ™

What you do is you install the server software and point it to all your directories / drives that might contain video material. You then take your iPhone and install the client app. If you configured the server to be available over the internet you can now connect from anywhere you want using a pass-pin (which is generated) and a password (which is set by you). And by “from anywhere” they mean “anywhere”. WLAN or 3g didn’t make any difference in my test. You start the client, point to a video file and most of the time you are asked if you a) want to directly play is (if the file is ipod-compatible) or b) if you want to live-convert it and play it (when the file isn’t compatible and needs to be re-encoded live for you) or c) if you want to add the file to a conversion queue which will off-line convert the video for you.

In terms of “finding your video” it does look like this:

Simple, eh? Taping a video will bring up this screen:

As I said – Play directoy, Play with Live Conversion and Offline-Conversion-Queue…

It did work with EVERY Video I tried. When I tried Full-HD Movies my serving PC wasn’t able to handle the load but everyhing in SD worked great which is perfect for me.

Therefore I can highly recommend this tool – it really does work better than anything I’ve seen before.

Source: http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/index.html

“I started investigating how I might wire up — and then write native iPhone apps from — a scripting language. Lua was on my radar already. It’s compact, expressive, fast enough, and was designed to be embedded. Took only about 20 minutes to get the Lua interpreter running on the iPhone. The real work was to bridge Lua and all the Objective-C/CocoaTouch classes. The bridge had to work in two directions: it would need to be able to create CocoaTouch objects and also be able to respond to callbacks as part of the familiar delegate/protocol model.”

Source: Announcing iPhone WAX

It’s a fast device – even noticeably faster than the 2nd gen iPod Touch. It’s got almost the same battery life like the touch for me and it was a plug-and-play experience to use it the first time.

What I wasn’t expecting is that the smooth experience suddenly came to a stop when I tried to plug the iPhone into my car – just where the iPod touch did the job for about 5 months (including that the touch got charged by the car along the way).

With the iPhone I got two error messages simultaneously:

“Charging not supported by this accessory”

“This accessory is not supported by iPhone”

Damn you Apple! What’s the problem? There’s a standard USB port which powered 2,5 inch hard disk drives previously and the iPhone just states that it cannot be charged with this accessory (e.g. the car).

On the other hand everything else just works as it was working with the iPod. I can browse my music library on the iDrive I can listen to music – everything works, beside those two error messages and the not-charging iPhone. Thank you Apple B-) Maybe I need to up-grayed my car too?

After not less than 3 and a half hour Songbird finished with importing the iTunes library I am using for about 6 years.

The first impression is: Cool, it’s got plugins!

The second impression is: Booh, it wants to restart (while stopping the music) to install!

It’s not faster than iTunes. And this is a sad thing, because the only thing I hoped it would be was faster. It’s not – the UI it’s as fast and responsive as iTunes’ UI – at best. With just a few clicks the whole songbird window went into sleep mode and the well known beachball came into the play.

Even worse: for some strange reason Songbird consumes considerably more CPU time while just sitting there and playing an MP3 than iTunes does:

18,7% CPU load used by songbird just by playing an mp3 (no filtering, no visualisation, no nothing)

2,3% CPU load for iTunes while doing exactly the same. Even the same mp3 was played.

iTunes even takes less memory… oh dear: A long way to go for the Songbird team.

The Display itself is thinner than thought:

I strongly recommend the Mac + Plex + Full HD display setup. Even if you don’t get any HD content from your cable provider you can live-stream or download HD content through the different provider plugins inside Plex. The plugin infrastructure with the built-in “App Store” is just great.

Since Plex is a XBMC based Mediacenter software you have tons of information scrapers regarding series and movies. So you’re eventually huge collection gets indexed and presented in a way you would not get from any other Mediacenter. You get pictures, movie posters, descriptions and many more just by automatic indexing your collection.

MST3k FTW!

Needless to say that HD content is something different. I only had some HD content on normal computer displays in the last years – having it now huge and sharp is different – better.

BTW: It’s on the floor right now because my wife couldn’t decide until now which tv-stand would suffice…

Source 1: http://av.samsung.de/produkte/detail2_main.aspx?guid=b6c1306c-f57d-4ce7-a944-56cc7346ed2e
Source 2: http://www.apple.com/macmini/
Source 3: http://plexapp.com/

Gorgeous!

Source: http://www.throwboy.com/

gnaaaaa 100 requests per hour…

There are great artists that do great things with a Mac – don’t get me wrong. As a matter of fact many great artist have switched and stayed on the white-sometimes-black (for an extra charge) side of the apple.

