You don’t even need to have an extra tool installed! Just use this handy keyboard shortcut:

There’s a new version of Dot.Tunes out which is now available for free. That’s good news and if you ever wanted to access your iTunes Library and you were not in Bonjour range…try this great tool!

“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 standard nerd knows: physics is fun. Even better: When you play with gravity and friction and water an what-not in a sandbox. Now there are several tools available that allow you to do just that: Play with physics.

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

…it starts to show off:

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.

It’s been a long time since my last blog entry – but here it is:

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

After about a week of “thinking about it” she bit the bullet and got herself a Nokia 5300. She wanted to have something that has some dedicated buttons for music playback control and she needed a new mobile phone. So the 5300 seemed the perfect match.

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/

This post is more of a reminder for myself. I need to remember that obviously great multi-track audio application that just became available.

“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/

Oh damn. So Apple said that Leopard – the next iteration of OS X – is coming in October instead of spring. I planned buying a macbook early this year but now I have to wait … Damn! I wanted to reorganize my hardware…

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.

There’s a free fan made Battlestar Galactica game available…

“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/

You are a fan of SIM* games? You want something light to take on your travels and play from time to time? I got good news for you: Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe is available in it’s final version 0.5.

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

“As everyone knows, it is possible to get quite a speed boost out of Mail.app by stripping all the bloat out of its Envelope index, an SQLite database Mail uses to store senders, recipients, subjects and so on.”

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

Uhh, seems someone took the time to create some clips that show the world the other way around as the well known Mac vs. PC clips did… Oh well as with all “point-of-view” things, just enjoy and start loving each other

Oh and there’s plenty of them here.

Source: OurPicks

That’s what I call a repair:

“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

hmm.. all of a sudden this happened:

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

Hear, hear!

“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

Well…just in case you’re planning to buy something…like me:

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/

So, wasn’t it Apple who claimed that Microsoft is copying almost all features from Mac OS X? Where’s the Innovation Apple when it comes to your own products?

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/

Well nice description what this could do:

“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

Since my MacMini has some kind of OS9 Classic mode which is quite slow, I am not using it on this machine – actually the emulated PowerPC G4 in SheepShaver feels a bit faster…

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

Paul Thurrott writes about the upcoming cat:

“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

“While yesterday’s preview of Leopard didn’t show too much (I’m talking about the “top secret” features that Steve left out this time around), it did show enough to, well, make quite a few shareware and freeware applications somewhat obsolete”

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/

“A repository for every keyboard secret in OS X. Some of these are well known, some are not. Shortcuts in the Menu category are common rather than universal. This list should continue to grow exponentially over time.”

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

“Macs are great. So are PCs. So are toasters – what’s your point? It’s just a computer, get over it.”

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