A Veritable Cornucopia of Useless Information

It’s not June yet (but it will be in 7 minutes); I should go to bed.

June will have posts with actual content in them. I promise.

What happens when you wander into a bar that’s across the street from Lincoln’s only midnight showing of Star Wars - Episode III (1 1/2 hours before the movie starts)? You find a Sith lord enjoying a beer, of course. There’s much to be said for the absurdity that life provides.

Continuing along my alcohol-related tangent, Clay has posted his ratings from last semester’s wine class; you should check them out. However, if beer’s more your thing, I’ve written reviews for a beer or two as well.

This AppleScript works wonderfully in QuickTime 7:

tell application "QuickTime Player" to present movie 1

Enjoy!

I apologize for beating this topic to death, but my QuickTime 7 + AppleScript saga continues…

I was able to get the following full screen AppleScript hack to work in QT7; however, it only seems to work for movies encoded in the ultrasexy H.264 (HD) format:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
   activate
   present movie 1 scale screen
end tell

Issues I found with this AppleScript (and I’m sure there are many more):

• In H.264 movies, entering and then exiting full screen mode freezes the image in the QT 7 movie window (the sound continues to play normally)
• In “MPEG1 Muxed” movies, entering full screen mode freezes the image (once again, the sound continues to play normally)

I’m sure some of you out there won’t be able to resist the urge to investigate this in greater detail. In any case, there’s always VLC.

My copy of Mac OS X Tiger arrived Thursday evening; unfortunately, I haven’t installed it yet. Unbeknownst to me, the DVD portion of my CD/DVD drive broke at some point between late January and Thursday. Very sad. I ordered a new drive from Newegg; it’ll be here around the end of the week. I should be able to install Tiger sometime between now and then; fortunately for me, transferring a multi-GB disk image over the Internet is a viable option.

In anticipation of overall Tiger goodness, I also downloaded QuickTime 7 over the weekend. Watching movie previews in HD is incredibly sexy; discovering that all the full-screen AppleScript hacks (that I’m aware of) no longer work is quite unsexy. If anyone knows of/finds a way to restore this functionality to the free version of QT 7, please let me know.