How to stream almost anything w/ VLC
Submitted on December 2nd, 2005 by admin
Filed under Audio and The Mac Side and Portables and Networking and Windows and Video and Linux
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One of my favorite media players to use, particularly for videos and DVDs is VLC, which is available for Windows, Macs, Linux, and a few other operating systems. It’s free, lightweight, and supports nearly any format you could possibly imagine. Because of the small resource usage and its ability to run even on PocketPCs, VLC makes a great tool to be able to stream video from one device to another. Imagine being on the road with a PocketPC, bored out of your mind…you could easily fire up your portable and connect to your PC using VLC and watch any movies or listen to any song you want, all for free. Engadget has posted a guide on how to stream almost anything with VLC which is sure to be very useful for a lot of you. If you use it, let us know how!
Get your Mac a hostname with DynDNS
Submitted on December 2nd, 2005 by admin
Filed under The Mac Side and Services and Networking
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NonStopMac has a nice tutorial on how to give your Mac a hostname.
Why would you want to do this? Many internet service providers give their subscribers dynamic IP addresses which can make it difficult to do certain things with your computer like hosting a website or having the abilitiy to remotely connect to that computer. By giving your Mac (or any computer, really) a hostname, it will always be accessible for you. All you need to do is sign up for account at DynDNS which is completely free. Read the article to find out some more!
[Thanks, Mirko!]
Manage multiple iTunes libraries w/ Libra
Submitted on November 30th, 2005 by admin
Filed under The Mac Side and Audio and Software and Windows
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I’m a big fan of iTunes, but there are a few things that bother me about it. For one, it only allows you to create one library, so if you have multiple people using the same computer, you may have music on your library which you may not necessarily want to hear (my wife and I have completely different music tastes, for example); not only that, but it’s possible that iTunes may become unresponsive when your library gets too large. If you want to use multiple libraries, there is a free application which lets you switching between them, called Libra.
Libra is available for both Windows and Mac OS X and makes library manage a breeze. Libra lets you create, rename, and delete libraries, and will automatically close and relaunch iTunes whenever you switch between libraries. It’s also available in various languages including English, French, and German.
Plugins and add-ons for Mail.app
Submitted on November 30th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Email and The Mac Side and Software
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I’m a big fan of creating clean and simple applications which can be easily expanded through the use of extensions, hence my love of Firefox. Yet, Firefox isn’t the only application which has extensions, and Apple’s Mail.app, an OS X e-mail client, also has tons of great extensions which expand the functionality of Mail.app and lets it do some pretty cool things. Hawk Wings has an extensive list of plugins and addons for Mail.app which is really cool. Some connect to existing e-mail services like GMail+Growl and the GMail Notifier, while others allow for mail forwarding, provide spoken notification of new e-mail, encrypt e-mail and help Mail.app integrate better into other applications. If you’re a fan of Mail.app and use it often, you will definitely find some cool and useful tools here.
10 tips for new Mac owners
Submitted on November 29th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Resources and The Mac Side
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Over the past year or so, more and more people have been switching from Windows-based PCs to alternative operating systems, particularly Apple’s Mac OS. While the basic principles of using an operating system are the same, the Mac OS interface is slightly different, and you may not readily know how to use it. Paul Stamatiou has a nice post on his blog that every beginner Mac user should read. The 10 tips range on everything from the amount of RAM you should have on your Mac, to how to use Expose, OS X’s application switcher. This is definitely some worthwhile reading if you’re new to the world of Mac.
[Via Lifehacker]
Firefox 1.5 Out!!
Submitted on November 29th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Browsers and The Mac Side and Software and Windows and Linux
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There has not yet been an official announcement made, but I just found Firefox 1.5 final on the official Mozilla FTP servers. I’m sure the Mozilla Foundation will update the Firefox page with an announcement anytime now. Until then you can click here for the Windows download, or go here to get Mac and Linux version.
This new version of Firefox has updates across the board, including better support for web standards, better pop-up blocking, and more responsive back and forward buttons among other improvements. You will also see an updated preferences Window and you can now reorder tabs by simply dragging and dropping them. Enjoy!
Envelopes in OpenOffice
Submitted on November 29th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Productivity and The Mac Side and Windows and Linux
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As Martin mentioned a few days ago, I recently got married (now that I have the house and I’m married, hopefully I’ll be posting more often again!). At any rate, one of the harder things we had to do was address envelopes. They were done by hand for the invites, but we decided to cheat and do it with a computer for the save-the-date cards. As it turned out, it might have been easier to do it by hand. Although most modern printers are totally capable of printing envelopes, it’s often a fight to make it happen. This article offers some great tips on how to do it and is a great starting place to learn how to print envelopes using OpenOffice.
Put your Mac to sleep with a text message
Submitted on November 26th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Email and Productivity and The Mac Side
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One of the most powerful features of Apple’s OS X Tiger is the Automator application which lets you create scripts to perform certain actions on your Mac based upon different inputs. One cool thing you can do is send your Mac a text message via your mobile phone, in order to put it to sleep. Imagine going to see your relatives for the holidays and you forget to turn your Mac off; now you can just use your phone to save some money on the power bill. In order for this to work, you need to have a phone which lets you send text messages to an e-mail address, then by using Mail.app with a custom Automator script, you can easily do it.
The entire process is detailed in this post over at TimMargh.net and is pretty simple and straightforward. Just remember to set Mail.app to check your mail automatically every so often.
Open Source Mac…need I say more?
Submitted on November 26th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Storage and The Mac Side
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Sure, there is plenty of freeware for Windows, but what about for OS X? Most Mac applications tend to cost some money, but there is plenty of free software out there for OS X as well! Open Source Mac is a fantastic website devoted to collecting open-source (read: free!) applications for OS X. The list may not be as large as it is on Windows or Linux, but it definitely covers most types of applications you might use. If you’re ever in need of an application, definitely look through Open Source Mac first.
Learn Mac OS X 10.4 with tutorial videos
Submitted on November 25th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Resources and The Mac Side and Video
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Looking at our server stats, about 10% of you are Mac users. Over the past year, tons of people have been switching from Windows PCs to Mac computers. While the basics of computer use remains the same across both platforms, Windows and OS X have different user interfaces and features which may take a little bit of time to learn if you’ve never either OS X before. Fortunately, I found some really useful video tutorials for OS X 10.4 which should help those of you who are recent switchers. The video tutorials deal everything OS X, from simple things like introductions to various applications, to the advanced search functionality of Spotlight. Definitely useful for all you Mac users.
