Apple’s Ringtone Dilemma September 19, 2007
Excellent commentary on the current Apple iPhone ringtone debacle at Alistair’s Place.
Perian v1.0 July 3, 2007
Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. They’ve just released version 1.0, go get it. Use it alongside NicePlayer to get full-screen video on your Mac without shelling out for QuickTime Pro. If VLC’s not your bag, that is.
Fixing the backspace and forward-delete keys in OS X 10.4’s Terminal.app April 2, 2007
This one’s bugged the hell out of me for ages, but until I started using GNU Screen I never got round to fixing it. Desp has the skinny on fixing the backspace and forward-delete keys in OS X 10.4’s Terminal.app.
Apple and EMI team up to sell DRM-free music April 2, 2007
Well it’s about time! Engadget has coverage of the Apple & EMI joint event, live from London. In summary, EMI are selling their entire catalogue as a new iTunes Music Store “premium” option: $1.29/€1.29/£0.99 per song gets you a DRM-free, 256kbps AAC track. That’s 30 cents/20 pence extra for no DRM, hence better interoperability, and better audio quality. Apple will still sell “standard” EMI tracks with DRM and 128-bit AAC encoding for $0.99/€0.99/£0.79.
“Premium” albums will cost the same price as “standard” albums, which is great news; along with Apple’s new “Complete My Album” feature this will hopefully redress the “death of the album” that’s been happening since single-track purchase came into existence.
Optimising Mail.app for low bandwidth usage March 31, 2007
Update: Turns out the reason Mail.app was downloading everything was due to to an malfunctioning plugin (JunkMatcher). Uninstalling this fixed it all, thankfully! Read more…
Interesting article on Apple’s FairPlay DRM March 7, 2007
Interesting article on Apple’s FairPlay DRM, including commentary pointing out that Apple benefits less from DRM than most think.
Tip to speed up Mail.app March 3, 2007
Everyone’s talking about this tip to speed up Mail.app. I’ve linked to Bbum’s article as he provides a better overview of what to do and how it works. It’s surprisingly effective!
MPlayer OS X and MEncoder binaries November 20, 2006
Update: I’ve overhauled this article to reflect the various changes that have happened since its creation. I’ve also finally re-added the binary downloads (built from the trunk as of 2008-09-08), please leave a comment letting me know if they work for you (or not)!
If you’re a Mac user, like me, at some point you’ll probably have had the misfortune to trying to play Windows Media Videos (WMVs). You’ll have discovered that the options are limited: there’s the “official” choice of Microsoft’s awful Windows Media Player for Mac, which they’ve now stopped developing, or its successor in the limited-but-free Flip4Mac components, which work through Quicktime. so by default won’t play full-screen thanks to Apple’s cheap-ass decision to cripple its media player. (Seriously, what is up with that? You’ve just spent a large chunk of money on a machine and they won’t let you play a movie full-screen easily without shelling out more cash? Sheesh.)
However, there is a better way…