Mac Mode

At the beginning of 2007 I started creating a weekday updated videoblog affectionately dubbed Hmmcast. Despite having a nice iSight camera hooked to my Mac I haven’t used it yet.

The iRecord sounds like it might come in handy:

Just open iRecord, and video recording is as simple as pressing the red button. Take a quick photo by dragging the picture to your desktop.

I have used Quicktime Pro … on Windows (don’t shoot!) for compressing to MP4.

With the recent purchase of an 80GB iPod 5g and video purchases from the iTunes store it hasn’t taken very long to empty my eMac’s hard drive. Fortunately I had already partitioned off an external network drive for use on the Mac and set that to be the master drive for iTunes.

But first … had to copy over the iTunes music folder from the eMac which took a little over an hour to move the nearly 18GB of music and video.

My next question is can I set iTunes to recognize multiple drives? Thus by adding another external drive I should be able to keep building on our music and video library.

Internet TV has been a clumsy experience by and large, with few exceptions. The free program Democracy hopes to change that.

Features include:

- easy subscribe to video RSS feeds including video blogs, podcasts and BitTorrent feeds.
- watch full screen
- share with friends

Oh, and they are hiring a Web Director and Designer in case anybody reading is looking for work.

gskinner is playing in the virtual snow via Flash and his G5:

I’m achieving this with a combination of convolution, horizontal blurring, color adjustments, thresholding and pixel sampling. It’s relatively processor intensive with 400 flakes, but it runs at the full 30 fps on my G5.

To get this to work with your iSight, just right click in the snowflakes and choose preferences. Click on the camera and choose the firewire camera.

This sounds like a cool future for the Mac Mini if it ever comes to pass …

Think Secret:

In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple’s new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user’s hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user’s iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into. When the user wishes to play the content, robust caching technology Apple previously received a patent for will serve it to the users computer as fast as their Internet connection can handle.

My wife was taken by the Mac Mini the first time she saw it: “Ooo, that’s cute.” She wanted one. Then later she changed her mind and said she didn’t want one. When I asked her why, she couldn’t really give me a sensible reason. Maybe I just haven’t figured out the right way to ask the question?

Earlier this week I got an early Christmas present, we bought an iSight ($149.99 via Apple store, affiliate) which the Apple store describes as:

The eyes and ears of iChat AV. iSight is the incredibly easy to use personal video conferencing camera with integrated microphone that will allow you to have face-to-face conversations with your friends, family and co-workers over the Internet.

Hooking this thing up was painless once I figured out what mounting to use.

Love the signature box Apple packaging.

For the $149, accessories are available to hook up to the various Macs out there including G5, iMac, and eMac. A generic stand will work for Mini owners.

Aha! That’s the stand to use for the eMac.

The iSight swivels up and down for different camera angles.

There it is, waiting to capture an iChat setting (which I haven’t yet chatted with anyone through iChat before, BTW) or video or … ???

The rumours about a new iPod and iTunes combo with video have been circulating for awhile but today Steve Jobs finally made it official. The new iPod, named just that: The iPod will start shipping next week. I’ll try to get back with some screenshots and more information after I’ve checked it out further.