You may not be familiar with the company Tronical but you will know their work because they are responsible for Gibson’s Robot Guitar tuning systems. Well judging by this video it appears that Tronical are about to launch some standalone systems that can be retrofit to pretty much any guitar be it a Les Paul [...]
Tag: Mac
How to clean your Mighty Mouse
Apple’s Mighty Mouse (now also called an Apple Mouse) has a dirty little secret. While the scroll ball performs its duties as intended when the mouse is new, it can become clogged with dirt and grime over time.
Its performance then deteriorates dramatically, with the ball sticking and failing to scroll. There are a number of things you can do to try and free the ball, and return it to its full 360-degree scrolling glory.
First of all, try turning it upside down and rolling the ball around. Roll it on a piece of paper, hoping the debris and dirt will rub off onto it. Give it a blast with a can of compressed air, or a rub with computer-cleaning solution or a wet wipe. But if all else fails, a drastic course of action may be required.
Removing and cleaning a Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball isn’t particularly easy. A considerable amount of disassembly is required before you can clean the ball and its housing.
In this tutorial, we show you how to get inside your Mighty Mouse without damaging it, and how to clean and reinvigorate your scroll ball to get everything up and running again. It should take approximately 20 minutes, but be prepared to invest a little more time if needed, especially the first time you clean your mouse in this way.
A word of warning
Caution! Disassembling your Mighty Mouse involves breaking off a component that’s glued into place. It’s not easy, and if you make a mistake, you’re extremely likely to damage or even ruin the device.
We can’t take responsibility if your Mighty Mouse is broken while following this tutorial, and as a result we can only recommend that you attempt it if your mouse is in such poor condition that you feel you’ve nothing to lose, if you give it a go.
It is recommended that you read the whole of this tutorial before you start, especially Steps 2 and 3.
PDF OCR 1.4.1 – Convert PDFs into text documents.
PDF OCR is a simple drag-and-drop utility for Mac OS X that converts your PDFs into text documents. It uses advanced OCR (optical character recognition) technology to extract the text of the PDF even if that text is contained in an image. This is particularly useful for dealing with PDFs that were created via a Scan-to-PDF function in a scanner or photo copier. Supports English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Vietnamese, and Italian currently. The OCR engine is based on Tesseract.
Limited to PDFs of 1 page or less. Enterprise Version ($29.99), no limit on the size of the PDF.
(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)
How To Quickly Improve The Quality of MP3s With GarageBand
Not all MP3s are created equal. The quality of some MP3s are good, others are barely audible. Among the thousands of songs on your hard drive, I’m sure that there are several that fall into the category of ‘should be better’ — the ones with low volume settings, the ones with weak vocals, the one with too much bass, and other various imperfect conditions.
The quick fix is adjusting the equalizer. But there are situations where repeated re-adjusting is annoying. You need a permanent fix.
The tools in the garage
I also have quite a few imperfect songs. Having just finished the eBook ‘Recording Your Next Hit With GarageBand‘, most of GarageBand’s tricks and tools are still fresh in my head. They are more than qualified to enhance and improve the quality of MP3s.
Please note that even the best audio tools out there have their limitations. Nobody can enhance Bon Jovi’s song and turn it into Celine Dion’s. With that in mind, let’s get started.
Open GarageBand and start a new project. Basically, you can choose any of the templates, but it’s preferable to use the ones that comes with the least tracks like ‘Voice’ and ‘Loops’. We are going to delete all the tracks anyway.
Add a weather forecast event to iCal
Have you ever wanted a handy, always-there weather forecast, ready for viewing at the launch of an app (be that app on your iPhone or your Mac)? Thanks to Weather Underground, and Mac OS X Hints tipster allanBook, you can now easily add an automatically-updating weather forecast to iCal.
Load the Weather Underground site in your browser of choice, enter a city name or zip code in the Search box, then click Go. For instance, if you entered Savannah, Georgia, you’d get this page of weather info. Near the top right of the page you’ll see an “Add to My Favorites” link, along with icons labeled ICAL and RSS.
You can simply click on the ICAL link to add this particular weather forecast to iCal. However, if you do it this way, the calendar won’t automatically update as time goes by. Instead, Control-click on the ICAL icon and select Copy Link (if you’re using Safari; in Firefox, this is labeled Copy Link Location) from the pop-up menu.
