Quick tip: Convert your .wma files (Windows media audio) to .mp3 files
on your Mac quickly and easily with Switch, a free download from http://www.nch.com.au/switch/plus.html. It works great and is very customizable; you can output to MP3 in whatever bitrate you choose, or convert to AIFF (.aif), .au, Ogg Vorbis (.ogg), Free Lossless Audio Codec (.flac), or many others.

For those of you Mac OS X programmers trying to use the Boost C++ library who are confused with all this #include and #include-path nonsense and can't get your program to compile, I have finally figured it out.

Most Mac users seem to know and love Quicksilver, that wonderful little application launcher from Blacktree (and much more, as LifeHacker often points out).

Those of you stuck in the Windows world (or at least sometimes) may finally have an alternative: Enso. The makers of Enso put a lot of thought into their product (and say it's not just a rip-off of Quicksilver). However, Enso, unlike Quicksilver, is not free; it will run you $19.95 after your 30-day trial. You can download Enso here.

Something that has bothered me for a very long time is my inability to play FLAC audio files on my Mac. (FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec and does not play in iTunes.) Well, I’ve finally gotten it figured out. Just follow these simple steps.

1. Download xACT, which converts from FLAC to WAV or AIFF, and iLAS, which is an extremely high-quality MP3 encoder, better than iTunes’s built-in one. Install both of them.
2. Open your FLAC files in xACT. Convert them to either WAV or AIFF; it doesn’t matter which.
3. Import your finished WAV or AIFF files into iTunes (I usually just drag them onto Library on the left). If you want completely lossless files, you are done!
4. Most of us will want to save space (and enjoy playback with less of a system resource hit!), so create a playlist with any and all WAV and AIFF files you want to convert to MP3.
5. When you are viewing that playlist, open iLAS and convert to MP3! I use the default settings, which produce extremely high quality MP3s, almost losslessly.
6. Almost done! Now delete the WAV/AIFF files from your iTunes library and move them to the Trash. Manually edit the information on the songs, because unfortunately, WAV and AIFF do not support the ID3 tags that MP3 files have to store information about song title, artist, and album.

Also of note is that iLAS is great for ripping CDs. Instead of making a playlist, just click on the Audio CD and rip away!

Finally, I have joined Technorati, just so I can read Tantek’s blog. Technorati Profile

You may know about iTunes Plus, which is that you can buy songs for $1.29 but at twice the bitrate and with no DRM (you can send it to friends and family, play it in Winamp or your non-iPod music player, convert to MP3, or anything you want!).

... But did you know?

1. Buying a whole album in Plus format is normally STILL ONLY $9.99!
2. If you go to the iTunes Store, click iTunes Plus, and look for “Upgrade My Library”, it will let you upgrade your previously purchased music (if it's now available as iTunes Plus) for only 30¬¢ a song (and less for most albums)!

If are an Apple fan but use Windows (perhaps via Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop or – like me – at work), you may find that you often hit Alt instead of Ctrl, as much of the Windows Ctrl key functionality is present in Mac’s Cmd key functionality, located it the same place as Windows Alt key. The solution is to swap the positions of the left Alt key with the left Ctrl key. Here’s how.

I’m in love with Opera.

Not the art form, but the web browser. I use Opera instead of Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Why? Here are eleven quick reasons.

For a while now I have been using the wonderful with my MacBook Pro.  I would also like to share out a few tips that are not very obvious when dealing with other keyboards on Mac.

The Microsoft Natural 4000 Ergonomic Keyboard

1. Microsoft, amazingly enough, provides software that smoothly integrates with OS X, its Preferences, and even iTunes to allow your keyboard’ Play/Pause, Volume Up, Volume Down, Mute, and Calculator buttons, among others, to work as expected!
2. The Microsoft software that comes with this keyboard automitically rearranges the modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Option, Cmd, Windows) to have the same layout as your Mac’s normal keyboard.
3. The 4000 has a handy Document Zoom slider in the middle of the keyboard which works in a lot off applications such as Microsoft Word and Opera
4. Interestingly enough, the Microsoft 4000 includes an extra row aboved my beloved numpad: =, (, ), and Backspace. They are handy for Excel/spreadsheets and number crunching.

External Keyboards & Your Mac

1. Scroll Lock reduces screen brightness, and Pause/Break increases screen brightness.
2. If your keyboard has volume control (as does the 4000), the previous tip means that you don’t loose your MacBook Pro’s brightness and volume controls when using an external keyboard
3. Through the Preferences pane for Keyboard, Apple makes it very easy to switch Alt/Windows buttons to be in the same order as your Command/Option(alt) buttons. (The Microsoft software, however, makes this unnecessary; it automitically does so just for the external keyboard.)
4. Using an inexpensive, short dongle (converting plug) on PS/2 keyboards does not let you use the device when plugged into a USB port! This only works if the keyboard was designed to work that way, and in that case, it will come with its own dongle. More expensive ($16+) converters should work.
5. Keyboard layouts differ; you may want to double-check that the shape of things like the Enter button is the same as they are on your Mac. The Microsoft devices are perfectly compatible as far as I can tell.
6. Curiously, sometimes the Delete button (not Backspace) does not invoke a Delete command and you must still use Command-Backspace.
7. This is barely relevant, but Adobe Photoshop (on both Windows and OS X) assigns differnt actions to Return (a/k/a Enter) and (Numpad) Enter; (Numbpad) Enter "confirms changes" when editing type, whereas Return/Enter adds a new line of text.

Updated August 1, 2007.