Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

New iPod Touch

Well, after quite a while of looking at them, I finally decided to buy an iPod Touch. In fact, I wrote this blog post using it. The hardest part is to force yourself to stop correcting your mistakes, and trust that it can correctly figure out what you meant and correct it for you. The auto correction is definitely a necessity, but it isn’t as effective for those who can’t spell, like me.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, April 4, 2008

Where's real AC3 Passthrough on the Mac?

In my previous post, I discussed how to do AC3 passthrough using Perian. Unfortunately, this method is really a hack, and doesn’t work in all situations. There is a better solution though. Apple has enabled AC3 passthrough with Quicktime. They have enabled it on the AppleTV to support playback of their HD movies. The code for passthrough is even in the latest version of Quicktime on the desktop, but the celebration ends there.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, March 14, 2008

Followup to Open Source Attitudes

Over half a year ago (that’s way to long to get back to this), I posted an blog entry on what I have observed in open source attitudes. I received a number of comments, the most interesting which is Daniel’s. What I found the most fascinating was the two opposite views I got in the comments. First, there were the developers, who seemed to largely agree with my comments. Then there were the users, who took offense at some of my comments, or the way that open source developers have treated them in the past.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, February 9, 2008

Sourceforge SPAM

Yes, sourceforge.net has resorted to spamming its users. I have received a number of emails from this “Sourceforge.net Marketplace”. In the past, I just let the spam catcher correctly junk them, but today I got annoyed with it. I looked at the bottom of the email, and I see This email was sent to: xxxx@users.sourceforge.net if you would prefer not to receive information about SourceForge.net Marketplace, please update your communication preferences by visiting the Profile Center.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, February 1, 2008

Switching back to Safari

A while ago, I switched to Firefox since it supported several features I liked, the most notable being an ad blocker. Â I knew that there were ad blockers for Safari, but none of them were very good. Â All required manually managing the block list, which is just painful.Yesterday, I found out aboutÂ Safari Adblock,Â which has support for the ad block lists, likeÂ Adblock PlusÂ in Firefox. Â So, I decided to install it, and finally opened Safari to try it out.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, December 11, 2007