Darkavich's Daily Ramblings Ramblings of a Mad Sys-Admin

I had great hopes for this tool. It is a device that lets you play video/audio/photos from your mac. The concept is perfect; the implimentation is horrible.

It has a remote that is impossible to understand. I had to keep looking at the quick reference guide to know what the buttons do. The remote performed poorly, unless I had it sitting right in front of the unit. There is no quick skip or quick back, so when you fast forward you end up going way past, then have to rewind. The one positive was it allowed you to change the screen ratios on the fly. This was a very usefull feature. The multi-media features were pretty good. But for Video it was a poor performer. Also, the composite video required a very tight connection to work. (I think it was a bad connection on the unit).

I think they have a long way to go before they will be ready for prime time or replace my ReplayTV. I rarely give up on a device after 25 minutes, but I lost my patience with this unit very quickly. Thank goodness I bought this on amazon.com, so returns are cake.

The search continues…

Back in the the 1970’s… You remember them don’t you? Oh wait, some of you were not even swimming in the gene pool yet… Man I feel old 😉 Anyway, back in the 1970’s there was a great Radio Show called “CBS Radio Mystery Theater”. I used to listen to it every night at 9pm. Some of these shows helped fuel my imagination and have turned me into the demented person I am 😀

I have embarked on a monumental task. I am editing 1400 episodes of the show. I plan to cut out the comercials so that they are only about 45 minutes long each.

I have been fighting trying to find a decent audio editing tool for mp3. So far most of the tools I have found convert the file, then you have to convert them back to mp3. This is very time consuming. I did find one tool called mp3 trimmer, but it was very difficult to use the first go around. Plus my power mate doesn’t work very well in it.

So consider this a formal call for volunteers to help me edit up my library. I also have found a few episodes that are missing their introductions.

If anyone is insterested in decending into this madness of editing, let me know and I will show you what needs to be done.

Ok, you finally came over to the light side and bought a mac! Yeah!

So I am always asked; “what else should I buy?” I have put together a few must have’s for mac users.

Most users enter the mac world with a power book or the mini. The first thing your going to need is port/disk expansion. I highly recommend the Mini-Pal. This neet little device gives you expanded usb and firewire ports, plus a faster hard drive. It even has a one button backup system.

Want to use your mac as a Digital Video recorder? Get an eyeTV card. And better yet, get the eyeHome. This will let you watch your video, photos, music, or any of your eyeTV recorded shows on your TV.

Do you want to do video or audio editing? If you want to have very fine control over the cursor, get a Powermate. I love mine, and having it pulse whenever I have new mail is the ultimate geek toy.

An Ipod! But hey, I don’t need to tell you that. But what you really need is two software programs. Jhymn and Make AAC’s Bookmarkable

If you have a mini, you really need 1gig of memory

Enjoy your new mac!