Admittedly, this is not a Mac specific post - but it is a really cool video of actions shot in high speed and played back in slow motion. I particularly liked the bullets going through soda cans, and the water balloons. Maybe this will inspire some of you to try some high speed video action of your own.

Slow Motion High Frames Compilation

Add to My Profile | More Videos


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I wrote about a great iTunes addin back in September, Gimmesometune. I use it and really like what it adds to iTunes. Of course Gimmesometune will automatically fetch cover art for you, making CoverFlow a nicer experience, but what I really like is the information window that it displays when tracks are played.

The developer recently wrote me and let me know that he's included a suggestion that I made to him, and it will now also fetch Lyrics for you! Sweet, that's awesome, thanks Matt.

Take a look at the website for all the information.

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This is a fantastic price on a refurbished 24" iMac, they come with full warranty and you can purchase AppleCare too.

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Apple stock has been on a tear lately. New highs were hit several time last week. I decided to hit the register Cha-CHING! and I sold the Apple stock that I've been holding. Sure it has room to keep moving higher, but I feel that the recent prices are more speculative based, so it could just as easily fall back a little.

If Apple stock retreats a bit I just may buy some back if I think it has a good chance of moving upward again. But even if Apple stock doesn't fall back, and it keep moving upward - I won't be too disappointed that I sold; Apple stock has been very very good to me, I've earned enough on it to pay for my entire new system... and my entire new next Mac system.


Your Comments appreciated.

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Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

MacSeven

I've used Plaxo for years, it's a fantastic service to help you keep all your addressbook information sync'd.

The Mac client has been out for a while now, it is Universal Binary and it works great.

Integrates with OS X Address Book
- Syncs with all your other clients
- Lightweight and easy to use
- The Plaxo Toolbar for Mac synchronizes your Mac OS X Address Book with your Plaxo Universal Address Book. Wherever you install a Plaxo toolbar, your address book will be consistent and stay up-to-date automatically. You can also access your address book on the web through Plaxo Online.
- No need to learn any new programs; the Plaxo Toolbar for Mac synchronizes with your built-in Mac OS X Address Book.
- Your Plaxo Universal Address Book is a single address book that goes with you, wherever you have Plaxo installed - your data will always stay consistent and update itself automatically.

Your Comments appreciated.

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I love my iMac 20" with Intel power. The other day I was thinking how nice it would be to replace the 250GB drive with maybe a 500GB drive. So after a bit of searching around I found a step by step instruction on how to do this.

Holy cow, this is involved, check out how this is done here. Another option is to have an Apple authorized service center do the swap for you for around $75, seems like the prudent way to go.

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Here is a list of the different Key Combinations which can be used when starting your Intel Mac.

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This guy in the UK has Apple Service Manuals for several of the more recent Mac's posted on his site like the iMac, MacMini, and MacBook Pro. (Yawn, and also most older Mac service manuals too.)

Grab now before Apple sends him a cease and desist.

Your Comments appreciated.

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RAR is a great compression system, it is far more flexible than Zip formats, it has very fast or very high compression, and option all in between, it spans an archive to multiple files like no other compression program out there. The options are simple and easy to use, and to unarchive a multi file archive you only need to unRar the first file, the rest automatically unarchive along with the first.

For single file archiving, since switching back to the Mac, I prefer DMG's - there's a lot to like about them. But for making multi file archives, or unarchiving RAR compressed files, SimplyRAR is my program of choice. RARsoft Labs makes a great product, and the Windows GUI is really nice, but for the Mac they only make command line compression tools. That is where SimplyRAR comes in, it gives a very nice and simple yet powerful interface to RAR for the Mac. SimplyRAR also handles PAR files.

The developer of SimplyRAR has a website for his main business, but not for SimplyRAR, so I've linked to the MacUpdate page for SimplyRAR

NOTE: The Unarchiver, a nice unarchiving program for OS X that fully integrates with your system, it just runs in the background and unarchives as needed, it supports unRARing. There is a new build as of Nov 12, 2006. Grab it here.


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I've mentioned UNO on the blog before, if you haven't checked it out I urge you to. It really enhances and unifies the look of apps on your Mac. Looks do matter! And Darling, your Uno Mac looks marvelous.

UNO derives from the Latin word for one and stands for "as one".

UNO is the root of Unity.

UNO is a theme that brings the sunken unified toolbar/titlebar look&feel to every single window on your system (cocoa or carbon, metal or aqua and already unified windows as well).

On an higher level, UNO's main goal is to enhance aqua interface consistence, by making all elements look&feel "as one".

