If I leave Firefox open on my MBP, it refuses to go to sleep. Now this bug report claims it only delays sleep, but that’s complete bollocks. I’ve left it on all night with Firefox open (no windows) and come back in the morning to find my poor little Mac has been lying awake at night in distress! Aaargh! If any other Mac users are experiencing this, I feel your pain.
Archive for the 'Apps' Category
Burning Toppy shows to DVD just got a WHOLE lot easier. And faster.
What I used to do:
- Copy .rec file from Toppy
- Demultiplex .rec with MPEG Streamclip into separate video and audio streams (.m2v and .m1a)
- Rename .m1a to .mpa so the next step would work
- Remultiplex these 2 files to DVD (VIDEO_TS) format using ffmpegX
- Burn with Roxio Toast
In what is simply a revelation, I just figured out that Roxio Toast can burn demultiplexed video files. O. M. G.
What I do now:
- Copy .rec file from Toppy
- Demultiplex with MPEG Streamclip
- Burn with Roxio Toast
Before it was an utter chore to the point where I just didn’t bother. Now, I can simply drag the .m2v file into Roxio and if there’s a .m1a or .mpa file sitting there with the same name it just figures it out and remuxes both streams as part of the burn process! It also automatically adds chapter marks every 5 mins and this was something lacking in my previous burns. It’s also a lot easier to add multiple titles to a disc. And I could potentially add menus, something I’ve steered clear of until now because of the complexity involved.
I’m so impressed that I’m actually slightly embarrassed to admit that I used to do this in such an inefficient way.
And no, I don’t think a DVD recorder would be a better solution. Lets face it, I’m a bloody pedant when it comes to video trimming and ad-removal. The software solution allows frame precision. So it might take a little extra time but the end product is worth it. Plus I would miss my Toppy!
I upgraded to Firefox 3 on my Mac the other day. I was spewin at the default Mac theme still not displaying favicons in the bookmarks toolbar *scoff*. I wasn’t at all surprised; I had this problem with Firefox 2 but a workaround was to install the “Mac Favicon” theme. But then I googled for it and was doubly spewin at its discontinuation! “Why do you need favicons?”, I hear you ask. Well my Firefox toolbar normally looks like this (on Windows):
I use favicon-only links for my VERY frequently used sites. I can tell them all apart using only the favicon, so they are all called “” - our good old friend the empty string (one of the many advantages of storing bookmarks in a single HTML file and not as .url files on the hard drive as IE does, is that you can name them “”).
Quite rudely, the default Mac theme still gives toolbar favicons the cold shoulder. With no modification my toolbar looks like this (that embossed circle is a link on hover). As you can see, this is quite useful.
Then salvation came in the form of the Stylish addon, which is normally used for applying custom CSS styles to web pages. An article on userstyles.org shed some light on how to use Stylish to tweak Firefox’s userChrome.css file “on the fly” without having to dig around in the Firefox profile, an activity which is both time consuming and just plain dangerous.
With the style installed, my toolbar was useful again. I still have a problem with the “hover” decorations. They’re too thin and look kinda stupid. But this is just a nitpick, really and I’m already used to it. I also added some other tweaks which fixed the spacing and increased font size and toolbar height.
/* change space around bookmark toolbar icons */
#personal-bookmarks toolbarbutton {
margin-left: -2px !important;
margin-right: -2px !important;
}
/* change bookmark toolbar label font */
#personal-bookmarks .toolbarbutton-text,
#personal-bookmarks .toolbarbutton-text-shadow {
font-size: 9pt !important;
}
/* change toolbar height */
#personal-bookmarks { height:22px }
Before I go, I really should slot in a plug for the Foxmarks addon, which in my experience provides flawless and transparent bookmark sync across multiple installations of Firefox (regardless of platform). It’s that one must-have addon I install before all others. You also get a spiffy web interface for your bookmarks.
UPDATE (7/7/08): Added line in CSS block to change toolbar shadow font.
I’m yet to find a decent free “DVD Shrink for Mac”. I’ve used ffmpegX to compress DVDs down to single layer size, but it can really only compress a whole disc and lacks the “reauthor” feature of DVD Shrink. But then I thought, why not run DVD Shrink through Wine? So I installed Darwine on my MBP, which is a great little package and worked straight out of the box. My first impressions were that it was bloody fast. So I thought I’d encode a whole DVD as an impromptu benchmark against my PC. This isn’t meant to be some “Wine on a Mac is better than a real Windows” spiel. That would just be silly. It’s more a comparison for interest’s sake so I can prove it to myself, and add another one to the growing list of contributors to my PCs obsolescence.
The original DVD was 6.93 GB and pre-ripped to a 5400rpm USB 2.0 drive. The same drive was used on both Windows & Mac. The encoded DVD was saved to the local hard drive, and not back to the USB hard drive. DVD Shrink version 3.2.0.15 was used.
MBP Specs: Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2, 5400 rpm.
Time to encode on MPB (Wine): 24m 56s
PC Specs: Dual Core P4 3.4 GHz, 2 GB DDR2, 7200 rpm.
