Zamzar - Free online file conversion

Asked to help with a project to put a few Youtube clips together in iMovie.  Just a short intro before a meeting.  The amazing ability for us to find so many online resources is dizzying.  I punched in a search and came up with Zamzar.  Fed it two links to Youtube and the site pulled, converted and emailed me a download for them.  Loaded them right into iMovie.  Not extremely high quality, but for a bit of fun, it was very simple.  Just be prepared for a few hours delay until you get the download link via email.

All-You-Can-Eat Broadband Is Dead: Time Warner to Charge by the Byte

I’ve never tracked my download usage, but I know I don’t go anywhere near these limits.  Yet.  But that could change as IPTV comes on board.  I would kill to go to an IPTV option today.  Being able to drop my stupid cable subscription for a fiber optic bandwidth to one box will be nice in the near future.

However, this is a bit scary.  What do you do when you reach the end of the bytes on the 26th of the month?  Start rationing?  Start hopping on your neighbor’s unprotected wireless?

But, when we were in Romania over the Holidays, one of my wife’s friends is an expert in the telecom industry and said the Net will start having major bandwidth problems in the next three years.  Mostly due to increasing access by the growing number of people on the Net but exacerbated by the individuals who are downloading video and will be moving to downloading hi-def fairly soon.  Net Neutrality is great, but you can bet the ISPs will use this as a way to try to bypass any bans by the government.

Featured Mac Download: Time Machine Over the Network with iTimeMachine

More Time Machine functions.  This time for over the air, so I could potentially set up my Mac to back up to a drive connected to my HTPC.

Open Source Living

This might be the best open source catalog I’ve seen.  Certainly full of high-quality products.  Something sites like Sourceforge struggle with (just try a search for a specific type of software functionality if you don’t believe me).  In this case, the software is handpicked and makes for a very recommendable site for people looking for options for almost any computer function.

photodrop

Great app which allows you to create your own droplets.  I’ve created two so far, both for rotating an image, and they happen very quickly.  Barely any hesitation other than the splash screen warning you about messing with the original of an image.  Certainly faster than the PhotoShop droplets I’ve worked with in the past though the newer version of Pshop may have solved that issue without a requirement to load the full Pshop engine to do the work.

Apple: Leopard Disk Utility Format Issue Screws With Time Machine (But There’s An Easy Fix)

On my move towards using Time Machine, I was researching issues and ran into this.  Might not effect me, but I’m pretty certain the drive I’m using came formated for Windows.  Probably FAT32.  Hopefully this won’t be a real problem for me, but always good to know a solution up front if possible.

Create and Share Floorplans Online with Floorplanner.com

Now, this is a great site.  When we moved into our new house, we used it quite a bit.  Once you have a room set up, measure your furniture and start editing configurations.  I worked really well to give an idea of what didn’t work.  Didn’t always help find the perfect option, that takes hands on with the actual furniture, but it was very useful in ruling out some configurations early.

Free to create and edit one room.  For more than one room at a time, you have to pay.

Yep

Yep is a PDF organizer that mimics the iPhoto interface.  I ran into something like this, on the recommendation of a professor, for the PC but had started moving to the Mac.  I had considered looking up the PC version and running it through Parallels, but have hesitated to do so.  This great, because I can finally start to organize some information I have worked on previously to do the same thing.  I still may end up using something like DevonThink to get all of my docs sorted out.  But will give this a try before moving onto something that requires $s.

Little Snitch - Download

One of the things I loved on my Windows machine was Norton Internet Security’s ability to hold up a connection until I said okay.  My wife often heckled me on the fact that I allowed almost everything to pass through, but I learned a lot about which programs like to make silent communications to their home servers.   NIce to see something like this for the Mac OS.  Though I haven’t been as paranoid about Apple as I was about Microsoft, I’ve read some interesting bits about how much into Apple is pulling from their clients and want to get the same insight about OS X.

TimeMachineScheduler

I’m loving Leopard so far.  Worked out most of the kinks and have it running as smoothly as possible until HamachiX is updated to Leopard support.  Time Machine is the last of the major upgrades I don’t have running, but I’m working on it soon.  Maybe this week.  Little apps like this can be invaluable.  Won’t know until I work with Time Machine as to how often I’ll want the updates, but at least this gives you some great options.