woof woof
Mac OS X
My New iPad
Jul 8th
Today I finally got my hands on my very own iPad. I ended up trading my MacBook for a 32GB WiFi iPad. It was actually from a person on Craigslist and I was happy with the transaction (even though I did get a bit lost meeting up with him). While I did have a bit of trouble getting the iPad to work out of the box it wasn’t something I couldn’t resolve. I guess working for Apple (er a reseller) and being a huge fan of Apple and a complete geek helped. The iPad at first just wouldn’t boot into the system. It was stuck at the Apple logo and refused to move anywhere. I placed the device into recovery mode and just restored the system. This resolved the issue and I then proceeded to install some of my favorite applications. More >
Google Chrome for OS X (in Blue)!
Jun 18th
I’ve really been enjoying Google Chrome on my Windows workstation, so I figured I would give it a shot for OS X. I should also mention it’s my web browser of choice when using Linux as well. I really dig it! Now it’s really simple to install for both OS X and Linux. Google offers up installers for both. You can snag your own copy from the Chrome site.
The one thing I didn’t like about the OS X version is that the default theme is not that blue one you see with the Windows and Linux versions. I guess this is nice, since the default blends in with the OS X UI a bit better, but I much prefer the blue theme. Fortunately you can install this by downloading and opening the downloaded file from this guys website! The result is as below and I love it!
On Hacking the Nintendo Wii…
Jun 14th
This past weekend I was visiting a friend’s house and he had a modified Nintendo Wii. Being curious I started asking him questions and at the end of this I basically rushed home to start modifying my own Nintendo Wii. Now, I had read a bit into all this before but never ended up modifying my Wii because it seemed to be quite a pain. However, after doing a bit more research I found out this process was a lot easier then I thought it would be. I basically grabbed a 512MB SanDisk SD card, placed some files from BootMii on there and within 5 minutes had the Homebrew Channel installed on my Wii. Now this is sort of where I got all confused, fortunately my friend came over and helped me out.
More >
Apple iPad: Thoughts…
Apr 10th
When the iPad was first announced I wasn’t to thrilled with it. I’d been waiting for Apple to release a tablet product almost 4-5 years. When Steve Jobs pulled out the iPad with a iPhone OS like interface I cringed. I wasn’t impressed at all. I didn’t need an enlarged iPhone. I wanted a tablet running OS X with some tablet-like enhancements. This was far from it. It wasn’t all that attractive looking either. I disliked the large black border around the device and the square (instead of rectangular/widescreen) look to it wasn’t very appealing.
About a week ago, Apple finally released the product into the hands of the public and I’ve seen most if not all positive reviews for the device. I believe the only negative talk about the unit is that some of devices are having issues connecting to WiFi access points. Apple has already submitted a support article on this. More >
Converting MKV to MP4/H.264 in OS X
Apr 1st
When I get anime episodes/movies or even sometimes regular video content it’ll come in a relatively new format (at least to me) called Matroska, file extension .MKV. The format can easily be played on your Mac using Perian or even with VLC. However I do most of my video viewing via my AppleTV on a much bigger screen. Unfortunately iTunes and AppleTV don’t recognize the MKV file format so one needs to convert it into something which it does understand.
For the longest time I had a multi-step process which was a real pain in the ass and resulted in videos that had been re-encoded multiple times. As you can imagine this meant a pretty good loss of quality and time. I basically had to de-mux the subtitle track on my Mac, convert it to an SRT file (sometimes an SSA file is used for subtitles) on a Windows box (using Subtitle Workshop), copy the new SRT file back over, convert the entire MKV file to an MP4. Then I would take my MP4 and the SRT file and combine them using ViddyUp!. Basically it was a real pain in the ass. More >
