575MB/sec

How does 575MB/sec transfer rate sound to you? If you're interested in editing uncompressed HD video you'll need transfer speeds not too far off this number. Mike Curtis over at HD for Indies had a very informative article on how to achieve this with a home-built 2.7TB RAID with a PowerMac G5 for under US$3,000.

Mac WMV, finally?

Macworld had an article yesterday about Flip4Mac, an upcoming (late 2004) Windows Media Format tool that allows importing, exporting and playback of wmv files in Quicktime. Macworld's report concentrates on the ability to encode wmv files, however in my possibly biased opinion it's the flexibility of having wmv import and export Quicktime components (if that is indeed what they are) that is the big news here.

10,000 zombie PCs

It's almost like something out of Neuromancer! An article at the Register today describes the discovery in Norway of a 10,000-strong network of PCs all infected with worms such as MyDoom and Bagle being controlled via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for spamming or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The article goes on to refer to a Ohio-based IRC provider shut down for acting as middleman in corporate DDoS attacks.

1.5GB mobile phone

Okay ... this is what I want my next phone to be like. This CultOfMac report on a new phone from Samsung sounds flippin' awesome. 320x240 colour screen, megapixel camera, 1.5GB harddisk, built in FM transmitter, TV output (!!!), and built-in stereo speakers. The original TechWorld report is here.

The phone is being discussed as an iPod killer. I don't know about that, 1.5GB translates to about 15 albums worth of 128Kbps MP3s - not enough for a real music freak. However for me the killer features are most definitely the hard disk, megapixel camera, FM transmitter, and TV out. While I probably won't go for a $800 Samsung phone, it should only be a matter of time before Nokia or SonyEricsson incorporate most of these features. The one probable drawback will be battery life. Neither of the articles discuss it, but with a built in hard disk I would be surprised if it could manage a whole day of moderate use.

Superdrive DVD-RW without Firmware Updates

MacInTouch had a report today about a workaround for Apple's crippled superdrive firmware which doesn't allow DVD-RW. Normally you would hop over to the Superdrive firmware page of the incomparable Cynikal and download a firmware update to enable the RW features of your drive, however if you're worried about ruining your drive, or your drive is too new for a firmware update, then the MacInTouch solution may be more appropriate.

Edit: due to MacInTouch's terrible layout and constantly changing URLs (the above link from yesterday is already broken!) I'll repost the relevant passage here:

If you put a fresh DVD-RW in your Superdrive, it spits it back out. However, get a friend with a DVD-RW on a PC to write something onto it. This will mount on your Mac just fine. And guess what? Toast will now erase it and from now on it can be used like any DVD-RW! It's as killer workaround that I have tested with no problems.

Ogg and the Music Man

When Mireth Technology, the makers of MacVCD and iVCD, released Music Man (formerly MacMP3CD) a few days ago I was curious to see if it would simplify the process of converting songs from my MP3 collection to 48Kbps Ogg files for my P800 phone. My current method involves batch converting MP3s to WAV with MACAST MP3 Converter and then converting the WAVs to Ogg with Ogg Drop X.

After installing Music Man as per the instructions, I discovered that in order to convert MP3s to Oggs I would need to install the LAME MP3 encoder as well as the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component. I already had the Ogg component installed, and after a quick read of this I was ready. Note: installing LAME 3.96 resulted in an error at the end of the make install process - the error was make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1, however the encoder seems to be installed correctly, since Music Man MP3 conversions now work correctly.

All of the above only took 20 minutes or so, and soon after that I was merrily converting MP3s to Ogg in just one click. Very handy, although watching the output folder shows that Music Man converts the MP3 to WAV before reconverting to Ogg, so the actual workflow appears to be similar to my previous two step process. However, I was disappointed to discover that Music Man does not apparently allow you to set the bitrate of your output Oggs. They appear to be 128Kbps files, which is too large for me to consider using on a mobile phone with only a 128MB memory card.

Dual Layer DVDs on OS X 10.3.5

Insanely Great Mac reported today on an article on the French site MacBidouille about burning DVD-R dual layer discs on a Pioneeer DVR 108 using OS X 10.3.5. You can find an English translation here. Points of interest include support only by Toast and DragonBurn (no Finder or iApps), and Toast 6.0.7 only being able to burn a maximum of 8GB onto the disc (which took 27mins).

Compressing sparse disk images

After recently getting a bargain on a no-name 256MB USB key drive I wanted to store an encrypted password-protected disk image on it. However after playing around with Disk Utility for a while, I discovered that although a 'sparse' disk image sounded like what I wanted, it actually wasn't! The problem with sparse disk images is that although they aren't fixed in size and grow as you add more stuff to them (which is what I wanted), when you delete the same stuff they do not automatically shrink! Technically this is understandable since the 'deleted' data hasn't been zeroed and is actually still on the 'disk', however it wasn't what I was hoping for.

So after much fruitless searching, I appended a question onto this existing Apple discussion in the hope for an answer. However after re-reading the discussion and having a look at the hdiutil man pages I eventually managed to refine my search enough to turn up an article on MacOSXHints which had exactly the solution I needed!

The answer is simple! Simply fire up the terminal, and type:

hdiutil compact (with a space at the end)

and then drag and drop your sparse disk image file into the terminal window. Note that you need to type a space after the word 'compact', before you drag the image icon to the terminal window.

Depending on the size of your sparse image the process will take a few seconds to a few minutes. Get info should now reveal that the image file no longer 'remembers' the size of the deleted files.

Note: when specifying the size of an encrypted sparse image in Disk Utility you are specifying the maximum size.

Hue/Saturation for iMovie

MacUpdate reported today on an update to HSL, a hue/saturation plug-in for iMovie.

iPod vs The Cassette

I recently stumbled across this guy's crazy mac.com page. My favorite part was the photo album entitled iPod vs. The Cassette. Defintely worth a look!

Movable Type 3.1 launched

Movable Type 3.1 was released yesterday. Looks good, perhaps one day soon I'll look into upgrading.