A number of sites, for example, CNN, provide video only in WMV format.

Barbarians.

There’s fortunately an easy solution for this problem, provided by Flip4Mac. Flip4Mac provides a number of WMV components for the Mac, including a free QuickTime plugin, available for download from Microsoft.

The free player component works well, allowing access to WMV-only sites that we’d otherwise be shut out of.

Flip4Mac’s Pro and Studio versions offer features such as import, conversion, and export, and are available at a variety of price points.

 

Installing XP under Boot Camp is the Way of the Many Reboots; it takes just short of forever to get all the patches installed, even when starting from an SP2 base. Not something you want to have to do twice, but none of the usual backup utilities will backup or restore a Boot Camp partition.

Fortunately, there’s Winclone, a free utility to address this problem.

So far as I’ve been able to determine, Winclone is the only way to easily and reliably backup and restore a Boot Camp partition; I’m surprised that it’s not getting more press.

Winclone handles both XP and Vista partitions.

 

Tags: Backup, Windows

I have a large library.

Frankly, what I have is a control problem in bookstores, but there are worse problems to have.

There’s a magical point in the book acquisition phenomenon where you truly can’t remember what you own. Therefore, when presented with a bargain on something at a used bookstore, you pounce, only to discover upon your return home that you owned the book already. Quite embarrassing.

To avoid this, I’ve tried cataloging my books in the past, but it’s just been too much data entry.

However, once again, the Mac provides a fantastic solution to the problem.

Books is a personal library catalog application. The beauty of Books is an extensible plugin architecture which has been leveraged to pull catalog information from what seems to be every possible online repository. Thus, by just entering minimal title information, complete canonical information about a book can be pulled automagically from a source like Amazon. If possible, Books even pulls in an image of the cover, which makes searching on the bookshelf that much easier.

Export plugins produce output for iPod notes, Palm organizers, PDF, and more. With a little effort, this should address my duplication problem.

Books is free and open-source.

 

OS X comes with iPhoto, a much better photo management application than anything we had on the old PC. iPhoto has a very intuitive interface; moving our photo library over was a trivial task. Furthermore, it immediately understood what to do with our camera as soon as we plugged in the USB.

However, by default, iPhoto imports pictures into the personal library of the user running iPhoto. This wasn’t the way we wanted iPhoto to work; rather, we wanted to share the same library, with full access control, no matter which account was in use.

The definitive and most workable approach to this problem uses a shared directory and access control lists, and is outlined at macOSXhints:

10.4: Share an iPhoto library among multiple users

Finally, to keep the ‘Pictures’ quickpick in the finder view looking normal, I followed the following tip, also from macOSXhints, to link each account’s iPhoto Library folder to the new shared folder:

Share an iPhoto4 Library between two or more users

This all works as desired. Each account sees the shared library and has full access control to it; iPhoto itself will disallow other instances of iPhoto to run under another account simultaneously, so data integrity is assured.

 

Tags: Photography