Switch to iCal and select Calendar -> Subscribe, then press Command-V to paste the link you just copied and click Subscribe. A new dialog will appear onscreen, as seen at left. Edit the Name field—Savannah, perhaps—and a Description if you wish. Click the Auto-refresh button and set the pop-up menu to Every Week, then click OK. (Feel free to use a shorter interval if you think the forecast will change more often.)
Congratulations, you now have an auto-updating weather forecast for Savannah, Georgia (or whatever location you chose) in iCal. For more info on any day’s forecast, just double-click the entry. In the Info window, you’ll see a URL for the full forecast (for US locations, at least), along with a more-complete description of the selected day’s weather.
Every week, this calendar will update with the next weekly forecast. If you want the weather forecast to appear on your iPhone, you can (as of iPhone OS 3.0) do that, too. You can’t sync subscribed calendars via MobileMe, but you can do so in iTunes. Connect your iPhone, select it in the sidebar, and click on the Info tab. In the Calendars section, click on the newly-created subscription to sync the calendar to your iPhone.
While a one-line-view of the weather in iCal probably won’t completely meet your needs for weather info, it does give a nice “at a glance” view at the upcoming weather.
(via MacWorld)
Plantronics DSP 500 Headset
Intensify your computer digital audio experience. The DSP-500 is perfect for multimedia applications including games, CDs and MP3 music, speech recognition and voice applications.
For me, MAC OS X immediately detected the USB device as a DSP sound processor and the headset was ready to use in a matter of seconds. As far as the headset is concerned, the Plantronics DSP-500 comes with a high quality lightweight headset with a 3 meter long cord, which has a rather modest sized DSP and an in-line volume control attached to it. The 3-inch long attachment is the Digital signal processing unit, which houses all the works that processes sound and sends it directly to the headset.
I use a Plantronics DSP-500 USB Headset for most of my calls using Skype. I am now doing 50% of my calls on Ustream.tv using this headset and Skype people tell me quality is great.
The quality is much better than a cell phone or a landline. It has some amazing DSP noise-canceling technologies.
As far as PC audio is concerned, the DSP-500 is Plantronics’ top of the line offering.
Redesigned MacBooks On Their Way
Word on the street has it that the redesigned MacBooks are already on their way to stores, since field checks denote the shipping process in currently in progress. Rumor also has it the new MacBooks will include an extremely thin aluminum casing, LED backlighting and something we’d never thought possible from Apple – an aggressive entry-level price point. There are people looking at a $999 MacBook, and that price point would certainly make it very attractive to pick up even for a person who doesn’t need one. Are you looking forward to the new slew of MacBooks, or are you happy with what you have currently and do not want to focus on spending but reining in your finances as the economy heads towards a downwards spiral.
(Via Ubergizmo.)
Top 10 Usability Highs Of Mac OS
By Juul Coolen
Although I’ve been a Windows power user for years, the transition to Mac couldn’t have been easier and more pleasant. I don’t want to turn this article into some endless rambling about how great Mac is, but as the user of both systems I can speak from my own experience quite objectively. Let’s take a look at some of the spots where Apple really has done it better in terms of user interface and usability.
60 Million Apps Sold at iTunes Store, There is a Kill Switch, Says Steve Jobs
It’s been a month since the iTunes App Store went live, and in an interview with the Wall St Journal, Steve Jobs has put the apps downloads figure at over 60 million. With the mix of free and paid apps, that brought Apple around $30 million. That’s obviously encouraged Steve: He’s enthusiastic that maybe ‘it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time’ adding that he’s ‘never seen anything like this in my career for software.’
And in a slightly unusual candid comment, for Steve anyway, he’s admitted that the apps won’t be making Apple much profit—instead future sales hopes are pinned on the applications tempting people to buy more iPhones and iPod touches. ‘Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that,’ he argues, suggesting that now the differentiation is about software.
Clearly the app store has been a success so far for Apple and the developers: The top 10 made close to $9 million in one month. What about the infamous ‘I Am Rich’ app? Apple decided to pull it as the result of a ‘judgment call.’
Steve also confirmed the existence of the kill switch for malicious apps, despite last week’s news to the contrary. ‘Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull.’ And you can’t argue with that logic. [WSJ]
(Via Gizmodo.)
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