Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Jerie was kind enough to send me a lovely educational video about a certain mythological Sikh warrior, and I was faced with the challenge of playing the .avi file in QuickTime.

On my first attempt at double-clicking on the file, I got neither audio nor video. I suspect that was a codec problem, but you never know when the traditional .avi advice of changing the file type and creator will clear up something like that. I didn’t follow it, but if you’d like to give it a try, see this MacOSXHints hint.

For my part, I dived immediately into .avi conversion using DivX Doctor II, and the Doctor kindly converted most of the file to .mov. However, DivX Doctor chokes on audio errors, so the soundtrack ended about two-thirds of the way through the .mov.

At this point Jerie showed up and we discussed the nature of the audio track. I’d figured since it was broken it must be wma, but she claimed it was mp3. Such philosophical questions are best answered with DivX Tool, which verified Jerie’s story and explained a bit about .avi audio problems. DivX Tool can extract mp3 audio for reinsertion, so I obtained a fine .mp3 soundtrack.

However, I would have needed to use QuickTime Pro to paste the soundtrack back in so it would play. That, my readers, would have involved money, and I was running a purely fair-use operation.

So I read through some of the articles at the 3ivx forums, and found some very helpful advice - namely, that to cure these pesky audio bugs it may suffice to run the .avi through the DivX Validator.

The DivX Validator is a secret ingredient of DivX. I downloaded the Pro trial version, but the free version may suffice for all I know. Once the original version of my educational video was validated, it could play in QuickTime right from the “converted” .avi file.

I just checked that the soundtrack had lasted all the way to the closing credits, because I didn’t want to play from the converted file. I still haven’t bought that new iMac, so my mac is a bit pokey for playing video. DivX Doctor seemed like a better bet for the pokey problem, so I converted my converted file to .mov with DivX Doctor, opened it up in QuickTime, and…voila! Education!

The one other program I downloaded in this process was a QuickTime full-screen viewer. Normally only QuickTime Pro will play in full-screen mode, but there are several free solutions to the problem available. I forget which one I downloaded.

[Addenda] It was PresentMovie from ThankYouWare. Now I’m downloading QiPo (QuickTime in, Preview out) to extract some screenshots.

I’ve been playing with icons. I downloaded a bunch of them and replaced my story files’ boring document and folder icons with cool planets, aliens and PADDs. Along with one of the sets, World of Aqua 4 from the Icon Factory came a lovely icon of the One Ring, and I wondered where I could use it.

The answer, in the end, was obvious. There’s only one artifact of a dark, all-consuming power on my bright and sunny mac - Internet Explorer. I did the standard Show Info, copy new icon, paste over old icon with IE, and you can see the results here:

(Click to see more of my desktop icons.)

My One Ring transplant into IE was only partly successful. It shows up in the dock, but not everywhere in the finder. I put it into the dock so I could admire it - I never actually use IE. Directly above the One Browser is the result of a more complicated icon transplant. I hated the default AIM icon enough to do ResEdit surgery on it. I got the directions from Resexcellence - you can see the original version there. The replacement icon is from Spiffy Apps at Icons.cx.

Mac link of the day: Browsers in the Hands of an Angry God - it’s offensive and silly and despite it all, hilarious.

If you don’t follow all the browser technobabble or if you need a bigger push to convert to the One True Browser, take a look at this article on how one blogger switched to Mozilla. He mentioned an old article, A Standard for Site Organization, which was a nice idea but doesn’t seem to have caught on. I surfed around the latter site, and found this amusing prediction from 1999 that “inside of a year” the blogging fad would have run its course. I preferred a newer theory I spotted in my blog rounds but can’t track down now: blogs will eventually replace the Usenet newsgroups.

Cool image of the day: a hotrod iBook

So I want to buy a new iMac, I really do, but the issue is: where? Do I order it from the on-line Apple Store? Do I hike over to the Apple retail store at the CambridgeSide Galleria for that hands-on, immediate gratification? Do I support my local reseller? Or is an on-line MacMall, with its rebates and free printers, for me?

For reasons I don’t recall, I joined the Boston Macintosh Users Group, and they also have an on-line store for members. The deals look the same as at MacMall, at least on the new macs. By the way, that free memory thing is a scam - they charge you most of the cost of the memory, but call it an installation fee. How about they send me the free memory, I open the bottom cover, pop it in, and close the cover? I won’t even charge them $40 to do it.

So, about that crate… My crates aren’t milk crates, they’re wooden crates with both the top and bottom open - no good for transporting milk, but marginally useful as shelves. Right now the green crates are concealing my beige plastic crates, which are also not milkcrates but the sorts of plastic crates you buy in college instead of stealing milkcrates. The milk confusion arose from the paint I used, milk paint from The Old Fashioned Milk Paint Co. Those who don’t know what color bayberry green is can look at their color chart.

