Quicktime + Firefox problem update

Windows: I still couldn't find any resolution other than disabling acceleration and have quicktime use safe mode.

Mac: I ran a check and fix file permissions just for the heck of it. It did find some problems. After everything is fixed, Firefox and Quicktime seem to behave better now. Quicktime videos running in Firefox (like the iLife 08 guided tour) run okay now, although they still seem to be sluggish and hog the CPU.

Quicktime major problems

I was going to watch the new iLife 08 guided tour from Apple's website. I have the latest quicktime version, latest updates on all software.

Windows:
Firefox 1.5: The quicktime video will crash firefox, or firefox will say that the quicktime plugin did an illegal operation. If it doesn't, it flickers and sometimes the video is completely garbled.
IE7: Same thing, dll crash.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling quicktime, no difference.

Mac OS:
Firefox 2.0: The quicktime video will flicker like crazy, and the system becomes sluggish (as if firefox/quicktime hogging CPU cycles).
Safari 2.0: surprise surprise, no video problem. The quicktime video runs just fine.

Gee, wonder what's going on. Does Apple do something specific on those videos so they only play nice with safari? The only workaround in windows is to set quicktime to safe mode (GDI). I haven't found any workaround for the flickering videos and sluggishness in the Mac firefox yet, other than to use Safari.

Dell Dimension 4600 power supply

Do a search online, and you'll find plenty of power supply problems on Dell Dimension 4600 model. I've been lucky to have my Dell running fine for 3 and 1/2 years, but finally the power supply bit the dust last week. I was hoping that I can wait for the new iMac to come out, but I really want Leopard so I bought a refurbished power supply from Dell. The old one was revision A00 made in Thailand. The refurbished one is revision A05 made in China.

Mediamaster

Mediamaster
They are basically an online music locker. You upload your MP3s, and you'll be able to stream your music via their flash-based web-player on any internet connected PC. They also provide a widget, like the one I put on the side. You cannot "save" your MP3s back, obviously to prevent "piracy," or more likely to save the creators from lawsuits.

Anybody can play your music tracks fully via the widget through playlists. People can browse your library on the mediamaster's website, but tracks are limited to the first 30 second clip. Aside from the widget, the site also provide a .pls/.asx link so you can treat your playlist like an internet radio channel. As for uploading, you can upload by tracks, or drag-n-drop folders on the java based advance uploader. Note that there is an iTunes button in the advance uploader. Pressing this button will upload your whole iTunes library, so be careful.

Neat idea, although I wonder how long this will last. I can see Mediamaster being compared to services like live365. They can be considered as internet radio, and then come the licensing issues. We'll see how long this will last/be free.

K550i test

K550i test, originally uploaded by pika2000.

Test

Test

SE K550i, not supported by iSync?

My cellphone, although usable and built-in support with iSync, has seen better days and the battery seems to be shorter too. Time for a new phone. I decided on Sony Ericsson K550i. I was waiting for the iPhone, but the fact that it is locked and 2 year contract really turn me off. When I tried to sync my new K550i, iSync said it is not supported. Uh oh... Google to the rescue. At first, I found some sites actually charging you for the iSync plugin. Too bad SE doesn't provide a free iSync plugin, unlike Nokia. Fortunately, the community doesn't disappoint. Someone developed a plugin for the K550i, and made it available for download.
Thanks Paco. :)

Airport Express + AirTunes

Bought it so I can stream my music from my Macbook to my portable speaker in the kitchen. It works great, and very easy to setup. I've dealt with various wireless routers (D-Link, Netgear, Linksys, etc) and all of them are pretty difficult to setup. Most of them requires you to connect via ethernet first to configure them. For the Airport Express, I connected my Macbook wirelessly, set-up the Airport Express to join my current wifi network, input the encryption key, and voila. Click couple of checkboxes in iTunes, and I'm set to stream my music.

The downside is price. The Airport Extreme cost $100 retail a pop. Can be pretty expensive if you want to wirelessly put music eveywhere in your home. All I need now is a full-featured remote control so I can control iTunes wirelessly, complete with track display and ability to rate tracks. Maybe an iPod with wifi will do this.

Switched to Mac

Well, I've been using my Macbook on a fairly regular basis, and I don't really miss my Windows PC. Most of the key stuff have been transferred (iTunes library, photo library, email, contacts, calendar). Also, thanks to iSync, my cellphone syncs more seamlessly with my Mac than with my PC.

Does this mean I'm getting rid of my PC? No. Although I can always use bootcamp, I want to keep my Macbook as OS X only. I will still be using my PC for other stuff, like transcoding DVDs, ripping Audio CDs (EAC), Picasa for uploading videos to my Picasa web album, bittorrent and games.