What I want to say is that: Making “doing things” look simple doesn’t always cut it. Of course you can get it done in seconds on a Mac – but “the real stuff” takes as long and as much of knowledge as on every other platform. You just have to know things – that you’re not told. Things that are hidden from you for the sake of usability. Things every nerdy-Macintosh-Fanboy just knows and which every other normal guy does not know.

The cause I am writing about this is a site of a very very great band called “Amplifico”. I visited their site and found that they are offering their EP for free download. I clicked on the link. Nothing happened. Maybe you can guess why nothing happened:

It can look as simple as it does on a Mac to make a website. But in fact it isn’t. Thank god for OS X! It’s wonders of usability and the feel every application has are the things I really like about it. I don’t like about it that so many things think they are something they are not just by using it. I don’t like that so many misinterpretations of the User Interface are possible – giving people the sense of “having everything in control” when they actually don’t.

So what I have is a number of audiobooks ripped as mp3s on my harddisk looking something like this:

If you only have the CD what you would like to do is rip the whole CD as ONE large m4a AAC encoded audiofile. We need it to be an m4a because we later want to inject chapter marks. If you have this big AAC file just skip the next few steps. But if you got those several small mp3 files – one for each chapter you want to merge them together and reencode them as m4a AAC.

There is a great free tool to merge these mp3 files together. It’s called (who would have thought) Merge MP3 and is available completely for free. It’ll create one big mp3 file out of your several small ones.

After you got that huge mp3 file you want to convert it into a m4a file with AAC encoding. I recommend using iTunes.

When you got that one huge m4a file you want to load it into a tool called Chapter Master. It’s not free and will set you back $15 but it’s worth as I did not find anything else that was a) that cheap b) that comfortable c) working.

Load the m4a file into Chapter Master, add the chapters in the right order and at the right time. Eventually you want to add an album art picture. Click save and you’re done.

The resulting file is a m4b file recognized by iTunes as an audiobook with chapters.

Source 1: http://www.shchuka.com/software/mergemp3
Source 2: http://www.rightword.com.au/products/chaptermaster/download.asp

“HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.”

I tried anything in my library, including some matroska movie files. Just everything worked – amazing!

Source: http://handbrake.fr/?article=snapshot

I thought about things like: Would I need my whole library or would it suffice to have 8/16/32 GB of it? Do I want to have additional applications or just a music player?

After the last update several things came together to a conclusion:

• There’s not a 160 GB iPod anymore. Since my library is almost that I wouldn’t be able to put my library on a 120 GB classic.
• The touch is cheaper now
• mostly I am listening to podcasts, which I do need to by in sync all the time, that means: remaining playtime sync and syncing without manual work

Since my wife doesn’t like the look of the new nano we decided to get the 16 GB Touch.

It was delivered today and I am hugely impressed with it so far. It’s what I wanted and the way I wanted it. The feature of having my podcasts and audiobooks start/stop positions synced is just fantastic (listening to the first 20 minutes on the go and the rest at home is now possible because the position where I stopped listening on the iPod is synced to the iTunes).

Did I mention that we took the engraving option?

Yo Ho!

“As usual I’ve got a very strange wish what nobody else seems to have on this planet. I have several computers of different platforms. And on one of this machines there are speakers attached…I want to have the possibility to output from any of the machines to the speakers. And please loss-less and low latency!”

It took more than 3 years to fulfill this particular wish. But now it’s done. In 2005 I mentioned the Airfoil software that could run on MacOS X and forward sound from almost every application to an AirTunes compatible device. As it turns out Rogue Amoeba did their homework and created a free “Airfoil Speakers” application which can be used on Windows and MacOS X.

So the things are simple: Start the speaker application on a machine that is in the same network/subnet as the Airfoil master. The virtual speaker is then displayed on the master machine and you can assign a sound source from that machine to the speaker. Hmm… Simple Setup sample: One machine is in my kitchen (Windows XP machine) and one machine is on my desk – an iMac. In the kitchen only the speaker application is started and the iMac instantly “sees” the speaker. One click and the sound output of my desk machine is forwarded through the network to the kitchen… Easy and cool. One can think of any other combination of Speaker/Master application – even multiple speakers can be powered by one master…oh joy!

So here is what the master looks like:

and this is what it looks like on a client (speaker):

Source 1: nerd wish of 2005
Source 2: http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

“As wonderful as Mac OS X is, it has a grave defect that can have an immediate adverse impact on the computer’s usability: the way it translates mouse motion into pointer movement. For many users, moving the mouse feels unnatural because of the peculiar way that Mac OS X performs that translation. In industry parlance, the translation is called the “mouse acceleration curve.” What is a mouse acceleration curve, and how is its implementation problematic under Mac OS X?”

