I was asked to answer a few questions from you all on the Design Tea podcast, right on the heels of Tim van Damme.
(pardon the random image from the movie)
You can watch the whole thing here. If you do have more questions feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks to Linebreak for having me.
I’m one of those people who hates Flash with a passion. Not only did it make your Mac browser crash a lot in Leopard, it also used disproportionate amounts of CPU time and made your laptop heat up like a stovetop. It’s virtually impossible to not use Flash online, though – it’s mostly Youtube that forces me to use it on a daily basis.
What if I told you that Youtube’s Flash requirement could be history? Somehow I missed the news that ClickToFlash, a brilliant open-source plugin I’ve been using for a while, now has a setting that will load all Youtube videos (including HD content!) in Quicktime instead of Flash.
It even allows reliably skipping portions of the video without having it completely loaded. This is a feature that didn’t work for me in Flash most of the time. I’m donating to the project, as it’ll probably keep my computer running cool and stable for the years to come. I suggest you do too!
Since I recently stopped using an old and dented Macbook Pro that was otherwise perfectly working as a computer, I tweeted about having turned it into a media, file, and Bittorrent server. I got a lot of responses asking for my setup, so here’s a guide for turning a Mac that would otherwise gather dust in disuse into a useful server.
My primary demands were gathering content from the internet through FTP and Bittorrent, serving them up to the Macs and Playstation 3 on the network through streaming, and function as a secure public-facing server so I can log in and grab some files when I’m on the go.
I’ve divided this post into three sections, dealing with getting stuff, serving up stuff, and all the nice other things you can do with an always-on Mac. Note: I will not be liable if you melt, damage, or hurt your old Mac in the process of following this guide.
Continue reading…
Whether you have purchased movies online, made digital backups, or simply have movies stored on your Mac or on an external drive, it tends to turn into a rather dull folder tree with a list of movie titles. Quick look or Cover Flow won’t help me out – I put my movies in directories.
Ouch, this isn’t exactly visual browsing.
Since I had this problem with my digitalized movie collection and I wanted to browse them casually, while at parties and with friends on my Macbook Pro, or simply at home on a dull afternoon, I figured something out to make everything a lot more appealing. Dive on in.
In an earlier post, I asked for your interest in a how-to on graphing several network statistics using MRTG, an open-source application that generates graphs using data pulled from SNMP. I used an Airport Extreme (802.11n, gigabit) for this, but it should work with Snow / Graphite Airport base stations and up (Express and Extreme). For other routers, your mileage may vary, and it may even not be possible, so I decided not to make a guide for anything else than Apple’s routers. If you want to have graphs in your desktop, updated in real time, as seen here, read on!
In my free time, I have been experimenting with the iPhone home screen icons. I was initially pleased by the icons, but found several to be lacking after having looked at them for prolongued periods of time. Since I don’t want to be greedy, I will share some techniques, know-how and tips with you to help you get up to speed designing icons for your own iPhone. I will also look at my upcoming set of icons and discuss why I am changing so little to the look of the default icons.