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Oct 25 2010

Things to do with an old MacBook Air: Blow it up!!

Screen shot 2010 10 24 at 11.59.19 PM 318x1881 Things to do with an old MacBook Air: Blow it up!!

Scott Gawlik from Crazy Cow Productions submitted this cinematic curiosity.

The guys picked up a couple of M-1000 explosives in Chinatown and decided to send their now-outdated-but-not-quite-obsolete MacBook Air to a higher place.

It puts me in mind of Jonathan Coulton’s “A Laptop Like You” where he sings…

In a year or two
You will seem big and heavy and slow
I will carry you
To wherever it is laptops go to die

Evidently, that place might be the messy spot behind the shed where you’ve got a firing range target taped to a heavy bag and American flag boxing gloves at the ready.

Sad… but in a cool explodie way.

Things to do with an old MacBook Air: Blow it up!!

By RickMacMerc • elsewhere, General News, News • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 31 2010

Photographer skins his iPhone 4 as a Leica M9

4946299399 a0cee67139 318x211 Photographer skins his iPhone 4 as a Leica M9

San Francisco photographer, Joey Celis ( @joeyjoeyjoey ) has turned his iPhone 4 into a Leica M9 with this ingenious skin. I had to look this up, not being a photography geek, but the M9 is “the world’s most compact full-format digital camera system” according to Leica. So, I would imagine that this skin would be highly sought after by every iPhone-4-using Leica fan.

With this skin, the photographic “business end” of the iPhone 4 is quite convincing as the compact M9 at a passing glance and can actually take pictures…although, not from the Leica’s lens. If you follow along with Celis’ iPhone 4 Leica M9 conversion photo set on Flickr, you’ll see how it looks in the wild as well as its humble beginnings as a Photoshop document.

While, at first, Celis had no plans to produce the skin for sale, response has been so positive that he posted this along with the picture you see above hinting that ordering information would be on the way soon:

Been getting lots of emails on when I’ll be taking orders for the Leica M9 skin and I think I finally settled on how I would like to release this and it will be in the form of donations to NF1 .

I’ll post information here and here once I skin the other phone.

Stay tuned and thanks for the support!

  1. Neurofibromatosis [↩]

By RickMacMerc • elsewhere, Geek News, Graphics News, iPhone, News, photography • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 24 2010

Automated DVD and Blu-Ray backup, encoding and tagging… right to iTunes

workflow2 318x139 Automated DVD and Blu Ray backup, encoding and tagging… right to iTunes

First written back in October of 2009, this post on the Handbrake forums is the backbone of my AppleTV home theater setup.

While it takes a bit of fiddling to set up, it allows me to use my old MacBook Pro as a “Media Mac” that backs up my DVD collection while also making that media available via iTunes and shared across my network to my AppleTV.

Using the system is simple: I insert a DVD and the Batch Rip Dispatcher Automator action asks if it’s a DVD of a movie or a TV series1 , it copies the contents to an appropriate Batch Rip Folder and renames it automatically. Then, in the wee hours of the evening, an iCal action springs into…well…action and summons Handbrake to encode everything for iTunes. An Automator action kicks in to add metadata, cover art, and the correct title for the resulting files and then Hazel moves it all to my backup folders and adds the movies to iTunes. Once in iTunes, the regular update process propagates the media to my AppleTV making them available for viewing.

It all works like a well-oiled machine. Every time I slide in a disc, my mind reared on Looney Tunes cartoons can’t help but start me humming this tune:

0 Automated DVD and Blu Ray backup, encoding and tagging… right to iTunes
Automated DVD and Blu Ray backup, encoding and tagging… right to iTunes
  1. this can be set to auto-run if you plan to rip a bunch of movies [↩]

By RickMacMerc • elsewhere, Featured, hax0r, minimediamac, News, tutorial • 1 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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