In what has to be a record, I’ve just finished filing my 2005 Federal Tax Return. It’s amazing what owning a home can do to motivate you to file that return as early as possible. That, and well, there’s that looming wedding which makes the refund check more than a nice thing.

One problem I ran into this year was that H&R Block discontinued TaxCut for the Mac. I’ve happily used that software for the last 3 years and was looking forward to using the new version this year. So, I was faced with the choice of either switching over to TurboTax or going the web route with H&R Block.

Ultimately, I chose using the online tax preparation tool, TaxCut Online Premium. A word of warning, I had trouble getting started using Safari. For some reason, I was unable to launch the application and I don’t think it was the popup blocking in Safari. I switched over to Firefox and had smooth sailing from that point on. There were some visual glitches in the interface. For example, some of the buttons seemed to only show their top half (they’re the green slivers you’ll see). I was able to get through the whole preparation interview, though, and file my federal taxes.

Overall, the online offering felt a lot like the Mac program from last year. It offered all the features I needed at a reasonable cost. The help was as robust as the desktop application and the UI made smart use of JavaScript and DHTML. I wish that they had a desktop application, but I’m sure I won’t miss it. Hopefully, filing my state returns will go as smoothly and I’ll have a successful experience with the product.

One nice thing in the report at the end of the product shows you your effective tax rate vs. what bracket you’re in. My effective tax rate was 12% lower than what it should be according to the tax schedule. Had I donated another huge chunk of money to charity (something like $8K more), I would’ve actually dropped a bracket. Something to ponder when comparing our tax brackets to those in other countries.

The Connecticut software hasn’t come out yet, but once that’s out, I’ll be done my taxes earlier than ever. Gotta love it.

Someone just passed on that Full Tilt Poker now has a native Mac client for their poker games. Pretty sweet. Finally, someone sets one up. No more ugly Java apps (not that I play online much).

Apparently Microsoft introduced more about Windows Vista at CES. That prompted a mac fan out there to create a couple of videos to demonstrate the great new features of Vista. You can watch Episode 1 on the innovative user interface and Episode 2 on search and parental controls. Good natured jab.

(Found at Crooked Timber)

The heart and soul of the Mac world is the large community of small software developers that make some of the best software on the Mac platform. I’ve had my favorites over the years. Watson, by Dan Wood, was one of the favorites (it helped me get my job at ESPN.com) and Dan is one of the good developers in the Mac software world.

Watson was run out of business more or less by Apple, and for the first time that I remember, Dan has put the story up on their company blog. The story is especially relevant because the rumors about iWeb make is seem like Apple is about to railroad Dan’s new product, Sandvox. It’s a good read, especially if you want to get into the Mac software business.

Dan Wood pointed out InquisitorX on his blog. Inquisitor is a search plugin for Safari on OS X that adds some neat capabilities to the search box, most importantly the ability to search different sources from the same box with simple keyboard shortcuts.

Dan really likes this app:

Inquisitor: Must-Have add-on for Safari

Check out Inquisitor. A Safari add-on that replaces the Google search in Safari. Wow. Real-time search results. A gorgeous UI. Also you can configure it to search other sites using different keyboard shortcuts. This is what I’ve been looking for. There’s also an online version.

If this is what “Web 2.0″ is about, then sign me up!

It’s pretty clear that my dream of cheap Dells running OS X isn’t going to happen:

After Jobs’ presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. “That doesn’t preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will,” he said. “We won’t do anything to preclude that.”

However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers’ hardware. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac,” he said.

So, damn you Apple. Damn you all to heck.

I’m on a mac small business list, one that was started to share tips and information on running a Macintosh small business (think shareware developer, etc.). The consternation being expressed there is downright amazing to me. In part, I understand where most of them are coming from. They’re small shops, usually one or two developers only, and some have spent a lot of time optimizing code using Altivec or some other PPC specific code. Others are really concerned about the perception of the boxes and the lack of a clear differentiator on a technical level than a PC. Others point to the confusion that this move will create in the marketplace until all software is shipping as universal binaries. Finally, there’s the time and cost involved in supporting two very similar but slightly different platforms. This means having access to both platforms as necessary in case of driver conflicts or other issues.

