Join MP4 files with Front End Digital Media Workshop

Want an easy way to join MP4 clips together? Front End Media Workshop, a nifty piece of Mac software published by the now defunct K-werkx, can definitely help you out. While the folks that put it together aren’t online any longer, the app is still available for download from CNET.
The app (it shows up as [...]

Run WordPress by itself or cached?

I’ve been running an experiment for the past three months. I wanted to see how well WordPress would do if I ran it by itself, without any sort of caching. So far, so good.
About four months ago, my web server kept getting pummelled into the ground almost daily, and I couldn’t figure out why it [...]

Flash Player 10 breaks teh internets

Shortly after upgrading to Adobe’s new Flash Player, version 10, I noticed I could no longer upload photos to my blogs. And I also noticed that FriendFeed’s image uploader didn’t work the same way. I didn’t relate that to the Flash Player upgrade at first, and tried to rule out problems on my own machine. [...]

Google launches video chat, ignores PowerPC Macs

A few days ago, Google launched something that a lot of people had wanted for some time: the ability to do a video chat, right from Gmail. Everyone got really excited, and for good reason. I was very happy too, until I discovered that PowerPC Macs were out of the picture. Why?
Here’s what I get [...]

Synkron and I don’t see eye to eye

I’ve been using Synkron lately to keep several directories synced up across a couple of external drives — a backup of sorts, just in case one of the drives decides to kick the bucket. I’ve also been cleaning up my drive, and something drove me bonkers: I couldn’t figure out why, in spite of my [...]

Get iMovie ‘08 to import 3GP files

I recorded a few video clips with my wife’s mobile phone today, and when I tried to import them into iMovie ‘08, I found out that I couldn’t. Apparently, I’m not alone, because if you do a search for this on Google you’ll find there are plenty of other people with the same problem.
Fortunately, there [...]

If Time Machine doesn’t work…

… and you get the little exclamation sign within the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, and Time Machine will not back up your Mac any more, then here’s what worked for me, twice so far:

Reboot the Mac.
Before doing anything else, go into the Time Machine drive, locate your Mac’s folder inside the Backups [...]

If iMovie ‘08 crashes…

You can try bothering with the preferences files, or the codecs, or the color profiles, as the forums tell you to do, or you can do the following:

Go to your home folder > Movies > iMovie Events. Locate the folder with the last clips you imported. Delete the iMovie Cache and iMovie Thumbnails folders.
Restart iMovie. [...]

A glimpse at the new Snow Leopard from Apple

Snow Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X, was announced at the 2008 WWDC in San Francisco. It’s an important release for the following reasons:

Builds upon existing technologies and perfects them. It introduces few new features, but will allow Apple to really focus on delivering a very good OS by developing further the technologies [...]

Drobo overestimates used space

Here’s what happens. When the Drobo is connected to a computer and the Drobo Dashboard software isn’t running, the Drobo’s capacity meter will overestimate the used space, potentially triggering a low space alert. When the Drobo Dashboard software is started, it does its own used space calculations and corrects the capacity meter, literally turning off [...]

Google Health is a good thing

When it launched a few weeks ago, Google Health received fairly lackluster reviews. Privacy issues and lack of features were the main complaints. Well, I’m here to tell you those initial views are wrong.
Even if you’re a long-time reader of my site, you may not know what qualifies me to make that statement, so let [...]

Do not update to Turbo.264 v1.3

Please be sure to read through my updates to the post below, made after being contacted by an Elgato representative. Scroll to the end to see them all.

The latest version of the Turbo.264 software from Elgato (version 1.3 build 294), issued a few days ago, is buggy, and will mess up your converted movies. Not [...]