Archive for the 'Apple' category

Really! Who would like to have Microsoft Office. It’s expensive. If you donwload it for free, it’s just illegal.

However, you can download the excellent Neo Office for OS/X (a Mac OS/X port of OpenOffice). It’s now available.

Some time ago, I had spoken here of SequoiaView, a Windows utility to visualize the space used by files on a hard disk drive (a great way to prepare for freeing space on a hard drive choking full of hundreds of GB of data).

Today, I found a free utility doing about the same task on a Mac: GrandPerspective. Recommended.

Source: LifeHacker.

Aquamacs is a software program in development for two years, but the ambition is quite interesting: Integrate Emacs, the prfered text editor of Roumazeilles.net, into the Aqua environment for Mac. This is an impressive feat because they are at the opposite ends of technology: Aqua is associated to graphics elegance, subtlety and grace allied to the most modern techniques of User Interfaces; Emacs is known for its roughness, performance and complexity.

Worth considering by all Mac lovers who checked on GNU-Emacs and were not satisfied by the lack of integration in the Mac GUI.

The bane of LCD displays: dead pixels. It is still very uncommon to find display manufacturers who accept to provide a garantee against dead o stuck pixels on their LCD screens. Honestly, this is bordering on abuse knowing that the main objective of the screen is to display several hundred thousands of pixels: Dead pixels (lit or black) only reduce significantly the main function of the display.

But, above the rightful teeth-grinding this produces, there was no technical solution in sight. However I found a tool that offers to correct this problem on your screen without paying a dime. The surprise comes from the fact that it is a software tool. Probably, like I did, you will exclaim: “What’s this story about a software program able to correct a hardware failure?!!” This should be either day dreaming or a scam. But since they ask for no money, I decided to give it a try anyway.

I happen to have a Hyundai LCD display with a stuck red pixel. Usually, this is not much of an issue (after all, it is only visible on a black scree; on white window backgrounds, I can’t see it and I forget about it). So, why not?

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They are great those Futurismo Zugaousaku screensavers. This Japanese artist uses Quartz Composer to create works of art on your screen.

For Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

The #1 problm of WiFi networks (well before the speed of data transfers)? Merely, the network range. There is always a corner of the office or of the house that is not reachable (or nearly not reachable) with your WiFi-enabled laptop: in the master’s room upstairs when the router is installed in the office downstairs, for example.

Solution #1: buy a range extender or a repeater. But this is usually very expensive (several hundred dollars).

Solution #2: reconfigure a 60-80$ router to transform it into a nice cheap WiFi repeater (a device that takes the WiFi signal, amplifies it, and re-broadcast it at full power to extend the available range).

I was thinking about this when I found the two interesting explanations describing how to install a new “DD-WRT” firmware on a consumer wireless network router (like a Linksys WRT54GL) and to configure it as a repeater:

• Turn your $60 router into a $600 router (LifeHacker)
• Universal Wireless Repeater (DD-WRT)

And it works even with a WiFi network that was correctly configured for security.

OK, I know that I don’t have TV because I don’t want to be continuously force-fed with mindless junk. However, plenty of people would like to be able to have their TV on the Internet. Up to now, you were mostly depending on your ISP and possibly some subscription additional to your basic broadband Internet package.

Here come FreeTube, ChannelChooser, Hiveproductions, Tape it Off The Internet, Streamick, TV-links, PPStream, ABC, Sintonizate.tv, PeekVid, PPlive, TV-Video, TVU Player, allowing you to watch TV online for free without the need for any special software, hardware or subscription service. Better than cable televison.

You simply need the (quite usual) Apple QuickTime plugin on your web browser.

Even more freely available TV channels on:

• wwiTV
• BeelineTV

While browsing through LifeHacker, I found this week a series of apparently interesting posts for Mac buffs. Let’s share:

• Top 10 Mac OS X tweaks
• Speed up your Mac
• Take screen shots on your Mac

The recent news lead me to talk again about digital music and its cohabitation (or lack of) with network technology. As a matter of fact, we learn this week that our new French President is in favor of a strong action against pirated music and downloads. This is not very new, indeed, but the confirmation came from Nicolas Sarkozy quite early after his election. Nearly simultaneously (I see nothing more than a coincidence), Amazon just announced that they would start a new service of online digital music sales that would do completely without copy-protection system (DRM or Digital Rights Management) and would go 100% MP3-only. This is supported by EMI that decided to provide tens of thousands of music titles out of its international catalog.

