Category: Apple

MacTheRipper and MPlayer

I’m spending some time today looking around at various shareware and freeware Mac apps that might be useful on my new iBook. MacTheRipper is a DVD ripper for the Mac. This could be useful if I ever decide I want to rip a couple of DVDs to watch while I’m on vacation or something. Then, I could watch them with MPlayer.

Notetaking applications for the Mac

  • NoteTaker from Aquaminds — nice look and some interesting features.
  • StickyBrain from Chronos — lots of features. Can sync with iPod and Palm.
  • NoteBook from Circus Ponies — big on outlining and general note-taking. Very colorful.
  • MacJournal from Mariner — oriented towards keeping a personal journal and blogging.
  • Formation from Radical Breeze — almost like a database program. Custom fields/forms, stuff like that.
  • Hog Bay Notebook — appears to be a fairly simple notebook app. Nice-looking, though.

All of these are pretty interesting. Meanwhile, I’m still using iOrganize, which isn’t as flashy as any of these, but does the job.

new iBook

My new iBook showed up today! So far, so good. Migrating information from the old iBook was really easy, using Tiger’s Migration Assistant. It took about an hour over FireWire. Now, I’m letting it run Software Update. That looks like it’ll take another hour or so. When all is said and done, I should have an iBook much like my old one, only with a bigger screen, faster processor, bigger hard drive, etc, etc. Much less hassle than I’d have migrating a Windows machine.

firewire blues

After much research and many failed experiments, I have decided that my old iPod just doesn’t want to work with my PC. I don’t know if it’s hardware, software, or some combination, but it just doesn’t work reliably. So I gave up and went back to the iBook. I reformatted the iPod on the iBook, set up iPodder, downloaded a bunch of podcasts, and synced them to the iPod. It worked great, no problems. I’m thinking about setting up my newer iPod to sync everything but the podcasts, but I don’t think that’s really necessary; there’s plenty of room on it. Meanwhile, as long as I’m using the Mac, I’m looking at iPodderX.

podcasting stuff

I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts lately on a fairly regular basis, and I decided to take the next step today, and actually start listening to them on my iPod. I’d been simply pressing them to audio CDs and listening to them in my car via the CD changer. This works fine, but I usually don’t want to listen to a given podcast more than once or twice, so it’s kind of a waste of a CD.

I decided to use my old first-gen 5GB iPod for this, rather than clutter up my newer iPod with podcasts. Getting this set up turned out to be quite a production. The old iPod was Mac-formatted, so, at first, I set it up to sync with my “received podcasts” directory via XPlay. That worked OK, but I thought I could do better by switching to iTunes. So I reformatted the iPod and set it up to sync with iTunes. I didn’t get very far. I started getting disk errors, so I reformatted again and set everything up again. I did a little better this time. I got one disk error at one point, but it’s been good since. I’ve been playing around a bit, trying to stress it and see if it’s going to keep working or not. So far, so good.

I also decided to upgrade to iTunes 4.8, just for yuks. That worked fine, except that it broke iPodder. I upgraded to iPodder 2.0.3, and everything seems fine now.

So, after all that work, I now have an iPod full of podcasts that I can plug into my car stereo via an old casette adapter. It sounds OK, but not great. I also ordered a car charger from XtremeMac, so I can keep the thing going, since the battery life ain’t what it used to be.