DVI Mac and DVI Other?

Update: After the comments below, I had another go at this and pushed harder and the cable eventually went in. I was probably being too gentle! (I didn’t want to break anything though :). The cable now goes in and out very easily and so maybe my connector was slightly bent or mis-shaped originally, most important thing is though that this isn’t a real issue, sorry for confusion caused!

I did learn something about DVI today though, and that is something I guess :)

So what am I missing here? I tried to plug in a Dell DVI monitor (Dell 2001FP) to my MacBook Pro yesterday and the cable wouldn’t fit! Now I always thought DVI was DVI was DVI and that I would be able to use my existing DVI monitor with my Mac. Apparently not.

Doing a bit of research into it, looks like there are two types of DVI connector, DVI-D and DVI-I. I also found an article on different types of DVI cable and connector that seems to have a lot of information in it without actually saying much.

Do I need to buy a converter cable? Is is possible to connect these monitors to the Mac DVI connector?

Update: From comparing the pictures of the connectors with the end of the cable, it seems the Dell monitor is a DVI-D, Single Link (digital only), this would tie up with what the PDF specification document says on the Dell web site. However, no matter how modern the MacBook Pro, it won’t fit in.

Technorati Tags: macbook pro, apple, dvi, dell, 2001FP

Region free DVD on MacBook Pro - All you need is a Windows XP machine!

This article is out of date but I have posted an updated summary so please continue the conversation over here.

So I was dissapointed to see that there seems to be no way to easily make the MacBook Pro’s DVD drive region free which unfortunately renders about half of the DVD’s I own completely useless. In these days of £20 multi-region DVD players this is not really on, and it is especially disappointing since on older PowerBooks VLC multi-region playback seemed to work so it means that additional time and effort is still being put into this pointless exercise to keep the movie companies happy.

With VLC for Mac out of the picture, the only possible solution was looking like a warranty voiding firmware hack which may or may not even exist (it is hard to tell if the ones that are being referred to on the internet are for older machines), certainly not worth the risk of a dead, out of warranty DVD drive.

So… no way forward with multi-region DVD playing :(

Unless, Windows to the rescue!!! VLC works like a dream playing any region DVD’s on Windows and has a really smart network streaming system built into it. So I popped the DVD in on my Windows PC, fired up VLC and ticked that little “Stream Output” button, select to stream over UDP and entered the IP address of the Mac to stream to:

On my Mac, also fired up VLC (using one of the universal binary nightly beta builds, which do seem to be generally very stable), select “Open Network…” and click OK.

Multi-Region DVD playback on a MacBook Pro, solved :)

PS. Yes there is a heavy dose of sarcasm in the whole Windows to the rescue thing for those reading with a sense of humour failure :)

Technorati Tags: mac, macbook pro, os x, apple, dvd, region free, vlc, streaming

Weird Application in Memory

So when I was checking how much memory was in use earlier for the Preview post I noticed I had a load of PowerPC applications loaded that I didn’t know about.

Sure enough, in my Applications folder there is a sub-folder called OpenBase with what looks like some management applications in it, I just don’t remember installing it. Doing a quick Google on it, it seems like this is the likely culprit but I am damn sure I have never been to that site before. Most likely it has been bundled with something but what? and more importantly, why is it loading by default!

Anyone got any ideas what did this?

Technorati Tags: mac, macbook pro, os x, openbase

Preview - Let me count the ways

So after my previous positive encounter with preview, I thought I was done with discoveries there but no, this really is a killer little app.

See the thing I discovered about it is that despite loading in < 1 second and only taking up a few megs of memory, there is more functionality here than simply previewing:

• Simple image editing - Cropping, Rotating, Image Correction (Brightness, Contrast, Exposure, etc…)
• Camera RAW support - Although this is better done in iPhoto
• Screen Capture - Including the very useful screen capture on a timer
• Extra PDF functionality - Annotation, Re-Encode PDF (for size reduction, etc…)

Windows is sorely missing an application that fills this gap, more than a “pure” preview but less than PhotoShop :) The preview that comes with Windows XP is a great little image viewer but has no support for editing after a simple rotation. Paint Shop Pro and a hundred other clones all go through the stage of having that perfect balance for a simple image editor but the vendors always decide to add more and more features and end up taking on and failing to topple PhotoShop. The closest to this on Windows that I can think of is IrfanView which is nearly as fast as this and has the basic image editing and preview features (but of course no support for PDF or other file types) but fails in that it looks like it was designed around 1986. Preview gets the balance of features perfect and I would say that it is probably all the image editor that your basic user would ever want/need.

My only wish? Make the zoom button (+) zoom documents (especially PDF’s) to full screen, or if that violates the sacred green button’s UI rules then give me a different button to press that makes the window fill as much screen area, and then zooms the document to that size.

However Apple are treading a very fine line with this application though between functionality and bloat, now I am very pleased to say that in my opinion they are definitely on the right side of that line at the moment but let me take this opportunity to make a plea to Apple to please, please, please keep the scope of this application limited to what it currently does. Don’t fall into the trap of so many software vendors before you and think that more features equals more value. Fight the bloat! Preview is great just the way it is!

Technorati Tags: mac, macbook pro, os x, preview, irfanview, paint shop pro

Easter and Downtime

Seems like this blog was down for the day yesterday with the WordPress.com downtime. I was taking the Easter weekend off from blogging anyway but sorry for any confusion caused.

Happy Easter and normal service will resume tomorrow :)