It doesn’t get much more geeky than the command line, and if you get your socks all tied in knots over some terminal love, then you MUST have this application. It lets you bring up the terminal from any application you’re in. You can assign a shortcut key to the operation, and upon hitting the key combo the terminal opens from the menubar. It’s really handy if you spend a lot of time jumping in and out of the terminal.
There are those amongst the newly initiated Apple community members who may not realize that Apple offers discounts to certain groups of users and potential users. The three major groups are Government employees, Businesses, and students.
The discounts provided are on a myriad of products. Anything from iPods, to Macs, to Apple software. There are of course exclusions. The biggest exclusion is the iPhone. Governmental employees and students pay the same price for an iPhone as the rest of the general public. Now they may be able to get discounts on their wireless service, but for that you would have to talk to the carrier.
The latest products added are related to 10.6 Snow Leopard. So I’ll give these as an example to show the discounts. The retail price for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Client single-user upgrade is $29. The price for Governmental employees is $24.10. The family-pack retail cost is $49. While the governmental discount cost is $40.70. Sometimes even governmental employees do not get a discount. Take for instance OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server. Even for Governmental employees the price is the same as retail, $499.
The odd thing is that students do not get discounts on Snow Leopard nor on iPods. It appears that the only discounts students receive are on Apple computers themselves; however, these are the most expensive items and are the ones that really need the discounts. The one place that Students do receive a discount on software is with Office 2008 for Mac – Home and Student Edition. It is $129.95 which is $20 off. The other place where students do get a discount is on Apple Care. Now they only get a discount on the products that they can get discounts on. This includes the Macbook, iMac, Displays, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro. And these are hefty discounts. The retail price for a Macbook Pro Apple Care warranty is $349. For students the price is $239. That’s $110 or about 31% off. That’s a huge savings.
Retail Apple stores are not the only place to receive these discounts. Any Apple Authorized Resellers are able to also provide the discounts. The biggest one that is most accessible, within the United States, would have to be Best Buy. Just make sure to explore each avenue. Of course, if all else fails Amazon.com is a good place to get your Apple gear.
Opera, the browser that gets very little lip service, but holds a dear place in a lot of users hearts hit version 10 today. It’s only a release candidate, but you can head on over there and give it a try. The release is bringing it up to date with Safari 3 and Chrome’s visual website bookmarks and they’ve even given the application the ability to use a web service as the primary email client for email links. They’ve also increased the speed by 40%, added an inline spell checker, and revamped their web developer tools.
All in all, it sounds like a solid update is in the works, and that the final version will contend with some of the other heavy hitters. We’ll save our full review for the final version, but if you’re interested in where the browser’s heading you should go try out the release candidate.
There are those among us who may still enjoy making “mix” CDs for ourselves or others. Did you know that you can print out an entire track list for a particular playlist? It’s actually quite simple.
Create Playlist
This one we’ll leave up to you. Create any playlist you want or use one of the canned ones that comes stock with iTunes. For our example We’ll use the Top 25 Most Played.
Select Playlist To Print
Click File -> Print
This will bring up a dialog box where you can select which type of layout you would like. My favorite is to use ‘CD Jewel Case Insert’ and Select Mosaic. This will provide a list of songs on the left along with a Mosaic of the album covers on the right.
Print out your Cover
It’s that simple.
Things to remember. The track list can only display 25 items when doing a CD Cover insert. If you’re doing anything other version the only limitation should be the size of the paper. An example of the Top 25 songs that I have can be found here. One thing to keep in mind is that these covers can be quite large in terms of space. My example is 7.1 Megabytes.
It’s not a whole lot, but it’s a nice little trick that can spruce up that mix CD that you’re making. Or as a handy way to backup your playlists in case you decide to do a wipe and reload of your computer when you install Snow Leopard.
Until I had played Firemint’s Real Racing ($9.99), I had played a few casual racing games that were not comparable. Then Real Racing came along and beat out all of those racing game contenders at the track. With Real Racing, $9.99 takes you way ahead of the game. This game boasts amazing graphics that mimic HD on a television and excellent gameplay.
The game has five modes. Quick Race lets you enjoy a quick run through the track and is great for getting started. Career mode lets you improve upon your skills while ramping up points and unlocking new opportunities (tracks, cars, and more). Time Trial lets you race against the clock to get better than your last score. Play locally or online (via leagues) with friends.
The controls are great. Tilt your iPhone to go left or right; touch the bottom of the screen to brake, and touch the top to change the view of the driver. You’ll find that these controls beat out other racing games, as I found most of those a lot more difficult.
One of my favorite features is that you can listen to your own music from your iPod library instead of listening to the game’s music. But beyond this, there’s a pretty good music soundtrack as well.
I’ve never before played an iPhone game that actually makes you feel like you’re there. That all changed with Real Racing. It’s really that good.
Here’s how to create ringtones for your iPhone right from your iTunes library. This will only work with songs you ripped to iTunes, or the 256kps DRM free downloads. If you have DRM songs you can burn them to a CD, and then re-import them into iTunes.
In iTunes, right-click the song you want, go to ‘Get Info’ and change the start and end points so it’s 30 seconds in length.
Verify that your Encoder in Import Using is set to AAC. You can set the quality to any setting you chose. I prefer the 256 kbps setting.
Right-click the song again, ‘convert selection to AAC’.
Find this new file and drag it from iTunes to your desktop.
Right click on the file and select Get Info; then, rename the file extension from .m4a to .m4r.
Import it back into iTunes and it will appear as a ringtone. Tada!
Now the song will be placed in your ringtones folder. You can delete the .m4a converted track from iTunes now, so that you don’t have the thirty second track on your album.
This is more of an application “plugin” than a stand alone app.
August 26, 2009
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