A Year of Mac

January 11, 2009 — Brian

While the MacBook Pro I got last January wasn’t my first Mac, it’s the first Mac I’ve had that I’ve used on a daily basis. It is a purchase I am glad I made.

I do wish I had gotten a bigger hard drive, though. I feel like I’m always close to filling up the 110GB I have. I find it funny that I’m worried that I only have 20GB free on it at this moment. The biggest culprit in that is the 20GB Windows XP virtual machine for VMWare Fusion (and now a 10GB Windowx 7 beta one). After that it’s the iMovie projects for SRD but I keep the majority of the assets for that on an external drive. Then mostly downloaded apps and such which I like to keep around for some reason…

Over the course of the past year I’ve:

  • Switched form OpenOffice to iWork.
  • Used iMovie like crazy and am very excited about iMovie ’09.
  • Bought a lot more music using iTunes – something I used to be very hesitant to do.
  • Used TextMate a whole lot for Rails development and taking notes.
  • Cross-graded my Photoshop and Illustrator licenses from Windows to Mac.
  • Used VMWare Fusion a lot for working in Windows when I need and used Spaces to switch back and forth.
  • Bought a fair number of games for the Mac: Puzzle Quest, NWN2, Weird Worlds, DROD.
  • Enjoyed a number of Windows games using CrossOver.
  • Used the Terminal most every day.
  • Made at least 16 different videos for Suburbia Roller Derby.
  • Bought a lot of programming books on PDF as well as a physical copy.
  • Never regretted buying a Mac.

The only problem I’m having right now is that the battery doesn’t last more than 30 or 40 minutes after charging, but I’m guessing this is somehow caused by the large dent the battery got when the laptop fell off my bedside table one day. I need to get myself to an Apple Store and get a replacement battery.

I guess my only other disappointment was MobileMe. Christine and I gave it a try for a while but it was always very flakey for us. I was excited by the prospect of having our calendars synced together but when we tried it it just didn’t work that well. Christine also wasn’t a fan of the web interface (she’s on a PC) and was always getting frustrated with it. But MobileMe is an optional service and doesn’t reflect on the MacBook Pro itself.

I don’t plan on buying a new desktop machine anytime soon (I say that now…) but when I do it will definitely be a Mac. I don’t feel like I need a PC for gaming anymore because I prefer gaming on the Xbox 360 these days. And there’s always VMWare Fusion if I need to run Windows for something.

Posted in Computers, Mac. 2 Comments »

Mac & Me… & Roller Derby

August 27, 2008 — Brian

I’ve been using my Mac to do a lot of Suburbia Roller Derby related stuff lately.

I’ve been filming all the bouts with a Sony MiniDV camera and then importing the footage into iMovie 8. iMovie was a little weird to me at first but I’ve grown to really love it. It’s great for scanning through footage, grabbing the bits you like and quickly throwing together a video that looks great. Obviously it doesn’t do everything (like slow-mo clips, grrr!) but it does enough and does it fast enough that I like using it a lot.

I picked up Final Cut Express 4 a couple of months ago with the intention of doing some more interesting stuff but it’s definitely a much more complicated/involved application than iMovie. I’ve yet to actually generate anything with it. I need to look into iMovie 8′s ability to export to FCE4 after finding all the clips I want to use with iMovie.

I recently downloaded iMovie 6 to give that a try as well since it has the ability to do slow-mo clips which are perfect for really showing when the girls take a nasty hit/fall. They LOVE seeing that stuff in slow-mo. The last few bouts I’ve been using the project at Barney McNabb’s (the official afterparty bar) to play back the bout and some of the girls go nuts. I suppose the alcohol also plays a part in that…

I’ve also been making DVDs of the bouts for the teams to review. I keep those pretty basic and just put the core bout footage in an iMovie project, export it to iDVD, add chapter markers every 4 minutes and use the simplest theme so it’ll render fast. I’m glad I finally sorted out the choppy/stuttering DVD problem with iDVD and Perian.

