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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 216. iPod Shuffle price drop. Apple releases XSan 2 and kills off XRaid. American Idol puked on my iTunes. iTunes 7.6.1 update. MacBook, MacBook Pro Keyboard Firmware Update 1.0. DoubleTwist frees iTunes music to other devices. Apple patenting podcast tech. I Jailbroke my first iPhone. 20″ Aluminum iMac gradient display debate. Replying in Mail with quoted text. Cleaning up Flash cookies (.sol files). Syncing OS X home directories. Quick toolbar TimeMachine access in Finder. Encoding Flash video for the web. Are Leopard’s Parental Controls busted? Extending AppleTV’s wi-fi range. Thoughts on the ModBook.
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Dude, thanks so much for playing the new tune! I can’t wait for iTunes to grab this episode, I wanna hear your take on the Great Keyboard Unfucking of 2008â„¢ =)
Adam, personally I would use VisualHub, throw it a full quality DV file, use XGrid, and use the JW whatever FLV player. Oh yeah, edit on a MacBook Pro, not a Mac Mini.
Adam Adam Adam, you are a very naughty geek!!
After listening to the latest MC I caved and drove to my Apple store and guess what? 30 mins later I have a Jailbroken iPhone ;-) OMG ZiPhone was a breeze and yes Apple should worry very very much!!
Was comforting to hear about your Apple care experience, will look into buying myself some for the 1st Gen MBP im running;-) You should get commission ;-)
Great show Mr C.
Thanks very much for the tip on System Preferences â–º Accounts, to unlock and right click to get Advanced User Options. That is rather odd to have something available in a contextual menu only.
I was all set last month to buy a 20″ iMac, but wasn’t sure how big a difference the two different video cards would make. It was in searching for reviews that I ran into the the LCD issues topic, and sure enough a visit to an Apple store was enough to confirm it for myself. It goes to show how important it is to do your research when buying hardware.
I ended up spending a little more than I wanted to, but I’m pretty happy with my refurbished 24″ iMac.
Adam,
The user who was trying to encode video on his Mini is pretty much out of luck. I have the same computer (I assume) G4 Mac Mini 1.42 w/1GB of ram and converting video with it takes ages. Ex. Backing-Up of a dvd may take 1 hour – 1.5 hour on my macbook using handbrake but on the mac mini it lists that it will take upwards of 36 hours. Whether or not it will actually take 36 hours I have no idea since I will normally just do it on the Macbook. As far as the xgrid goes I’ve never had much luck with that in visual hub and if I am not mistaken xgrid has been taken out of the new version of visual hub so watch out. Most of the conversions I do are *.avi to .mp4 with .h264 encoding so I am not sure how the mini treats *.flv files. I’ve also noticed on the mini if I do not use .h264 the encoding goes faster but it still takes just about forever. All in all I think that it is the computer not the software that is causing the long encodes.
Tom
On your “eMail Quote” Apple Mail advice ..
All anyone has to do is select the text one wants to include (or Select All), then click the Reply button .. the selected text is automatically quoted within the reply .. no need to go through all the shortcut gymnastics you went through :)
-bolo
Just to add to Bolo’s comment, to answer the question on the podcast, that means that you can highlight just a blank character or line and when you choose Reply it will quote that blank text. It’s not perfect – it still leaves the quote stuff at the bottom, with a blank line of text – but it works. (I also have to say that I hate getting e-mail replies without at least some quoted text, as it makes it much easier to understand them with context.)
I think I still like the Cmd-A, Delete though. Much cleaner and easier if you know you do not want to quote anything.
The 20″ iMac Gradient Issue is the result of Apple using ‘TN Film’ based LCD screens in the new 20″ iMac – something that Apple hadn’t done previously to my knowledge as they were using ‘IPS’ panels previously.
TN-Film is one type of matrix technology used in LCD displays and usually they can only display 6bits per channel as opposed to 8bits per channel for any IPS, MVA or PVA matrix panels. TN-Film is quite a simple matrix technology, cheap to produce and is in fact the quickest from a refresh rate point of view. However the viewing angles are much more critical in terms of chroma distortion (something not advertised on the tech specs in the display industry I might add). The only indication of TN-Film matrix based lcd panel is the luminance viewing angle figures – normally 160 degrees for TN Film vs 178 for the IPS, MVA or PVA matrices.
The LCD display industry has flooded the market with ever cheaper displays mostly by introducing TN Film based panels into ever larger sizes to an uninformed buying public. I would suspect LG.Philips was forced to follow suit for fear of losing market share to the cheaper manufacturers. Apple either chose the TN Film 20″ for the iMac to keep costs low, or simple because LG.Philips no longer manufactured the IPS 20″ panel – which was a shame.
Also I’d like to add that having seen both current iMac screen sizes, I am actually quite impressed with the quality of the TN Film used on the 20″ compared to other TN Film panels, they have improved over the years or at least the ones from LG.Philips have. So the issue is only there if you look for it specifically. Having said that, the 24″ would be my choice, as it uses an advanced H-IPS panel.
Adam,
Concerning the user that wanted to sync home folders… while the advice was great, you really have to tackle this another way…. why would someone really wanna do this? By Rafael’s own admission, he would use a second mac as an extension of his macbook pro, which I gather means carrying only a subset of his data around. Personally, I’d get a 2 gig USB flashdrive and be done with it…. ultimately, I’m sure all he REALLY wants to do is sync documents that he works on in both locations. Trying to balance home folders, with the inherent risks of overwriting, just doesn’t seem worth it. I think it’s a much more disciplined approach to have to track computer differences manually.. that keeps you from overwriting, deleting or in any of a dozen OTHER ways, screwing up your data.
One man’s opinion
Hi Adam,
Your listener wanting to sync two home accounts reminded me of the following article: (which I see has now been superseded by ). There are also some pointers to related articles at the bottom of the latter. As with, say, an rsync-based solution, these are kind of geeky, but perhaps something along those lines will work for him.
However, I’m also with Marty regarding questioning the premise.
What, you strip out hyperlinks? Trying again:
http(colon)(slash)(slash)kitenet.net(slash)~joey(slash)cvshome
http(colon)(slash)(slash)kitenet.net(slash)~joey(slash)svnhome
Adam,
I’ve not been able to download this show yet (it normally arrives immediately). I’ve tried re-subscribing to the feed listed in iTunes, and to the feedburner link in the article above: iTunes just sits there saying ‘downloading’ but stuck at zero KB.
Any ideas ?
In case anyone is interested: This is why I love my jailbroken iPhone.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/iAno-Turns-Your-iPhone-into-a-Genuine-Piano-79064.shtml
You can find this app at:
http://moocowmusic.com/Pianist/
You have to see it to believe it! If you love banging around on a piano, this will amaze you!
Hi Adam – My experience with Leopard parental controls IS that I agree they are mostly broken. I slapped them on … and my daughter said she had trouble with Google searches and something else that sounded legitimate, so I turned that off. I tried the time limits and they worked fine – but the way we share one machine with four busy users I ended up getting frustrated that I couldn’t log my kids off. It was more punishment for me than them. I never saw any of those lock-ups or horrible things you mentioned. I’m on a G5 iMac just for reference….