AppMiner 2.0

AppMiner2.0AppMiner 2.0, by Bitrino, monitors the App Store for apps which have been discounted or become available for free. With a layout very similar to the App Store, you can easily view all newly released apps, all on sale apps and all top rated apps. Each of these options can viewed by sub-categories or you can view the top 100 in each section.

The most useful section is of course, the Sale section. Here, you can view the on sale apps in specific categories. My most viewed category is Top 100. Apps in each category are displayed chronologically which really helps to see all the newest apps that have just come on sale. Each category can be changed to display just the paid apps, just the free apps or all apps..

My favourite feature however, is the Watch list. Here you can add a watch for any apps that you would like to purchase but can’t afford or don’t want to pay the current price. You can select a target price and if/when the app becomes available at or below your target price, it will be highlighted next time you launch AppMiner. This makes it really easy to keep a tab on your potential purchases without having to go to the App Store and individually searching for the apps to check their current price.

PS3 friendly videos with mkv2vob

The best tool I have found for converting your high-definition mkv files with x264 video and AC3 sound, to a PS3 friendly format is mkv2vob.
Previously I’d have had to transcode or convert the mkv file to an avi or other PS3 compatible video format, which would take ages and I’d lose the AC3 sound.
Mkv2vob simply muxes the x264/AC3 streams in the mkv file to a vob file, which is readable by the PS3. There is no transcoding or re-compression involved so there is no loss in quality. If the mkv includes DTS sound, then there is an option to transcode that to AC3, but my system can handle DTS so I leave it as it is.
The whole process takes literally minutes. Occasionally I have a file which does need to be transcoded and this does take longer than the regular process, but it happens so rarely that it’s not an issue for me. The good thing is that the user does not have to do anything, the program detects the type of the video source and automatically determines if any conversion is required.
Once the process has completed, an mpeg file is produced which can be played on your PS3, complete with HD video and surround sound – awesomes!

Parachute Panic

The iPhone has no shortage of great simple games. To stand out a game has to do something different or quirky while at the same time keeping the controls simple. Parachute Panic is very, very simple but due to it’s quirky graphics and sound offers something that will appeal to all iPhone owners. This video shows of the game well:

The aim is to land your parachutists safely on the boat. Helicopters, UFO’s and lightning clouds get in the way and using only your finger to control the wind you need to guide your guys to safety. The game plays really well but the hand drawn graphics and funny audio (think Flight of the Conchords) add so much to it that it’s hard to resist. A bargain at only 59p!

We Choose The Moon

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings, We Choose The Moon has been set-up to remember, commemorate and also educate the current generation in what it took to get man to the moon.
WeChooseTheMoon

I’m not usually a fan of flash based websites but this is a rich and informative site that pulls together animations, video, radio and audio interviews to give a flavour of what took place 40 years ago. A great site if you are interested in space or for educating kids.

DigitalOutbox Episode 7

DigitalOutbox Episode 7
In this episode the team discuss Windows 7, Virgin Media, naughty Amazon, Apple news and app’s and Console streaming. Blimey.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
– Windows 7
– On sale
– Euro website crashes
– Surprised at how many people are buying…the OS that will replace XP.
– Was £50 at PC World at one point. Bit of a rush on getting the best deals.

– MS Spotify rival
– Microsoft to launch a music streaming service
– no clear info yet, could be free with ads, but could be paid for service, nothing confirmed

– Virgin Media
– DOCSIS 3.0 rollout almost complete
– 50Meg drops to £38 without phone line, £28 with a phone line, still no throttling or bandwidth caps
– Trailing 10mb upload, 200mb download services
– Change to target hardcore downloaders
– Will contact those that abuse between 9 and 21

– Amazon pulls books from Kindle
– Orwell books too – Irony
– 1984, Animal Farm remotely wiped
– People who bought it had it wiped from their Kindle, money refunded
– Say they won’t do it again
– So much for owning the media….
– These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.

