Monthly Archives: April 2008

Fire sale: Griffin FireWave adds surround sound to Macs

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If your Mac doesn't have optical audio out, you can still enjoy Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound from your system. The Griffin FireWave is a firewire connected breakout box that delivers six discrete channels as 1/8″ mini jacks. These in turn get connected to your amplifier and then to your speakers. This unit is great for quick impromptu setups using existing desktop computer speakers. It works with DVD Player, VLC, and even Traktor DJ Studio where the 3 pairs of stereo outputs can be assigned to headphone, main, booth or record.

Best of all the unit is currently $29.99 with free shipping.

Link.

Create your own iPhone ring tones

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It's incredibly easy to now create your own ring tones for your iPhone without paying the 99c. Here are a few different ways to accomplish it.

1. Use GarageBand to load a track from CD or an MP3 file. Trim the song down to a reasonable length. If it's short, it's a good idea to loop it a few times and make sure the loop point sounds natural. Export the song as a “.M4A” via the share menu. Rename the file with the .M4R extension and drag into iTunes. Sync your iPhone.

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2. Use Quicktime Pro to edit/copy/paste the ring tone. Export as MPEG-4 audio. Rename the file with the .M4R extension and drag into iTunes. Sync your iPhone.

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3. Locate an existing song in your iTunes library that is .M4A format by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on the song and choose Show in Finder. Copy the song to your desktop and rename the file with the .M4R extension and drag into iTunes. Sync your iPhone.

Apple’s Time Capsule: Painfully Slow

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We recently bought an Apple Time Capsule for backing up or main machines at home. The first thing we did was disable the wireless portion of it since we already have a wireless base station that's performing quite well (we've also been burned by bad Apple wireless products in the past, read: original Graphite Base Station had bad capacitors, an Airport Express that randomly drops the wireless signal, and two Airport Expresses that have faulty power supplies).

I needed to perform a restore from the time capsule to my PowerMac G5 via 100mbit/s ethernet. The total size for the restore was just over 90GB– it took just over 40 hours to restore completely. That's nearly two days! That's just wrong– there has to be a problem somewhere.

To it's credit, it performed as advertised allowing me to restore my computer completely from a backup. It just took longer than I believe it should have.

Needless to say, I'm now backing up my machine on an internal drive and leaving the Time Capsule for future generations until there's a fix.

Oh, and don't believe the estimate. It never went over 20 hours at any point.