Archive for the 'an apple' Category

how to videochat with ichat when i doesn’t actually work

Monday, June 26th, 2006

disclaimer: this is getting pretty complicated in the end, you should know how to use a shell (err, Terminal.app) and what ip addresse and ports are.

now that every macbook (pro) user owns the means to make video conferences, it was time for me to give it a try, too. with its h.264 video codec, ichat offers damn good video quality and i haven’t seen anything else that can compete (anything else that’s free, free for mac users at least).

(you can skip the blahblah if you want to)

following the habits of a happy mac user, i fired up ichat, added a (macbook pro) friend to the buddy list and clicked on the video chat button, expecting everything to work just fine - as usual - but it didn’t. it didn’t work. hey, it’s an apple, it’s supposed to work out of the box. well, i soon discovered that my dsl router is in fact not from apple, and my friend’s neither - gotcha. a bit of googling revealed that we were not the only ones on the world having this problem. apparently, some people managed to get video chat running by forwarding some ports through their nat routers and breaking holes into their firewalls. didn’t work for us.

(more…)

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reading pdf documents on a mac laptop

Saturday, May 6th, 2006
powerbook as is in book

apple’s preview has a feature that comes in very handy when reading larger documents on the screen: you can rotate any file in steps of 90 degrees by pressing [apple]+[r]/[l]. just rotate 90 degrees left, turn your laptop right and you can hold it like a book, having a screen that easily displays an entire A4 page without scrolling. for even better reading: turn on fullscreen - [apple]-[shift]-[f].

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2 finger scroll and 2 buttons

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006

“One Finger Snap is a Preference Pane that brings up the contextual menu whenever you click and hold down the mouse button. This means that you can do everything with a single-button mouse that you can do with a 2-button mouse.”

finally a software that solves the one-button-trackpad-problem for newer power-/ibooks as well. while for older apple laptops, sidetrack offered a reasonable solution to having multiple mouse buttons, it does not support the two finger scroll on newer models. now, one finger snap does.

oh and by the way, with iScroll you can get the 2 finger scroll for older models. :)

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Alternative Clip of Bill Gates Demonstrating Vista

Friday, January 6th, 2006

“For anybody who saw Bill Gates demonstrating Vista during his CES Keynote and thought it was eerily similar to something they’ve seen before, you might want to check out this video clip”

(via macrumors.com)

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sleep timer on iTunes

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

i usually leave iTunes (mostly in radio mode, ’secret agent’ is an excellent station playing jazzy electronic stuff) running when i go to bed so i can listen to some music … the problem with that is that i want iTunes to stop playing music after i have fallen asleep. unfortunately there’s no sleep sensor on my iBook (yet), so i had to choose a time based solution: stop playing music after, say 30 minutes.
iTunes doesn’t have any sleep timer, but thank the apple god that we have a unix underneath, go to a shell:
ps ax|grep iTunes
gives me the process id (PID) for iTunes, and
sleep {milliseconds} && kill {iTunes PID}
stops the noise….

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iWork

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

got a chance to play with apple’s new iWork today. iWorks consists of two application: keynote 2 for presentations and pages, a kind of design oriented word processor.
both apps work pretty much the same way, you start by selecting a template, then you fill the placeholders with your own content. because it’s apple iWork is really easy to use. a set of icons here, a bit of drag ‘n drop there, integration with iPhoto and iTunes…
i have to say that i was quite impressed when i saw the presentation of iWork at steve job’s key note at this year’s mac world expo; i was somehow disappointed when i got to try it today - i am not sure why, you can make great looking presentations with keynote, and neat documents with pages, but still… i think the power of iWork comes from the collection of presentation/document templates that come with the package. as you’d expect from apple these are *really* well designed. but after that, you get two easy to use but - in terms of features - average programs. i can do a lot more with OpenOffice/NeoOffice/J (at least with documents, i don’t know any software that can match with the animation effects of keynote, they are a class of its own), if i invest the time doing it all by myself :)

anyway, both are a way to create good looking presentations/documents very quickly and easily, i’ll add them to my collection

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new power book

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005

apple just released the new power books. faster (but stil G4) processors, more ram, bigger hard disks, built-in bluetooth2 and wireless lan, illuminated keyboard, a third speaker for better sound (15″+) … no more excuses, i have to get one.

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