When Ducks migrate for the winter, they are able to have their brain partially asleep. This comes in handy when you have to fly hours on end in a pack, without restbreaks. Aparently, people have started to adopt this habbit. Yes you’ve read that right. I’ve seen some very good examples of people using only one half of their brains.
About a week ago, I was a bit bored and decided to see what Twitter is all about. I created an account, and I Tweeted for a week. I tried to keep to the original idea, where a Tweet should answer the question “What are you doing”? Looking back, my tweets include Coffee, Podcasts, Global frustration, Small joys, Small irritations, Re-tweets, and Replies.
I recently found an old harddisk which used to be in one of my old PC’s. I discovered some FLAC files on there, which were rips of old CD’s I used to have. iTunes is not too happy with importing them into my library, and the original CD’s are in a box in a deep dark corner of my garage.
I searched for a converter and found this wonderful converter which can just about convert any audio format out there. It’s called “Max”, it’s Open Source, free to use, and available as bundled OSX application. Brilliant! It does have a bunch of options, but as long as you go for the “MP4 Audio” output format, high quiality, 256 bits and VBR, you can’t go wrong.
According to their website “Max can generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE”.
Happy transcoding!
Bill Gates found a very good way to get the news reporters to pay attention to the malaria problem. In his talk at the TED conference, he released a few mosquitoes, stating that malaria should not be just for poor people to experience. People who did not see the whole performance may react shocked, because when placed out of context it sounds like an outrageous thing to do.
If you think that’s the case, you should maybe have a look at his talk, available (for free, without registering) at TED.com. You’ll see that the audience is actually laughing when he releases the mosquitoes, and at the end of the talk Bill gets a standing ovation.
In addition to the malaria problem, Bill also makes a very good case about how important good teachers are, and what we can do to help teachers become just that.
It’s frightening to realize how close to the truth Eric Burke is.
My wife bought me a playstation 3 last year, and I’ve enjoyed many hours of gaming on it, finishing Tomb Raider underworld, and now making decent progress in Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction.
I was a bit sceptical about the DLNA capabilities of the PS3, because I read a lot of bad news on this fairly new “Interoperability Guidelines” concept. It sounded like a lot of trouble to go through to simply watch the photos and home videos on a TV. For weeks, I was not able to find a single site telling me how to install a DLNA server on my Mac, or where to find a decent one.
Altgough they’re hard to find, there are a few OSX DLNA servers out there. One of them is actually very good. Here’s what I found:
Dear Steve,
Congratulations on the 25th aniversary of the Macintosh. I was sorry to hear that you are not feeling well and took some time off. Try not to worry about work, enjoy the time with your family and take care.
Get well soon,
Rolf
“Remote Desktop Connection.app” allows you to see the desktop of a remote Windows machine on your mac. This application will not update itself automatically, unless you have it installed as part of the Microsoft Office for Mac suite. If you’ve downloaded the 1.0.3 version you probably did not notice that “Remote Desktop Connection.app” was updated somewhere last year by microsoft.
You can find the latest version of Remote Desktop Connection on the Microsoft Mactopia site. Version 2 is an improvement over 1.0.3 (which I had). Notable differences are:
I played with it for a while, and apart form the new looks I can not say it’s very different from the 1.0.x version. It could load my old RDC 1.0.3 configuration files. If you need to connect to a Windows desktop from your Mac, this does the job just fine.
Here’s Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a brain scientist, studying schyzofrenia, and the micro-circuitry in the human brain which causes these (and other) mental illenesses. On the morning of September 10, 1996 she had a stroke. Amongst all other things that went though her head, she realized that this was a tremendous oportunity because she got to study this phenomena first hand. Luckaly, she fully recovered, wrote a book about it, and did a very impressive presentation about it at the 2008 TED conference, called “a powerful stroke of insight”.
Having watched this presentation, I realized that Zen monks already figured this out a long time ago, without knowing that they were talking about left or right brain halves. Here’s a short recap of what your left and right brain halves do:
There is a nice and clean way to automatically mount network shares each time you log into your Mac. It’s called the “Bonjour Mounter”, a simple application which runs on login, and mounts the drives you configured it to mount. No more, no less.