Have you got an email that had an attachment like "funny.asf" or "clip.wmv" that would not play? That's because they are windows movies, but you can play them on a mac with the right software.
Here is a list of movie files and what you need to play them:
.mov -Quicktime
.mpg - Quicktime with mpg plugin ($20) , VLC viewer, Real player, Windows media player
.asf .wmf - Windows media player, or VLC viewer
.rm - Real player
Quicktime You most likely already have quicktime, but you can download it here. It has a paid version that has more features, but the free one plays movies just fine. You have to pay an extra $20 for the MPG player component if you want to play MPG files with quicktime.
Real Player This one has a free player and a 'plus' player that you have to pay for. Download it here Don't be fooled by thinking you have to pay for it!
Windows Media player This is microsofts program, it is you best bet for playing some of those files. Note that not all Microsoft movies will play on the Windows media player for the mac! Download here
VLC Viewer This is the open source player, they happen to have a mac version and it works quite well! Download it here
When you download these programs, they will fight over you movies. So when you double click a movie, it will most likely open in the one you installed last! I saw one computer where Adobe Acrobat claimed ownership of all movie files, not very usefull, acrobat would try to open the file and tell you it couldn't.
To change which program you movie opens with :
1. First download the movie.
2. Get info on the movie (on the file menu)
3. On the open with portion, change the program to your favorite player
4. Click the change all button!
Google maps is a new page that makes all the other map pages look antique. You can find your address, then search for Pizza and it will show you all the the pizza places around your address. When you make directions to get somewhere, you can click on the intersections to see a pop-up enlargement of the intersection.
If you remember back to the November meeting, I drove around a neighborhood and found 90 houses that had Wireless networking. Only two of the houses had WEP (encryption) turned on. Channel 6 news ran a 3 night story on why you might want to turn on encryption. So I tried it again and found that about a third of the houses have turned encryption on, and some houses now have 2 wireless networks, while other houses picked rude names for their routers.
WEP is not really good encryption. Someone can break WEP in a few days. The new standard WAP is much better, but the most secure thing to do is to encrypt your wireless connection with a VPN (virtual private network)
Being a mac user, most of you don't have to worry about viruses, but so you can understand better what the rest of the world has to go through, This page give a good demonstration!
Do you have the need to use your work computer from home? Say you lived in Flour Bluff, but you worked in Portland, and every now and then need to use your computer at night. It would not be very efficient to drive 40 minutes each way to use your computer!
There are 3 ways to do this:
You could remotely control your computer as if you were sitting at it. As a bonus these programs let you transfer files between the 2 computers.
Very easy to set up, especially compared with the alternatives
Usually pretty fast depending on configuration
Range, you can easily control your computer from any computer on the internet, anywhere!
VNC is not the most secure program in the world (sends passwords over the internet unencrypted)
Printing to the printer that is right next to your computer is sometimes a problem
You can not do real filesharing between your home and work computer.
You can also buy a PC version. Note that they make you buy 1 copy for every computer you want to control. At around $100 a piece, it could get expensive if you want to use it on a bunch of computers. But if you are going to use it a lot, this program is far superoir to the alternatives.
Apple remote Desktop 2 : This is Apple's offering, it is a high powered application more geared toward computer labs. It's $300 for the cheap version, and $500 for the "unlimited" version.
VNC is a free program that lets you remotely control your computer. there are 2 mac versions, OSX VNC (the server), Chicken of VNC(the Client)
Note that I was not happy with the preformance of Chicken of the VNC over slower connections, so I made a way to use the Java veiwer instead. You can Download the SIT file here.
A VNC server is built into Panther right out of the box, but there is no way to turn it on! OSX VNC is a little program that turns the server on. You want the sever to be on your work computer, Chicken of VNC is a client, which would be at your home computer.
If you have a PC at work, you can remotely control the PC with TightVNC, or Ultra VNC which has both the server and client built in. The PC version will also let you log in through a web browser, maybe they will port this feature to the macintosh soon.
