Burning DVDs without a menu

I like iDVD, it’s nice and dead easy to use but sometimes you just wanna burn a disc to autoplay without any of those “useful” themes. Here’s a method that works for me.

• Make a black jpeg 720×480.
• Open up iDVD, click Customize then Settings
• Drag the black jpeg onto the Background box and then set the duration to 0:00
• Click Map twice and then enter a title in the box or delete it
• Click Map again and drag your movie onto the autoplay box
• Then Preview or just click Burn

And that should do it.

Microsoft mail mayhem

I’ve been receiving a lot of attachments from people recently called winmail.dat and have been unable to open them in Thunderbird and I’ve assumed until now that there was something wrong my end but apparently not. It’s due to a Microsoft propriety setting which the other person hasn’t reset. But I’ve found a tool called TNEF’s Enough which opens the file and lets you extract the contents. You can download it from JoshJacob.com and if you have a lot of windoze friends, I suggest you download it – it’ll be cheaper than buying them all a MacBook.

YouTube audio not playing

For about a week or so, whenever I visit YouTube and play a video I can’t hear the soundtrack. I’ve unplugged & powered off my speakers, tried headphones but still no good. A quick trawl of the net and all the fixes seemed to suggest dumping the contents of ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia which did nothing other than stop Flash stuff from playing. But this little trick seemed to do the, um, trick.

Open up “Audio MIDI Setup” which is in your Utilities folder and set the Output Format (in the bottom right corner) to 44100.0Hz. You might need to change the source as well but that’s all I needed to do and now I can listen to Star Guitar in all it’s glory.