mountain masala

loving emusic.com

I just have to say that I am having a great time with my emusic.com subscription. 50 songs a month for US$20. this month it has been Dar Williams' debut album "The Honesty Room", a Bruce Cockburn discthat I didnt have, the Jethro Tull Christmas album (which is fantastic!) and Gillian Welch. Then this week they had a Christmas special - 30 songs for $10 - so I picked up Ryan Adams "Heartbreaker" and "Boxer" by The National, Paste magazine's album of 2007, and 3 John Coltrane jazz tunes to boot.

just wonderful.

off for Christmas.  have a great one folks.

you can watch the mitchell ladies dancing here.....

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1599485065

(I'll get killed for posting that...)

have yoursELF a merry one

we've all been playing with this for the last 48 hours....

have fun!

http://www.elfyourself.com/

printing PDFs in OSX

darren asked me how to adjust the PDF printing compression settings on the Mac, so here's the answer for all...

when you choose the print to PDF option there are a bunch of options below that. eg. compress PDF.

these are actually Automator scripts that are stored in Library/PDF Services

double-click one and it will open up in Automator.

Change the compression settings and save it under a new name in the PDF Services folder. It will be added to the PDF menu when you print.

teenagers are media-rich

Major Australian newspapers today reported on the results of a recent study of teenagers' media habits by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The study sampled 751 family households with 8-17 year olds. Summary in today's Australian newspaper.

You can find the report here.

An Age news summary here. (thanks to cheryl)

Quicktime 7.3.1 & Flash

I’ve just discovered that Quicktime 7.3.1 on the Mac no longer plays Flash files.

This will particularly affect you if you use Arkaos VJ which uses Quicktime to play its movies.

If you’ve already run the auto update (like me), you should be able to reinstall 7.3, but at the moment I can’t find it on the Apple website.....

bloody MPEG

don't you hate trying to convert MPEG files. our youngest daughter and her friend have been filming a mini-movie over a couple of weeks on our little digital camera (yes, yes, I REALLY need a good SLR...)

she had brought them all into iPhoto and I said we'd just pop them into iMovie for her to edit. lo and behold, they're MPEG-1 files. Quicktime played them fine but iMovie could'nt figure it out. (For the uninitiated, MPEG muxes and demuxes video and audio. ie. processes them separately and then puts them back together. You don't have a movie file with two separate, synced audio and video streams.)

I told it her it would be easy to convert... Quicktime doesn't. ffmegX didnt, Export2QT Demo did but with a weird result.

Thankfully MPEG StreamClip, a nice free app for Mac and Windows did the job of converting the files to  DV PAL Quicktime files suitable for iMovie.

It's here.

Worth getting as you may need it sometime.

now back to cooking kangaroo mince...

tony's preaching class

Here's the flyer for Tony's advanced preaching class next year. If you're a minister and would like to brush up on your preaching and hear some of the  more recent insights, click on the image for a larger version with details.

Four Thursdays, 9.00 am - 4.00pm starting 13 March. You can audit this for $150 or do it towards an MMin (or Bachelor's degree).

More details here.

my new baby

here's the new toy that I receaived as a special combined birhtday & (early) Christmas present. It's a portable M-Audio Axiom 25 USB MIDI keyboard & controller. Came with Ableton Live Lite 6. Now I just need to upgrade Reason and Arkaos VJ and I'll be having LOT'S of fun!

Off to learn how Ableton Live works...

Podcast on The Way of Pilgrimage

The Upper Room have started a podcast called Continuum, and the first episode features one of the authors of "The Way of Pilgrimage" talking about spiritual pilgrimage.

You can access it here.

really random this time....

the twins were shopping at Marion today and came across a famous Australian trumpet player in the sport store (where Grace was buying a helmet so at 18 she can take up roller blading....)

of course they told him that they were jazz musicians and asked him about his new electronic trumpet invention thingy.