Well, I know absolutely nothing about OSX, so I’m picking up a couple of books from Amazon. Hopefully, they will help me learn how to rename files!

I’m trying out “Zooomr”:1 for image hosting.

*_Update: 2006-07-25_*
Here’s ThinkSecret.com’s “reviews”:4 of some OSX Tiger books.

[4(ThinkSecret.com OSX book reviews)]http://www.thinksecret.com/reviews/tigerbooks.html

[3(Amazon detail page)]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596009151/sr=8-1/qid=1153844695

[2(Amazon detail page)]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596009410/sr=1-1/qid=1153844779

[1(Blog-friendly Zooomr photosharing)]http://www.zooomr.com

I’ve defected from the Windows camp and recently picked up an Apple MacBook. It’s sweeeet so far!

Here’s a little spoof on Apple ads that a friend set along…

[1(Zooomr blog-friendly photo service)]http://www.zooomr.com

An Engadget “post”:1 turned me on to the “Videora iPod converter”:2, which is a handy little program to convert videos to .MP4 format which the video iPod can understand. I haven’t tried it out with a video iPod (I don’t own one), but it seems to work ok with my Windows Quicktime player.

In a nutshell, Videora converter is GUI front end to “FFmpeg”:3. Here’s the FFmpeg project description from SourceForge:

bq.. FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows.

The project is made of several components:

* ffmpeg is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another. It also supports grabbing and encoding in real time from a TV card.
* ffserver is an HTTP (RTSP is being developed) multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. Time shifting of live broadcast is also supported.
* ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries.
* libavcodec is a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performances and high code reusability.
* libavformat is a library containing parsers and generators for all common audio/video formats.

p. Update 2005-10-28:
Oh, “here’s”:4 another Engadget post on using “VLC”:5 to do the conversion. However, for some reason, I couldn’t get my Quicktime player to play the converted .MP4 file — probably due to operator error.

[5(The most excellent VLC media player homepage)]http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[4(Engadget on using VLC to convert videos for the iPod)]http://features.engadget.com/entry/1234000583063891/

[3(FFmpg page on SourceForge)]http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

[2(Videora iPod converter page)]http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPod/

[1(Engadget post on Videora and iPod video conversion)]http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000723066031/

I used to be in the Apple camp of, _”The cell phone will eventually kill the iPod as it subsumes digital music functionality”._ After all, everyone is going to have a cell phone, so why carry both?

However, after the “Nano”:1, I’m now in the camp of, _”Apple should just start making cell phones.”_ I mean the high bar to hit is Nokia. Here’s some of Nokia’s recent “designs”:3.

Uhhhh… whatever.

Come on, it’d be game, set and match Apple.

After all, *everyone* is going to have one. “Bill”:2 can keep his “PC on every desktop”:4, thank you.

[4(Infoworld on a PC on every desktop)]http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?/features/990621directions.htm

[3(Zoinger on Nokia... lost in the Matrix)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/05/10/nokia-starts-making-phones-you-might-want-to-buy/

[2(Wikipedia on Bill Gates)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

[1(Link to Apple's Nano site)]http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/