– Apple
– Apple apparently called MS asking them to stop running Laptop Hunter ads …
– iTunes 8.2.1 blocks Palm Pre – get out
– Palm Pre sdk released, weak compared to iPhone but out very quickly compared to Apple
– My Location now enabled on iPhone safari browser
– iTunes D45
– new D45 section launched, discounted price for 2x songs: a hit song and a less common or previously unreleased song – App Store – 1.5 billion downloads
– Slow 3.0 for 3G and older?
– Tunewiki for iPhone
– Free app
– Music streaming, lyrics database, youtube charts
– Purchase music from stream your listening too
– Tweet the current track your listening too
– Music maps – who’ listening to this track around the globe
– User interface – nasty

– Twitbit: another Twitter app,
– £2.99, includes Push notifications, all or nothing though, future updates will allow customisation
– Resident Evil Degeneration on iPhone/iPod – £3.99, rather good apparently
– DropBox iPhone app almost complete: view, modify and download your files + sync iPhone photos
– SweetFM now open source (was $29)
– http://www.chocomoko.com/
– Last.fm client with iTunes integration
– Great design
– Rips the stream – 128kbps copies to iTunes with tags and album art

– Games
– Activision – Modern Warfare 2 – £54.99 in the UK. Fuckers. EA won’t raise prices of holiday titles…this year.
– Battlefield 1943 – Glorious now that it works
– Wipeout HD Fury – Expansion pack, July 23rd, 3 new modes, 12 new tracks, thirteen new ships. More than original game?

– Console Streaming
– PS3 – bluetooth remote
– Xbox 360 – noisy
– Streaming from Mac – Connect 360, Medialink, Rivet
– Quality
– Issues?

Picks
– Parachute Panic – .59p, hand drawn graphics, really simple, really addictive – nice music too
– AppMiner – FREE – bargain hunter

Geek it up with GeekTool

Something I’ve not done in a long time, especially after switching to Macs, is customise my desktop. I remember when I had a PC, I used to love tweaking the UI with apps such as WindowBlinds, IconPackager and ObjectDock. I’m reasonably happy with the Mac UI so haven’t had the desire to change much other than a slight tweak to the dock and the menubar icons. But this has all been done without resorting to any drastic changes or 3rd party apps.
Recently I came across GeekTool which is a system preferences module for OS X and can display system logs, unix command outputs and images on your desktop. This information can appear as embedded in your desktop or in front of other windows.
It’s a light-weight app and if used creatively, can allow you to enhance the already elegant OS X visual look. Once installed, it appears at the bottom of your System Preferences. It’s reasonably straight forward to use and you need to be familiar with unix commands.
GeekTool
Groups are listed in a dropdown on the left. You create a group of as many elements as you like and only one group can be active at any one time. An element can be the output of a file, a unix/shell command or an image. Text output (from a file or command) can be formatted to any font, size and colour. When you add a new element, a semi-transparent placeholder for it appears on the desktop, which can be dragged around or resized with the mouse. You can also enter the precise size and coordinates in the window. There is also an option to always display this element on top of other windows.
That is basically, all there is to it. The rest is up to the imagination of the user, how creative they want to get with it. Some examples I have seen display really nice weather output, including graphics. Whereas other examples are so geeked up, with massive file outputs covering the entire desktop, that it looks like a complete mess. I didn’t want to do anything drastic and followed the example from a LifeHacker article to create a nice desktop displaying basic information.
Desktop

Flogr

Flogr is a great web app that allows you to create a photo blog based on your Flickr entries. You download the application and install it in your web server. The configuration is pretty minimal – point it to your Flickr account and that’s about it. You then have a really nice photo blog set-up ready to be customised.

The theme is fully changeable via CSS so the look and feel is totally in your control. The real options are around the photo’s you bring back from Flickr. You can bring all, a set or filter via a tag. I’ve chosen the tag route as it means I can pick photo’s from any of my sets to display. The sites I’ve set-up can be found here. One issue is that the photo’s can take a while to load from Flickr so I intend to set-up a mysql database locally and store the photo’s there instead. You can also view sets and a tag cloud on your Flogr installation and by selecting a photo the metadata and comments from Flickr are displayed.