Switching to Mac Day 5

Jsut getting used to my Macbook. I like the fact that it boots up pretty quick. Its temperature can be quite hot, expecially when connected to the AC adaptor. Using iStat nano widget, sometimes it shows the CPU temp as high as 70-80 degrees celcius! Did a google, apparently this is not something unusual, with the Macbook Pro reaching 90 degrees celcius! Hopefully this kind of temepratures won't give any ill effects for my Macbook in the future.

Media card reader. You know, those 5 to 50 plus in 1 USB card reader. Apparently not all of them are compatible with Macs. The one I have is not even detected by my Macbook. Bought another cheap $18 one, and it is detected fine. Just a note: when buying something, make sure to read the system requirements, and try to buy things that explicitly say Mac support.

Another one for the wish list. Most PC notebooks can automatically set the brightness of the screen to a lower setting when using battery power (set in the BIOS). I don't seem to find anything like this on my Macbook. Sure, I can just reduce the brightness manually, but it's easier if the system can automatically do it based on the power source.

Switching to Mac Day 4: IM chat

Just a quickie. None of my friends use AIM/Google chat/iChat, so iChat is useless to me. All my friends are using MSN messenger. I find Adium to be quite decent. Nice GUI, and very Apple-like. Alas, no webcam functionality yet.

Switching to Mac Day 3: iPhoto + Office2004 test drive

Just a couple tidbits to add.
1. In iPhoto, I find that I can just drag each roll to the sidebar, and iPhoto will create an album for it. So I did this for all my "rolls," to duplicate the folder structure of Picasa.
2. When editting a photo in iPhoto, you can adjust the color semi-automatically. It's the same idea as finding a neutral color in Picasa, but manually. In Picasa, I can just click 1 button. In iPhoto, you press the Apple key, find a neutral gray color area, and click on the area while still pressing the Apple key. iPhoto will adjust the photo's color accordingly.

Now, in regards to Office 2004 test drive. I know I don't and won't use or need it, so might as well uninstall it. Sounds simple right? I went to the Office 2004 test drive folder, and there's an "Remove Office" icon. Double click that, and went through a couple of screens, but on the screen where the uninstaller ask for what program to uninstall, it listed nothing. WTF?

Searching google, there is not much info about this. I was thinking, maybe the program is not "installed" yet. It's in the hard-drive, but in a pre-installed state. This is very common place when you buy a PC which have tons of pre-installed trial/bloatwares, where the files are in the hard-drive, but final/finishing installation only happens when you start using the programs. So, I decided to run MS powerpoint, went through the license agreement, and quit. Then I re-ran the uninstaller, now it managed to find the office 2004 test drive program. Weird part is it also found Office X (an even older office version for the Mac). Finally, Office 2004 uninstalled, and trash is emptied.

Switching to Mac Day 3: Picasa > iPhoto

I like Picasa much better than iPhoto. Why?
1. I tried to import a bunch of videos taken with my digicam to iPhoto. 1 of them is 1GB in size. Regardless of what I did, iPhoto choked on this 1 file. Everytime I connect my camera, it said "ready to import," and when I pressed import, it started importing, but in the end it didn't transfer the file at all. So I had to go back to my windows PC, imported the file, and copy the file manually to my Macbook.
2. Picasa has these nice effects such as glow and soft focus that you can customize. The effects in iPhoto are more limited and no customizations.
3. Picasa has a tray where I can "hold" my photos while I'm browsing, very useful for a large library. No such thing in iPhoto. I guess I can create an album, and drag-n-drop the photos, but the tray and hold feature in Picasa is much easier to use.
4. The Picasa Web album plug-in for iPhoto doesn't support uploading videos. :(

I just hope that Google and Apple will colaborate together to make either iPhoto better, or Picasa for Mac.

Switching to Mac Day 2 Part 2: iPhoto

After transferring my iTunes library, now is the turn for my pictures. On Windows, I use and love Google's Picasa. Its integration with the Picasa web album is superb. On the Mac, there's iPhoto. Alas, Google doesn't make Picasa for Mac, but they do provide a Picasa web album plug-in for iPhoto, so I can simply export pictures to my Picasa web album.

Backing up pictures from Picasa is very easy. Although by default it is set to backup to optical media, you can reconfigure the backup tool to do a backup to any folder (networked drive, external drive, etc). Simply select the albums you want to backup.

Importing to iPhoto is as easy as importing Picasa's backup folder. Unfortunately, all my editing and enhancements from Picasa are lost, so I would have to review my photo library one of these days and re-do any enhancements using iPhoto. :(

Apparently iPhoto can handle videos too. I have some videos taken by my digicam in my Picasa library, and iPhoto transferred them just fine. Unlike Picasa, playback of videos in iPhoto is handled by Quicktime.

