Category: Mac

I’m planning on getting Deb a new laptop for Christmas. (Yes, she knows about it already.)

Of course, I have been trying to convince her that what she really needs is one of the new MacBook Pros, because they really are excellent hardware. Unfortunately, even if I did get her a MacBook Pro, she would probably run Windows on it most of the time.

You see, Deb tells me she needs to run Windows. When I pressed her on this, she claims that she has a couple of programs Quilt-Pro and Stitch Painter that she uses regularly — read “occasionally” — which she can’t live without. I told her about the joys of Parallels Desktop and how she could still run her Windows programs at the same time as Mac OS X, but she wasn’t convinced. Hm…

Well, if you didn’t click on the above crafting software links, I’ll let you in on the punchline: Both programs are available for Mac OS X. I ran the demo of Stitch Painter, and it seems to run fine.

So, I got to thinking… All you Windows users out there, what do you actually still need it for? For me, I can think of only one thing: Games. In fact, I still do have a PC, but literally all I use it for is gaming. (It has one 60Gig drive in it, since that’s all I need to hold my active game files.) There may be a day when Macs have as many games available as PCs — they certainly have the hardware to run them now — but as of today, there’s only so much WoW you can play.

Let’s see, what else do I use regularly… There’s Eclipse, or course. And Notes and Office at work. I make music with Reason and Logic Express. I run the GCW family of websites, and I watch TV.

That doesn’t include all of the free stuff that comes with your mac for personal productivity (iCal, Address Book), internet (Mail, Safari), and multi-media (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD), all of which I use regularly. The fact that my contacts, events, todos, and bookmarks are all automatically sync’ed between the G5 and my laptop makes them even sweeter.

All in all, I’m done with Windows. What about you?

As you know, I got an EyeTV Hybrid, and I’m very happy with it. One of the nice things about the device is that you can control it with your Apple remote, if you attach it to a Mac that includes one. Unfortunately, I’m using the EyeTV with the PowerMac in my basement, which does not.

So the obvious next question is, how could I remote control the EyeTV. (Because you know, it’s not a real TV until it has a remote control. :-))

First off, the EyeTV appears to have an IR receiver built into it, so I tried a couple of the universal remotes I had around the house, but didn’t get any reaction.

I then considered just buying a remote. The Elgato site identifies several commercial Mac remotes that will work with the EyeTV, but even I could figure out that buying one doesn’t make sense: it’s not like I’m actually going to use it, I just want to be able to claim that I could.

Then it came to me: Salling Clicker!

Salling Clicker is a software package that allows you to remote control almost anything on your Mac (or PC) using a bluetooth cell phone or PDA. I’ve been running it on my laptop for quite a while. It’s a convenient way to make sure that I always have a presentation remote with me, since I know I’ll be carrying my cell phone.

There was only one problem: The G5 doesn’t have a bluetooth interface either.

Now, I still had a D-Link USB bluetooth transceiver from back in the days when I used to use my PC for something other than game playing. I remembered from the last time I plugged it into the PC that it needed a very specific driver to work, so I went to the D-Link site, only to find out that there was no Mac driver. Hm… Oh well, I plugged it in anyway and, as I should have guessed, the Mac recognized it immediately.

The rest of the story is short: installed Salling Clicker, paired my phone with the Mac, discovered that Clicker already knew how to control the EyeTV (woot!), and happily spent the rest of the night clicking through the channels.

I decided to purchase an EyeTV Hybrid. I was frustrated with the quality of the TV listings software I was using and, from all accounts, the EyeTV software is the best thing you can get on the Mac. I wasn’t able to find the device at any local retailers (of course, *sigh*) so I ordered one from CDW.ca. This took quite a bit longer than I expected, but it finally showed up today and I just hooked it up.

It’s an interesting beast. It uses software decoding, so (unfortunately) it uses significantly more CPU than the old one. On my G5, that works out to be about 25% when just streaming live TV and close to 95% when recording. Note: 95% is fine; max load is 200% on a dual CPU box.

The good news is that the picture quality is significantly better than the old myTV.PVR box (including de-interlacing on the fly, *woot!*), and the software works. Here’s the proverbial “picture worth a thousand”:

The even better news is that, even though EyeTV does not directly support Canadian TV listings, Guillaume Boudreau’s EyeTV EPG Proxy worked perfectly me. One caveat: Setting up the virtual host to fake out data.titantv.com convinced Great Castle Wilson that it’s name was “localhost”. It took me a while to figure how to fix that, but it’s all good now.

Hey, I found a Mac application to read Canadian XMLTV data from Zap2it. It’s called MacProgramGuide. Here’s a shot of the GUI:

It’s sparse, but good enough. It supports scheduling via eyetv2, but not, of course, via the software that came with my myTV.PVR box. *sigh*.

For some reason, one of the folders inside my Applications folder keeps getting hidden. I’m not sure why this happens, but I suspect it’s a side-effect of updating one of the standard applications that I use.

In case this happens to you, and you want to make a hidden file visible again, then the simplest way to do it is to do:

/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v YourFileOrDirectory


Obviously, you must have the developer tools installed to have this command available.