Time to encode on PC (WinXP): 34m 38s
Wine is still a bit glitchy pretty usable, once you get past the annoying xterm and log windows it insists on spawning. It maps the Desktop and filesystem root in My Computer for easy access; you just have to remember to do the “Explorery” stuff like creating folders in Finder, as Explorer functionality is limited in some areas.
Next I’m gonna leave uTorrent running for a couple of days and see how stable it is.
UPDATE: To stop xterm launching when X11 is started, run this command in terminal: defaults write org.x.X11 app_to_run /usr/bin/true which updates your ~/Library/Preferences/org.x.X11.plist file.
The Mac version of VLC Media Player now has native support for the Apple Remote. W00t. All that’s missing is the ability to customise what each button does. I’m not too sure about the fast forward skip time, whether it gets it from “medium jump length” or just makes it up. I tried changing jump lengths with inconclusive results! Not sure about DVD menus either. Here is a funky diagram I made of the controls.
As I was chowing down on some Apple crumble the other day, I found myself musing on some of the aspects of Mac OS X Leopard that have impressed me in recent weeks.
TV Out That JustWorks(TM)
Given that watching stuff through TV-Out is one of the primary uses of my MBP, I consider this pretty darn important. OK so it cost $41 to get the TV adaptor, but it’s totally worth it. Set up the TV as an additional display, switch to PAL, turn on overscan (who wouldn’t?), drag VLC onto the other screen, maximize and hit play. That’s it. The quality is absolutely superb and it shits all over my old HP’s TV-out. Colours are vibrant, and the display doesn’t go to sleep half way through the video (though that may be VLC’s doing, I’m not sure). The adaptor has dual outputs; composite and s-video so that’s also a plus.
Native Display Zoom
Being able to zoom the display using simple shortcut keys or mouse actions is a truly innovative feature. E.g. Ctrl-MouseScroll zooms to the current mouse cursor position, and the zoomed display pans the screen as you move the cursor. Or with the keyboard, Cmd-Opt-8 toggles zoom; zoom in and out with Cmd-Opt-plus and Cmd-Opt-minus respectively; and toggle smoothing with Cmd-Opt-\ (I have it on). This works a treat when watching widescreen videos on my TV through the adaptor. And in truth this feature is why I’m still using VLC to play videos on the Mac. In Media Player Classic, my video player of choice on Windows, you can zoom in and out with 9 and 1 on the numpad, or map to other keys. VLC however, has no such keyboard shortcut so I was forced to watch skinny widescreen videos half the height of my 4:3 TV screen. Then I discovered the OS X built in zoom and literally did a little dance around the loungeroom (watch on YouTube).
Custom Keyboard Shortcuts
Since Ubuntu, I’ve thought this is a feature that really should be built into all OSs. It’s just bloody handy to be able to map functions to keys that make sense to you, not just to the designers of the OS. E.g. I remapped “take screenshot” to Cmd-F7, the key with a little screen icon.
Native Disk Image Support
Mac OS X’s support for disk images has been one of the most impressive features I’ve seen so far in an OS. While I haven’t yet had a chance to explore the imaging support in great depth, certain features stand out. For example, you can download an ISO image and mount it straight on your desktop and have a look at the contents. DMG has become the default Mac archive format as well as being a flexible format used for both hard drive and optical disk images.
The Dashboard & Web Clips
The dashboard has suddenly become useful again with the introduction of web clips, which let you convert sections of web pages into dashboard widgets. Along side traditional widgets for date countdown, Internode usage, Gmail and iSlayer, I have web clips for the Elders weather forecast and latest BOM radar image which removes the hassle of opening a browser, loading the bookmark, etc. It’s just there when you hit F12. The only downside to the dashboard is that widgets can be designed to be any bloody shape under the sun, which sometimes makes it difficult to get a nice looking layout, but for the 5 seconds the dashboard is open, it hardly matters.
The Little Things
There’s loads of other simple innovations in OS X, e.g. when you rename a file with an extension, instead of selecting the entire filename, Finder selects all of the text before the extension so you are not constantly having to retype .jpg or whatever when you rename a bunch of files. Another one is the spotlight search box. Hit Cmd-Space and type the first few letters of the app you want to run and hit enter. It’s like Windows+R on steroids. I also love the Cmd-comma shortcut which brings up program preferences in almost every app.
I’ve been using a stack on the Dock for my Downloads folder for a while now and sure, it’s pretty, but not terribly functional. You can open and drag files but that’s about it. What I want and I’m used to (in Windows) is an icon that opens the Downloads folder in Finder. I could use the Finder icon on the left of the dock, but there are two problems with that. First I would have to change the default location for new Finder windows, and I like having that as Applications. Second is that if you already have a Finder window open, clicking the icon just focuses that window instead of opening one in the default location.
Of course, I tried just dragging the folder onto the main dock area but it only accepts folders on that magical area to the right of the pedestrian crossing. And they show up as stacks. So I’ve come up with a quick and dirty workaround using AppleScript. Read on for the details.
Continue reading ‘Dock Folder Launcher’
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