UNO is aimed to those who want a clean and un-osbstructive interface while keeping the best of Aqua.

The unity level proposed by UNO does not compromises overall GUI contrast: UNO and UNO shade can be mixed up in order to achieve that usability goal.

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I'm heading out on holidays for a few days, I'll be back in town November 19th (just in time to catch the World Rally Car's in New Zealand.)

See you then, and I'll have more Mac goodness upon my return.


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CrossOver Mac is a program which lets you run Windows programs from your Mac - without needing Windows. Think of it as a Rosetta for Windows instead of PowerPC Mac applications. They specifically comment in the notes that Quicken 2007 for Windows still doesn't run on the new CrossOver Shoot! That's the one Windows program that I can't do without. - I would love to see TMPGEnc run on CrossOver, I'll have to test that one.

Notes on the new release: (release url)

Hi Folks,

I'm happy to say that we've now made a public prerelease versionof CrossOver Mac 6.0 available for your testing pleasure. A summarylist of changes is available below.

At this point, we feel we're finally beginning to converge on a final 6.0.We still have some major issues we hope to solve, mostly withprograms like Quicken 2007.

However, we hope this build brings a lot of joy, particularly in fixesfor service packs, Outlook 2003, Quicken versions prior to 2007,and with some Half Life 2 fixes.

We're also hoping to confirm that we've made progress on non US locales,particularly European and Japanese environments, which should nowbe working reasonably well.

Major issues we will continue to work on are around Quicken 2007,and just general polish and clean up of a variety of applications(e.g. End Note and others).

I'm particularly interested in Outlook 2003 use in Exchange environments.In all of our testing, this seems to be working pretty well. I'd really appreciatetest reports on your experiences with it.

At any rate, thanks for your interest and help. We'll be watching the betareports and forums more closely, please direct your feedback there.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Your Comments appreciated.

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I saw a post over on The Unofficial Apple Weblog earlier today, the post was saying how Mail.app and .Mac mail suck because they broke a few things. Many people in the comments talked about either how no, not so, it's great, or others more politely saying how Mail.app does have some flaws.

For some time now I've been meaning to post my thoughts on Mail.app, I guess now is that time.

Mail is a great looking program, the interface is one of the nicest I've seen on a mail program. This is always a good thing, and more or less expected by people on a Mac. There are many issues that I run into with frequency with Mail though.

First let me say that I use AIM email service, formerly MailBlocks. It's a great service, better than Gmail in my opinion. (Side Note, some of the things I like about AIM: Ajax, 2GB account, integrated Plaxo, IMAP access, fast searching, free.) I use AIM via the web interface at work on my XP machine, and I access it at home with Mail via IMAP access.

-Often times mail crashes on me for no apparent reason. I'd say at least twice a week.
-Frequently I receive email with attachments which don't show up in the email at all, or show up as mime looking text, I have to log into my WebMail to access the attachment.
-Mail doesn't download the body of emails so I can't search my email for context within the email (major drag)
-Mail doesn't update the messages in folders other than the Inbox unless I click on that folder.

Elegant interface notwithstanding, Outlook Express is a far superior email client in terms of functioning as an IMAP client.

I sincerely hope that when Leopard is released with the new version of Mail, that Mail has received some much needed improvements, not just new features like Notes, To Do Lists, RSS, and Stationary - these are all great additions, but clearly the "core" Mail functionality needs improvements before more goodies are added on, this sounds more Microsoft like than Apple.


Your Comments appreciated.

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LAME is a fantastic MP3 encoder. The new build 3.97 has been packaged for easy installation on your Mac (Universal Binary) by Thalictrum. Many audio programs use LAME for it's encoding, you may very well have an older version of LAME installed already, whether you do or not, grab this one and run the latest.

Your Comments appreciated.

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Switch Sound Converter is another audio converter that I've tried. It has a simple, easy to use interface, and works well. I have read reviews where people complained that Switch didn't work well with all audio formats, I'm not sure if this was an older model, or on audio formats I haven't tried, but I've had no troubles.

Switch is available for free with limited format support, and Switch can be registered for $39.

NOTE: Switch is on sale until November 15th for $19.40

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There are three Get a Mac ads on the Apple Japan Get-A-Mac website, for whatever reason I think these are kind of cool.

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It is cool that Apple got on board with Bono's RED campaign, helping to fight AIDS in Africa is definitely a worthwhile cause, and those RED iPods are pretty cool looking. But don't think that the iPod is the first or only RED product out there.