There’s also a lot of hand wringing over the difference in performance. Aside from the power consumption issues, the G5 is technically a superior chip than the Pentium 4. I can’t argue with that much, either. My G5 rocks compared to anything in the office here up to and including the monster machines in the server room. So, after all of this marketing telling us how great the G5 is, Mac users are essentially being told, well, we were wrong.

I don’t actually think this is the real message being sent, but Jobs tried so hard to put a positive spin on the Intel move that this is how it came out. Bottom line is that Apple is going to be building more machines like the Mac Mini that require lower power consumption and heat generation. When you look at what the G5 gives you, it’s a boat load of processing horsepower with a boatload of heat, too. Heck, back when I was at the G5 unveiling at WWDC, I noticed the amount of heat pouring out the fans in the back. I don’t think this is a model that Apple is going to be focusing on for growth going forward. Mark my words: we’ll have a Mac Mini style box intended for your entertainment center or TV. Or some other small factor box that I haven’t thought of a use for yet. The power consumption question is going to be much bigger on those boxes, so this move allows them to grow in ways that aren’t in their traditional markets.

It also gives them a boost in the laptop space, though I think the lack of a technical differentiator is more significant here.

I still wish they would open it up and go for it heads up with Microsoft on the PC platform. Schiller makes it clear they’re not trying to be a software company but I swear, if anyone could do it, it’s Apple. OS X is just that much better than Windows.

A couple of notes about Tiger… Damn you Apple for making Spotlight exactly like the little bastard cousin of LaunchBar, then using the same UI paradigm and activation key. I’m going to try keeping Spotlight with the default Cmd-Space hotkey, but that means retraining my brain to hit something else to get LaunchBar… which I now do almost reflexively (today, after installing the new LaunchBar, I hit Cmd-Space to launch LaunchBar… and wondered why nothing happened.)

I’m switching back to Safari on my machines at home, just to see the new features and play around with the RSS integration. I’m curious if Safari is better in this release, but I’m also looking forward to the next update which claims to be ACID2 compliant. Not even Firefox can make that claim, so I’m curious to play around. With some of the DHTML things we want to do at work, I’m hoping we have a solid platform to work off of.

Quick links of things to look at:

• Safari and setting your default feed reader
• Brent Simmons on Automator (and why it’s the best feature of Tiger
• Dan Wood, author of Watson, gives his rundown of Tiger (he’s excited about Quartz Composer, I think )
• John Siracusa’s technical rundown of Tiger in Ars Technica

More on this later. So far so smooth. I did have trouble installing the update on my iMac. Turned out there was minor filesystem corruption on the computer that Disk Utility couldn’t fix (incorrect number of thread records). In fact, the installer just choked and said something like “Installer encountered an error. Please retry installation ” or something. I ended up running Disk Utility off of the installer DVD manually where I saw that Disk Utility was choking on this error. I suggest running Disk Utility and verifying your disk manually if the installer wigs out.

Luckily, I have a copy of DiskWarrior around from my iSight troubles and I was able to use that to fix things right up. BTW, if you have the downloadable copy of DiskWarrior, it’s tough to actually use it because you need to boot from something else. Making a bootable CD/DVD is just annoying enough that I found it easier just to boot my iMac into Target Disk Mode (hold T while booting your Mac). The computer then behaves like a big firewire drive. Just run a firewire cable between the iMac and my PowerBook and I can run DiskWarrior from my PowerBook. After about 30 minutes or so of chugging along, I had a working disk and the installer got moving past the disk check.

Spotlight took a LOT of hours to get through my disks… I have over a half-terrabyte attached to my iMac now (530 GB per mfr), and it’s about a third full. My PowerBook only took a few hours to get indexed, though.

