One of the many things I was really looking forward to when ording my first Mac last month besides getting my hands on TextMate was to give iTunes a try as an alternative for buying CDs. Thanks to Sony's policy in the whole XCP/Rootkit and MediaMax affair to treat customers like morons on the one hand and the way too high CD prices on the other made me look for alternative ways on how to legally get music from known artists. Please don't get me wrong: I like indy music but most of the time I still like to listen to bands like NiN or Depeche Mode.
Read more about "Using iTunes" ...Archive for 2005/12
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Using iTunes
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Linking Fortran objects into C code using GNU tools
I'm currently attending a course about programming languages used for mathematics you I also inevitable got to know Fortran. Everything worked like a charm under Linux but now that I've moved to MacOSX as client system I also wanted to get it working under this OS.
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Fullscreen mode in Firefox or Camino on MacOSX?
Am I blind or does neither of these Gecko browsers support a fullscreen mode? IMO really strange and quite disappointing esp. since the Linux version (and probably also the Windows version) of Firefox has this feature. And that it's possible also shows Opera... Really stupid since I thought about making some presentation in S5 but something like that doesn't look all that great in a maximized window :(
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Microsoft Office 2004 Test Drive having a time problem?
Some short maths: I got my laptop IIRC on Nov. 24 bundled with a trial license for Microsoft Office 2004 valid for 30 days which should make it available to be up to Dec. 24. Well, today I wanted to make a PowerPoint presentation so I started PowerPoint .... and was greated by a message box telling me that my trial period is over. Now I really wonder, when my evaluation period effectively started ... the moment Apple started to assemble my laptop? When they put all these 1024x768 fireflies behind the glass? ... Stupid
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Star Trek: Titan
It's strange: Since a few years there's basically an inflation of new book series in the Star Trek universe which are only indirectly related to the TV shows. Most notable for me are the SCE series and not to forget the "New Frontier" series. Since April 2005 there is now also a series around the newly promoted Captain Riker, former first officer of the USS Enterprise-E, and his new ship: The Titan.
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Getting to know QuickSilver
After having read on quite a few websites out there about QuickSilver I still wasn't sure what this is all about. Sure, right on the homepage it says "Launcher" but it also says
An evolving framework for accessing and manipulating many forms of personal data.
I guess it always simply ends with installing a tool and seeing for yourself what it is all about. So today I finally found some time to do it and downloaded build 3348 not really expecting anything simply because I didn't even remember anymore why I wanted to try QuickSilver in the first place ;)
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EGM subscription?
A few years ago I had a real problem: I was literally addicted to video games magazines. Every month I bought IIRC 3 to 5 magazines which basically required all the money I had, so I couldn't even buy games anymore. Ok, that was just a little bit exaggerated. Let's say I bought more than necessary :) I even got some magazines from the US (EGM, Inside (RIP)) simply because I liked how they wrote about all that stuff.
The rescue came in two steps: (1) I simply realized how much paper was lying around each month that was more or less worthless after half a year. And a few years later (2) I found GameSpot and subscribed to it for reasons that I not really relevant to that whole story hear ;) I got everything I wanted for a quarter or less the money it would have took for one print magazine.
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MS teaming up with MTV to battle iTunes?
According to this Microsoft seems to have reached an agreement with MTV to create a service directly battling Apple's iTunes. That actually made me chuckle ... I mean, I don't know what MTV is like in the USA or anywhere else in the world, but the german version is simply trash. It's like you have to make a party everytime they actually play a music video. All the time you get only cheap shows and mediocre to really simply stupid cartoons.
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Erasing AudioCDRWs on MacOSX 10.4.3
For some reason I wasn't able to erase an AudioCDRW I burned a few days ago using the Disk Utilities bundled with MacOSX. All I got were greyed out buttons :-? Since I'm still not really mac-savvy yet, it took me quite some time to find a commandline utility which I hoped would still be able to erase that disc. First I thought about going with cdrecord since I already know this tool. But it's still marked as unstable in fink for Tiger, so I kept looking ;)
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Poor US-gamers. They have to share with the Japanese ;)
Well, to make it short. I just listened to the latest episodes of the 1up and GameSpot podcasts where both were basically whining about the whole Xbox360 launch in Japan and why waste the units over there when in the US there aren't enough units in stock to please everyone... I actually think this is quite funny since normally only players in Europe (and probably also Australia) are on the losing end of basically any equation made in the gaming industry. Remember when the PSP was launched in the US and it wasn't sold out as fast as Sony had expected and European gamers had to wait for half a year for the European launch? Welcome to the world of people making strange decisions, my dear friends in the USA ;)
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