My favorite use for VNC is to remotely control a computer in the same room! If you only have room for 1 keyboard and monitor, but need 2-4 computers for some reason, then you could put VNC on all the computers and remotely control the computers that do not have the keyboard and monitor on them.
To access you work computer from home, you have to configure your firewall to let you in (I hope you have a firewall at work!). You need to "open a port" to get VNC through to your work computer. The port VNC uses is 5900 by default. So you router needs to forward the port 5900 to your computer at work you wish to control. Then you need the IP Address of your work router, you can get this from one of the router information screens. Then you go home and type in the router's IP Address in Chicken of the VNC. If all goes well you will be controlling your work computer!
One more nice feature is that you can remotely control your computer from a web browser on the PC version of VNC. Just type in the IP Address of your computer (or router that forwards port 5800) in your browser to remotely control your computer. An Example is: http://56.44.23.54:5800. Hopefully they will include this feature in the mac version!
If you have a slow internet connection (or even a moderately fast one) you might see a speed improvement by changing the compression to ZLib. If you have a really fast connection (both computers are in the same house) Tight compression is faster.
Maybe just remote control is not good enough, what if you needed to see a server, upload and download lots of files, or would like a more secure way to log in with your remote control program. VPN stands for virtual private network. Basically it is just like you ran an ethernet cable all the way across town and hooked up those other computers! Filesharing network printing and anything else you might do on your network is now possible over the internet without people snooping on what might be going across.
Pretty secure, depending on setup
Easy to configure programs to use it, since it appears that the computers are on the same local network
You could stream your ITunes from your house to work!!!
Range: you can log in to your network anywhere in the world.
A little slow. Most cable companies throttle upload to 256 kps. That means 1 megabyte would take 1 minutes to transfer.
-That so slow that if you wanted to print something over the network it would take minutes to send something to the printer.
Complicated, to set up one of these is pretty difficult, but once it works it should be trouble free.
there are 2 way to set up a VPN, hardware and software
The hardware way is to buy 2 VPN routers and hook them up at work and home. The advantage is that all the computers at work will be visible by all the computers at home. The second advantage is that all the router will handle all the encryption, so it won't slow down your computer to do the number crunching.
I bought the LinkSys BEFSX41, it was amazingly cheap for a VPN Router!! ($80) In the old days a VPN router would cost $300-400.
One thing is that if you do buy this router, and have great trouble with it (like I did) the only fix is to go to linksys's site and downgrade to the oldest firmware you can find! The 1.50.x versions are buggy, the 1.4.x versions are better. And I have yet to try the 1.51.x version (the old one works to well!) Check out this page to download the firmware.
Someone else also bought these routers to use with a mac and has written an excellent article. Mirror of article. He used 3 routers to connect 3 offices together all the time, and it works very well for him. I on the other hand bought them and after much head banging bought 2 'Zywall 2' routers for about twice the price, and while they are much nicer and work much better, are substantially more complicated and out of the box do not work very well with games or other non-business type internet programs.
If you already have an Airport router, and want to do VPN you might check out this page, older airport routers do not work well with VPN's.
The software way is to buy software that does VPN. OSX comes with it (it's called racoon), but you need to be a unix guru to use it. but you can download or buy a front end to make it easy to use racoon. Note that Racoon is just the client, to connect to your computer at work you would still need a router that has VPN, or a fancy server that has VPN capabilities built in.
The free program is called IPSecuritas, you can download it here as well. Not very user friendly, but if you read that article I mentioned, it guides you through it.
The other program is called VPN Tracker 3, and it has 'presets' for many different routers. If you can't get IPSecuritas to work, chances are VPN Tracker will. This one does have a free trial period, so it doesn't cost anything to check it out.
