Transmission is very nifty. And I thought uTorrent on Windows was good!
Also, good e-commerce experience of the day: Book-a-Bin. Nice simple straightforward “specify what sort of bin you want, when, and where” system, handles the payment, the bin simply arrives when you asked for it and goes away as booked. Have used it before, and have booked another bin to cart more of our accumulated rubbish this weekend.
Popularity: 34% [?]
Gave up on Synergy2, leaving aside the issues with daemonizing, having the server running on OS X was resulting in wacky Warcrack mouse behaviour. Have dug out an old Belkin USB KVM. It too has its issues — in particular it takes a few seconds for Windows to notice devices when I switch to that machine, and in the past it used to do annoying things like automatically flip inputs if the monitor was put to sleep. Which is a bit of an issue when you’re dealing with system reboots/etc.
Otherwise, so far so good. Except for iTunes+AppleTV. Streaming is fine, syncing video is fine, but trying to sync the 10k+ music files causes the system to eat itself after about 500-600 tracks. Suspect it may simply be that 1GB of RAM and a G5 is not exactly what you’d call “current” and iTunes is gnawing its eyes out trying to cope, but it’s tricky to track down when the system runs so slowly that you pretty much have to reset to get control back…
I had hoped to move the video encoding work over to the Mac. It’s a slower machine, but OS X is pretty good about running this sort of thing in the background with limited impact on interactive stuff. But the mplayer/mencoder bug which screws up subtitle support appears to be extant only on OS X and in every build I can find that’ll support H.264 as a target codec. Having tried a few randomly-selected SVN trees I’ve been unable to make it build at all, each time for different exciting reasons. Same deal with the ffmpeg kit. So for now that task is back on Windows too.
Will see how this goes. My experience has been that most computing environments irritate me within a few weeks at best, and while I’m quite happy with Leopard at the office this dual-system scheme is probably going to get on my nerves after a while. Longer term I may simply wind up buying a more modern Mac and putting everything on that, worst case with the video stuff would be a GUI-less Linux VM, and everything else I care about (WoW, Spore, Puzzle Quest) seems to have a Mac port. But that’s probably end-of-the-year stuff, so We Shall See.
Popularity: 46% [?]