Macintosh

So far I haven’t found any Mac software to convert video to my PSP that doesn’t suck. Video conversion is painfully slow and I find that it fails pretty often. I’ve tried both iPSP & PSPWare, and both have their problems. iPSP is a little nicer, but still buggy & slow. It’s very easy to lose data on the PSP with PSPWare because it tries to synchronize items. iPSP lets you copy individual items to the PSP rather than synchronizing selected items. EyeTV’s export for PSP seems to be the most reliable conversion, but it’s only for EyeTV recordings.

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Originally uploaded by mike3k.

I have more pictures here.

After trying my software on it, the first thing I did was boot a Knoppix live CD. It booted, but x11 wouldn’t work unless I used the framebuffer mode for laptops. It also didn’t recognize the built-in ethernet. I’m not using the latest version of Knoppix, however.

I did three things today:

• I got an antenna extender for my new Linksys WRT54G and relocated the antenna high on the wall to increase the signal strength. I can now get a decent signal on my powerbook if I sit in the yard behind my apartment.
• I installed PmWiki on my powerbook. I had previously tried MoinX to use as a personal wiki for note taking & storing snippets but I didn’t like having yet another application running. Since I already have apache with PHP running, I wanted something written in PHP that will run on it. I looked at a few but I chose PmWiki because it’s very fast, very easy to install, and doesn’t use MySQL.
• I wrote a PHP & MySQL based web front-end for the iTunes Music Library on my Mac Mini. I had tried a certain iTunes sharing product. Although the developer is very nice and I’m working with him to fix the bugs, it’s just not very usable. It’s way too slow starting up, runs as an application requiring user interaction to start up, and is very buggy. Once again I wanted to take advantage of apache, which is already running. I used SQLTunes to build a database from my iTunes library and wrote a PHP script to present it nicely and with most of the features of that other product. The script is available here.

I’m still recovering from my mail meltdown. I’ve migrated all of Mail.app’s local mail to a local IMAP server, with a Maildir in my home directory. I was using Courier-imap but I had lots of trouble with it. This morning I installed Dovecot, which works a lot better. I first tried to install bincimap, which is available from DarwinPorts, but it wouldn’t build with either GCC 3.3 or 4.0.

I tried several email apps, including Entourage, PowerMail, and Mulberry and found that they all suck worse than Mail.app. Thunderbird isn’t too bad, but I’d prefer better integration with OS X’s addressbook.

I’ve had a lot of trouble with Tiger’s Mail.app freezing for the last few days. I’m thinking of switching to Thunderbird, and as a first step in that direction I’m now migrating all of the email stored in local mailboxes to courier-imap running on my Mac.