Milk paint is non-toxic and doesn’t stink up your apartment, even in the winter with the kitchen window barely cracked open. I just made the happy discovery that the blah beige crates could be concealed inside the exciting green crates this weekend, and now I’ve reduced the general crate-count in my apartment, leaving more room for the rocking chair.

The rocking chair has been a floor-space problem ever since I dragged it in off the front sidewalk. The crates are also Garbage Nouveau, as are the low bookshelves. There’s also a large selection of Post-Veronica chairs, and the remainder of my decor is Late American Thrift Shop.

The point being, I’m cheap. I don’t even have a TV or a stereo, just a couple of boom boxes that date back to when they were called boom boxes. No VCR, no microwave, no cable. The only piece of furniture I bought new was a set of black wire bookshelves to match the black metal Garbage Nouveau rocking chair, unless you consider the Powerbook a piece of furniture. (The lamp was provided by Veronica.)

So yes, my furniture was discarded by other people, but it’s still nice. If it’s not nice, I paint it green and then it’s nice. I’m also picky about food - you won’t catch me cooking store-brand pasta. Barilla is the brand for me. You only live once, and there’s no excuse for anything less than the genuine Italian article.

So it never ceases to surprise me when people complain about their PC’s. I don’t mean people (like me) who get paid to work with PC’s - I mean non-geeks who buy these things and bring them into their homes and sit in front of them for large chunks of their free time. If you don’t like PC’s, or if you can’t get them to run stable, then you should get a Mac. You only live once, and you shouldn’t be wasting your time fighting with your computer, or retyping the last hour’s work that it crashed and burned. In the long run, the aggravation is just not worth the (apparent) savings. If you’re really all that poor, buy a used mac. The virtual thrift-shop is open.

Life is short. Switch.

Instructions are now up at Ranchero.com for using NetNewsWire to post to a MovableType blog. This will spare me the trouble of trying out EspressoBlog, another Mac-only program that lets you post to MT and (theoretically) Blogger weblogs.

On the down side, I can’t try either of these blogging interfaces yet, because both NetNewsWire (as opposed to NetNewsWire Lite) and EspressoBlog require MacOS 10.2 (Jaguar), and I’m still running OS 10.1.5 (here, kitty, kitty?). I’m getting a new 17″ iMac soon, and my folder of Jaguar-only things to install and/or do with my new Mac is growing daily.

If I weren’t getting the new iMac, I’d be getting annoyed by now. I can understand Apple doing the Jaguar-only thing with new software like iCal - Apple is the one who gets the $129.00 when someone upgrades to 10.2 - but I don’t understand why other mac developers are following in Apple’s upgrade-forcing footsteps. It used to be that mac developers went out of their way to support every version of the OS back to 7. Now no one even feels obliged to provide an excuse for not supporting 10.1.5.

I’m a geek, so I can imagine what sorts of technical difficulties would come up with supporting 10.1.5 and excuse developers for not surmounting them. What I can’t imagine is going around saying you only support 10.2 without saying why, or whether you expect to support 10.1.5 in the future. It makes the buyer nervous. Am I going to have to buy 10.3, and 10.4, and so on, just to run your software? Say it isn’t so.

iBlog is a great idea. It lets you both blog and subscribe to RSS feeds. As far as I can tell, iBlog publishes to a .mac account, not to a pre-existing blog.

I have just one question: how long will they get away with using the Apple website’s look-and-feel? They had me fooled until I looked at the URL.

I checked out the Surfin’ Safari blog today and ended up at inessential.com, blog of the maker of NetNewsWire for MacOS X. I also grabbed TigerLaunch while I was there.

NetNewsWire looks like a newsreader or an email program, but instead, it reads blogs and other RSS newsfeeds. I set it up to read my blog and others, along with some of the defaults. Here’s a screenshot for anyone who doesn’t grok RSS, the way I didn’t until very recently. It’s a cool little app, in which you navigate between the panels with the tab key, through the blogs and entries with the up and down arrows, and open the original page in your default browser with the right arrow. It’s much simpler than browsing through all the pages individually, and cleaner than a friends page.

I’ve added a bunch of LJ blogs, whose RSS URLs look like this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/synaesthete7/rss. Not surprisingly, they’re pretty flakey with whether they provide summaries. MovableType does summaries by default in your index.rdf page. I’ve linked the RSS feed (the MT “syndicate” link) using one of the buttons from antipixel:
You, too, can be an RSS addict.

Evil link of the evening: Ariel Sharon eating babies, from The Independent. You’d think it was still 1939 across the pond.

While stalking the wild Mac Rumor, I found some cool links. Check out this switch commercial, and its switch to Linux companion. MacEdition has an interesting article on the rapid changes Safari has made to OS X browser demographics. Watch TV on your mac with EyeTV from El Gato software.

New PowerMacs have popped up at Apple, along with much cheaper studio displays and the long-predicted 20″ model.

I’m still holding out for new iMacs with the swingy arms. The word on the information superstreet is February 3rd.