eggchen

Recently I came across this awesome website that features high quality wallpapers!
InterfaceLIFT

It’s been a good half of a year since I started my journey adventuring the Apple territory. Many friends that I had the chance to talk to are slowly to get interested in the Mac OS X. I must say it’s by far the easiest operating system I had used.

Things to consider when I was moving to Mac OS X:
- no more un-intuitive menus and drop down craps
- see less crashes (all system crashes, just a matter of %)
- a fresh start
- no more drivers to worry about
- the motivation to learn new things

Things you should be considering about before moving to Mac OS X:
- it’s not going to be like windows XP
- keyboard controls will be different
- mouse will move differently
- installing apps is very different but very simple once you understand it
- there will be many free apps for you to play with
- slicker UI
- it’s more of a non-work related os, unless you find the right software to do your bidding, ie. VPN utility
- think twice before you buy
- you must have the heart to learn new things

I will continue my journey with my little Mac Mini, until next time, happy learning!

So whom out there likes to chat online? I’m sure more than half of Internet users like to stay connected with friends and families online. This is probably the most popular messenger program on the Mac OS X world. This program supports every chat protocols, I like this all in one goody.

This is what’s supported

This is where you can get the software. HERE

For people that uses iChat a lot may appreciate this application. And for Microsoft Messenger users, this is like the MSN Plus, which enhances the user experience while using iChat. Multi-tab messages is the way of future!

Chax (free stuff once again!)

Snips of what the feature it contains:
User list:

* Toggle text status visibility of users
* Automatically resize the contact list to fit the number of visible users
* Set font of names, status messages, and group separators
* Show animated user icons
* Ability to hide iTunes music store links in text statuses
* Idle time included in tooltips
* Display Address Book nicknames instead of full names
* Option to show a warning before messaging mobile users
* Hide the audio/video status icon at the top of the user list
* Message a specific screen name for people with multiple screen names

Message window:

* Tabbed chats, allowing you to keep all of your chats together in one window
* Option to auto-accept text chats, skipping new message notification window
* Show status changes directly in the message window
* Disable the smiley button in text input lines
* Option to open images sent through direct connect directly in Preview
* Send away auto-reply only once per conversation
* Save and restore window positions for individual screen names

Other:

* Unread message notification in the dock
* Growl notifications for new messages and users changing status
* Properly use ICQ accounts without sending text formatting in messages
* Automatically set status to away when screensaver is activated
* Option to auto-accept file transfers
* Hide all iChat windows when iChat is inactive
* Always on top option for user lists, text chats, and audio or video chats
* Set a custom away auto-reply that is different from the away message
* Change the delay of or disable auto-away
* New message windows cascade properly instead of always appearing on top of each other
* Built-in log viewer
* Activity window shows history of user status changes
* Warn before quitting while there are active chats
* Option to disable pausing of AV chats while there are active file transfers
* Disable picture-in-picture in video chats
* Automatically reconnect when disconnected
* Disable alert sounds when away, idle, or available

So I feel the urge to stay up tonight just to write a few sentence on my thoughts on iPhone from Apple Inc.

- I’m excited! As I know what a true smart phone should have and Apple is definitely heading to the right direction.
- Consider I had worked for BlackBerry before, the smartphone/PDA features on this iPhone is definitely worth the R&D resources
- iPod widescreen sounds yummy
- user intuitive cell phone interface
- os X embedded
- I’m glad it’s solid memory, not moving hard drive (better longevity on the batter for sure!)
- Well, I better start saving some money for this little puppy!

Another post for our friendly Mac Community. This time we have the program, MainMenu.

Program: MainMenu
URL: Santa Software
Download: Here

Many Mac users understand that when purchasing a system, either a desktop or a laptop, from Apple, they don’t come generous with system memory (unless you are willing to spend tons of cash on the system from Apple). So most people are stuck with 256MB (old days) and 512MB (later standard memory configuration). Albeit the system are doomed to run slow when you work on it all week long, this is where MainMenu comes in handy. This neat little software will clear useless cache stored on the hard drive and RAM, this results in better system performance. One thing I like the most is that since Dashboard sucks out a lot of resource and you are like me whom uses it once in a blue moon then MainMenu can clear some resource from there for you to use, say play games. Oh, MainMenu also runs maintenance scripts on a regular basis for you, this is designed for people like me, super lazy yet want everything automatic. I don’t want to sound cheap, but again, this software is free

A simple screen shot for you:

So I was bored and thought about doing a research on video/audio streaming on local network. This is what I have on my LAN sharing this 1Gbits switch.
1. XBOX360 (100Mbps)
2. Windows XP Pro (1Gbps)

I came across this little piece of software called TVersity, it’s free. What it does is it allows the system to stream video and audio on any of the system mentioned above. I was more interested in seeing this work on my Xbox360 because I was holding the wireless controller and it’ll be awesome to just use the Xbox as the only media source in my room. The XP Pro system actually hosts my massive collection of TV shows and movies and TVersity will “on the go” converts any video files to wmv format and push to the destination client system, in this case the Xbox 360.

TVersity Version 0.9.9.2 (still beta)
Download

My thoughts: The video quality coming from default setting in TVersity was very unsatisfactory. I enjoy watching my videos close to High-Def quality, can’t really stand blurry video. After some setting change on the program, the video quality finally become acceptable. The following are my settings if you are interested (note: this is done on a local LAN connection, if you wish to stream outside of your home network the result will be unwatchable…)

Under General Settinigs: no changes were made
Under Media Settings: no changes were made
Under Transcoder Settings:
- When to transcode? -> Only when needed
- Optimization -> Quality
- Connection Speed -> Wired (100Mbps)
- Connection Quality -> Excellent
- Compression -> Minimum
- Video Resolution -> 1280×720 (I use the wide screen format)
- Image Resolution -> 1024×768 (standard pc monitor format)
- Decoding Speed -> unchecked

Some things I have noticed:
- During a playback of the movie, the server CPU usage was constantly at 100%. This is normal as all videos are transcoded on the fly thus taking up a lot of resource. The creators of this program recommend Hyperthreading PCs or dual cores, I believe it’s definitely recommended especially for people who streams to more than one clients on the home network.
- Assume if you stop the video half way through the playback of the video, the CPU usage on the server is still consistently running at 100%. This worries me a bit, but again, this software is still on its beta stage.

Things I want TVersity to improve:
- transcode higher quality video at the same time without sacrificing network congestion speed
- a better utilization with CPU usage on the server side
- perhaps a mac version

Some screenshots for your viewing pleasure:

I will take this chance to introduce my sub-blog of eggchen.com, the link is located at http://life.eggchen.com.

Once again, happy new year to everyone!