software | Works for me

Cocoa Remote Desktop 0.4 in beta

May 7, 2007 at 11:16 am | Posted in osx, software, sysadm | Leave a comment

One of my favourite OS X applications just got better; check out the latest release of Cocoa Remote Desktop, 0.4 beta 1.

Here’s a quick list of the most relevant changes, please refer to announcement for more details:

Clipboard support: text can now be copied and pasted between active sessions and OS X
Save screen capture to file
Quick connect: connect to a server by just typing the address into the toolbar and hitting enter
Third mouse button recognized (usually middle-click)
Throttled mouse events, which should speed up sessions on very slow bandwidth connections

I would happily help the author in finding bugs, but at the moment I have yet to see one 🙂 , kudos to arcadiclife.

Mail.app extensions

May 7, 2007 at 9:01 am | Posted in customization, gpg, mail, osx, software, tagging | Leave a comment

Out of the box, the OS X mail client is pretty functional and useful; using the following extensions I’ve got it to cover all of my needs:

Mail Tags 2.0:this is the best mail tagging system that I’ve ever seen, it even supports saving tags in message headers, a must for IMAP users.
GPGMail:a featureful plugin for GPG/PGP users.
Growl with mail.app notification:Growl is extremely useful on its own and together with the GrowlMail plugi-in provides a nice notification system for incoming messages.

Tikouka.net offers a comprehensive listing of mail.app plugins, check them out.

CoRD progress

April 20, 2007 at 2:23 pm | Posted in osx, software | Leave a comment

Cocoa Remote Desktop is progressing very quickly; if you’re feeling brave, checkout the latest alpha at Arcadiclife.com; I cannot stress how much I like this project since I got my MacBook, it’s really set to make RDP pleasant again under OS X.

Experiences in DVD ripping

April 14, 2007 at 11:33 pm | Posted in multimedia, osx, software | Leave a comment

I have a large collection of audio cds, which I am slowly ripping on my home NAS (most of the time with cdparanoia or EAC); I have lots of limited editions with bonus DVDs, which I decided to rip alongside the audio tracks for comfortable playing.

I am an audioholic, and I always choose FLAC or Apple Lossless for audio ripping, but I don’t care that much for video, so H.264, MPEG-4 or XviD are perfect choices for my archival purposes; I settled on MPEG-4 at the moment (with MP3 audio) because almost any device I own is capable of playing it without too much hassle.

After a bit of googling, I found a very interesting cross platform project which serves this purpose, called HandBrake(recently merged with MediaFork, check the site for the current name), and I tested it under OS X for ripping the bonus DVD included in the latest Chimaira release, Resurrection.

I ripped the first title of the DVD using the following settings:

Video settings

Audio settings

The conversion of the first title (1 hour and 26 minutes long) required about 30 minutes on my MacBook 2GHz with 2 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive; during the encoding I have worked with Visual Studio 2005 under Parallels, so take this “benchmark” with a grain of salt 🙂 . I can see a bit of interlacing in the resulting video, but it’s probably due to my inexperience with the settings; other than that, it looks good.

UPDATE: simply check the Deinterlace setting in the Picture Settings dialog to solve all your interlacing issues 🙂 .

I usually watch videos using VLC, which respects the anamorphic settings, but Apple software like QuickTime has issues with these; have a look at the Handbrake documentation for the gory details, especially read the Guide to Anamorphic Encoding in MediaFork. If your target is Apple stuff (QuickTime, iTunes, iPod etc.), see this very informative post by Mike Curtis.

To get a rough idea of the anamorphic issue,look at these stills of the video played in VLC and QuickTime on my system:

VLC vs QuickTime anamorphic display

HandBrake is still in beta, but seems to work well; this is not a surprise, considering the solid foundations on which it is built; checkout this page to get the complete picture.

For some reason the download speed from the official site was pretty slow; should you experience this issue, try downloading from MacUpdate.

I haven’t bothered to try HandBrake on Ubuntu or Windows, but I suppose that it will work without issues, so give it a try; while you’re at it, checkout the new Neal Morse recording, it’s freaking awesome (Neal also provides free music downloads on its site)!!!

Mount an NTFS volume read/write on OS X

April 6, 2007 at 6:51 pm | Posted in integration, osx, software | 1 Comment

OS X is able by default to mount and browse disks and partitions formatted using the NTFS filesystem, but only for read access.

With the port of the FUSE tools to OS X (project MacFuse), it is now possible to use the NTFS-3G driver to mount NTFS volumes for read/write access.

You can find detailed instructions and downloads in this post by Paul Blacksburg, which has developed, together with Sören Nils Kuklau, a package containing a compiled NTFS-3G driver and a set of command line tools to manage mounting, labeling and more (just like ntfsprogs under GNU/Linux).

I tried the software for mounting a Iomega USB external disk, and it worked like a charm; write performance is still kind of slow, but work is undergoing to improve it (keep in mind that NTFS-3G is still pretty young), and I’ve copied 8 gigs of audio without problems.