Matt Vapor’s Blog

Australians are switching to Macs at a faster rate than almost anywhere else in the world.

Research firm Gartner’s latest figures show Mac sales grew 52 per cent in the second quarter - nearly six times the rate of the PC industry overall.

This is even better than in the US, where Mac sales have been growing at about three times the industry average.

Apple’s share of the Australian computer market in the second quarter of 2008 was 5.3 per cent, according to Gartner, up from 3.8 per cent a year ago. Rival research firm IDC puts the present figure as high as 6.2 per cent.

If Mac sales continue to grow at this rate, the platform will have a double-figure market share within a few years.

This blog is brought to you by CLiCK Computer Recycling

Source Courier Mail

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Have you got the odd Thumb / Flash Drive laying around doing nothing?

You can now pass it on to someone who needs one!

Increasingly families who do it tough have problems dipping into their pockets when it comes to affording all the necessities that kids need these days for school. This year we have had a huge jump in families asking if we can provide them with flash drives as these have become the new essential on school childrens stationary lists.

The prices have dropped, allowing people to pick these up as almost a semi-disposable item, but for many families an extra $20-$30 per child is a strain at the beginning of and school term. You can ease the pressure and do something great with your flash drives you don’t use any more and pass them on to children who now need them most!

If you would like to help, all you need to do is place your old drives into an envelope and send them to:

Thumbs Up!
CLiCK
PO Box 168
Rockingham, 6168
Western Australia

Your small donation can make the difference for our next generation!

For more information feel free to contact CLiCK!

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In the last few weeks I have discovered a great little game which I have been pouring a lot of my spare time into… I love it! Its called Super Tux and it is a clone of Super Mario with a flavor of Tux - the Linux mascot.

” SuperTux is a classic 2D jump’n run sidescroller game in a style similar to the original SuperMario games. ”

Its available on most common platforms including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix (BSD)

You can download it here

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Well a few weeks ago I managed to fork out for a new Intel MacBook, I have always been a fan of Macs, but not their price, however that has somewhat changed within the last year due to the introduction of Intel based components.

Since I have been using it for almost a month now I thought I would share some of the little free gems I have found along the way, and hopefully help out of the fellow Mac comrades out there

First of all, I had to start off with a browser. Mac OS X 10.4 came with Safari, but I have become accustomed to FireFox and its abundance of extensions, so if your use to that, you will wanna grab FireFox.

Next is FileZilla a great little FTP app, I have been using this on Windows and Linux systems so it is great that they also ported it to Mac, if you use all or some of the three OSs mentioned and dont want to go to the effort of looking for a different app for each system FileZilla is the one for you!

Microsoft Messenger… Ergh I know, “Why Microsoft on a Mac!?” you might say, well I havent come a cross a replacement that I like, I have seen Adium and a few others and I am not keen on them… some habbits are hard to break

Juice is a great podcast downloader, I am not keen on how iTunes downloads my podcasts, yes I know I am very fussy

Want to remove a program? Well dont just delete it! Thats what I was told and I grabbed a cool little app called AppDelete, not only does it delete the app it also removes all traces off it!

Come across any other Mac Freeware you can’t live without, then please let us know!

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One for those retro Mac lovers:)

[youtube 5FjmMuIrs6Q nolink]

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Have you ever wanted to have a DVD converter which ran on Windows, Linux and Mac? The answer is here

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Supported sources:

• Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (encrypted or unencrypted, but protection methods other than CSS are not supported and must be handled externally with third-party software)
• PAL or NTSC
• AC-3, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks

Outputs:

• File format: MP4, AVI or OGM
• Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer encoding)
• Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)

Misc features:

• Chapter selection
• Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
• Integrated bitrate calculator
• Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
• Grayscale encoding

Credits

HandBrake uses a lot of (L)GPL librairies from the Linux world:

• liba52 (AC3 decoding)
• libavcodec (picture cropping, scaling and deinterlacing, MPEG-4 encoding)
• libdvdcss (CSS decryption)
• libdvdread (DVD navigation)
• libfaac (AAC encoding)
• libmp3lame (MP3 encoding)
• libmp4v2 (MP4 muxing)
• libmpeg2 (MPEG-2 decoding)
• libogg (OGM muxing)
• libsamplerate (audio resampling)
• libvorbis (Vorbis encoding)
• libx264 (H264 encoding)
• libxvidcore (MPEG-4 encoding)

Visit the HandBrake Download Page to Download

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Thanks to Phil at the Australian WebWorker I came a cross an interesting post calling for beta testers. The project called Whisher is hoping to set up a free global WiFi system using users existing WiFi hardware.

Whisher are asking for the beta testers to be:

• be knowledgeable in WiFi technologies and networking, we’re not asking for gurus, but we need people who know what an SSID is
• have at least one laptop computer with WiFi, be it a PC with Windows or a Mac. A desktop with a USB or PCI WiFi adapter is also good.
• have at least one WiFi access point or router, and be knowledgeable in its configuration and management.
• be willing to test a software application and report frequently and consistently using an online bug tracking platform (don’t worry, it’s dead easy to use!).

If you are interested in signing up to try this then feel free to visit their blog post calling for beta testers.

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