at any rate! macports is a great way to get it installed on your mac.
the current way of setting up macports and then doing
sudo port install ffmpeg
works fine on my PPC at work (oddly — pretty old computer now) but not my Air (intel x386)

So I set out to find the fixes needed to make it work. Here they are:

step 1: install macports — see http://www.macports.org/install.php

sudo port install x264 +noasm # for i386 (not needed for PPC)
sudo port fetch ffmpeg
sudo port checksum ffmpeg
sudo port extract ffmpeg
sudo port patch ffmpeg
remove “–enable-shared” from /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg/Portfile
sudo port install ffmpeg

(and “ffplay” is pretty cool now! i am considering using it over mplayer, hmm….)

OK, here is how to get your mac to output 24p to your Samsung series 6 (or higher) TV:

1. Connect your mac to your tv with a DVI->HDMI cable
2. Install SwitchResX, which will let you customize display settings on your mac.
3. Launch SwitchResX and create a custom resolution, using the settings below.
4. Reboot your mac.
5. Launch SwitchResX again and confirm that the new 1080p24 setting is available.
6. Activate it and rejoice!
   

I’m mostly happy with my new TV (in true redneck fashion, I traded my pickup truck for it). I originally got a Series 5, but It could only do 1080p60, and I really wanted 1080p24, so I had to upgrade to the Series 6. Unfortunately, the Series 6 arrived with a dead pixel. I don’t know what to do about that..

You will need a second Mac or Linux box to host the remote backup. This takes five to ten minutes to set up and configure.

First, configure your remote backup machine. These instructions assume that you are using a Mac for this.

• Configure your remote backup machine with a static IP address
  
  • Your backup machine must be connected to the same wireless router that your laptop will connect to when you are home
  • My wireless router is set to assign IP addresses starting with 192.168.1.100, so I assigned my remote mac to use 192.168.1.23
  • To assign an IP address manually while still using DHCP to get other network settings from your wireless router, go to System Preferences -> Network -> Airport -> Advanced -> TCP/IP and choose “Using DHCP with manual address”
    
• Configure AFP File Sharing under System Preferences -> Sharing
  
  • Select the “File Sharing” checkbox. You should see a message that says “Others can access your computer at afp://192.168.1.23″, or something similar.
  • Click the “+” button under “Shared Folders:”, and add the hard drive you want to store the backups to the list
  • Click the “+” button under “Users:”. Create a user called “backup”. Give this user Read & Write permissions to the backup hard drive
    

• Mount the remote backup hard drive
  
  • In the Finder, choose “Connect to Server…” under the Go menu
  • Type afp://192.168.1.23 in for the server address
  • When asked, log in using user “backup” and type in the password. Be sure to click “Remember password in my Keychain”
    
• Now, Configure Time Machine
  
  • Choose System Preferences -> Time Machine
  • Click “Choose Backup Disk”
  • Choose the remote backup disk that you mounted using AFP
    

If you use your laptop in the standard, Apple-approved manner, then you can configure Time Machine to only backup your Users directory, which will save space and time. Let me know if you need more help!

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Then send kill -1 to the Dock process.

Link to the blog I found this on

Shoes is a very informal GUI toolkit. It’s for making regular old windowing apps. It’s a blend of my favorite things from the Web, some Ruby style, and a sprinkling of cross-platform widgets. (More in the README.)

Check out the book reader tutorial on Hackety.org

simple screenshots:

Download it here! This is a very early version, so please help me test it!

But now let’s say you are writing in Cocoa. ugh. Before you shell out to your favorite scripting language, check out CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes() It doesn’t encode the RFC 2396/RFC 2732 reserved characters by default (other than ‘[' and ']‘), but you can specify additional characters to encode in the fourth argument. Use something like this:

CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(
    NULL, 
    (CFStringRef)@"escape this %;/?:@&=+$[] string", 
    NULL, 
    (CFStringRef)@";/?:@&=+$,", 
    kCFStringEncodingUTF8
);

It took me quite a while to figure this out… I found the NSString method stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding, but that doesn’t escape the reserved characters.

(I have a suspicion that Cocoa developers are getting paid per letter…)

So now I get to go through Apple Setup again and create my user account and go to System Preferences and change “key repeat rate” to “Fast” and change “delay until repeat” to “short” and pull out all the crap that’s in the dock and put terminal in the dock and I think you get the idea. I have to set up my mac again. Every time. I’ve done this around 40 times in 2006 alone.

Apple Setup has an option to transfer data from you old mac, but it’s pretty specific to transferring your home directory from a previous machine. There is no option to “restore you laptop to the way it was before the hard drive crapped out”.

And wouldn’t it be nice if it was simple as copying my home directory? But no, many applications install stuff into the “/Library” folder and so on, kernel extensions, registration keys. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the music that I purchased from the iTunes Music Store will no longer work on my macbook pro even though it is exactly the same machine with a new hard drive. Everywhere in the iTMS documentation it says you can “authorize up to 5 computers” … but really what is implemented is you can have up 5 different installations of Mac OS X authorized to play your songs at any given time. If you lose access to those installations for whatever reason you are screwed and/or have to deal with Apple Support to reset some counters. I am really curious how Apple Support handles this iTMS authorization issue but I haven’t had the energy to make the phone calls yet.

I was hoping the boot-disk-RAID-mirror would solve the problem of backup but in the end it didn’t work out due to complexity, poor documentation of Apple RAID Mirroring, and just plain not understanding what happens when there is a conflict between two mirrored disks. In one of my tests, the file with a conflict just ended up with some bogus data in it … I didn’t feel like it was worth my time to analyze what does and does not work with Apple RAID when the mirrored pairs are disconnected, modified differently, and then reconnected. There is no point to making a backup if you are unsure whether it’s even going to work.

This is a long way of saying I would love to hear about a way to back up your mac in a way that minimizes all these problems.

Just now the backlight on my white MacBook is kaput. I can see the display is working back there but just barely because there is no backlight. Apparently I am not the only one. A failed backlight almost certainly indicates a loose connection or a failed inverter board. This means … you guessed it, I have to get “the box” for my MacBook now.

I have three mac laptops. Only one of them is functional right now, all due to hardware failures that are not my fault. I’m really glad I kept this PowerBook 12″ with which I am composing this post. It has worked like charm for the nearly two years that I’ve owned it. And at the moment it’s the only mac I own that works at all.

It’s very frustrating but still, I would *much* rather be dealing with Apple Support than Dell or HP. I am noting down some techniques for how to get the fast path through Apple Support when you know you have a hardware issue and just want to have them send you “the box” with minimal amounts of BS.

Link to a helpful “my backlight is broken!” Apple Discussions thread