Tag Archives: Software

The Great Escape

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You would think that in this day in age it would not be difficult to switch between technologies and applications and platforms.  After all you can open a word document on a mac now, but that aside, you can virtualize windows on a mac.  With all of that explained, there is still no way to export your address book from AOL.  I don’t use AOL, I don’t condone the use of AOL, I hate AOL.  That said, until this week my mom was still stuck in AOL because she could not remove her contact list and move it to a better option.  I looked into it so we could get her using mail.app.

You start by following the directions here –>

http://www.connectedsw.com/ConvertAolAddressBook.php

Once you have your LDIF file in step three you need to import it into the windows address book (start–> accessories –> address book).  From here you can either use it in windows, or proceed to the mac.  Select the contacts that you want to put on the mac and click and drag them to a folder on your computer.  The files will be copied as vCards which can be used by Thunderbird or Mail.app.

Tah Dah!

Silverlight: Not so bad

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Today Laurelin and I decided to try Netflix instead of Blockbuster Online. I must say that although it was nice to be able to peruse the Blockbuster store, there is no contest about this. First of all, Netflix is cheaper for what we really need. We currently have the 1 movie at a time plan with unlimited streaming. As we are both Mac users, Netflix Instant was not an option until relatively recently.

As with all things there are always strings attached. The string with this, at least to me, seemed more like barge rope than thread. I would have to install a Microsoft plugin for it to work. I grumbled about DRM and the fact that I was sure Microsoft would begin spying and snooping immediately, as well as being wholly un-mac-like. Gladly, however, I was wrong. The install was smooth, painless, and did not appear to break anything. Although the selection of movies available to watch instantly is not immense it is still useful. There are older movies and the like available for instant watching.

Quality of Streams
Let us establish that I am not a videophile in any way shape or form. I felt that the quality of video was quite nice. The quality does seem to vary based upon individual videos. The only issue with quality is that in some dark areas there is some blocking, however, if the movie is worth watching, the small quality drop is well worth the trade for convenience.

Bandwidth might be an issue for some users and I have yet to establish a benchmark of size per film. It would also be nice to have greater control over quality, i.e. being able to control the quality for both bandwidth limited customers and those who dont mind a longer buffer time but would prefer higher definition. One last preference, which would be a DRM nightmare, would be to store, for limited time, offline films to watch so that one could watch them on planes and trains and in automobiles and the like without needing to get the DVD and rip it.

Apps You Need… A Price You Can Afford

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The following applications are just a few of the freeware/donationware applications for OS X that I use fairly often. They are useful enough that they should be included in the OS yet for one reason or another are left out (read: limited interest, legal concerns, and redirected focus of R&D). To be perfectly honest I have not donated money to any of these applications yet; however, as soon as I am out of college and have a little bit of spending money I will certainly pay back. Rambling aside, lets look at some software…

Alarm Clock

This small, simple, and elegant application sits up in the menu bar taking up almost as little space as it does system resources. That said it is by no means a weak application. It serves as an alarm clock, timer, and stopwatch. Alarm Clock can also wake the computer from sleep to set off the alarm in time. It is easy to figure out and quite configurable.

Find it here

Camino

Camino is a wonderful web browser for OS X. It is strong, quick, stable, and in my opinion and on my machine much more all around reliable than Safari, and far less of an eyesore/resource hog than Firefox. A quick google search will reveal lots about this application.

Find it here

Plex

Plex is a unique approach to media playing and user customization. Perhaps the largest niche that his application filled that nothing else could was that of cataloging and streaming data from a SAMBA share. The need for a library to manage digital content has become important with the large amounts of digital content that we compile. Another need that arises with all of that content is the inevitable number of filetypes, and instead of transcoding them all into an itunes friendly format and then accepting that using a network share is going to be difficult to manage at best, you could use plex. Not to mention the eye candy factor.

Find it here

OS X Sparsebundles: Better than sliced bread…

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I was looking for a way to keep track of multiple libraries of photographs using lightroom.  The problem was that I had implemented some not so archival methods of organization prior to now.  Instead of switching to a new system I wanted to save my old catalog, and then start a new one.  This is where the image files come in.  However, before that bit becomes relevant I should explain my setup.  

If I had some money I would have an OS X server.  That said, I have a 798mhz XP machine with 256mb of RAM sitting in a corner, and it acts as way for me to sit in bed and move about my apartment and access my music, movies, tv, and various files.  The first problem was that XP does not play well with HFS.  MacDrive is an excellent application to work around that small issue.  That said, I would rather use linux, however, the machine runs headless, and Microsoft RDC is a nice and easy way to access and administrate the computer from my mac.

So now at this stage in the game I have a samba share that I can access on my mac.  Well that’s great, but for any application that requires correct paths or any semblance of normalcy this won’t do.  Enter the disk image.  While a standard DMG works well, the idea that I had to create the entire image first seemed unnecessary.  So I played about with sparsebundles, and it seems that they are working quite well for my needs.  I have one giant lightroom catalog and it sees the images as drives, ergo mainting paths whether I attach the drive directly or over the network.

The only issue that I have experienced thus far has been the fact that the sparsebundles appear as images when viewed in finder over the samba share, and as folders when mounted locally.  However, after much searching about the web I found no answer to my question.  If an image appears as a folder all one has to do is open up disk utility and then drag the folder to the left sidebar below the other drives.  Then select the image on the sidebar and click on mount on the top toolbar.  The drive will mount on the desktop and function properly from then on.

EDIT:  I am now employing this technique to access an iTunes database file as well as songs over a Samba share with success!