Non-Tech: Unintentional Humour from Valve

14. June 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Apple, Gaming, Microsoft, Non-Tech, OS X, Windows · Tags: , , , , ,

When Valve was first leaking details about Steam for Mac, they released a series of images parodying ‘classic’ Apple ads. This was one:

Turrets

I get what they’re trying to say – the PC is boxy and old-fashioned while the Mac is shiny and new. The unintentional humour is that while the Portal turret does it’s job adequately in its game, it’s easily defeated. The PC (or Team Fortress 2 turret) on the other hand starts out small and meek, but can be easily upgraded in to a massive powerhouse. That said, which would you rather have? Effective but locked down, or less-than-pretty but easily customizable?

Of course, I could just be reading too much in to things again.

Rant: BP “SpillCam” is Windows-Only

26. May 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Linux, OS X, Rants, Windows · Tags:

So in the wake of this whole oil-spill thing going on, BP was forced to drop a camera down to the source of the link and broadcast the footage out over the internet. Initially, the site was wanged (see the Penny-Arcade definition) due to the huge amount of traffic it was generating, however it’s working fine now, at this link:

http://globalwarming.house.gov/spillcam

Of course, unless you’re using Windows, that link is no good to you. Why? Because, in this age of HTML5 video and Flash streaming, the video uses the Windows Media plugin – specifically, the Windows Media 9 Codec. There are ways to get it working short of a Virtual Machine running Windows, but it shouldn’t be difficult. The video should be in an open, available format to allow everyone easy access.

Now, I’m no Microsoft-hater, and I’m not a Linux fanboy. All I want is to be able to watch video on whatever platform I want, be it Windows, *Nix, or even OS X. I don’t think this is too much to ask, yet apparently it is.

Update: A Flash-based stream is available here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127258287&ft=1&f=1003

Sony and Apple Will Be the Death of Me

20. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple, howto, OS X, Rants, Troubleshooting · Tags: , , ,

Argh. One of my recent tasks at work has been taking video recorded on a Sony Handycam HDR-XR200V (and HD Digital Video camera) and making the footage web-ready. Normally, the camera is a joy to work with. It’s easy to get the recordings off of it, and the software provided with it converts it in to WMV and MPEG2 quite easily. In terms of web-readiness, though….

Normally we just convert everything to WMV format, as the video is only used in-house for a short period of time and then deleted. Files are stored on our local server, so size isn’t really an issue. In this case, though, I need to put the final versions up our website so a few external people can access and download the clips. That means that 2GB+ files are completely impractical.

Digging around, I found that we had a Quicktime 7 Pro license, so I thought my problems were solved. Take the raw .MTS files, convert them to MPEG format using Sony’s utility, then use Quicktime to export them to smaller, more web-ready MP4 format. But do things ever really work out that easily?

The first problem is that although Quicktime will play .MPG files, it doesn’t have a built-in MPEG2 codec, which is the codec the Sony utility uses. Quicktime doesn’t support WMV at all. If you want support for MPEG2, you need to buy the codec from Apple. That wouldn’t be so bad (it’s less than $30 CAD), however it doesn’t recognize the audio track in the Sony-converted files. Crap.

After a few hours of near-hopeless searching through page after page of shareware and crap-ware, I finally found a solution. Take the Sony-converted MPEG2 files and convert them to .MOV format using MediaCoder, a truly free audio/video conversion suite (with a 64-bit Windows version). From there, I booted into OS X and fired them in to iMove to quickly splice a few segments together, and iMove spat out the .M4V files I needed. After that, it was a simple matter of using Quicktime Pro to make a few different versions of .MP4 files in varying levels of quality.

The system works, however it relies a lot on Apple products (not ideal if you don’t have a license, a Mac, or just hate Apple products), and takes a lot of time. The result is that my bacon has been saved, and I’ll be able to get the web-ready videos out to those who need them on time.

Entourage 2008 and Exchange: What were they thinking?

27. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Apple, Microsoft, OS X, Rants, Software · Tags: , , ,

I recently purchased an iMac at work for a project that I was working on. The first thing I did was use Bootcamp so I could dual-boot with Windows 7, and for the most part never touched OS X. Then I ended up with a copy of Office 2008, and figured, “Let’s see what all the fuss is about”. I wiped my Windows partition, installed Office 2008, and told myself I’d try to go a full month with just OS X.

It’s been just over two weeks, and I’m finished with it. I’m going to install Vista on a VirtualBox VM and load up Office 2007.

The deal breaker? Entourage 2008. Why? Well, lots of reasons, actually.

To start off with, unless you install the Web Services Edition Update, say ‘bye-bye!’ to things like your To Do list and easy calendar syncing. Do you use Distributions Lists that are stored on your Exchange Server? Too bad! Entourage can’t sync them, so you’ll have to recreate them all by hand on your local system! Want a different signature for your email replies? Tough luck!

Aside from the lack of support for basic functions that Outlook has had for ages, there are also a plethora of usability issues. Randomly, Entourage will decide that dragging-and-dropping isn’t hip anymore and won’t let me move emails around unless I reboot the computer. A simple close/reopen isn’t good enough it seems. If I try to add an appointment to my Calender on the Exchange Server, there’s a 50/50 chance of it actually showing up after saving it.

The MythBusters may have proved that you can polish shit, but in the end, it’s still shit. Hopefully the announced Outlook 2010 for Mac will be a near-clone of the Windows version and the Mac BU at Microsoft burns the Entourage source code at the release party.

You can polish shit...