Mat on Macs

We’re getting an Apple Store! Okay, perhaps that’s a bit harsh, but the cool news is that the Knoxville News Sentinel is reporting that we’re getting an Apple store in West Town Mall. No word yet if it’s going to be a full size store or one of the mini stores. I suspect that the local Mac dealer (MCS) can’t be too happy about this. (And yes, I realize we’re not going to be getting an Apple Store as cool as the one in the picture, but I took this at the New York SOHO Store back in 2003 and it was convenient to hand).

Via MacVolPlace

So I haven’t been posting for a while, but I do have a bunch of things on the burner. However, something I have been waiting for since I got my Mactel finally happened. Brent Simmons has released a public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1. I absolutely live in NNW, so this is a big deal for me. It’s smokin’ fast, and includes a variety of other updates (like Newsgator syncing of subscriptions, including read/unread status between computers (Mac and Windows) and the web). Brent has previously promised that registered users would be given 2 year subscriptions to Newsgator at some point, so I’m looking forward to that. Anyway, go get it here.

Now if only Pathfinder and Flip4Mac would come out as UB’s, I’d be pretty much set. Evidently they’re doing a closed beta for the UB of Pathfinder right now, and there is a clunky work-around for Flip4Mac that I will be posting about later.

The Different District. Lots of great Apple ads, conveniently arranged. A fun time-waster.

Just a quick note to say the HSP is on hiatus while I wait to receive a couple of NICs I ordered from Newegg. Once I get those, I should be able to get everything going. I’ve been doing some research online which leads me to think I might be better off going with IPCop rather than smoothwall (ipcop is a fork of smoothwall) since support for a Blue interface is already built into IPCop 1.4.

So to get the Home Server Project started I obviously needed the server. At first I thought about going with a Linux server running on an old Athlon PC I happened to have from the bad old days from before I saw the Mac light. However, after playing around a bit with Ubuntu I decided to just go with what I know–OS X. Now ideally I would be running OS X Server, but I’m not willing to drop $200+ on the project so I’ll just have to go with a regular client version of OS X which nonetheless has a lot of server features available, and which can of course be upgraded with lots of open source server tools. Since I’m doing this project on a shoestring budget I was wondering what sort of Mac I could get for $100 or less. Some eBay searching revealed that 500-600 GHz G3 iMacs were generally going for about $150 and I didn’t want to pay that much. As luck would have it, however, I found a 400 MHz graphite iMac DV SE without a hard drive, but with 512MB of RAM for $68. The RAM was important because OS X is very memory hungry and I didn’t really want to buy it (in fact, at Crucial.com a 512MB stick for this machine runs about $100). Anyway, I bought the iMac and it was delivered a few days later–with shipping it totaled about $100.

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I fear that I’m afflicted with a terrible disease whose name I’ve just discovered. While browsing the smoothwall.org community I saw someone else noting that he was also afflicted with this disease and he gave its name. We are both suffering from the “fix it till it’s broke” syndrome. Just can’t stop; if it’s there to be mucked with… well ya just gotta. So my latest project: a home server. Here’s the plan:

What the image shows (click for larger version) is my planned home network. I recently purchased an old graphite G3 iMac DV SE (more details in a subsequent post) to be the home server itself. I’m planning to do several things with the server including running it as:

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Most of the time when I’m playing videos I’m also futzing around with other stuff at the same time so I often do not use Frontrow (as I’m typing this post I’ve got a movie going). Anyways, I’m playing a DVD full screen on my main monitor with DVD Player and it occurs to me: I wonder if the iMac remote works with DVD player. Well, hot damn, it does! Play/pause, chapter forward/back, 4x fast forward/back (hold buttons down) all work. In fact, the play/pause button works on the DVD Player app even if some other program like Safari is in the foreground. (The menu button, however, does not bring up the DVD menu, but Frontrow). What about Quicktime Player? Yep, that one works too (play/pause, scan forward/back). When something besides Frontrow is running, the volume up/down buttons on the remote adjust the system volume. In short, this thing does more than I realized, but exactly what one would expect–isn’t that more or less what makes the Mac different? Well done Apple!

[update: TUAW has linked to this post (Thanks!) and in the comments there you find out that the remote does even more things–control iTunes, put the machine to sleep, etc. Cool!]

I was recently looking for some Macintosh posters to decorate my office and perhaps one of the sort of mousepads that you see in Apple showrooms, but I’ve had a heck of a time finding any. I’ve never understood Apple’s unwillingness to sell officially licensed accessories. While you can find a few Apple memorabilia type items at places like The Missing Byte, it is quite hard to find any number of things one might like to have. Apple tends to engender the kind of loyalty that would lead to a lot of sales of mousepads, shirts, etc. Apple owns one of the most valuable brands in the world, and while I can understand their desire to keep it somewhat exclusive, it seems patently foolish to forgo a lucrative market which is pure profit. Other exclusive brands don’t seem to mind. So what gives? Why doesn’t Apple what my money?

One of the first problems I ran into was playing downloaded videos on BONAVENTURE. This is really annoying as Divx for Mac 6 (PPC) had just been released a few days before and I was justing getting used to using it to play divx and xvid content in the Quicktime Player. Fortunately, the Divx people are on the ball and have already released a Intel beta. I’ve downloaded it and it seems to be running quite well. It has played most of the files I’ve thrown at it so far, but still chokes on certain xvids. [update: There’s a divide by zero error caused, evidently, by malformed AVI headers. Supposedly it’s already fixed internally, so I assume they’ll kick it out with the next beta. For now, though, my only recourse has been MPlayerOSX (see below)]

Before the Divx release I was using the excellent open source video player VLC, but it just wasn’t cutting it through Rosetta. And from what I could tell from the forums it might be a while before the Intel native binary is released. A few sites list an Intel binary from last year, which I had to google to find, but even when I did I was unable to make it work properly (all the blacks appeared green). [update: Someone suggested to me in an email comment that I should try one of the nightly Intel builds found here. I just tried the Feb 21st nightly build and it’s finally working! Huzzah!]

After assiduous searching I found that an Intel binary of MPlayerOSX (download) had been released that would in fact play the xvid that was acting up. I never really liked MPlayerOSX (which come from the Linux world and looks it). I found the PPC version to be much less capable (and attractive) than VLC, but I’ll take what I can get as long as my content playing. So I would recommend first trying the Divx codec in Quicktime and if that doesn’t work try MPlayerOSX.

[update: sadly the story on Windows Media support isn’t as good. Ironically, Microsoft announced that it was stopping development of the unlamented Windows Media Player for the Mac and instead would be giving away flip4mac’s WMV codec for QT Player at MWSF, but unfortunately they’ve indicated that it’s not yet Intel compatible and there’s no ETA.]

As I mentioned before, my previous computer is a G4Powerbook. I was previously using the mac version of the open source, cross-platform virtual keyboard and mouse sharing software SynergyKM to share my desktop keyboard and mouse with my notebook (in fact I still use Synergy at work where the server is a PC). While there is a universal binary out, I was having some trouble with it so I turned to a Mac only alternative called teleport. As you can see below you arrange the machines’ desktop so that it matches the actual physical layout of your computers. When you move the mouse to the edge of the screen it automatically jumps over–including copying the clipboard. A bezel appears on the server mac indicating that the mouse and keyboard are controlling the other machine. In short, teleport “just works” and is a much more mac-like program.

So now I can control Clare with my preferred Logitech MX 1000 and Macally Icekey and I can have a threeway! Highly recommended.