Do you find yourself hesitating to click on YouTube’s full screen button because of the extra bit of time you will have to wait to watch the video? Or maybe you just wish the videos would play in full screen by default? Well wait no more. All you need to do is harness the power of the built in zoom function Mac OS X.
How-to with video after the jump.
Downloading YouTube videos for offline viewing (on you iPod or in iTunes) is a lot easier than you may initially think. Of course, there are utilities like TubeSock that will copy videos from YouTube for you. This will however set you back $15. Why pay $15 when there’s a free and easy way to download videos from YouTube?
Creating a folder named Demo Mode on your 5G iPod and renaming a video of your choice Demo in iTunes will activate that video as a screen saver on your iPod when it’s charging!
[Via francisreal's .mac webpage]
As noted,
This will only work on
Read on for step by step instructions with screen shots.
If you haven’t come across HandBrake already, it is a free utility for ripping DVDs. It converts DVDs to either the MPEG4 format or to the iPod friendly H.264 format. HandBrake is also very customisable in terms of the frame rate, language selection, target file size and even subtitles.
However as you may have noticed if you’ve used HandBrake before, the videos encoded tend to be significantly darker than the original. A quick fix for this is to load the video into iTunes and convert it for iPod. In the banner below, you can see the difference between the HandBrake file (on the right) and the iTunes converted file (on the left).
It is however worth noting that the new file that iTunes will encode will be optimised for the iPod and therefore may not be of high enough quality to watch on a bigger screen.
OS X’s built in bluetooth file exchange utility seems to have been giving Nokia N70 users quite a bit of grief. In fact browsing the Nokia N70 from OS X is next to impossible. The only way to get your pictures across to your Mac so far has been by transferring them one at a time, which can be a painstakingly time consuming task.
There is however a work around that will let you transfer all of your pictures in one go.
Video after the jump.
I really like how my mac simplifies and automates a lot of tasks, but one of the biggest things that irks me is all the junk that fills up my desktop after downloading and installing things. I generally keep my desktop clean (with no HD icon) except maybe one or two things that are currently important (and I keep these on the far left of the desktop, out of the way of all the detritus that builds up on the right). Using the wonders of applescript I wrote a simple script that will trash the files and folders that are on the right hand side of my desktop, but not the left hand side! Here’s how I did it. (more…)
We showed in our last post that you can make a free 1GB file storage account at Box.net and mount it on your desktop. While it’s very easy to set up, it’s not perfect, Let’s see why… (more…)
Perhaps as many Mac users know, you can drag-and-drop files (and text) with the use of exposé (both the show desktop [F11] and show all windows functions [F9]). For those who don’t, here’s a video to illustrate followed by an explanation:
As we saw in a previous post, LATEXiT can be used to place professionally typesetted equations in Apple’s Keynote. In fact, LATEXiT has an even better integration with Apple’s Pages word processing application. Continue reading for a demonstration of what you can do with LATEXiT and Pages…
As promised, here is the second installment of our Keynote Secrets post from a few days ago! This post will deal with Keynotes ability to work natively with PDF files.
PDF Handling in Keynote
The second feature of Keynote is its ability to accept PDF documents when placed on a slide (PowerPoint first converts the PDF to an image file resulting in a major loss in quality). This is particularly useful if you have LATEX installed when combined with a freeware program called LATEXiT. As illustrated on the LATEXiT homepage, you can quickly typeset equations and then drag-and-drop them in PDF form on a slide. Part of the beauty of this is that the resulting equation can be scaled to huge proportions, rotated and have shadow applied from within Keynote and still maintain excellent image quality. The image below of a Keynote slide illustrates this (click for a larger version).
Furthermore, if you have a PDF document from which you wish to display a particular part, you can open the PDF in Preview.app and use the copy selection tool and paste into Keynote. Again, the beauty here is that you can scale the PDF snippet and zoom in on the interesting parts without losing image quality!
Keep a look out for our next LATEX (on OSX) related post, we shall expand upon the use of the freeware application LATEXiT and the other Apple iWork application, Pages…