I admit easily that I am not surprised to see a politician posturing as is expected from his image and adopt an attitude that is based on perceptions but ignoring technical and commercial realities. Nicolas Sarkozy is playing his part in the show as a right wing leader decided to fight all kinds of illegal activities. Nobody should be surprised here. But I contend that this is already an echo from the past and he is missing the light of the future.

Exactly on the opposite, Amazon recognized the commercial reality: Customers do not want those technical anti-copy measures. They go against the legal user (the illegal one does not even see this in the illegal but free MP3 files, of course); They do not stop industrial copy and intense distribution on the P2P networks for example, but they stop the buyer from playing the music title on a player that is nto pre-aprpoved or on the PC of the son’s bedroom, or on the CD-player of Mom’s car, etc.

Amazon, understanding this reality -and certainly also aware that online stores without DRM have better sales/user figures than the others- decided to go and fight directly the current leader of eMusic, Apple iTunes.

Wish them luck! If there will always be poor teenagers ready to sacrifice quality, ease of use, ease of purchase, elegance of the package, etc. (didn’t we copy LPs on dirt cheap tapes when we were young?), a good product will always be a hit.

And if some people insist on telling that the competition of a free product (illegal downloads) can only kill paying products (online music stores), I invite them to consider the tough/relentless competition between a product with a (very very high) price as bottled water and a product (nearly) free like tap water available in nearly all homes (at least in the developed countries). As far as I know, Perrier, Dasani, San Pellegrino, Vittel, Volvic et al. do not petition for a law prohibiting tap water. Those companies and brands offer a product with very notables advantages and make a nice profit out of it.

With about eight months of delays, AMD finally launches its new high-level grpahics card. Curiously, it is not set to beat all performance records but to fight against the GeForce 8800 GTS of nVidia (both are sold around 399$). Nonetheless, it will be necessary to wait for the future tests. As a matter of fact, the results published today on various web sites are very astonishing: The card is sometimes very powerful, sometimes slow as molasses (with no understandable pattern); Performance in CrossFire mode (associating two cards in a single PC) is desperately near to one card only; You have to understand that the drivers are not finished at all and that we need to wait for one or two more versions to see what the card can produce (this is utterly abnormal situation, but we can only suppose that the HD 2900 XT 512Mb will be as fast as the GeForce 8800 GTS 640Mb -or even better).

However, it is already clear that the power drawn and the heat produced are properly extraordinary. It is a 2-PCIe-slot card with a noisy cooling fan. But the first results show that the overclocking capability is very large.

We’ll be waiting for more information before judging the card.

Lightzone is a RAW manipulation tool (”Your personal digital darkroom“) that some people like a lot for its specific set of qualities (clean neat interface, support for a lot of RAW file formats, ability to handle batch jobs, end-to-end color management) despite its hefty price tag ($150 for the Basic version and $250 for the Full version for Windows or Mac).

Now, thanks to Download Squad, I noticed that there is more than the 30-day trial version that you could be interested into. Light Crafts made LightZone available for free for those of you running GNU/Linux. I would say that it make sense to have a partition running Linux on your PC (or maybe even a LiveCD boot and some reserved disk space) just to be able to run some useful applications like LightZone on your computer.

The Linux-based LightZone is essentially the Full version of the software application, so it’s a really neat bargain.

However, you will not find it on the corporate web site of Light Crafts. You should go to the specific LightZone for Linux web site. Light Crafts is OK with it, but does not want to support this version. However, since this is good software…

PS: After all, it looks a little like the shareware strategy of some years ago. You can use my software application, it should be attracting you to pay in full later for additional benefits (here, to get to run it natively on your Mac OSX or Windows).

Update: Modified the link to LightZone for Linux.

Microsoft promised that the new graphics standard for Windows (DirectX 10) will not be applied to anything older than Windows Vista. This was enough to push some people in looking for ways to make it work on Windows XP (WinXP), or on Mac, or on Linux. A guy, named Cody Brocious from San Diego, California, claims to have had the first success at this. He created a wrapping code to make those DirectX 10 appplications (mostly games) run on Windows XP and even on some DirectX 9 hardware.

That could quickly become one of the most interesting development in video games for Windows this year.

Cody Brocious official Project Alky blog.

From the Inquirer.