Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

This one has been a minor thorn in my side, but today it reared its ugly head again and for some reason really pissed me off.  Creating a new file from Finder.  In Windows I could right-click then choose New... and I had a ton of options (Text Document, Word Document, etc.).  I can't do this in Finder.  After much googling I came up with two possible solutions - some app called NuFile or Quicksilver.  Since I've been told by many fellow Mac users that Quicksilver is the end all and be all I decided to give that route a try first.  Well, after about an hour of struggling I decided to give up and go with the NuFile route.  After installing and trying to figure out why it wasn't working, and a little more googling, it turned out that it hasn't been updated in over 3 years and doesn't work on Snow Leopard.  So it's back to Quicksilver, which is causing me to prematurely go grey.  I was able to get this working, but it took me about a hundred keystrokes, and was far more frustrating than opening a text editor and clicking File -> Save As... would have been.  So I'm still not sure what all the hubbub over Quicksilver is.

Frustrated.

Please, all MacHeads reading this... HELP!  I can not believe that there is no way to merge two directories through the GUI in OS X.  Yet every forum thread I read tells me to use mv or cp or ditto or opendiff or some other cryptic Terminal command instead of just dragging and dropping the contents of one folder into another (which, as we all know, obliterates the target directory, overwriting it with the source).  This is utterly retarded, and I'm really starting to hate it.

Oh ya, and I also really hate that I can't right-click a file (or directory) and choose "Copy" "Cut".  Or Cmd-C Cmd-V.  Or via the Edit menu.  Why???  Why can't I copy cut a folder, THEN navigate to where I want to go, then PASTE?!  So fucking frustrating.

Don't get me wrong... the Mac has a lot of redeeming features... but these two simple file system UI oversights are driving me bonkers.  I just don't know what to do... for every other issue I've had a forum or blog solution has appeared within minutes of searching... but the only solution I seem to have for these is to go command-line or buy some sort of product - for functionality that SHOULD BE NATIVE!

Argh.

And please, if there's something ridiculously stupid that I'm overlooking or don't know about, feel free to make fun of me - as long as you also provide the appropriate solution.  I don't mind being mocked, as long as it's a learning process.

I was going to make this a comparison with a fore drawn conclusion, but instead I'm just going to mention the deal breakers with VLC and the deal makers with MPlayer OSX Extended.

VLC

• Crashes when I load certain subtitles using Thai fonts (like all SSA files from ThaiSubtitles.com)
• Hangs sometimes when I'm playing a movie, pause it the try to exit or load a new movie, requiring me to kill the process.
• Bookmarks don't work.
• Has an option for always on top, but not always on top while playing.
• Always on top option causes Dock mouseover names to appear underneath the player.
• Postprocessing only has a quantitative quality ranking (1-6) and is not granular. 
• I hate VLC's icon.  Seriously, a pylon?  How is that related to multimedia?
  

MPlayer OSX Extended

• Handles all subtitles I've thrown at it so far.
• Has never hung or crashed on me.
• Option for always on top while playing.
• Always on top option allows Dock mouseover names to appear above the player
• Video postprocessing equalizer allows granular control over video settings.

Sure, MPlayer doesn't seem to have bookmarks or a functional playlist, but since I'm only using it for video the playlist function is moot.  Bookmarks would be really nice (as in, the ability to mark a timestamp in a particular file to resume from there later), but I can live without it.  The continued crashing/hanging of VLC is really what did me in, and I'm glad it did as MPlayer, so far at least, seems much nicer.  VLC also appears to have a ton more options, but none of them concern me right now.  Though I'm sure if I needed to change my output module to Color ASCII Art or add a Telnet interface to my video player, I'd switch back to VLC.  Until then, MPlayer is it.

Update (18/01/11): I recently developed an online tool to do this conversion for you. Read the rest of this post if you want to go old school, otherwise stop by and use the Thai Subtitle Converter brought to you by Grinning Gecko Labs.

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Original Post:
After some searching and experimenting I believe I've found a solution. I realized early on that it was a character encoding issue, but didn't really know how to resolve it. Well, after reading this thread I've managed to make it work in MPlayer OSX Extended (loading either the pre-converted or post-converted subtitles in VLC just crashes it... oh well). As I'm sure you already know if you're reading this post, ThaiSubtitle.com is the place to go for Thai subtitles. However, according to the above thread, it encodes its SSA files as ANSI (TIS-620) instead of UTF-8. This causes issues. The solution, though, is rather simple. Using iconv (included in OSX; 10.6 at least, but I'm sure it's kicking around in earlier versions as well) you just run a quick little Terminal command and you're off to the races.  So, let's say for example that your downloaded subtitle filename is subtitle.ssa and your movie filename is movie.avi.  Open a Terminal window, navigate to the folder containing both of these files and type the following:

iconv -f tis-620 -t utf-8 subtitle.ssa > movie.ssa

Now when you launch movie.avi in MPlayer, it automatically loads the subtitle of the same name (movie.ssa) and the characters render correctly.  Sweet!

