Saturday, June 28, 2008

Make Your Terminal Sing

11:00PM Gina Trapani | You already know that typing say something into the Mac’s Terminal will literally make your Mac say “something.” The UsingMac blog posts a few more nifty text-to-speech commands that will make your Mac sing. Literally. Copy and paste the following to the command line: say -v Good oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo See? Get a few more Terminal songs (one with kinda funny lyrics, even) at the UsingMac page. Then check out 10 more things you forgot your Mac can do. Terminal Sings Songs [UsingMac] More »

Why Apple Australia won’t repair your first-generation iPhone

10:34AM Angus Kidman | While the iPhone 3G will go on sale in Australia on July 11, there’s already a healthy proportion of iPhones in the country, thanks to the wonders of jailbroken iPhones. But what happens if you end up with a physically broken imported gen 1 iPhone? Don’t go looking to Apple for help, would seem to be the answer.Dan Warne at APC reports that Apple is officially refusing to support or repair the first-generation iPhone in any way even after the 3G release — which is sort of fair enough for a jailbroken phone (doing that voids the warranty), but sounds like tough luck on anyone who’s visiting Australia for work when their phone goes cactus. The article also has a useful list of non-official iPhone repair shops, which might well prove to be the best solution.iPhone repairs won’t be available in Australia: Apple [APC] More »

This Week’s Best Posts

10:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | This week’s most popular posts include: How not to blow your download limit at the iTunes store“With virtually all Australian ISPs enforcing some sort of bandwidth cap, what tactics can you use to minimise the impact of a spate of TV downloading?” Expensive simplicity: the PVR tradeoff“With the recent launch of the Foxtel IQ2, the imminent (and much-delayed) appearance of Tivo in Australia next month, and Sony promising its own PlayTV personal video recorder (PVR) option before the year is out, there are more big-name PVR choices for Aussies than ever before.” Top 10 Ways to Trick Yourself into Saving Money“Good money management is a mental exercise in self-regulation and focusing on the long-term goal, even when you’re sure you just can’t go on another day without buying that Kindle or MacBook.” Functional Firefox User Styles“Now that you’ve been running Firefox 3 for almost a week, it’s time customise its interface to your liking with a few great user styles.” Extreme Lifehacker Home Office Makeover“When my messy home office got so cluttered I couldn’t get anything done in it, it was time to take action—and I turned to Lifehacker for advice.” Tweak Firefox to Display Richer Colors“If the digital photo you just uploaded looks washed out on Flickr compared to in your desktop image editor, that’s because Firefox 3’s advanced colour profile support isn’t turned on.” Five Best Desktop Media Players“You’ve collected hundreds of thousands of megabytes (and maybe even gigabytes) of digital music and video in the past 10 years, and as your media library has grown, so has the necessity for finding the perfect desktop media player.” Find Album Art at AllCDCovers“Web-based album art library and search engine AllCDCovers just may have the missing art you’ve been looking to fill in your digital music collection.” Run Windows Apps in Linux with Wine 1.0“No matter how easy Linux distributions make it for newcomers to install and use a free, open-source operating system, nearly everyone has at least one program that only works in Windows.” More »

PlacesBar Editor Customises Windows Explorer

8:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Donationware application PlacesBar Editor customises the default shortcut locations in the Windows and Microsoft Office Save As and Open dialog boxes to give you easy access to the folders you use most. We’ve seen applications like this before, like previously mentioned FileBox eXtender, but this application’s ability to set different default save locations for Microsoft Office and Windows as a whole is a great addition. PlacesBar Editor is donationware, Windows only. PlacesBar Editor [via FreewareGenius] More »

How to Clear Your DVD Clutter

7:00AM Adam Pash | If you’ve got a growing DVD collection that’s taking over your living room, design site Apartment Therapy has posted a simple howto for clearing out the DVD clutter. Basically the author spent a little time with a label maker and cheap jewel cases and was able to fit an enormous DVD collection into a much smaller space. Another alternative, of course, is to move your DVD library to your hard drive, ripping your DVDs in one click with DVD Rip or any other popular DVD-ripping tool. If you’ve successfully decluttered a large DVD library in your abode, let’s hear more about how you did it in the comments. How To: Clear The DVD Clutter [Apartment Therapy] More »

Bookmark Previews Creates Thumbnails of All Your Bookmarks

6:00AM Adam Pash | Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Bookmark Previews creates thumbnail previews for all of your Firefox bookmarks. Once installed, you can browse your bookmarks in a straight thumbnail view or in an iTunes Cover Flow-esque album view. Apart from the impressive eye candy, Bookmark Previews could be an especially handy tool for organizing and cleaning out your bookmarks, since rather than inspecting each link to determine what it’s pointing to, you can just check the thumbnail to determine whether or not you need it. Bookmark Previews creates previews each time you visit a bookmark, but since your previews will be empty when you first install it, it can also create previews for all of your bookmarks automatically in the background. Bookmark Previews is free, works wherever Firefox does. Bookmark Previews [Firefox Add-ons] More »

Best (and Worst) Things About Vista?

5:00AM Gina Trapani | In honour of Bill Gates’ retirement from Microsoft, our brother in blogging Jason Chen lists a few reasons why Windows Vista really isn’t that bad, from security, to looks, to gaming abilities. We’ve given Vista a pretty hard time around here, from our posts on how to make Vista less annoying to implying it copied Mac OS. But what do you think are the best (and worst) things about Vista? Let us know in the comments — and see what Mr. Gates himself really thinks about Vista—after the jump. More »

Blogger Gets Several Major Updates

4:30AM Adam Pash | Google’s weblog publishing platform Blogger received several significant updates to Blogger in Draft yesterday. The new features, which you can see in more detail here, include inline commenting, import and export, and a new and improved post editor. More »

Import Your Del.icio.us Bookmarks and Tags to Firefox 3

4:00AM Adam Pash | Web utility del.icio.us to Firefox merges your bookmarks from social bookmarking web site del.icio.us—tags and all—with your existing Firefox 3 bookmarks. Why might you want to do this? Because the new and improved bookmarking functionality in Firefox 3 supports tagging, but since previous versions of Firefox did not, you’ve already got tons of bookmarks with no tags. More »

Find and Embed Album Art in Your MP3 Collection

2:00AM Kevin Purdy | Your digital music doesn’t stay in one place, and it should look the same no matter where it’s playing. But somehow, in all the transfers from system to system, onto and off of MP3 players, and to and from the net, the album art illustrations that should add visual cues and familiarity seem to always get lost. If you’re looking to match up all your music with their album covers, read on for a quick guide to the best tools and sources for finding and locking down album art, no matter what computer you’re using. More »