My employer, American Express, joined the RED efforts back on March 1, 2006 with the awesome looking card below. Also shown is the RED iPod, it sure looks nice, I may have to break down and get one.

Your Comments appreciated.

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Those cookie lab techs over at ran some tests and verified what some people had suspected, the release of 10.4.8 brings big improvements to Rosetta.

This is great news for you Adobe CS2 users on Intel, or those wanting to move to Intel.

Virtually everything I run is Universal Binary or Intel specific build so while I think it's great, it really doesn't improve anything for me.

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Some German guy figured out how to wire your won USB connector for the new iPod Shuffle for less than a dollar.

Nice going!

Here is the link to the instructions.

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By the way, it seems the $0.10 price on 4x6 prints was a sale, the normal price is $0.12 per print - still a great deal.

Cheers,

-Ed

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Order prints through iPhoto at Sony's ImageStation for only $0.10 per 4x6 print.

I prefer to just show pictures online, but my wife prefers to print them out and put them into photo books. So we do both. I'd been printing digital photos at Costco for several years. The prices were always very good, the quality was also very good, and for me it was convenient - especially once you could upload pictures from your computer. But since switching back to a Mac, Costco isn't quite as convenient for me now because they only support multiple file uploads on a PC. I would select the photos I wanted printed in iPhoto, then export them to a folder on my Media Center Edition Windows XP machine, remote desktop to it, and upload and order from Costco from that computer. Not ideal, but it works without too much trouble.

My search for a new photo printing service started out looking for a company that could print the date of the picture was taken from the EXIF data, but I found non (in the competitive price arena - let me know if you know of somebody that does this.) And in my searching I ran across Sony's ImageStation photo printing service.

Sony ImageStation has two methods of uploading multiple files, the first is a web browser plugin (that I never could get working on Camino or Safari) but fortunately the second method is an iPhoto plugin! The way it works is this: You select the photos you want to print in iPhoto, then instead of selecting ORDER PRINTS to order from Apple/Kodak - you select File | Export and select ImageStation. The files upload to your account, and when the upload is completed you are taken to your account in a browser where you can place your order. The online ordering process is very similar to Costco's - it's easy to use, and of course the $0.10 cost per 4x6 print is awesome.

FWIW - enlargements are far cheaper at Costco than other places, so I'll still go through Costco for enlargements, but after I receive my 400 some odd print order I just placed at Sony's ImageStation, if the quality is good then I'll keep ording 4x6's from Sony.

Your Comments appreciated.

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The guys behind www.MacZot.com have a program in beta now, Disco. It's is an attractive looking cd/dvd burning program. It looks to mainly be data oriented, though I see it can burn Video_TS to a dvd movie. Some features I was hoping for were encoding non DVD-Compliant videos to DVD-Compliant and burn them to a Video DVD, or burn say a DivX DVD, maybe also create menus for video dvd's, etc. At $14.95 it looks like it will be a good deal for what it does.

It's a nice app, great attention was paid to the GUI which is always a good thing! Hopefully as it matures it will become more full featured and give Toast a run for it's money.

Check out the cool smoke effect, click on the picture below for an MOV movie of it in action.

Your Comments appreciated.


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I'll keep in line with yesterday's audio entry about Audacity, and keep the theme today.

Sometimes we need to convert an audio file to a different file format. I often use SoX Wrap for this task. It is a GUI front end to a Linux conversion program, Sound eXchange (SoX).

You can drag audio files onto SoX Wrap and quickly tell it what format you would like to encode them into. It does not let you specify settings like CBR / ABR / VBR / Bitrate, etc but it still has a valuable use even without these more advanced settings. I'm not sure if it is Sound eXchange itself which doesn't support these features, but regardless they aren't available in SoX Wrap today.

SoX Wrap is a wrapper for the conversion routines of the open source sound utility SoX (Sound eXchange). It transfers to and from the following formats: 8svx, aiff, al, au, avr, cdr, cvs, dat, gsm, hcom, la, lu, maud, mp3, nul, ogg, prc, raw, sb, sf, sl, sph, smp, snd, sndt, sw, txw, ub, ul, uw, vms, voc, wav, and wve.SoX Wrap is a free application. It's merely a GUI wrapped around the standard distrubtion; an attempt to make SoX accessible for people unfamiliar with the UNIX environment that it runs in. I encourage anyone who is interested in the application and has some programming skill to visit SoX's SourceForge page (linked above) and participate in the project.

Your Comments appreciated.

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Check out Previous posts on MacSeven.com

MacSeven Posts from October 2006

MacSeven Posts from September 2006

MacSeven Posts from August 2006