I got 13/14 mostly cause I figured the ones that were obviously one or the other must be tricks

Flickr Easter Egg: [link]

From our playful friends at Flickr comes a nifty little Easter egg that adds a bit of holiday flair to your Flickr portraits: Add a note to a photo with the text ho ho ho beard or ho ho ho hat and you'll get a resizeable Santa hat or beard to drag and drop onto the unsuspecting subject's head or chin.

Unfortunately, Flickr is blocked for me at work, so I can't try this until I get home. Grrr...

ARGH.

I need to encode some video into RealMedia. Our edit station is a new Mac. Real does not appear to have any encoding software that will work with Tiger. (They do have a free Quicktime plugin, but it explicitly says "Does not work with OS X 10.4," and installing it seems to confirm that, since I can't get any of my Quicktime apps to recognize it.)

Anyone know of a solution to this? Some unofficial Real encoder I can use?

Real still hasn't done a MacIntel-friendly version of their codec, so as far as I know, there's no tool out there that can do it. This kind of crap is one of the big reasons my group really tries to steer people away from Real, but of course that doesn't help at all with your project....

(If you still have access to a PPC machine, you might try the QT exporter anyway: they do say "not compatible with Tiger", but they also say "has known issues", which suggests to me that it works at least some of the time.)

(If you still have access to a PPC machine, you might try the QT exporter anyway: they do say "not compatible with Tiger", but they also say "has known issues", which suggests to me that it works at least some of the time.)

That might be worth trying -- so far I've only installed it on the new (Intel) Mac. If it works on the old one, it'll be a PITA to transfer the clips over there (the company doesn't "officially" support Macs at all, so neither one is networked), but at least they can both burn DVDs. (Which none of our PCs can.)

I also may try telling them "Here's a Quicktime, encode it yourself!"

I also may try telling them "Here's a Quicktime, encode it yourself!"

That would work. As would "Here's a QT, just use that because IT'S BETTER ANYWAY, YOU DORKS".

The fact that your only DVD-R machines aren't even networked makes me want to cry. I'm sure it makes you want to throw things out windows, or at least shake people very hard.

I'm sure it makes you want to throw things out windows, or at least shake people very hard.

Fortunately for my blood pressure, I've become fairly numb to the quirks of this company's corporate IT policies.

Real player can handle MPEG4 files. The clients might not notice the difference.

Flickr Easter Egg

Thanks for pointing that out, Jon. It's fun.

I am now the proud owner of a Mac Mini. It's so cute! I got a decent deal on eBay. It came with Parallels loaded on it which is very cool. As this is my first Mac, I'm sure that I'll have lots of questions going forward, but there's one that needs immediate attention.

I've got it set up in my living room, attached to my HDTV via its DVI input. The problem is that all four edges of the computer display are outside the edges of the TV screen. This is most annoying at the bottom, where the dock is out of view.

Is there any way to "shrink" the display at the Mac end so that I can see the edges of the screen? Because it's a DVI input, I can't change it on the TV end. Simply changing the resolution at the Mac end doesn't help either.