For the record, on Windows just use Media Player Classic Home Cinema and switch the font/encoding to Thai or use VobSub and do the same.  Both are included as part of the K-Lite Codec Pack.

 
Since I have the iPod Touch and don't have a functional wireless router/AP, I needed to set up wireless internet sharing on both my Mac side and Windows side.  Setting it up was easy, but getting either of them to enable it after reboot was difficult.  On the Mac side, it shows as enabled, but you have to toggle it (turn it off then on) for it to work.  On Windows it just doesn't connect until you tell it to.  After extensive googling I managed to find the solution for both, and present them here.

Mac (OSX 10.6)
Set up Internet Sharing on your Airport as you normally would.  Then open a Terminal session and type the following:

sudo sh -c 'echo killall InternetSharing >> /etc/rc.local'
sudo sh -c 'chmod +x /etc/rc.local'

When you reboot it works as it should.

Windows 7
Share your wired connection (or whatever your internet is connected to).  Then create an Ad-hoc wireless network.  Once that's done open a command prompt and type:

netsh wlan show profiles

This will show you a list of wireless profiles.  Remember the name of the one that's referring to your newly created Ad-hoc network (referred to hereafter as PROFILE).  Then create a shortcut on your desktop with the following command-line:

C:\Windows\System32\netsh.exe wlan connect name=PROFILE

Name it whatever you want, then move it to your All Users Startup folder (I was unable to create the shortcut directly in my All Users Startup for some reason, likely some sort of UAC restriction).  When you reboot it connects to the Ad-hoc network and your internet is shared.

Who'd have thunk that I'd be posting Mac tips on my blog.  Not I.

I've been using my new Mac for about a little under a week now, and figured I'd regale you with my software choices.  As on Windows, I tend to stick with FOSS if at all possible.

Firefox - No brainer.  Firebug is a major requirement.  Also I really hate not having a status bar at the bottom of my window (a la Safari).

VLC - To be honest, I haven't even loaded up QuickTime yet, but I really have no intentions of doing so.  Actually that's not 100% true... I loaded up FrontRow with the included remote (which, apparently, was replaced by Apple with an aluminum one in October of this year - and which I ordered in September so got the crappy plastic one).  I tried playing an XviD.  It didn't work.  That was the extent of my usage of QuickTime and I quickly jumped on the VLC bandwagon.  I've also experimented with MPlayer OSX Extended and definitely like it, so I may bounce back and forth.  My biggest issue right now is with Thai subtitles... they won't render using the correct encoding, and they appear as garbage in both VLC and MPlayer.  I had similar issues on Windows, though using ffdshow and VobSub I had a lot more in the way of configurable options and managed to make it work.  I'll keep trying I guess.

GIMP - I tried Seashore as per a few people's recommendations, but I couldn't even figure out how to crop an image.  GIMP may run under X11, but it functions just like it did in Windows and it's snappy.  Doubt I'll be changing this up anytime soon.  Definitely had to follow this guide though as the window positions were really pissing me off.

SABnzbd+ - This is an awesome little usenet binaries downloader.  It's free and uses a web interface (highly recommend using the Plush theme as it's ajaxy and the default isn't).  Definitely not as robust as Newsleecher, but does the job and does it nicely.  Even has support for RSS feeds so I can set up a feed for my favorite shows and it automagically downloads them when they become available.  Very nice.  Check out here and here for some very useful tips on using RSS feeds to d/l TV shows.

Komodo Edit - Played around with TextWrangler, but from all the reviews I read online Komodo seems to be superior.  It's got nice autocompletion for CSS and a bunch of other languages, as well as tooltips when you type a keyword explaining its function.  Excellent free app.

Adium - Never really used an IM client on Windows (other than the embedded Gmail one) but since I've started using the native Mac Mail client I never have a browser open with Gmail anymore.  Adium was recommended by a friend, and it seems to do what it's supposed to - i.e. IM.

MAMP - Mac Apache, MySQL and PHP.  Used WAMP on Windows which did pretty much the same thing.  My only issue so far with MAMP is that I seem unable to connect to MySQL to populate DBs unless I use root, even when they're permissioned correctly.  I'm sure it's a problem between the keyboard and the chair, but it's such a minor issue that I haven't really looked into it further.  Oh, and it prompts me for my password when I have it set to use port 80.  Really wish I could get around that one without using port 8888... or maybe I'll just revert to 8888 and not worry about it.

FileZilla - My go-to FTP client on Windows, and they have a Mac version as well.  So it is written, so it shall be done.

Evernote - As above, used the Windows client before, and now using the Mac client.  No brainer.  And I'm happy to say that the Mac client is much nicer than the Windows one.

