Bluegrass is known for it’s hot pickers, playing faster than ears can hear. It can make learning tunes a bit difficult. Luckily, we no longer have to ruin our records and needles, or stretch out our cassette tapes with endless rewinds. If you have iTunes on your computer, then you already have a great tool for slowing down music… AND video! It’s a little known fact… but Apple’s free QuickTime Player (installed along with iTunes) is great for slowing down your favorite audio and/or video clips. It even allows you to change the pitch so you don’t have to retune your instrument! Here’s how to do it:

1. Choose an audio or video file and open it in QuickTime Player (mp3s, wav, aif, mov, mp4, etc…)
2. In QuickTime, choose cmd-k (Mac) or ctrl-k (PC) to open the A/V Controls (or from the Windows menu)
3. Adjust the speed and/or pitch to your liking

If you don’t already have QuickTime, you can download it for free for your Mac or PC from Apple’s website. In addition, QuickTime Pro ($30 upgrade) allows you to easily set in and out points, loop edit files and more.

Also, if you have Windows Media files, download and install the free Flip4Mac’s WMP Plugin for QuickTime which then allows QuickTime to playback and slow down WMP files.

I spent some time playing around with the built-in video camera on one of the new Intel Macs. The quality is actually surprisingly good, though it is only capable of 15fps. Apple may not have had it in mind when they developed it, but it makes an excellent mandolin practice tool. Here’s a few scenes from today’s episode of MandoBoy, featuring “Orange”, my beloved BRW…

Evening Prayer Blues
New 5 Cents
New Camptown Races
Frog on a Lilly Pad
Jerusalem Ridge
Poor White Folks
Right Right On
Tennessee Blues

QuickTime 7 required.

Apple’s iPod and iTunes Music Store are the kings of the hill and as such, their critics, competitors and even partners regularly take feeble swings at them both.

For example, in an apparent attempt to mitigate any dissimilarities between the writing quality of mainstream journalists and that of your average teenage blogger, a recent BusinessWeek “article” quoted Chris Gorog, CEO of Napster Inc. and disingenuous corporate whore as saying:

“The villain in the story is the iPod,” “You have this device consumers love, but they’re being restricted from buying anything other than downloads from Apple. People are bored with that.”

Yes Chris, people have been bored with that over 300 billion times. Swing and a miss!

Apple released it’s new video iPod today. An interesting step forward in the video download business. It got me thinking about the pundits for the original iPod… so I dug up and read the Slashdot article about the original introduction of the iPod. Very interesting indeed…

Not that you would, but if you are actually interested in learning about running a Unix server, Apple has quite a few nice articles that can show you the way.

I especially like the ones on Command Line Administration as well as the full boat of technical briefs.

Geeks are funny…

I recently made the switch back to Apple’s Mail after about a year of running Microsoft Entourage (Outlook for the Mac). At the time, Mail was pretty buggy and I was looking for a change. Recently though, I became so frustrated by Entourage, that I decided to give Mail another chance.

After upgrading to 10.2 (Jaguar), I imported all my existing email into Mail and gave it a spin. Immediately, I noticed that in addition to being a much improved version, Mail consumes much less battery on my iBook than entourage did. I had forgotten that I used to get well over 3 hours out of my battery but of late, I have been only getting maybe an hour and a half. I asked around and it seems that Entourage is very busy behind the scenes and therefore is tough on your battery. This was a huge bonus on top of the pleasure I take in removing Microsoft applications from my machine. Now if only Chimera will hurry up and finish their browser so I can ditch IE…

I’m always forgetting which options get me the output I like from tcpdump so I’m posting it here for all to see. This line gets close to the output of EetherPeek that I always liked but costs about $500 less. Here it is:

tcpdump -vvv -i en0 -X -s 0

Here’s a breakdown for what it does:

• “-vvv” Turns on uber-verbose mode giving the most information
• “-i en0″ sets the device to listen on (in this case the first ethernet card)
• “-X” prints hex and any ascii text (human readable)
• “-s 0″ grabs the entire packet (or n bytes if not 0)

PHP is installed on Jaguar as it was in previous OS X builds and only needs to be activated in order to work. Here’s how…

Launch Terminal.app and enter each of the following steps in order:

1. sudo apxs -e -a -n php4 /usr/libexec/httpd/libphp4.so

2. echo 'echo "AddType application/x-httpd-php .php" >> /etc/httpd/httpd.conf' | sudo sh -s

3. sudo apachectl restart

That should do it. To test if it’s running, create a files called info.php (or whatever) that consists of the text:
<?php phpinfo() ?>, drop it in your web site documents folder and open it in a browser. It should look something like this. If all is well, you now have an active PHP module with support for MySQL.

For a more detailed instructions and a PHP lib file with more features configured take a peek here.

Tim O’Reilly spoke at Apple’s WWDC about OS X being “The Next Big Thing” (also covered on Slashdot). Aside from rescuing my drowning Apple stock, I’m not concerned whether OS X is the “next big thing”, rather, that it’s my thing.

Since OS X came out, I have seen some changes that could be perceived as fodder for this argument. For instance:

• Apple now has it’s own section [slashdot.org] on Slashdot
• There seems to be a little less Apple FUD spinning around the web
• There are more OS X specific information sites like O’Reilly’s
• There are a ton of new OS X books

The reasons for these changes are, to be sure, numurous and loaded with opinion much my own reasons: No more switching back and forth from Mac to Linux just to get a “full featured” desktop machine. Open a Word doc, make a movie, use your firewire and USB peripherals, surf with IE if you want, jump on the command line, drag and drop, run Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Bash, Grep, etc…. All this and I get hardware that was designed as if someone had read my mind (iBook).

Actually becoming the “next big thing” would be great for Apple and it’s users but seeing how I’ve been waiting for years for the next Beatles or the next Michael Jordan, I’m not holding my breath.