The memory of my last (and only) Mac crash (logicboard failed) is still very vivid in my mind. Therefor, I have become a passionate back-upper: not just once a month or two, no: TimeMachine, the great Leopard feature, makes backups of my important data every hour and with SuperDuper! I clone my complete hard drive to an external fire wire drive (note to self: do that more often!).
The thing is: The drive for my TM backup holds 500GB, but TM is not near to using that up. So, at least …

The B5 geek in my badly needed a new ringtone and I decided to pull out all the stops and create a video ringtone (3gp file).  This tutorial will also help you to learn how to merge audio and video files with QuickTime.
Prerequisites
You will need QuickTime Pro. With QT Pro, you will create your file. For that, you of course will need a QT compatible video (preferably .mov or .mp4/.m4v) and audio file. I used the excellent tool iTube X to download a flash file from YouTube containing the opening …

I like movies. Sometimes I even love them. Unfortunately, German tv doesn’t show them in their original language, which means I am always stuck with some more or less appropriate synchronization.
If you have ever seen »Armageddon« in German and in English you will know that they just completely screwed the translation up. Many of the funny lines don’t come through in the German translation. And I won’t even go to »The X-Files« and »Babylon 5«. The latter is especially terrible, sometimes the meaning of the dialogue is completely altered. It …

Mac computers don’t play AC3 files natively so what to do? And how to add them to iTunes so you can sync them to your iPod or Mp3-player of choice?
First thing’s first: How to play those files? You need to download the A52 codec, that will enable Quicktime to play the files. Read the instructions in the »Readme«!
Now, I am running Mac OS Leopard and conversion did not work for me with mac3dec.1.6.3 – it worked fine under Tiger, but not anymore. Instead, I downloaded MpegStreamclip. Just load your AC3 …

Finally I have all the time I need to re-install all my essential applications and migrate my data.
As I wrote here, a very nice employee of Cyberport helped me backing up my data from my broken MacBook before sending it in for repairs. Thank godness he did, because the Mac was returned to me with a new logic board and a new hard drive.
Migrating Mails
This was on top of my priority list. Since I didn’t have a clone of my system, I could not use the migration assistant and had …

Yesterday I switched my permalink structure within WordPress, so my links would reflect the title of the entry and not just some cryptic page ID. Everything seemed to work fine and I was absolutely happy – SEO (search engine friendly) URLs, here I come! May Google crawl my site and digest my content.
But this morning, out of curiousity, I clicked on my sub-pages (About, Pictures…) and they only returned a 403 error. To make a 6+ hour trial-and-error-marathon short: changing the permalink structure worked fine for blog entries, but …

Now that I have finally finished my thesis – yes, I keep repeating that, but after all, it’s a huge success for me – I want to write about the tools that I employed. Before I started my thesis I kept searching the internet for applications that would suit my needs and wouldn’t cost too much. Bringing those two factors together was no easy task, let me tell you … as my friends would tell you, I do have high expectations.
I found a number of articles and ended up downloading …

Ok, in this entry I wrote how I searched for software to convert some .flac files on the Mac. Well, either I read the description of the app I recommended then not attentively enough … it doesn’t start anymore, that’s the problem I was faced with a couple of days ago. I thought that after the trial period some functions would remain, only the variety of files that could be handled would be limited. But the app didn’t start at all.So, I went to look for an alternative again. And …