Folx - Download manager.  If my internet was even somewhat reliable I'm sure I wouldn't need this, but as it is I had to install GetRight on Windows and this is the only free equivalent that I've found on Mac.  My biggest problem with it is that it supposedly supports torrents as well, but it sucks at them.  However when it downloads a .torrent file it doesn't open µTorrent for me, it keeps it and tries using it.  So I have to manually kill its torrent download and open the torrent in µTorrent.  Bit of a PITA.

Update: So it turns out Folx is a piece of crap.  Or, to be politically correct, "it didn't suit my needs".  I was trying to download the iPhone SDK which is 2.4gb and requires being logged in to the Apple site.  Folx just couldn't get it, no matter what I tried.  And it kept intercepting the download link, even after I'd disabled it and the Firefox plugin.  But it couldn't actually get to the file and kept downloading a redirected login page.  So I'm now trying out DownThemAll! which seems to be a much better fit.  Native Firefox extension so I'm not having any problem grabbing the file from the site, even when I haven't actually logged in (i.e. I was logged in when I first started d/ling it, but have restarted Firefox multiple times since then and it keeps resuming nicely).  Hopefully this one works out for me.

Max - for converting audio file formats.  Nothing fancy.

StuffIt - for dealing with rars.

Quicksilver - I have no idea why yet.  But the two largest Mac proponents in my immediate circle of friends/family both told me to install it right from the get-go, so I did.  Apparently I need to watch some tutorials or something before I can figure out what to do with it.  In other words, RTFM.

So far that's about it.  All FOSS.  I'm sure that there are better pay alternatives out there to some of these, but I'm on a budget and really, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I just moved a folder (Books) into another folder containing a subfolder Books.  It asked me if I want to overwrite the target folder (which, admittedly, I assumed meant "overwrite any files contained within that are already there").  Thinking it would merge them as it does in Windows, I said yes.  Instead it wiped the target and moved the source.  Luckily there wasn't anything really important in there, but that's somewhat retarded imho.  If it's gonna be destructive it should at least tell me that, or give me the option to merge.

Oh ya, and Time Machine doesn't work on a FAT32 drive, which is what I need so that I can share between my OSes (as well as with my friends).  I suppose I could partition, but who can ever predict how much space they'll need for various partitions/data stores?  Not I.  Frustrating.

As an aside, I just finished installing Windows 7 using BootCamp via my USB HDD.  Took some finagling, but I managed to get it to install and all the drivers seem to be there (i.e. no unrecognized devices).  So now I just need to figure out what I want to play, cuz I've been missing gaming.   I would also like to say that for the record, it looks pretty much like Vista.  Tough to compare speeds since this machine is much faster than my Tablet was, but it does seem snappier (but then, when does a clean install NOT feel snappier than a bloated pre-load?).  I'd also like to say that the Mac eye candy still puts Windows to shame.  I was working in it for a bit and thinking "hmm... not bad. Visually pleasing. This might actually be better than OSX".  Then I booted back into Macintosh-land and after launching one app thought "nope, Windows still has a long way to go in the eye candy department".

<sarc>Thanks Steve</sarc> (if only I could use those tags in real life).  I get my shiny new lappy and iPod, and after playing with the lappy for a couple days I decided just now to unbox the Touch and see what it can do.  Well, after setting up sync'ing and all that, it tells me there's a software update available.  Neat I think.  Tell me more!  Well, it turns out that this software update (from v.2.2.1 to v.3.1.2) will cost me $4.95.  Um, isn't this device BRAND NEW?!  Shouldn't I be entitled to at least a month's worth of updates for free?  Or forever?  I mean, it is a firmware/OS sorta deal, isn't it?  Updating my Nokia's firmware doesn't cost me anything.

Guess I'm stickin' with 2.2.1 unless someone can tell me why I shouldn't?  Cuz likely by the time I do anything that would have required 3.1.2 instead of 2.2.1, 4.0 will be out.  Re-tar-ded.

As in Apache, MySQL and PHP.  I was happily using WAMP on Windows, and my sister suggested I use XAMPP on OSX.  However in reading the included software it appears to include PHP 5.3.0, which is incompatible with the latest stable version of Joomla!, 1.5.14.  So I searched and found MAMP, which includes PHP 5.2.10 (compatible).  So I'm off on my first foray of installing an AMP package on my new toy.  Whenever the slow download finishes that is.

I really hope there's an easy way to restore a factory image, as I'm sure I'm gonna cause some serious problems before this learning experience is complete.

My first post on dosboy.ca via a Mac.  Get it?  DOSboy.  Mac.  Ironic.

I have no idea what I'm doing.  I just installed Firefox (though I'm using Safari for this cuz I started while FF was d/ling).  Beyond that, I have no idea what to do.  But it sure is shiny.  And my gf is already jealous of my NEW gf (though, at the risk of sounding gay, all my computers have been named after Transformers, and all male, so technically this would be my new robotic bf).  However I don't even know how to name this thing in front of me.  I'm seriously lost.  Time to RTFM I suppose.