On Picasa, I'm used to have my library setup by folders. With iPhoto, each folder becomes a roll. Problem is, the rolls are not listed in the library sidebar. Definitely something that I have to adjust to. Another point for Picasa, looks like iPhoto doesn't have a built-in backup feature. Ability to do full-screen editing is nice, but I already miss Picasa's features. Picasa's "I'm feeling Lucky" button seems to do a better job than iPhoto's "Enhance" feature. Also I can quickly pick and set a neutral color and do auto brightness/contrast/lightning on Picasa, while everything is manual in iPhoto. Picasa is just so superb (when I first use Picasa, I though it was made by Apple as iPhoto for windows) that it is definitely going to be missed. Again, with Google and Apple being buddies, I hope the best of both will come in the next version of iPhoto, or maybe Picasa for Mac.

Switching to Mac Day 2: iTunes

Now that email, contacts, and calendar are taken care of, it's time for my music. I have 3 iPods (shuffle, nano, and 60GB 5G), and I already have an extensive library in iTunes on Windows. I want to transfer them to my Macbook without loosing any meta data like ratings and playcounts. There are various options in doing this. I don't want to be hassled by editing iTunes library database files manually, so I opted for the backup method. iTunes now has the ability to backup your library, albeit only to optical media. I haven't backed up my library ever anyway, so I prepared a couple DVD blanks and started the process. iTunes automatically divided my library and spanned them to whatever media I put in (mix of dual-layer and single layer DVD blanks). Pretty straight forward, although I wish iTunes can just backup my library into an external hard-drive, which will be much faster than waiting for the DVDs to burn. If you choose to backup everything, iTunes will back EVERYTHING, including all videos and podcasts, so make sure you have plenty of DVD blanks.

I was planning to have the iTunes library sitting on my networked storage, but later found out that syncing the library to multiple computers will be a great hassle. Local hard drive it is then. Restoring them is pretty straight forward too. I insert one of the restore DVD to my Macbook with iTunes opened, and iTunes automatically asked if I want to restore the music. After it finished with 1 disc, it will eject the disc and ask for another. At this point, you can cancel if you want to continue later, which I find to be great. iTunes seems to see any backup disc as an individual backup, so restoring your library partly is not a problem. Basically you can insert any of the backup disc in any order anytime you want, and iTunes will just restore that disc. However, when after I restore my last disc, iTunes still asked for the next disc, which I think can confuse some people (just cancel it and you'll be fine).

After restoration, I find couple things missing, namely the "last played" meta tag and my playlists. Those are missing. Bummer. I have setup playlists to rotate my songs based on the "last played" tag. For the playlists, I went back to my Windows PC, and start exporting my playlists 1 by 1 (oh I wish Apply can just include playlists in the backup). A slight hassle having to import them 1 by 1 to my Macbook. Also, I find playlists that are dependent on other playlists, will screw up. On my Macbook, those playlist seem to not be able to find the other playlists that they are dependent to, even though they are there. So I have to re-linked them 1 by 1. Another thing missed is even though all my podcasts are backed up, iTunes lost track on which podcasts I have listened to, so all podcasts came up as new. Subscription is also lost, so I have to re-subscribe all my podcasts.

OK, library is set. Now syncing my iPods. I know that Macs can read and write on PC-formatted iPods (not the other way around though). However, on my iPod setting screen in iTunes, I saw a warning saying that only Mac formatted iPods can be updated (firmware) via iTunes on a Mac! Another bummer! Since this is a switching plan, I took the dive and restore my iPods and have them formatted for the Mac (restoring iPods on Macs will automatically make them Mac-formatted).

I find iTunes on my Macbook is super smooth, especially when viewing cover flow. Viewing cover flow on Windows is very laggy, while it is silky smooth on my Macbook. I guess all that hassle gotta worth something. :)

So, not a smooth and hassle-free experience. Couple points in regards to iTunes:
1. If you set iTunes to backup your whole library, it will backup everything. For those that have massive library, this means tons of DVD dual-layer blanks, and slow burning process.
2. Backup doesn't backup playlists, "Last played" meta tag, podcast status and subscription.
3. You can only update the firmware of a Mac-formatted iPod on a Mac. Exception is the shuffle, which doesn't get that note on the setting screen.
4. You can restore any backup disc anytime without having to sit there restoring all discs in order at once.

Wish list for Apple:
1. Make the backup program to backup playlists and complete metatags.
2. Allow backup to use external hard-drives.