t 'n t luoma

In preparation for Apple’s “Black Friday” sale, I had two items in my “Shopping Cart” ’ one was the Apple iPod AV Cable ($19) and the Apple iPod Universal Dock ($39).

Last year I picked up an Airport Express at a really decent price and I use it often, so I was hopeful I’d get something else as equally useful.

Well, I could have been disappointed when Apple didn’t have anything all that interesting to me for sale...

...but I found something much more interesting. Getting the Video out of Your New iPod--for Cheap! which reveals that if you take a “camcorder A/V cable” and:

• Plug the red RCA plug into your TV's yellow RCA jack.
• Plug the yellow RCA plug into your TV's white RCA jack.
• Plug the white RCA plug into your TV's red RCA jack.

you can get your iPod with Video (c’mon Steve, can we call it a “viPod” please?!) to work with a cable you may already have ’ I did. I tried it, and whiz-bang! It worked! However, I have, as many of you know, a terrible memory. So I did what seemed logical to me:

But as I was writing “Red” on the white plug, and “White” on the yellow plug, and “Yellow” on the red plug, I couldn’t help but think that Orwell would be pleased, not as pleased as he was with a certain ad campaign, but this certainly strikes me as Doublethink.

I’m happy to see that this news has made its way into the comments on the Apple iPod AV Cable page. It will be interesting to see if anyone spots a downside to using a non-Apple cable.

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered I can use an existing cable, my Dock from my 3G iPod, and I saved $50 :-)

Posted by TjL at 03:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently had to completely reset my Airport Extreme and Airport Express base stations.

I had a heck of a time trying to configure the Airport Express properly. I don't know if it was a problem of knowing too much or too little, but nothing worked. Fortunately I was able to call Apple and they helped me get hooked up, but I wanted to make note of how this works in case I ever need to do it again.

These instructions assume that the Airport Extreme is already setup and that your Mac has joined that network.

1. Unplug the Airport Express
2. Hold down reset button and plug it back in
3. Wait for 4 flashes
4. run Airport Setup Assistant
5. Choose: Setup a new Airport
6. Join existing network
7. Extend range

Boom, 7 simple steps... simple, if you do them in the right order.

Posted by TjL at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’m using GraphicConverter X 4.9 (because that’s the version that came with my Powerbook) and just noticed something cool.

If you open a file, say a BMP (because that’s what MSWindows uses for its screenshots) but want to save it as a PNG (because it’s just much better that way), all you have to do is do “Save As” and name the file with a .PNG at the end, and GraphicConverter is smart enough to change the file type to PNG instead of BMP.

Very cool, very Mac-ish.

(Otherwise I would have had to click on the dropdown and find PNG out of a list of... well, I don’t know exactly how many, but a lot, of options.)

Posted by TjL at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is the 1 year anniversary of when I ordered my Powerbook

This morning I moved my old Dell laptop around, unplugged and replugged in the printer, and was reminded of yet another reason why OS X is better than XP.

Continue reading "X vs XP: Plugging in a printer" »

Posted by TjL at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For some reason, my Stickies (a free Post-It note-like app that comes with Mac OS X) seem to sometimes want to wander off-screen. I first saw this after I started using a dual monitor system at work. Stickies often appear partially off-screen when the external monitor is not attached.

To fix:

1. Quit Stickies while off-screen
2. Resize the Display (use System Preferences, I recommend the smallest display size available)
3. Start Stickies (you may want to make some change, even just dragging a window to a new position
4. Quit stickies
5. Resize screen to normal resolution
6. Restart stickies

Stickies should be on-screen now.

Tested with 10.3.8 on a Powerbook.

Posted by TjL at 02:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have been importing video to an external drive but was confused why it would automatically stop at 4294928384 bytes (4 gigabytes).

The solution came via Matti Haveri who pointed me to http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/iMovie_HD_bugs.html#formatting on the MacDV list.

The short version is that the drive must be formatted in HFS+. I had chosen UFS because I needed case sensitivity.

I had no luck finding this information via Google and Toast technical support was no use either, so I'm noting it here in the hopes that someone else might benefit from my experience.

By the way, I was going to try a HFSX until I read The dangers of case-sensitive HFS+. So I guess I'll skip it.

Posted by TjL at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 867595 You cannot install Virtual PC Additions on a guest PC in Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac did not solve the problem for me.

I believe all that "Apple + click" does it force mount the virtual ISO that contains the additions. It did nothing to launch the installation process.

If they still won't install, try going to the virtual CD-ROM drive (usually D:\) and manually run the setup.exe.

That worked for me.

Posted by TjL at 03:01 PM | Permalink

Gwyneth Paltrow gives birth to Apple. No, not that Apple, a baby girl named Apple. Mazel Tov and may she grow into a better world.

Posted by TjL at 01:13 PM | Permalink

iOpera - Mac-like customization of Opera 7.50 has been released. Not only is it very cool, it's amazing that Opera lets itself be so easily configured.

Posted by TjL at 10:27 AM | Permalink

tnef @ sourceforge is a commandline program for dealing with winmail.dat files. It compiles cleanly under Panther.

Those who dislike Terminal.app may prefer Josh Jacob's GUI tnef program, however you have to extract the files manually, one by one.

ytnef failed to compile for me under Panther. Fixing it may be easy, but finding an alternative program was even easier.

Posted by TjL at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

GNU smartly combined fileutils, shellutils, and textutils into one package called coreutils which (I love saying this) compile cleanly under Mac OSX.

Continue reading "Coreutils" »

Posted by TjL at 03:50 PM | Permalink

rdjpgcom, wrjpgcom, convert and imgsize are 4 file utilities for manipulating image files. They are not installed in Mac OSX by default, but adding them is simple.

Continue reading "rdjpgcom, wrjpgcom, imgsize, and convert for OSX" »

Posted by TjL at 11:21 PM | Permalink

Dreamhost users (and others who have access to Samba servers) can easily mount their accounts in Mac OSX (Panther, perhaps earlier). Here are the steps.

Continue reading "Mount your Dreamhost account under Mac OSX (Panther) using Samba." »

Posted by TjL at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Apple PowerBook G4 versus the IBM ThinkPad X31.

As I move closer to eventually being a Mac user, you can count on more Mac stuff appearing here :-)

Posted by TjL at 05:34 PM | Permalink

Apple has two new great "Switch" ads

Santa Claus switches (from "Merry Christmas" to "Happy Holidays") and Santa's iPod

See Microsoft, that is how you how you make a fake ad, not this way

Posted by TjL at 09:30 PM | Permalink