For the most recent bout they were short a DJ so, in addition to my videotaping and PA duties, I also DJ’d the bout. What I did was create a dedicated roller derby account on my MacBook Pro, attached my 160GB AcomData mini Pal and copied all the music from my iPod (all legally obtained, mind you) back to the hard drive using Senuti. I bought a bunch of disco/funk songs (the event was called Flat Track Fever), put together a bunch of playlists for different parts of the bout (pre-bout, intros, period 1, intermission, period 2, post-bout) and used the free Remote iPhone app from Apple to control iTunes while videotaping. So it wasn’t DJing per se, but it was effective and got the job done.

Next time I’m definitely moving the computer and PA away from the announcers desk though. If you watch until the end of the Flat Track Fever footage you can see a girl crash into the announcer’s booth, sending a couple of beers flying and almost landing on my equipment (computer, external hard drive, mixer and amp). Next time I’m pushing that stuff far back. I’ve got long enough mic cables for it.

I’ve got one other project idea that I’m working on for SRD using the Mac but I’ll wait until after the Derby de los Muertos Championship Bout on Saturday September 6th to talk about it.

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iDVD + Perian = Choppy DVDs

August 17, 2008 — Brian

I think I finally solved a problem I’ve been having a problem with for a while.  I’ve been making DVDs of the Suburbia Roller Derby bouts for some of the rollergirls to review and learn from.  Unfortunately every time I made a DVD the video ended up beging very choppy / stuttery.  The movie in iMovie was fine and the preview in iDVD was fine, but as soon as I burned a DVD or disc image I’d end up with choppy video.

I did some googling and came across the topic iDVD and choppy video in the final product.  It was started at the end of 2006 but there was a recent post mentioning Perian being the cause.  Persian is a “free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats”.  I had originally installed it for Flash video (FLV) support to burn some other derby leagues from YouTube to DVD for the team.  After uninstalling Perian I seem to no longer have the choppy video problem with iDVD.  I’ve only burned a disc image so far, but they had the same problem when I had Perian installed.  I’m going to burn a DVD in a little bit confirm.  If this is the solution I will be very happy.  I’m still annoyed that I need to “Share” my video in iMovie to get it into iDVD (a slow process) and can’t easily create chapters in iDVD (without using a GarageBand hack) but at least the final product won’t mess with your eyes now.

There are also some posts on the Perian support forum, such as perian performance – lags in movies which offers some other suggestions, but since I don’t currently need FLV support anymore I’m going to stick with the “uninstall Perian” solution for now.

Update: Woo!  The Perian-free burn is smooth!

Posted in Computers, Girls, Mac, Movies. 1 Comment »

Interactive Fiction

May 6, 2008 — Brian

This week’s interest/distraction is Interactive Fiction, read “text adventure games”.

It started this past weekend when for some reason I told Christine, “It’s dark. You might be eaten by a Grue.” She didn’t know what I was talking about, so I told her to look up Zork on Wikipedia. That resulted in me looking up ways to play these old games on the Mac. I’ve been using Zoom, which works well, looks very nice and has a nice full screen mode. For Windows there is Gargoyle.

We played a little bit of Zork but eventually were both tired and decided to go to bed. I was getting a little confused by the dungeon we were in anyways.

The next day I decided to give Planetfall a try and have been playing it on the train the last few days, even going as far as to map out the locations using NeoOffice Drawing.

Planetfall in Zoom and NeoOffice

I’ve also done some poking about with how to make IF using the Inform programming language. There’s a great IF development app for the mac called Inform 7. It also handles version 6 of the language, which is the the version I’ve been toying around with just a little. I honestly have 0 ideas for an adventure game and even less control of the English language. But it’s fun to mess around with.

It’s kind of refreshing to play a text adventure game and let my mind fill in the pictures.

Posted in Computers, Gaming, Mac, Nostalgia, Programming. Leave a Comment »
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