This is the solution I’ve always wanted – photo’s hosted on Flickr but key ones picked up and displayed on a separate blog. Lovely app that’s free to download and enjoy.

DigitalOutbox Episode 6

DigitalOutbox Episode 6
In this episode the team discuss Google Chrome OS, O2 and Twitter sitting in a tree, Prowl and push notifications and a special look at Plex, a media centre for the Mac.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
– Google Chrome OS
– Very little announced – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
– FAQ – http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-chrome-os-faq.html
– If it is really cloud based computing, where is the onine infrastructure to cope with photo libraries, music, graphics, itunes library etc
– Rumours of Microsoft announcement on Monday forcing Googles hand – Office in the cloud? It is – Office 2010 with Excel, Word, Powerpoint in the cloud. App’s are free, more feature rich than Google. http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/
– Targetting netbooks first, lightweight computing, targeting people who spend most time on the web. Only beginning
– Open source and free
– Will current Windows app’s run on it? Or is it a brand new platform to be developed against
– The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform.
– No details
– Lots of competition from MS, Apple, Linux + things like Jolicloud – http://www.jolicloud.com/
– Hardware partners – Acer, Adobe, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments
– Downloadable version by year end, first netbooks late 2010

– Google out of beta
– http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-apps-is-out-of-beta-yes-really.html
– Finally
– Enterprise push? – http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/07/paving-road-to-apps-adoption-in-large.html – guess so.

– O2 Free replies and DM’s to your mobile
– From 1st August
– Some fair usage applied – try to keep under 600 a month
– Tests to twitter will be as part of your normal bundle

– Games
– 1 vs 100 – July 10th on Xbox Live – http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/live/1vs100
– Battlefield 1943 – woes…

– Apple
– Touchscreen Netbook Rumour
– http://www.tuaw.com/2009/07/13/rumor-watch-apple-touchscreen-netbook-on-tap-for-october/
– October, $800, 10 inch screen
– Camera’s on iPods?
– Natural progression
– Video assumed – game changer for devices like Flip?
– Apple in talks with T-Mobile and Orange -explains the O2 – Palm Pre decision
– Appstore is 1!
– Prowl
– http://theappleblog.com/2009/07/06/prowl-get-any-growl-notifications-via-push-on-your-iphone/
– http://prowl.weks.net/
– Growl notifications form your Mac pushed to your iphone.
– Limitless applications of this – file transfer complete, chat requests, e-mails, system activity, backups complete etc etc etc
– Register on prowl site, client on the Mac
– Useful but potentially spammy
– Can set to send only when mac is idle
– TwitVid
– Free
– Add video to twitter – posts link to your uploaded video
– BoxCar
– £1.19
– Push notifications for mentions and DM
– System for push notifications doesn’t scale – nothing to differentiate between notifications

– PLEX
– Mac media player
– based on XBMC
– Setup – clumsy, awkward
– http://www.screencastsonline.com/index_files/SCO0201-plex.php
– Careful with file naming
– movies
– tv

Picks
– mkv2vob – http://www.mkv2vob.com/ current version 2.4.6
– mkv2vob will remux MKV files with H.264 video and AC3 audio to a VOB file which is playable on the Sony PS3
– http://wechoosethemoon.org/ – 40 years since apollo 11

DigitalOutbox Episode 5

DigitalOutbox Episode 5
In this episode the team discuss the Pirate Bay, iPhone app’s, game news and a bit more on Mobileme.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
– Pirate Bay Sold
– http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-sold-to-software-company-goes-legal-090630/
– https://thepiratebay.org/blog
– http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-closes-its-tracker-removes-torrents-090630/
– http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bays-peter-sunde-discusses-the-sites-future-090630/
– You can buy shares in the company
– New trackers – originally closing tracker but then moving to new tracker tech
– Monitisation options
– Potentially massive implications – TBP tracker contains over half of all torrent users
– We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site
– Talking to the BBC, Pandeya said that he plans to make legal file sharing (which is what The Pirate Bay will be focused on from now on) more attractive than illegal file sharing by paying the users for sharing files. He also plans to pay the content providers that provide the files, and he plans to raise money from the ISPs by reducing their traffic overload.
– “Let’s say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site – which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP – we can take that song and put it out on P2P,” he says.
– Spokesman for Global Gaming Factory X said they would remove all illegally hosted content – but Pirate Bay has none according to their legal argument, no?
– Sounds like Napster 2………but is it bull? PirateBay do like to play games.