It’s a problem I can live with but I am not happy. With Panther and Tiger I had a solution called MacMiceCommand. But with Leopard this solution stopped working and until I found this:

“This is a GUI version of Richard Bentley’s MouseFix. (i)MouseFix is a very simple program that will allow you to regain control of the mouse acceleration in Mac OS X. Both this web page and the program copies large parts from MouseFix because he says: “feel free to take the code and wrap a nice interface round it. Be nice and make it free for everyone to use though ”"

Source 1: mouse acceleration explained
Source 2: http://www.lavacat.com/iMouseFix/

From the wiki about section:

“In Widelands, you are the regent of a small tribe. You start out with nothing but your headquarters, a kind of castle in which all your resources are stored. In the course of the game, you will build an ever growing settlement. Every member of your tribe will do his or her part to produce more resources – wood, food, iron, gold and more – to further this growth. But you are not alone in the world, and you will meet other tribes sooner or later. Some of them may be friendly and trade with you. However, if you want to rule the world, you will have to train soldiers and fight.

Widelands offers a unique style of play. For example, a system of roads plays the central role of your economy: all the goods that are harvested and processed by the tribe must be transported from one building to the next. This is done by carriers, and those carriers always walk along the roads. It is your job to lay out the roads as efficiently as possible.

Another refreshing aspect of the game is the way you command your tribe. There is no need to tell every single one of your subjects what to do – that would be impossible, because there can be thousands of them! Instead, all you’ve got to do is order them to build a building somewhere, and the builders will come. Similarly, whenever you want to attack an enemy, just place an order to attack one of their barracks, and your soldiers will march to fight. You’re really a ruler: You delegate in times of war and in times of peace!

Widelands offers single-player mode with different campaigns; the campaigns all tell storys of tribes or Empires and their struggle in the Widelands universe! However, settling really starts when you unite with friends over the Internet or LAN to build up new empires together – or to crush each other in the dusts of war. Widelands also offers an Artifical Intelligence to challenge you.

In the end, Widelands will be extensible, so that you can create your own type of tribe with their own sets of buildings. You can create new worlds to play in, and you could even create new types of worlds (who says you can’t build a settlement on the moon?). ”

Source: http://xoops.widelands.org/

“I see some discussion about fixing busted iTunes libraries, either when moving one on the same computer or migrating to a new one. Here’s what I have found works for me. Bonus: no slow AppleScripts or payments (donations cheerfully accepted and squandered).

First, what I have discovered about how iTunes manages music collections. There are two files it uses, one that is binary (ie, machine readable for faster performance on searching, sorting, add/edit/delete operations) and one that has the same information but in a human readable format (for a certain subset of humans who can read XML natively). The XML file is written from the binary file as a backup (check the dates to confirm).”

But that isn’t were it needs to stop. I had to do some more things with my iTunes library lately – like extracting all that ratings and exporting them into a new music player software I liked to test. I therefore wrote myself a little tool in C# that does the job of reading in the whole iTunes library and giving you programmatically access to that library. It only needs to have read access to the Mediathek.xml file iTunes stores in it’s music folder and you from there on can work your way through the bazillions of music tracks you may or may not have in your library. It even does the find-and-replace job a bit easier than the solution mentioned in the article above.

I release the code under the CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license and here is your download:

ReadiTunesMediathek.zip (11,82 KB)

This code is a simple example of how to use the XmlTextReader in C# and how to traverse through them. It should be easy to understand and easy to change. I would love to hear from you when and if it helped you.

Source 1: iTunes library, fixing a broken one or moving one
Source 2: ReadiTunesMediathek.zip (11,82 KB)

“YouTube has stacks and stacks of music videos on their website. I have written a little dashboard widget called iTube. iTube gets the artist and title of the song you are playing in iTunes. It then performs a search on youtube and plays the first hit in the widget window. Once installed iTube works by itself in the background, so start a song up iTunes then look at your dashboard and with a little luck you’ll be watching what you are listening to.”

Source: http://philipandrews.org/blog/itube/

“The one name that stuck was Plex. I like it because it evokes “cineplex” and the suffix means “comprising a number of parts” which the application certain does. In mathematics, you use the suffix to mean “ten to the power of the number” (e.g. oneplex = 10).

