Safari is Cooler than you Think!
When you really start digging into Mac OS X, it's fairly mind-boggling how much extra stuff it has that your average user never sees. I recently encountered a problem on my MacBook Pro, where the Optical Audio was overriding my internal speakers, which prevented me from hearing any audio (without using headphones). Unfortunately, there's no easy-to-access preference pane to enable or disable various audio devices. This led me on a search for command-line utilities to manage system preferences ...
Published: 2008-08-11
Extracting and Encoding Still images to/from Video files
ffmpeg is a cool tool.While it's got many many features and uses, I mostly use it to extract frames (or still images) from a video and create a video out of frames. While instructions on how to do this are posted on their list of FAQs, it's probably worth posting again.To extract all frames from a video file named "video.mpg": ffmpeg -i video.mpg frame%d.jpgThis will produce a series of JPEG image files ...
Published: 2008-07-11
Games for Kids: dodger
I've always thought it would be fun to build video games, and when my daughters were born, I knew I would eventually want to build some simple games that they could enjoy while they're young. My original attempt at this lead me to pygame, and the result was a simple alphabet/number game that plopped letters and numbers on the screen (very similar to AlphaBaby, but not nearly as good!). Unfortunately, I never continued to develop that one ...
Published: 2007-10-31
Announcing pgSlideShow
I've just released a simple little application called pgSlideShow. It's a free image slideshow application written in Python using pygame. It recursively searches a given directory for image files, and then displays them on a computer screen in Fullscreen mode. You can get it here: http://bradmontgomery.net/pgSlideShow/https://github.com/bradmontgomery/pgSlideShow
Published: 2007-05-22
Easy Video Conferencing?
I just skimmed through the list of PC World's 100 Best Products of 2007, and one of the things that caught my eye was SightSpeed. Apparently it's supposed to be the world's best video conferencing system. What interests me, though is the price (FREE!) and that it works on Mac OS X (and Windows). I'm going to give it a shot and see how it works.
Published: 2007-04-23
MacMathematics
One of my Favorite Mac Apps is Grapher. It lets you graph everything from simple 2D equations to complex 3D equations. For example, want to see all of the Axes of symmetry for a cube? Just enter the equations x=0, y=0, z=0, x=y, x=-y, x=z, x=-z, y=z, and y=-z, and voila! Pictures make math fun! You can also save these in .gcx files. Download my cube: CubeAxesOfSymmetry.gcx
Published: 2007-04-23
MacMathematics
One of my Favorite Mac Apps is Grapher. It lets you graph everything from simple 2D equations to complex 3D equations. For example, want to see all of the Axes of symmetry for a cube? Just enter the equations x=0, y=0, z=0, x=y, x=-y, x=z, x=-z, y=z, and y=-z, and voila!Pictures make math fun! You can also save these in .gcx files. Download my cube: CubeAxesOfSymmetry.gcx
Published: 2006-11-01
DiskWarrior Rocks!
...the title says it all. For just less than $90 USD, I've now recovered all of my priceless data for which I did not have the foresight (or time, or means, or whatever) to back up. If you're a Mac user, and you ever have a drive that stops working (or a problem like mine), head over to http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/ and purchase a copy.
Published: 2006-07-22
Competition is Good
Well, I've finally grabbed a copy of the IE7 beta, and I have to admit that I'm impressed... although, I recognize features that are present in almost every other browser I've used. So far, I'm pleased to see that IE7 doesn't break too many of the sites that I've built, which make extensive use of CSS. I guess this just goes to show that competition DOES foster innovation.With IE7, I've also got ...