On the whole, though, big thumbs up for Tiger. I’m busy with my own projects right now, but I hope to dive into Automator and the new SDKs soon.

One of the reasons Heidi and I haven’t put up the pics from our vacation is that it’s been an absolute pain to try to view and manage them inside iPhoto. With over 400 pictures to pare down, scrolling and moving to different pictures has been unbearably slow. While searching around, I found out a couple of things that might be of importance. Having more memory is definitely helpful (I’m only at 512MB on both my PowerBook and my iMac). I’ve seen recommendations of at least 1GB.

What’s made a bigger difference, though, was this tip I found on a forum site:

When viewing your photos and scrolling iPhoto does one of the following:

- If your thumbs are smaller or equal to 240×180 the iPhoto will resize those images and shw them there.

- If your thumbs are larger than 240 pixel then iPhoto will need to resize the original image to show it as a thumbnail.

Yep, the thumbnail size you use when browsing makes a huge difference.
Using the 240×180 size (or smaller) gives much better performance.

There’s an easy way to make sure you are using that size - when you are in the browser view, press the 1,2 or 0 key.

1 will take you to maximum size, 0 will show the smallest thumbnails, and 2 will show you the optimal 240×180 thumbnails.

I used the tip and browsed after hitting “2″ on the keyboard. It was definitely smoother and more useable. Wish it were a menu option instead of this random key. I wonder if it’s documented anywhere?

I finally got a movie onto the PSP that played with the sound intact and everything. Amazing, huh? My process was simple. I used MacTheRipper to get the movie off the DVD, using Title Only extraction. I then used FFMPEGX to encode the video using the built-in PSP profile. A couple of things to know:

• PSP doesn’t like the NTSC Film frame rate. Leave it as NTSC (29.97).
• Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones (AOTC) is 2:22 long. It wouldn’t fit on a 512MB card unless I reduced the audio encoding down to 64-bit and 24000Hz sampling. The Incredibles, which I haven’t gotten to work yet, did fit with 128-bit, 48kHz sampling. It came out to about 390-420MB depending on the options.
• I’m not so thrilled with the video quality of AOTC. The edges of people are blurry and not exactly what I expected. The Incredibles encoded much sharper, but then it is animated… no hair to deal with, for example.
• The Incredibles hasn’t worked yet. Something about the multiangle stuff is causing my tools to barf. I’ve tried both YadeX and MacTheRipper to rip it and both FFMPEGX and iPSP to encode it. Both have had major issues with the audio sync. The closest I got was using MacTheRipper to demux the VOB file (essentially splitting the video and audio into two separate file). I then encoded with FFMPEGX, but the audio was out of sync by a smidge. Enough to be annoying, though… I’m going to try to fix it using Sync Hole but I’m not holding my breath. I’m going to try some more things before I just give up and wait for Disney to release it on UMD.
• I’ve yet to try iPSP’s full screen mode. Sony would like people to encode video at 320×240 rather than at the full resolution of the PSP (which is real widescreen, 16×9). People have figured out how to encode movies at the full resolution and tweak the headers so that the PSP will play it (clever people). The movies take up more room, so that might be a problem for me with the 512MB card, but it’s worth giving it a shot with a shorter flick.
• The subtitles didn’t make it through in AOTC where they should’ve in regular English playback (for example, when they’re speaking in some alien language). It’s odd, but I think I may have not set the option on the encoding. That’s something else to play with.
• This stuff is SLOOOOOOOW on my iMac. At home, ATOC took about 270 minutes to encode (4 hours, 30 minutes). On a dual-G5, I’ve seen it encode in 2 hours or so. This is using two-pass encoding with Trellis quantization enabled. I’m not including the time it took to rip the movie from the DVD (on both computers it took under an hour, probably close to 30 minutes).
• iPSP is SLOOOOOOOW, much slower than FFMPEGX. Not sure why, but I’ll try to get some comparison times to put up.

I’ll update with more information as I get it. It’s nice having a portable video player.