– One size fits all mobile charger in Europe
– http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_8124000/8124293.stm
– Phones won’t come with charger, buy one if you need one
– MicroUSB to be standard
– Not legal, voluntary
– Under the accord, the companies, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola, Research in Motion and Samsung, are committed to developing the charger.90% of euro market

– News
– Poor Palm Pre build quality: http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre/188040-horrible-build-quality.html
– Palm Pre coming to O2
– XHTML2 is officially dead, HTML5 is the new king
– http://gdgt.com/ – Gadget site – review/wikipedia for gadgets, users control specs, review, aggregator – already a big community
– That Microsfot ad – http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/02/microsoft-makes-users-sick-pulls-ad/

– iPhone/Mac
– Steve Jobs officially back at work
– Birdfeed: yet another Twitter app for iPhone, £2.99, caching
– iPhone 3GS jailbreak with PurpleRa1n
– Augmented reality using 3GS compass
– Pocket Universe
– http://web.mac.com/john_kenn/craicdesign/index.html
– http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=306916838&mt=8
– Plot position of planets, stars, constellation outlines
– Nearest Tube
– http://www.acrossair.com/apps_nearesttube.htm
– Still to be approved
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fZk0HaIs4s
– Another giant robot in Japan, Wakamatsu park will get a Tetsujin robot in October http://www.kobe-tetsujin.com/
– F-22 Raptor photographed going super sonic http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=73057

– Games
– Fable III ? rumours
– Worms 2 – Fantastic update
– Battlefield 1943 – Wed 8th July, 7 years since 1942, three maps with 4th released once 43 million kills have been registered

– Mobileme
– Do you use
– Whats good and bad
– Ease of use
– Calendar sync
– Contacts
– Bookmarks
– iDisk
– Photo Gallery
– Online tools
– Application sync
– Back to my mac
– Find My iPhone
– Alternatives
– Costs?

Picks
– GeekTool – http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/
– GeekTool is a PrefPane (System Preferences module) for Panther or Tiger to show system logs, unix commands output, or images (i.e. from the internet) on your desktop (or even in front of all windows). Use File mode to monitor MacOS X activity with /var/tmp/console.log or /var/log/system.log, or Shell mode to launch custom scripts or commands like “df” to check space left on filesystems, “uptime” to monitor load of your machine… FInally, Image mode helps you monitor bandwith usage, CPU loads, memory availability of your server, via tools like MRTG or RRD.
(closest Windows equivalent – Rainmeter http://code.google.com/p/rainmeter/)
– Flogr – http://code.google.com/p/flogr/

X Lossless Decoder

I’ve struggled for a while to find a decent lossless converter and ripper for the Mac – X Lossless Decoder (XLD) is finally an answer for those issues. This is a free app that has a very simple front end that will allow conversion from and to:

  • (Ogg) FLAC (.flac/.ogg)
  • Monkey’s Audio (.ape)
  • Wavpack (.wv)
  • TTA (.tta)
  • Apple Lossless (.mp3) [10.4 and later]
  • AIFF, WAV, etc

The conversion from Flac to Apple Lossless was extremely quick. In fact it was so quick I thought it had failed but I was wrong – the quality is excellent too. XLD also rip’s CD’s in to a lossless format of your choosing and again it does this pretty quickly. With support for MusicBrainz and also tags in Flac I’ve been impressed with just how flexible the app is. The front end is functional but to be honest that’s all you really need. XLD – a very handy tool to have installed.