Ranchero Software for sale?

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 04 Oct 2005 12:14:57 GMT

Om says that Newsgator is buying Ranchero Software, makers of NetNewsWire. He says that the deal will be announced on Wednesday. Congratulations Brent, but we’re going to miss Ranchero.

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The PDA Mac rumor is back

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 08 Mar 2005 19:07:56 GMT

Oh no, not again. Macrumors is running yet another palmtop/pda/tablet Mac rumor. I thought they’d all been killed off years ago. Here are the details:

Sources who claim to have see one have commented to the PowerPage that an internal planning spec details that the new machines runs a stripped-down flavor of Mac OS X. We’re told that it will finally utilize Apple’s Inkwell technology to “write anywhere” and neatly fold into your pocket - rather like an enlarged Motorola RAZR V3 mobile phone with a keyboard.

I’d probably love to have one, but I’m completely incapable of getting excited over this sort of rumor anymore.

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Making recordings for Asterisk on a Mac

Posted by Scott Laird Sun, 06 Feb 2005 00:38:02 GMT

How to get decent-quality sound recordings into Asterisk from a Mac without a ton of work:

  1. Record with GarageBand. Use a real microphone, not the one built into the Mac. If your Mac doesn’t have a microphone jack, consider buying a Griffin iMic.
  2. Export to iTunes. With GarageBand 1.0, this seems to be the only export option available.
  3. Find the track in iTunes and convert it to an MP3. This shouldn’t be necessary (or really even a good idea), but my copy of sox (below) couldn’t handle the AIFF file that GarageBand produced.
  4. Run sox with these options: sox recording.mp3 -r 8000 -w -s -c 1 recording.wav resample -ql
  5. Verify that the WAV file sounds okay.
  6. Copy the WAV file into /var/lib/asterisk/sounds. You can now use it with Asterisk’s Playback application.

The WAV file produced is sampled at 8 kHz, with 1 channel of 16-bit signed linear audio. This seems to be the best format for Asterisk, assuming that you don’t mind using around 16 KB/sec for audio files.

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