Sunday, September 21, 2003

Personal File Server For The Masses [Slashdot] 10:31:38 PM

The calendar fiasco. Ray Ozzie reminds us what a fiasco calendars still are: Each fall, as I manually enter the entire Celtics season schedule, my company's holidays and my childrens' school calendars into my own personal calendar, I am again reminded how ridiculous it is that The Net has not yet ubiquitously embraced the everyday exchange of virtual objects so basic as calendars and as vCards - which can also likewise be subscribed-to, aggregated into Contact Lists and auto-updated via personal RSS feeds. Bizarre. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] The situation is perhaps slightly less dismal than that, but not much less. I asked Google for Celtics schedules. It found a CSV file from nba.com that I could download into Outlook, and also an iCal calendar at iCalShare.com that I could subscribe to on the Mac. I don't know how many people have bothered to acquire the Outlook-compatible data, but according to iCalShare's stats, an underwhelming number of Mac folk have subscribed to that version. ... [Jon's Radio] 10:28:27 PM

Playing AACs on Windows. I have a heap of music in iTunes in AAC format on my G4 at home.  I also have a work-supplied WinXP laptop and often need to not hear some of the conversations around me at work (don't ask). So - how do you play AAC encoded MPEG-4 music on Windows?  After a lot of fiddling the answer is relatively simple. At first I thought that I could use MusicMatch - since it is bundled with iPod for use on Windows. But if you read the iPod FAQ you will discover that iPod for Windows only supports MP3, not AAC.  WinAMP does not support AACs out of the box either - but it does support plug-ins.  I have never liked Windows Media Player - so a solution that avoided it was what I wanted. After a bit of googling (and some help from Greg) I found rarewares which has a page of AAC gadgets including this found this AAC plug-in for WinAMP3. I also had to rename the files to .mp4 as WinAMP didn't seem to understand the files, even after assoicating the extension with it. Hmm. I hope this saves someone a bit of time and mental anguish.  Now I'm happy, as well as wet. [justinknol.net - a stack of useful stuff] 10:25:18 PM