Category: Z Page
December 16, 2008
Songbird: Not There Yet
I saw all kinds of great stuff about it and how it's "sooo much better than iTunes." So, I downloaded it. Now, I don't get it.
Missing Functionality
First off, there is no video support. Half my iTunes library is made up of video content -- podcasts, movies, and a variety of other small video sources (all legit and without DRM). Songbird shows them. I click to play them. The audio plays fine. No video. I had to search on the help forums to see folks asking when video support will be added. They are serious about being just a music player, apparently. How 1995 of them.
More Missing Functionality
Second, although there is a great plug-in for syncing to iPods it doesn't support a number of things. Apparently, it doesn't support video syncing. That's no surprising, considering the above. However, it doesn't support applications, firmware updates, or other data. The iPhone and iPod Touch are not supported, either.
Missing Hope
At first, I was hopeful that maybe something would finally come around that was actually better than iTunes. I used to exclusively use WinAMP, but it stagnated after an acquisition and has never really returned. Then, I used iTunes after getting an iPod. Now, with iPods and iPhones, both my wife and I use iTunes exclusively. After looking around Songbird, I don't see that it will change anytime soon, either. It's a reasonable attempt at a music player, but even something like Boxee has more functionality and yet it's designed to have a simplistic couch interface.
I won't be switching as Songbird obviously doesn't meet my needs. I don't even see a point in trying to use it for some things right now. I hope they can figure out how to get there, though, if only for the sake of competition so iTunes also improves.
()December 15, 2008
Two Amusing Updates in 10.5.6
I was looking through the list of changes in Mac OS X 10.5.6. I found two that were amusing.
What's With German?
Addresses inaccuracies with Calculator when the Mac OS X language is set to German or Swiss German.
What does German have to do with Calculator?
Unreliable Chess
Improves the performance and reliability of Chess.
So, apparently, relying on the Chess app hasn't been a good choice. It's also good to know it can now kick ass even faster with its new and improved performance.
November 20, 2008
New Gmail Theme: Neat but Jarring
Google recently introduced themes to Gmail. I didn’t like the new default on, so I went looking to change mine. I found that they had a Terminal one.
Yes, that color of green on black. It’s pretty well done to look like a text mode view, but sheesh – how’d we ever live with that sort of contrast?
(0)November 14, 2008
Early NXE: Netflix on Xbox 360 TONIGHT. For Me.
I signed up to get the “New Xbox Experience” early. I had figured it might be a couple of weeks early or so. Sadly, it’s not. It’s five whole days early. In any case, we’ll be getting it tonight at 5pm EST. Just in time for the weekend.
Now I just wish we hadn’t watched Heroes on Hulu last night because that’s supposed to be one of the few things that’s in HD. We’ll try again next week, I suppose.
(Actually, I’ve been watching the first few episodes of the new Doctor Who series that Netflix has. This will make it easier. ;))
November 13, 2008
Hulu on the PS3
Apparently, the most recent feature for the PS3 was Flash 9 support. Why is this great? Well, sites like Hulu use Flash 9. Does Hulu work? Yeah, mostly.
The video plays back fine, but the controls don’t work so well. For instance, you can’t switch to full screen or switch playback to 480p, so the quality suffers. I’m not convinced these things are actually Sony’s problem, though, as it might be the way Hulu is approaching it since some of them try to work but things draw in the wrong place.
However, you can get full screen playback. Use the right joystick button to zoom in. On the main player, this zooms in to the full player control, which includes the side bars which don’t have video. However, with an embedded video like you find on some of Hulu’s pages, the player doesn’t have any side controls. In this case, the zoom is perfectly full screen. Playback is smooth, but at only 360p, it could be higher quality.
In any case, it’s a pretty nice solution that should get better.
November 11, 2008
Having GIMP Troubles on Mac OS X? Try This.
If, like me, you’ve installed GIMP for Mac OS X that runs in X11, you may have experienced some very strange behavior. By default, if you click on another window in Mac OS X it merely activates that window but doesn’t pass the click to the control you clicked on. This behavior is called “click-through” – the ability to click on something in a window that’s not active to both activate the window and click on the item. Linux and Windows both work this way, by default. Like many things, OS X breaks the mold and goes a different route.
However, with an app like GIMP where it uses multiple windows to do things, this is completely unacceptable behavior. I would have to click twice to activate a tool. And then I’d try to start drawing, but a click and drag won’t even activate the window. So, I’d have to click again and then I could click and drag to draw. It was a complete nightmare.
Luckily, there is a solution. Click-through can be enabled for X11.
$ defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true
Execute the above command from an xterm and restart X11. Now the clicking will behave as you expect.
Now I just have to figure out how to do this for other apps.
Poor, Confused Mac OS X
I thought this sort of stuff wasn’t supposed to happen on the precious Mac OS X?
To be fair, it stopped happening after a few more launches of the settings tool. It also required a full screen capture because the partial screen selection tool caused it to redraw correctly. It was quite annoying, though, as it wouldn’t redraw correctly at all while using it.
Curious, though, as it’s the sort of thing I’ve seen on all OSs at one time or another. Perhaps everyone is using the same scroll algorithm?
October 29, 2008
Artificial Heart
There is news today of an artificial hearth that is so good that just seeing the graph of the beats isn’t enough for a doctor to tell it’s not a real heart. That’s great news.
The bad? It’s lasts as long as 16 hours but as little has 5 hours. Yes, that’s right. FIVE HOURS. Think about that for a minute. Wait, go charge your heart. Ok, now think about it again. Just don’t fall asleep. The battery might not be good when you don’t wake up in the morning. Yikes!
October 28, 2008
MTV Makes All Music Videos Available
They even allow them to be embedded. Here’s the top viewed one, currently. I remember seeing this a long, long time ago. It was pretty popular on MTV, for obvious reasons. Laurie and I just went through a bunch of other classic music videos. It’s pretty fun. Anyway, enjoy the memories. And the futuristic 3D graphics and visual effects. :)
October 27, 2008
ABC Streaming Now Worst of Net
ABC.com was one of the first places where we got our streaming TV from. Now we barely even want to go there. From the EXTREMELY loud autoplaying front page to the terrible streaming experience, I’m absolutely hating using ABC.com now. On a Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz system with a dedicated graphics card, even the non-HD stream skips and stutters and the HD stream just doesn’t work at all. The audio doesn’t sync well at all, either. It’s just terrible. Maybe one day they’ll join all of the other networks and stream through Hulu, where the experience is far superior in both look and sound even if it doesn’t have as much HD.
Now, to be fair, it’s not ABC per se but there choice in the streaming player. Everyone else uses Flash (or Silverlight). Not ABC. And it’s the player that sucks.
We try to watch about four shows on ABC, but we’ve reduced it to just two since the experience is so bad. We’ll drop them completely if they aren’t strong enough to keep us interested over the terrible player.
