Ennui Blog

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I’m going to be getting my hands on a rather large 38″ TV this week and my wife and I have resolved to turn it into a home theater. The only problem is that the TV is from circa 1998. The picture is great and the TV works great but it doesn’t have any of the new fancy connectors such as HDMI or Component Video.

I’ve been jonesing for an Apple TV. It would work well with my Mac and my existing collection of Apple videos and the network integration is seamless. The only problem is that an Apple TV requires HDMI or Component inputs in order to work. The only solution I can find it to buy an expensive ($130) Composite Video to Component video converter. You can pick up an Apple TV for about $200 reburbed, but combined with the required converter (which may not work) it pushes the cost up significantly. So much, that I’m now considering going the extra mile and getting a Mac Mini.

A Mac mini would provide pretty much the same functionality as an Apple TV. It comes with Front Row for viewing videos and DVD’s. It has a built in DVD player and if we wanted to, we could surf the net, giving our house a valuable second computer. However, Mac Mini’s can be pricey, about $400+. The benefits are clear though, you can hook up a Mac Mini using old school analog hookups. Not only that, we can get a TV tuner for the Mac Mini and use at a free PVR.

Previously, I had hooked up my Aluminum iMac to our other analog TV using an adapter and 50 feet of S-Video cable. The solution worked pretty good. The picture was nice and the sound was excellent. The only problem was that the 50 foot S-Video cables were very fragile and would break after very little use. It was a very unreliable connection that we had to abandon.

Western Digital has just released a product that may do the job I want. It’s the WD TV, it’s a set top box that allows you to hook up your external hard drive to your TV and watch video with a Front Row like interface. This may be the solution we need and it only costs $100 and it will work with ancient connectors. It also supports a myriad of media formats, which is perfect for my video collection.

I’m open to any other TV set top box solution for watching videos from my computer on my TV. I’d like to spend as little as possible and have access to my huge collection of video on my home network.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Here’s a video demonstrating the WDTV:

It can be difficult finding an Apple app for a specific task. Especially if you’re in the middle of a project and need a program quickly to do one thing and do it simply. So, I’ve put together a list of the 10 Mac Apps that you may not have heard of in the hopes that some people find these programs as useful as I have.

Adium

All iMacs come with iChat but it’s not fully featured enough, especially if you use Yahoo or MSN Messenger. Adium is a multi-protocol instant messenging app. It combines all the major IM protocols into one app. You can use AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Bonjour, Jabber, iChat and much much more. Best of all it’s completely free.

Cost: Free
Website: Adium

Evernote

Evernote is an incredible application. It’s a multi-platform notetaking program. It has a standalone program for taking notes, an iPhone program and a web based client. You can edit a note on any medium and they will all stay synced with each other. It’s revolutionized the way I write. A really cool feature in the iPhone program is that you can take photo snapshots and sync them. The program and the service are free (but there is a usage quota - I have never hit it).

Cost: Free
Website: Evernote

Livequartz

Everyone knows that photoshop is the mother of all image editing applications. The problem is that I have no freaking idea how to use it. Simple tasks elude me and I don’t have the time to learn it. Livequartz is a simple application sort of like MS Paint, you can edit images quickly, resize, save in a multitude of formats and do more advanced things. It’s open source and free. Great little program, it’s light and quick. You’ll have an image resized before Photoshop even opens.

Cost: Free
Website: LiveQuartz

Filezilla

Transmit is the best FTP client for Mac, in my opnion, but FileZilla is a good, free full featured alternative. It intergrates well with OS X and is very stable. It’s free and open source as well.

Cost: Free
Website: FileZilla

NeoOffice

Don’t want to gouge your eyeballs out installing MS Office for Mac? NeoOffice is a good alternative. It’s free and works with all the Office formats. It’s pretty fast and is now native to OS X.

Cost: Free
Website: NeoOffice

Scrivener

Scrivener is a fantastic writing program. It’s designed to help you brainstorm your ideas, outline them, put in notes and images and then finally write your book. Once your book is written, it will compile it for you in a Word Doc. It also has full screen writing mode, which takes away all distractions. You can do all of this in one program, it’s fantastic.

Cost: $39.95
Website: Scrivener

iStat

Not really an application. It’s a free dashboard widget that tells you everything you could possibly want to know about your computer. It tell you how much hard drive space you have, how much ram is being used, CPU temp, etc. It has it all. Excellent widget to have to keep tabs on your Mac.

Cost: Free
Website: iStat Widget

Journaler

This is a great little program if you want to keep a daily journal. It has all the requisite text editing features needed, it’s laid out like Apple Mail and other similar program. What sold me was that you can choose to blog your journal entries or you can export them easily to another format. Great for if you ever want to turn it into bookform.

Cost: $34.95
Website: Journaler

MarsEdit

I manage about seven blogs right now and it got increasingly annoying to login to all their respective web interfaces. This consolidates all your blogs and puts them into one program. You can write and update blogs on most platforms directly from the program. You can also enter your own HTML and upload images. It’s great. It has saved me a lot of time.