Because there are no four-letter domain names left (seriously, try to find one!) we decided to square the plex, so to speak. Think of either plex^2 or plex squared (the beta logo below tries to connote the word “plex” inside a square that might represent a TV screen). The domain names are plex2.com, plexsquared.com, and plexsquare.com for good measure. They are not active yet.

In the coming days, we’ll be working on the rebranding process, including the application packaging, logo, web domains, etc. In the longer term, we have some exciting things in the skin department as well. Stay tuned, and thanks for all your support; we really are lucky to have such an great community.”

Along with the new name comes a new logo:

Source: http://www.osxbmc.com/
Source 2: http://www.plex2.com

“DOT.TUNES is not some lightweight iTunes utility. It’s a fully developed web server application that supports MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV, MPEG, MP4, and MOV files, allowing you to share your iTunes library contents with your friends in other cities, your classmates across the dorm or the coworkers scattered throughout the building. DOT.TUNES contains a custom web server designed specifically to serve the audio tracks from your iTunes at lightning fast speeds. Through seamless integration with your iTunes base, DOT.TUNES easily handles large libraries without missing a beat.”

I tried it and it’s working quite well – especially if you consider that there’s a bunch of plugins available.(which you have to pay for)

Source: http://www.dottunes.net

The first tool is called “phun” and is Windows and Linux only. It’s a small tool that allows you to draw circles, boxes, springs,… and when you finished: press the “play” button to start the simulation. You can interact all the time with the objects and the simulation by draging and manipulating everything.

There’s even a video available of phun in action:

It’s serious fun…that phun tool… yeah I had to write that, you know?!

The second tool I want to write about is called “Chipmunk” and is available for OS X only. To be fair: this is not a real drawing tool like phun – it’s more or less a game physics engine that cames with several samples in sourcecode that you can play with if you can… You need XCode and some Objective C knowledge.

So now go and play!

Source 1: http://www.acc.umu.se/~emilk/index.html
Source 2: http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk

I really don’t know why it would display that much used memory…but it does and it even displays it in different positions… sometimes it’s physical memory, sometimes virtual… weird.

One of my favourite “we’re-just-a-bunch-of-fanboys”-site is mactechnews.de. These guys are always on the line when it comes to Apple and their beloved hard- and software but something strange happened a few days ago: they relaunched their website which is now a from-the-scratch rewrite with all new Ajax and what-not. The point is though: They did not only rewrite it, they did make a choice.

Now mactechnews.de is based completely on Microsoft .NET and ASP.NET 2.0 powered by Windows Server 2003 machines…

Source: http://www.mactechnews.de/news/index.html?id=139708

She wanted to sync her new phone with our Mac so we had to look for something that would allow that to happen. Apple iSync does not support the 5300 out of the box but there are several plugins available on the intertubes. One of them is free and does the job just like all the other ones that need to be bought. It’s called “iSync-Plugin 2.4″ and is available here. Just grab it, drop it to the ~/Library folder and restart iSync. iSync should now recognize the phone…just like it did in our case:

Source: http://www.s60themes.co.uk/

“Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound.

Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Above all, Ardour strives to meet the needs of professional users. This means implementing all the “hard stuff” that other DAWs ( even some leading commercial apps ) handle incorrectly or not at all. Ardour has a completely flexible “anything to anywhere” routing system, and will allow as many physical I/O ports as your system allows. Ardour supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates. You will also find powerful features such as “persistent undo”, multi-language support, and destructive track punching modes that aren’t available on other platforms.”

Source: http://www.ardour.org/

To make one thing clear: I do not buy a macbook because of OS X. I am buying it because it also runs Windows. Diversity is a good thing. I currently already own a PowerPC mac just because I wanted to see what all the fuss is about two years ago.

“Beyond the Red Line is a stand-alone total conversion for the award-winning Freespace 2 released by Volition and Interplay for the PC. It is based on the popular new tv-show Battlestar Galactica. No, not the one from the 70s.”

It’s free and available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

Source: http://www.game-warden.com/bsg/

If you need one, take a look at this one:

“A free, full-featured, graphically laid out, high-precision, scientific calculator for Mac OS X 10.4 and greater. Full source-code is included with the distribution.
Ideal if you need to enter large expressions or have accurate precision. “Data” drawers allow an easy way to generate statistical data, linear regression and gaussian elimination. The extensive support of complex numbers and hexadecimal numbers is also a significant benefit for anyone who has to work with this type of data.”

Source: http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/~mattg/

It’s running on Windows, Linux and MacOS and you will need the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe files because OpenTTD just reuses the graphics of the old version.

