Another Win For the Consumers

So, for you laptop buyers out there, this will be great news. Yes, AMD did something awesome (though not altruistic, I'm sure), and opened the blinds to the world of testing laptop batteries. That laptop you bought isn't actually useful for the number of hours it states. The laptop manufacturers turn down the brightness to the screens most of the way (though I do too when I'm unplugged) and let the computer idle for as long as they can, and also leave the wireless off. I mean, really?!?!? If you're not programming, then laptops these days are basically just portals to the Tubes. Now, here come the lawsuits.

I'm hoping this leads to better laptop power. They could certainly stand to consume less, at least. Hopefully, also, laptop vendors will not want to post things like "Hey! This laptop is only good for about fifty minutes!" That actually happened to me once. Remember the Dell Inspiron 9100, which was about the size of a small Mac truck? Well (and this is no surprise), it ate the battery it came with.

Consumer WIN!

FLV -> ??? on a Mac

Have you ever wanted .flv files in a different format? Well, I was in this particular predicament. I wanted audio (in MP3 format) out of a .flv file. After playing around with a bunch of things that didn't work, I discovered a two-step process for it.

First off, on your Mac, open download FFmpegX and associated binaries (instructions on the site) and install it. Then, open it and drop your .flv file into the left-hand pane, and choose to convert it to iPod h.264 320w or 640w. Hit Encode and wait for it to complete. When that's done, drag the resulting file into the left-hand pane of ffmpegx and, in the right, choose Movie audio to mp3, and hit Encode. It should spit out a nice MP3 file that you can drag into whichever application you like to use to listen to such things.

The end.

Mac Apps

It occurs to me that I don't have a collective list of Mac applications that I like. I'm an avid OS X user, and I have my own special set of applications that I love. Primarily, I'm doing this for my friend Tim, for whom I promised I would do this a long time ago.

1. Quicksilver is an awesome little (more than a) launcher. It's quick, pretty, faster than Finder, and indexes your harddrive so that you can reach anything in the shortest time possible. There's a tutorial if you want to see what more you can do.
   
2. Adium is just about the best instant messager on the planet. It's heavily configurable and has loads of interesting features, and supports things like Google Talk, Twitter, and Facebook natively.
   
3. Growl is a notifier. Lots of applications support Growl. It allows these applications to send messages to Growl, which will the pop up little notification screens on the actions that just happened. For instance, Adium supports Growl by sending instant message texts to it so that the body of the message can just pop up on the screen for a few seconds to allow you a preview.
   
4. Mail/Address Book are built-in to OS X. What's really cool, though, is the integration they have with each other. Instead of Mail having its own e-mail address book, it uses the OS's native address book. Other applications do this too, but these exhibit the best integration I've seen.
   
5. Opera 10 Beta/Firefox/Safari - Three very different browsers, but each serves its purpose, and each is pretty cool. The Opera 10 Beta is fantastic, fast, and has features no other browsers share, like the ability to view thumbnails of all your tabs, but doing so within the tab bar, and Speeddial (which was stolen by Apple for Safari). Firefox has loads of interesting plug-ins, like Noscript, Flashblock, Download Helper, and other features. The Safari 4 beta is pretty cool, too. It's also quick, and, like all Apple products, has a very pretty user interface.
   
6. Handbrake is a pretty phenomenal way to ahem backup DVDs.
   
7. Delicious Library is one of the only applications I've purchased for OS X. It's a digital library for DVDs, books, and games. One of the coolest features it has, though, is the ability to use my Macbook's built-in iSight camera to scan the bar codes of these items and then pull their information from Amazon.
   
8. I Love Stars provides a very pleasant interface for ensuring that you have rated all of your music.
   
9. VLC is just about the best video player ever.
   
10. Perian is one of those applications you'll install and never see again. What it does, though, is critical. It gives Quicktime the ability to play loads and loads of other types of videos, and pretty much just makes the Quicktime experience a bit more enjoyable.
    
    That's all for now. As i remember more, I might update, but that's my list of core applications.
    

Microsoft Software (Mis)Management

I generally don't like Microsoft. I'm not terribly happy with them. Their software is convoluted and complex. They can't design a user interface. Also, for some reason, they like to try to tell their users what they meant to do instead of letting them just do it (I'm looking at you, Office AutoFormatting).

The most recent atrocity is a Microsoft licensing thing. I have a piece of software that the EULA says I can install on two computers. One copy is installed on the girl's computer. The other was installed on a virtual machine.

I recently decided to move to a different OS on a different virtual machine. I wanted to migrate the software to that virtual machine. When I tried to activate it, it stated that I had already installed it on two computers. This is true.

However, when I returned to the other virtual machine, I found no way to release its activation. As a result, I cannot install it on my new VM. I'm irritated.

In an attempt to remedy this (unfortunately prior to fully reading the activation error message), I navigated to the software's home page, only to find that, to even ask a question to Microsoft, I have to pay them money! They are money-mongering idiots who can't design user interfaces.

After failure, I decided to try to install it once more. This time, I fully read the error. In it was an email address to email for questions about this error. I have done so. I fear the response...