Cost: $29.95
Website: MarsEdit

Papers

Paper is a pretty cool app. It searches your hard drive and indexes all or your PDF files. You can rate them, tag them and organize them like you would in Mail or iPhoto. Pretty slick application. Useful for me because I save PDF’s when I come across an interesting story that I want to keep, for ideas and research.

Cost: $42.00
Website: Papers

I was not wowed by the announcements and subsequent release of the new 3G iPhone.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an Apple fanboy. But honestly I see no purpose to the 3G iPhone. The design is almost the same. It’s only redeeming feature is 3G internet access. But I don’t have 3G service where I live, so that feature is useless. Despite the lack of 3G access, one will still have to pay for 3G service, which is more expensive that the current package.

Really if you want most of the functionality of the 3G iPhone just download iPhone software 2.0. You’ll get access to all the awesome news apps and will have most of the same functionality.

I won’t be upgrading.

It’s that time of year again. There’s a major Apple based conference coming up with a scheduled keynote by our God, Steve Jobs, and the geek media is frothing at the mouth of the possibilities it could hold.

In the past, Apple was pretty reliable about announcing new and awesome products at it’s major events. Lately, however, the groundbreaking product announcements haven’t really been happening like they used to. The last major, earth shattering product announcement was the iPhone and that was nearly 18 months ago.

So, with that fact in mind, perhaps that’s why the rumor sites are going crazy with speculation. It’s been so long since a major product announcement, there’s gotta be something up their sleeve. What’s Steve Jobs been up to?

We’re all hoping that it will be more than another version of the iPhone. That in itself would not be a major, groundbreaking announcement. Woohoo a 3G iPhone. Ok great, but it’s still the iPhone (I won’t be buying one).

There’s rumors circulating of an Apple Tablet PC based on the iPhone OS. This would be pretty cool, but honestly the idea of it doesn’t really impress me that much. It’s not something I would stand in line overnight for. Granted, Steve hasn’t demonstrated it yet.

This begs the question. Apple has conquered most avenues of revenue. They’re the standard for music players, standard for high end computers, standard for high end laptops, they’ve tackled TV, online music and movie sales, the list goes on and on. What could they possibly do next? Can Apple out Apple itself? Should we even expect it to at this point?

I hope this isn’t the beginning of a decline. Really, we should be content with every product Apple has given us. Why do we always need something MORE? Always need something better?

I’m not going to get very excited about WWDC. Of course, I’ll monitor the live feeds on the major Mac new sites, but I don’t expect anything earth shattering to come out of WWDC. I expect a new 3G iPhone, maybe a Mac tablet and maybe a preview of the next version of OS X.

We shall see. If anything, Steve Jobs is great a surprising us all.

Last year, Mac geeks around the world heralded the coming of the Jesus Phone. It was the great phone, music player, PIM, web browser and automatic ass wiper to ever be invented. We gobbled it up like crack addicts who screw to earn the next hit. Disclaimer, Yes, I have an iPhone, yes I love it. However…

iPhone lovers have been nagged by the possibility that their great phone would COULD HAVE been better. Everytime it takes 5 minutes for Digg to load on Edge, you have to wonder, there has to be a better way and surely, Steve Jobs is thinking of it. Well, the savior everyone is anticipating is a 3G Enabled iPhone.

They possibility of it’s release next month is being treated as the Second Coming of the Jesus Phone.

What the hell is 3G and why is it going to be better? Is it actually better?

I remember in the early naughties, 3G was touted at the future of cell phones. I salivated at Japanese phones and European phones that supposedly had this ‘broadband’ capability. Steaming video would be possible they said! Well, typical of American cell carriers, they couldn’t get their crap together. So, they came up with 2.5G, which became known as Edge. It gave moderately fast data speeds, if by fast you mean compariable to logging onto Prodigy at 2400 BPS. 

Over the past couple years, the cell carriers, flying jumping on the bandwagon, decided to roll out 3G networks. Coverage is spotty. Most major cities are covered but the coverage is no where near as great as Edge. The point I’d like to make is that 3G is old. There is already a 4G elsewhere in the world.It promises faster speeds than Edge, and it may deliver that but there are disadvantes as well, such as:

• Spotty Coverage
• Bandwidth and Latency are different concepts - just because the speed is fast doesn’t mean packets of data will actually move faster
• High Bandwidth = greater data errors
• Phone software doesn’t run as fast as a ‘fast connection’ does
• 3G drains batteries

Despite all these disadvantages, iPhone lovers have been clamoring for an iPhone based on outdated 3G technology. And frankly, Digg loading in 2 minutes rather than five would be great. Battery technology hasn’t changed much in the last year since the first iPhone came out, so I doubt they’ve really fixed the battery drain issue, so likely we’ll have a bigger and heavier battery in the new 3G iPhone.

I’ve been pretty happy with my iPhone over the past year. Yeah, it’d be great to have stuff load faster. But it’s not a reason to plink down another $500 for another one. Apple would have to enable it to make me breakfast, then I’d consider.

The iPhone second coming will undoubtedly come soon and it will convert the holdouts who’ve been waiting for 3G. Will current iPhone users switch in droves? I don’t think so. Besides, the minute it comes out, they’ll be demanding 4G from Steve Jobs.

One thing is for sure, we Apple nuts are never truly satisfied.