Copacetic

So I got a new Mac G5, it looks pretty cool and is designed to replace the cable madness sprouting in all directions from our current windows PC (a Dell). All the things you may have heard about the Mac is true, its incredibly stylish and with the wireless mouse and keyboard (I already have a wireless lan), the only cable protruding is the power cable so chalk one up for Apple.

Now I use a JVC Everio MC200 for home video.This is a tapeless video recorder with a hard-disk that creates these funky .MOD files (MPEG-4?). The recorder comes with its own editing and management software (Power Director) but I don’t do much more than dump the content to disk at the moment. On Windows I just asked Windows Media Player to try and read the files and bingo, up comes the whole thing with no issues. It then mapped the .mod extension to Windows Media Player and ever since then I upload and away we go.

Now on the Mac it just plain don’t work. After a little digging I discovered that with the Quicktime Pro upgrade I might be able to look at them. I bought this (~ €40) only to discover I had to shell out an additional €20 to get the MPEG-4 codec. Even with this I still can’t hear the damn video. I then tried ffmpegx, a free download. It can create a format that Quicktime understands but I appear to have lost some resolution.

Now I’m new to the mac so I could just be having a bad attack of neophytes syndrome, but I don’t think so. Smells more like corporate gouging to me and sloppy compatibility to me.

Emptying all of the change in your pockets into a carpark payment machine and having just enough to pay the ticket…

I see VA Software is now offering Sourceforge OnDemand. This is the closed source version (e.g. you can use to to manage proprietary, non Open Source Projects) of the hugely successful sourceforge.net repository used for Open Source projects. At 50 bucks per user per month it isn’t super cheap. I guess its priced to allow larger companies that can support a full-time Tools support person to transition to Sourceforge Enterprise.

This approach benefits early stage startups in a number of ways,

Now all they need is a credible discounting scheme for larger numbers of users or projects.

IrishEyes points out the lack of blog credentials for the winner of the blog sections Kelly McErlean. I just think its a bit farcical that the all the URL’s or the shortlist page aren’t links.

Web 2.0, not!

Digital Rights Ireland is formally launching on the 6-Dec-05 at The Conference Room, Pearse St. Library, Dublin 2 at 11.00am. This is vitally important organisation that has been setup to protect Civil, legal and Human rights in the Digital Age.

McVities have been underpacking their jaffa cakes for quite some time now,

Its a bit of a scam that several snack manufacturers have adopted as a way to to increase profits at essentially low/no cost on the basis that their consumers are stupid and don’t notice that the contents no longer fill the packaging. Well guys “Some settling of contents may have occurred during transit” just doesn’t cut it in this case. And yes, I know it says 12 cakes in the pack, which means that strictly speaking the trades descriptions act has not been breached, but lets face it, the game is up.

(Thanks to Darren for the tip on shrinking the image using flickr)