Update: I updated my process in this new post on 5-6-2007.

The PSP really looks like a winner. In addition to playing the game I mentioned last time, I’ve tried the two grand experiments on my list: play a video game again other humans (online) and get a feature film onto a MemoryStick. I’ve had mixed success with both.

First off, the video game. After playing Need For Speed for a while, I got bored with racing around in a circle. It’s fun for a while and I’ll probably go back to playing it again, but I needed to get online against people with a game that has more action. So, off I went to Best Buy to get another game. After poking around and being shocked at the price of the games (some as much as $49.99!), I settled on Twisted Metal Head On (TMHO), part of the Twisted Metal franchise. The game is pretty much the old Atari game Combat with really cool graphics and more than just a boring square to shoot at your opponents. Seriously, you can just download BZFlag and imagine it with really cool graphics, cars instead of tanks, and different types of tanks/cars instead of the one-tank-to-rule-them-all. That’s TMHO.

The gameplay is fast, the graphics are beautiful and the soundtrack is pretty good. The best part of the game, though, is that you can play online using the PSP’s built in wireless. I had few problems getting online yesterday, though I did hit the 80110482 error a few times. I just re-tried and voila, on the net. The online play is smooth, at least as good as playing online on the computer. A few blips of lag today, but yesterday was as smooth as can be.

There’s something a bit odd about playing an online game (and I mean concentrating and really playing it) while laying on the couch. You’re just not supposed to do that! I swear I would sort of realize what I was doing between rounds and think, man, two years ago I would never have expected to be able to do this. To have a screen with such great graphics, good sound, enough battery power to run the hardware PLUS a wireless Internet connection running at full speed for hours of gaming? You kidding me? This is f’ing awesome.

OK, so I’m a big fan of the wireless connectivity. Let’s move on to the next big experiment, my own DVDs on my PSP. While at Best Buy, I picked up a copy of The Incredibles and a new 512MB MemoryStick Pro Duo card. My goal was to get The Incredibles onto that MemoryStick and playing on my PSP. I ended up with mixed results.

After a bit of poking around the Internet, I found that the process to encode video on a Mac for the PSP had already been documented by a number of uber-geeks that had the Japanese release and more video knowledge than I. So, it was just a matter of finding and noting them to make a list of the software I’d need and the steps to follow. All of this stuff is freeware or very inexpensive shareware, so luckily that was no burden. Unfortunately, all of this stuff was freeware or shareware and so I ran into some cryptic options.

I ended up using YadeX and ffmpegx to do the conversion. I eventually plan on replacing YadeX with MacTheRipper, but for now both work about the same. ffmpegx has a preset for the PSP, but I tweaked a few things along the way. I’ll document that later once I have a complete success story (and can eliminate my tweaks as causes for my current problem).

After a LOOOONG time (I left the encoding running overnight on my 1.25Ghz G4 iMac), I got a copy of the feature down to around 340MB, more than small enough to fit on the MemoryStick. The audio kind of sucked (32-bit/24khz sampling), but it was hard to really tell with the speakers. The video was a little blurry to me (side effect of most of these compressors, at least to me), but in general it was very nice and very hard to notice. The video was smooth and fluid.

The problem was that the audio seemed to be almost 20-30 seconds behind the feature. I don’t know why or how or what is causing it to be this way, but it’s in sync for the first few minutes (basically the entire TV interview segment at the beginning of the film), but after that the audio and video seem to lurch a bit and then they’re out of whack the rest of the way. Frustrating. I tried re-encoding a bunch of times today while at work, but with no success (luckily, my dual G5 at work only takes an hour or so to encode from the VOB).

I’m still investigating, but this may be beyond my feeble knowledge of 24 hours. I’ll post the steps I followed for a successful encoding if I get it to work. Perhaps I’ll try a different movie…

You can find the resources I’ve found on encoding video for the PSP on OS X at my del.icio.us page. I’ll be adding more and posting here if/when I have any success.

Update: I’ve put more notes and findings on this page.