Features

First Look: Equinux Tube Stick Hybrid

When it comes to Macintosh TV tuners, it’s hard to ignore the very large cat sitting in the corner. Elgato dominates the US market, but in Europe Equinux has been a big player and they’ve recently crossed the ocean with a new US-compatible tuner. The TubeStick Hybrid with its “The Tube” software arrives at a distinct disadvantage.

It’s a small white box that you can attach to a spare USB port and use to watch channels both from over-the-air signals or connect to your cable TV. Equinux provides the software that turns the tuned data into a watch-able show on your screen.

The product and its software remains at a stage I can best describe as “beta”. Yes, you can watch TV with it. Yes, you can tune to both ATSC (High Def) and analog channels. But many features like integrated TV listings are not yet available for the US. You’re able to import your own Extended Programming Guide listings in XMLTV format, and Equinux recommends SchedulesDirect.org. Read the rest of this entry

Popularity: 8% [?]

iTunes: Free Wednesday

Once again, apple.cooone.com is pleased to present you with a selection of free songs and videos from around the world. Many of these iTMS items won’t be free for long, so grab your copies before the week is up. And don’t forget: If you want to buy these on your iPhone or iPod touch, make sure to sign into your account in iTunes before you sync.

Follow the jump for all of this week’s tasty free goodness. Read the rest of this entry

Popularity: 8% [?]

Mac Automation: E-mail songs from iTunes

What do you do if you need to email a song from iTunes to your work computer, or to another machine you own? If you have one machine where you do all your CD imports, you might want to send a track to the office; maybe you’ve got your GarageBand compositions in iTunes and you want to send one to a friend. We can simply this process by using Automator for Leopard. In this how-to, I am going to show you how to quickly and easily e-mail songs from your iTunes library.

Continue reading to learn how to e-mail songs using Automator. Read the rest of this entry

Popularity: 6% [?]

Review: Napster MP3 store

As we noted yesterday, Napster has now rolled out the world’s largest DRM-free MP3 store. In the spirit of the Amazon MP3 review we ran last year, I thought I would take Napster for a spin to see how the service works from a Mac-user’s perspective.

The first thing to note is that this is a download service. While Napster continues to run its subscription-based service (with downloads limited to Windows computers with Microsoft DRM), you do not need a subscription to purchase MP3s from the Napster Store (though you need an account, of course). Once downloaded the files are just straight 256kbps MP3s that should play without problem on any of a variety of devices. With that in mind, let’s have a look at the Napster experience. Read the rest of this entry

Popularity: 9% [?]

iChat problems, keyboard control, SRS iWOW bugs, iPhoto desktops, and more

In this exciting round of Ask we’ll be looking at questions about using the keyboard to control dialog boxes, getting iTunes to play when a Mac wakes from sleep, using selective iPhoto sources for an automatically changing desktop, port forwarding for iChat, using one Mac to control another Mac running Front Row, and more.

As always your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you’re running and which version of OS X, as certain answers will vary between different Macs and Tiger vs. Leopard, etc. (we’ll assume you’re running Leopard if you don’t specify). And now, on to the questions!

OSXleopard2 asks

I and my friend both have Mac’s (mine a penyron MBP with Leopard and hers a year old MB with tiger) we’ve tried time and time again to do an iChat video to each other from my house to her house with AIM and Jabber, but it always says there was a communication error. The funny thing is that I can talk to everyone else on my contact list, and she can do so as well. It’s only between the two of us when we’re at home. I might add that it worked when I was in town on a different wifi network. Are there some settings in my/her router that I can change to fix the issue??? Read the rest of this entry

Popularity: 13% [?]