Once you get the VPN software, you will have to open up some ports on your router if you want to be a server. Port 500 and port 9 are used to host a VPN connection. You would only have to open the ports on the computer at work, your computer at home can go through most modern firewalls just fine. If your router at your house is too old (pre-2004) your VPN from your house will most likely not work until you buy a new router.
You could buy 2 wireless access points, set them up in bridge mode, and it would be even more like running a cable down the street than having a VPN! I went over this in another meeting, and as long as your not to far away it's a reasonable solution.
Very very fast. Some of the newer wifi hardware is just as fast as running a cable.
semi good security
easy setup
Does not require the internet at all, and if one place has the internet, it can "share" it with the other location.
Range: normally wifi only goes 200-300 feet! With a big antenna you can go 2 miles, with an antennas at each side 20 miles.
Security, if someone wanted to break into your Wifi, it would only take a couple of days at most.
--NOTE: this can be fixed if you put a VPN on top of the Wifi security. There are access points that have Wifi and VPN! It would take a normal hacker years to break into your VPN network once they got on to your Wifi network. This article explains more
Some more problems is that the signal will not go through certain kinds of walls.
And someone invented a novel security measure, paint that the signals won't go through!
Handbrake is a different kind of DVD ripper. Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 Instead of just putting the DVD on your hard drive to watch on that trip, it will compress it with MPG-4 so that more will fit on your hard disk. That means when you take a trip to Antarctica, and the only thing you can bring is your laptop, you can put 4-5 times more DVD's on your laptop for the trip...! Here is a nice guide for getting started.
In 1984 Steve Jobs gave a demo of the Macintosh,
In 1992 Jobs gave a demo of the Nextstep 3 operating system Large Movie Small Movie
Here is a price list of a Nextstation in 1992
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From a 1992 Usenet post of the Winter 1992 price list
NeXTstation 8-1MB SIMMS, 105MB HD $3775
NeXTstation Turbo 2-4MB SIMMS, 250MB HD $4775
NeXTstation Turbo 2-8MB SIMMS, 250MB HD $5775
NeXTstation Turbo 2-8MB SIMMS, 400MB HD $6775
NeXTstation Turbo 4-8MB SIMMS, 250MB HD $7775
NeXTstation Turbo 4-8MB SIMMS, 400MB HD $8775
NeXTstation Color 4-4MB SIMMS, 105MB HD $5650
NeXTstation Turbo Color 2-8MB SIMMS, 250MB HD $6650
NeXTstation Turbo Color 2-8MB SIMMS, 400MB HD $7650
NeXTstation Turbo Color 4-8MB SIMMS, 250MB HD $8650
NeXTstation Turbo Color 4-8MB SIMMS, 400MB HD $9650
These prices are in the ballpark of comparable machines from Sun and Apple.
===============
While cheaper than the original $10,000 cube, I would say that they are a little more expensive than the apple offerings of the time.
What is amazing is that almost all the really neat features of OS X where in Nextstep 3 more than ten years ago! And there is one technology that is coming up in Tiger (spotlight) that has not made it to the mac platform yet. It is rumored that some PC manufactures are talking to apple about putting OS X on their PC's to let them run a real operating system.
Services are in OS X,(it was in Next 10 years ago), but not a widely known or touted feature, it can be useful.
Some built in functions are like "make a sticky" note or "speech". So if you highlight some text in an application, you can send the text to Stickies, or have your mac say the words out loud.
If you are in an application that was written with OS X in mind then in the first menu (the menu with the name of the application) services will show up. In a quick test I found that most programs don't work with services, but some that did were: Safari, Camino, TextEdit, Stickies and Tex-edit. I was surprised to find that services don't work with BB Edit and Appleworks.
One more nice thing about services is that some programs will add services to the list. Tex edit will add a open text in tex-edit option
You can download the ACP Web Services, and it will add a whole bunch of translation and searching services!
or there is the MSN Dictionary for what Jobs was showing off in his demo of what the Next could do!