But when you got all that you get a very very great game that doesn’t need much resources and is insane fun.

Source: http://www.openttd.org/index.php

It can lead to a speedup of Mail.App. Despite the fact it decreased the Envelope Index for me it wasn’t really noticable… but your mileage may vary.

Source: hawkwings

Oh and there’s plenty of them here.

Source: OurPicks

“A while ago, a 700 MHz iBook was given to me with an infamous video-problem. An iBook which boots, but gives no output, neither to it’s own display nor to a hooked up external monitor.”

Source: http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/726/diy-obsolete-ibook-logic-board-repair

It want away after a few screen ctrl+a’s but…WTF?

Oh that’s interesting. WPF/E is running on a Mac which leads to the new platform independent approach for Microsofts Windows Presentation Foundation technology…booyah!

You want to take a look on WPF/E by yourself? Well, go ahead.

Source 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/webnext/archive/2006/12/05/i-m-a-mac-and-i-run-wpf-e.aspx
Source 2: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A3E29817-F841-46FC-A1D2-CEDC1ED5C948&displaylang=en

“What Windows has really lacked, besides pervasive and effective security controls, of course, is an emotional attachment with users. Unlike rival computing platforms such as Linux and the Mac, there aren’t fanatical groups of Windows enthusiasts roaming the Internet and striking down non-believers with unnecessary religious zeal and bias. In fact, if you think about it, the closest we have to that scenario in the Windows world are guys like me, and I couldn’t care less if you choose not to run Windows. Instead, Windows guys tend to be more pragmatic than Linux and Mac fanatics. First, we’re not fanatics, and while I can’t speak for the rest of the community, I completely understand why someone might want to run Mac OS X, and I’d never ridicule them for making that choice.”

Source: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_04.asp

Gutschein-Code: NA1VD3JHHD
Rabatt: 34 Euro
Gültig bis: 31.12.2006
Mindestbestellwert: 348 Euro

Gutschein-Code: IPM9ZXAV9Z
Rabatt: 81 Euro
Gültig bis: 31.12.2006
Mindestbestellwert: 812 Euro

Source: http://www.opensourcemac.de/2006/11/12/apple-store-gutscheine/

Almost a year ago a guy named “Jonathan del Strother” released a nice tool called “Coverflow”. Now Apple bought the Coverflow Intellectual property. It’s common sense in the IT industry to do such things. But Apple is one of the few companies that blame other when they are doing that…

“We are pleased to announce that all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property was recently sold to Apple. It has been incorporated into the latest version of iTunes.”

Source: http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/

“They may not work. They may not even install. They may make your monitor explode in a shower of glass. EVEN LCDs! They may make your children grow horns, and cause the people in your neighborhood to explode spontaneously while doing the Macarena. They will rip out your eyeballs, and eat your soul with a really dull spoon, laughing and cackling while forcing Cheerios up your nose. They will make your intestines explode in a rain of confetti, while evil clowns bite your feet.”

But what it really will do is slightly different:

Source: http://ranger.users.finkproject.org/kde/#about

Source: http://www.uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/08/7352/

“Sometimes I wonder how Apple CEO Steve Jobs can sleep at night. He appears to spend half his waking hours ridiculing Microsoft’s admittedly behind-schedule operating system, Windows Vista, for copying Mac OS X features. But this week at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), he announced ten new features for Leopard, the next version of OS X, most of which will seem more than vaguely familiar to Windows users. I’m not dim: Microsoft does copy Apple on a fairly regular basis. But seriously, Steve. Apple’s just as bad.”

Source: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/macosx_leopard_preview.asp

Follow the link and find out which applications are going to be obsolete and which programmers will find themselves searching for a new job soon…

Source: http://phillryu.com/2006/08/08/7-apps-on-leopards-hit-list/

Source: http://rixstep.com/2/20040510,00.shtml

Source: http://tv.truenuff.com/mac/

I am a PC and Mac user…and the apple ads are just…insanely dumb. So listen up to this:

Source: http://www.bestweekever.tv/2006/07/07/bwe-mac-ads/

The thing is: It’s so not Apple. Why would they support the operating system they always bashed?

Source: http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

This dot apparently shows me that I cannot do anything with this window apart from moving it around.The dot shows that the document changed – in the case of the iLife applications you cannot do anything else than moving the window around… you cannot minimize it. And the case is: The only thing I don’t want to do with such a window is starring at it’s progress bar and waiting … So normally I and probably every other user wants to hide/minimize that window. But it’s impossible. It’s just not allowed to minimize it…

Why is that? Ideas anyone?