Blogo, blogging without the browser

Today I decided to give Blogo a go. I have a few blogs and it’s frankly a pain having to log into them to update them. This little app allows you to write bloggy garbage and send it to whereever you want it, right from the desktop. Of course I will get bored with it after a week but that is the darwinism behaviour that I like to exhibit.

How to: Convert M4P files to MP3 on a Mac

George Patton urinates into the Rhine River, Germany, March 1945

Alright, now you can buy drm free music from iTunes. Boo-yah. Typical of Apple, some of their content is still only available as M4P files. That is, they are still crippled with DRM and unable to be shared between computers easily. The official route for re-encoding these puppies is to burn them out to a CD as .cda’s and then to re-rip them using iTunes as MP3’s. This is a tiresome bore when you are dealing with more than a couple of songs.

So, having had my lazy gland™ tickled I decided there had to be an alternative out there. And thanks be to Crom, there is here. It’s called M4P Converter, rather unimaginative I know. But the solution is rather cool. The software creates a virtual cd drive on your Mac. You drag the files you want to convert to a playlist in iTunes, right click the playlist and send to the virtual cd drive. M4P converter takes over and uses the virtual cda’s to create DRM-free MP3’s. Double plus good. The licence is stiff for a single task bit of software but the agro you avoid makes it worth it.

As a side note, I couldn’t be fucked finding an appropriate image to use as an illustrative metaphor for this article so here is a photo instead of General George Patton pissing in the Rhine River in March 1945.

Filling up on software

 

I am forced to use the Cisco connection client at work. If you have seen this for the Mac you will know that it is a clumsy and ugly example of how not to implement a UI in OS X. In addition the designers make it impossible to access except through using up valuable dock space or sticking an alias somewhere. Instead try Shimo. This neat little implementation piggy backs off the Cisco client and reduces the interface to just the essentials. Additionally it lives up in that little Mac taskbar thing at the top (yeah I haven’t learned all the Mac buzzwords yet). It’s donationware so your investment is as low as you want to make it.