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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Links of favor for April 18

Merlin Mann | Apr 18 2008
  • NEAT Receipts Scanner - Sharp-looking receipt scanner for the Mac, coming soon. I tend to avoid one-off gadgets that have any kind of permanent footprint on my desk, but this looks pretty handy if it works.
  • Footers In Modern Web Design: Creative Examples and Ideas | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine - Inspiring collection of ways to use the space at the top and bottom of a web page. The first advocate for this approach that I can recall is Derek, who always uses his footers to such lovely and functional effect.
  • A Pattern Language for Productivity - Gah! I feared I'd waited too long. I've totally been meaning to start something like this on the 43f wiki for a couple years. (curses self). Nice start, here. Should be useful for folks.
  • The Fishbowl: Twitterpated - I get a surprising amount of flack for not following more people on Twitter. Which dumbfounds me. It's like being angry at someone because they aren't watching enough TV. Anyhow, some of these hyper-following people strike me as either nutjobs or cynics, e.g. "in one case, 34,000. If you were truly following all these people, and they updated only once per day on average, you would be reading a Twitter message every two seconds." Yeah. That sounds really fun and enriching. [via anarchaia]
  • Word Spy - speed mentoring - "Getting advice in a series of short conversations with experts and other mentors." I need me more of this.
  • BENTWOOD by contexture design workshop - My gosh, what a lovely idea; a wooden bangle that turns into a coffee cup sleeve. Smart. [via Erika]
  • Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes | Life, Tutorials - Guilty as charged on a number of these. I think the one I'm laziest about is straight quotation marks (""") where I really mean inches ("″"). I do love that people care this much about this stuff (most of the time).
  • Mac Mini Media Centre / journal / hicksdesign - Jon has been sharing how he's setting up his Mac Mini as a home entertainment juggernaut. This post outlines his basic setup, the apps he uses, etc. He also has a companion Flickr set. I'd love to hear more from folks on workflow. How -- hypothetically -- an AVI from out in the wild gets downloaded, encoded when necessary, and then dropped into the "~/Movies" folder. Maybe Automator? As a new Mini owner with the same goals, I'd love to hear your tips here in comments.
  • Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio) | Berkman Center - Clay's book is justifiably hyped right now, because it's just so damned good. If you enjoyed seeing the Claymeister General on Colbert, you might want to catch this swell talk, where he gets a bit more room to say his piece on a world where things get organized without organizers.
  • Spark | CBC Radio | Disaster Preparedness Kit for your digital life - "...Nora and Merlin Mann (of 43Folders fame) are putting together a 'Disaster Preparedness Kit' for your digital life. Do you have a tip, trick, or tool that puts your mind at ease and keeps you from worrying about data loss?"
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phunkysai's picture

Software for mac mini media center

Submitted by phunkysai on April 18, 2008 - 10:11am.

I use XBMC. It was originally written for the old XBOX, but has since been ported to Linux and now the Mac. Not all features have yet been ported over, but most of them have, and the devs are working to get to version 1.0 as quickly as possible.

That said, it works great for me out of the box. Version 0.5 is about to be out soon, which will offer better remote control support (it has basic apple remote support right now).

My worflow is this: I download stuff (TV, Movies, music, whatever) on my upstaris desktop, and then drag and drop them onto my mac mini which is downstairs using Leopard's built in feature of auto-detecting other Macs on the network. XBMC reads every format like VLC (and maybe more), so I don't need to convert anything.

There are a few little bugs, but overall I like how much more open it is than Frontrow. Plus you can skin it (one skin called Aeon is unreal).

One drawback I can see is that it won't play DRM'ed files, since it is an open platform. So you prolly would have to go with something else if you have a lot of DRMed content.

Mac version: http://www.osxbmc.com/

Official site: http://xbmc.org/

Wiki: http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=XBMC_Online_Manual

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