iMovie09 reviews starting to come in

Now that iLife 09 is shipping, a few reviews of iMovie09 are starting to appear. Gizmodo covers some of the new features, and it certainly seems impressive. Crunchgear has a more general iLife09 review, and Beau Colburn just focuses on the new image stabilization features.

I’ve got my copy, but haven’t had a chance to play around yet. Perhaps next week I’ll do a more general review.

UMCal for the iPhone

UPDATED: Screengrabs changed to allow for syncing more events. Check out C4 below.

This is off topic for the normal blog content, but here goes.

iPhone users at the UofM know that getting data from UMcal into your iPhone is painful at best, obnoxiously painful at worst. It involves a one way sync into iCal, then a sync through iTunes under the phone.

Not anymore! Synthesis AG has released “Todo+Cal+Sync” (clever names, those Germans). It’s a $14.99 app for the iPhone which can sync with the UMcal servers. It’s a standalone application on the phone – it doesn’t sync into the phone’s calendar app. That’d be ideal, but at least this solves the issue of adding events on your phone, or double checking an event, etc. No longer will I get to the east bank and then realize I don’t know what building I’m going to.

Here’s how to get it set up.

A) First, purchase and launch the app. Tap the sync settings icon in the upper left:

Syncsettings

B) Next, select the settings tab at the bottom. You’ll be modifying settings in the three areas I’ve highlighted below.

Settings Menu

C) First go into the server settings menu (B1). Add your username (C1) and password (C2) (university X500), and set the SynML version to 1.1 (C4).

Serversettings

D) Then, tap the url field (C3) and make it look like the screenshot below:

Serverurl

Get back to the main server settings screen (B1 above) and go into the Calendar and Todo settings. Make each of them look like they do below. You can choose the number of “past days” and “future days” – longer spans will take longer to sync.

Photo Calendarsettings

You’re done! Click done on the settings screen, click the synchronize button, and it (should) work.

Compressor Controller – new app

Whipped up a small little app for controlling a Compressor cluster node. It’ll let you start, stop, and reset Compressor and Qmaster. It goes a bit deeper than the system prefpane – actually stops the launchd process, kills any stray processes, etc. Reset will toss your cluster settings so that you can readd it to a new cluster, or recreate a cluster.

I’ve tested on a total of one machine so far, so who knows if it’ll blow up and murder you…

CompressorController.zip

Compressorcontroller-1 Compressorcontroller

Use a mono mic with a Sanyo Xacti HD1000/HD1010

We recently got a load of Xacti HD1010s, along with Azden WLX-Pro wireless mic kits. Hooked em’ all together, and they sounded … awful.

Here’s the problem – the Azden has a mono output, while the Sanyo has a stereo input. You end up with your wireless mic going to just the left channel. However, the Sanyo seems to use joint stereo encoding, which ends up giving you a right channel ‘warble’ echoing the left channel.

So, what you need is a mono to stereo adapter in line. Of course, you can’t magically make stereo out of a mono source, but you can duplicate the signal. So, I just make some adapters that went from the tip on a female minijack connector to both tip and ring on a male minijack. Problem solved.

I went looking for a premade adapter, but couldn’t find anything that seemed sure to work.

Updated Xactis from Sanyo

Sanyo has announced a load of updates to the Xacti line. Engadget has some info, and Sanyo has the press release.

They’ve added three “traditional” camcorder models (meh) plus brought all of the models in the line up to at least 720p. The high end HD2000 gets higher resolution stills, 1080p60 shooting, plus some software improvements.

 News 2009 01 Img 090121-01-01-A

There’s no announcement about when these will hit the US, but hopefully it won’t be too long.