Live & Direct from Nowhere in Particular...

I think this would be better on a ceiling than a wall. Putting it on a wall would be covered by furniture & artwork and the like. A ceiling would rock though. Minus the pattern of course.

Yeah, it actually is. I used to think that A Better Finder Rename was probably overkill. I mean all it does is rename files & folders right? How much value can that possibly add. That & it has a goofy name. Though I guess the goofy name worked, since I remembered it when I needed that functionality.

That was before I finally got fed up with the 86 folders in my Photos directory that were from an older camera. At some point Canon changed there software from naming folders YYYYMMDD by default to YYYY_MM_DD by default. I think it was when I started using a DSLR. So, my folders were all very annoying to sort. I couldn’t even sort by last modified date, because on a Mac, if you edit a file in or add a file to a folder, the modification date is updated. So, I figured I’d give it a try. To be honest I could probably do it via the command prompt, but that would take too much effort & I’m feeling lazy.

It works great. The demo will only do 11 at a time (it actually says the first 10, but it did 11 every time), but that’s better than one at a time. I’m trying to decide if I would have enough use for it to buy it, or if it’s just this one time that I need it. But either way, it is a pretty handy tool.

They have another toy that I know I could have used in the past called The Big Mean Folder Machine. Basically it will merge folders or divide files into separate folders. I had never even heard of this utility before. This would have saved me tons of time when I’ve tried to get files divvied up to archive to DVD or CD.

In both cases the things these tools do aren’t hard to do on your own, they are just time consuming. The last utility they have that sounds interesting is A Better Finder Attribute. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds like it lets you see & tweak attributes that the Finder won’t let you get to. The feature that looks most handy is to copy the EXIF date that a pic was taken to the Create date of the file. That might be worth the $15 right there.

I just wish it would just display the complete EXIF data (the Finder doesn’t). The last App I found that did that was EXIF-O-Matic, which was last updated to v1.2 in January of 2009, but still requires Rosetta (the version I have is actually from May 2003). It was a handy little lightweight Java app.

Oh, did I mention that all three of these apps have cool icons?

I thought this went well with this.

A coworker was just mentioning his test results for his new ISP (really a secondary ISP, since he has FIOS), Clear. He asked me what mine was getting for ping time & such, so I ran the tests again.

About 10 times better than his for bandwidth (expected since he is in a grey area that doesn’t really have coverage on Clear’s map) and about 1/5 the ping time. Actually, I think I got a bit better than I have recently … I guess it’s a good night to stream something.

A while ago this popped up over on LifeHacker (among other places)…

So I told Netflix I had a PS3 & wanted to sign up. I got an email yesterday saying I would get my PS3 Instant Streaming disc today. Basically, you put in the special Blu-ray they send you, select it under Video on the PlayStation 3, then you enter the code it gives you into your Netflix account to enable it as a device, just like you would with a Roku or other Netflix enabled box. After it Authorizes (took mine just a few seconds) it pulls up your Instant Watch queue & away you go.

I’ve used Instant Watch before using both the old Flash client & the new Silverlight version on my MacBook Pro, but it either involved a long DVI / HDMI cable to the TV and a long optical cable to the stereo or watching it on my laptop. Both of which weren’t really worth it, so I rarely used it. I think that’s gonna change.

Watching on the PS3 is much better. It’s easier for one, slap in the disc & away you go. I can also continue to use my computer. Whereas, when watching on the computer, if I use full screen mode, I can’t do anything else. It won’t even keep full screen if I use it on a second monitor. It also seems to be higher quality and I had no problem with lag or delays. I’m guessing they are taking advantage of the Cell processors in the PS3 to do a bit better compression. Of course this might help too…

I even streamed a little HD content and it seemed quite good too. Most of what I watched tonight wasn’t HD though. I watched the entire 1st season of Coupling. And an episode of Series 3 of Chef! (crap compared to Series 1 & 2).

All in all, I’m pretty impressed and will probably use it a lot more.

Shouldn’t he be enjoying that?

Perhaps he would prefer a warlock.