Well, I’m at it again, after developing the ISOx360 and Wii Tools, I thought about what else might be a useful tool for all of the fellow Mac OS X users out there. One thing that came to mind was that most of the HD content that can be found on the internet is usually in MKV format.

I wont cover the MKV format in-depth, just know that it is a container and not a codec, similar to how an AVI can be encoded as a divx or an xvid, an MKV file can use many different codecs. Most commonly MKV files contain the H.264 / X.264 codec for Video and the DTS / AC3 codec for audio.

The other thing you need to know about MKV files and HD content is that a typical 720P MKV file using an H.264 codec has a max bit-rate of about 9000, currently the AppleTV can only support 720P content with a Video bit-rate of up to 5000. If this limitation didn’t exist we could easily transcode the file to an MP4 / M4V container, but because of the Video limitation, we need to re-encode the file at a lower bit-rate. Don’t worry about quality, I haven’t seen any noticeable decrease in quality when re-encoding.

So, enough with the tech talk, you’re probably wondering, the title of the post is Convert MKV to MP4 on a Mac, so I’ll get on with it. The application that I’ve developed makes this an easy 1 step process. You load the MKV file, choose a save location for the new MP4 file, pick a few options and click convert. When its done, you can copy the MP4 file to your AppleTV / iTunes and enjoy great quality HD content.

Note: My application will also remove subtitles and convert any DTS audio track to AC3 so that you can keep all the surround sound. The thing is, to enjoy the surround sound, you’ll have to use the optical output on your AppleTV and have a receiver that can correctly decode the audio, along with a nice set of surround sound speakers.

You can download a trial of the application below, it will work exactly 10 times before it is rendered useless at which point you will have to purchase it, but don’t worry I kept the price cheap, only $14.95.

Download :

  Click to Download the MKV2AppleTV Trial (9.4 MiB, 98 hits)

Purchase:
Click to Purchase an MKV2AppleTV License

I recently acquired a white G3 eMac with a 17 inch screen and thought it would be perfect to put into my daughters room. Unfortunately the eMacs didn’t come with built in airports, so no wireless. I looked around online for wireless cards that would work with a Mac and found that they are quite expensive.

Instead of purchasing a wireless adapter online, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a Belkin Wireless USB adapter. After getting home and opening the box, I noticed that there are no Mac drivers on the included CD, furthermore after searching Belkin’s website returned no results for any available Mac drivers for this particular adapter.

After some more searching on google, I found a few sites with drivers for this card for a Mac, but only to find out that there are multiple versions of this particular card. You can use the version matrix below to determine your version.

Version 1 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050
Version 2 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050A
Version 3 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050B
Version 4 – FCC ID = RAXWN4501H
Version 5 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050E

This article will cover installing Version 4 of the F5D7050 adapter. Although, I will also be listing available drivers for Versions 1, 2, and 3. The Version 4 driver may also work for the Version 5 adapter, although this has not been tested, and if anyone tries and succeeds, I would appreciate a comment to let everyone know.

F5D7050 Version 1 & 2 Mac Driver
F5D7050 Version 3 Mac Driver
F5D7050 Version 4 Mac Driver

Each of these drivers is installed in much the same way, there is an install file that you run and then restart the Mac when the install has completed. After the Mac restarts you have to click on System Preferences and click on Network. You’ll receive a pop-up dialog alerting you that a new network device has been detected. Apply the change and then start the wireless utility if it hasn’t been started already. Scan for wireless networks, when your network has been found, connect to it.

That’s all there is to it. The install is very simple and straight forward. If anyone has any input / advice, feel free to post for others to read.

So, unfortunately hackers have found a new way to hack Wordpress blogs by way of MySQL injection when registering for a new account on your blog.

Unfortunately my blog was hit, what this hack does is, a new user registers and achieves a level 10, which is an administrator account, and with this account changes your permalink structure. This in turn renders your blog useless when your readers try to click on an article they are presented with a page not found error.

This is the string that gets appended to your article’s URL:

/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode(Array%5BHTTP_EXECCODE %5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%

So How can you fix this issue ??

1. Login to your Wordpress Blog
2. Click on Permalinks under Settings
3. Change your Permalink structure to what you previously had it set to

Once you’ve corrected your permalink structure you need to remove the registered user that caused the damage. Unfortunately you will not be able to do this from within Wordpress, since the user will appear hidden. You can see this for yourself if you click on Users, then look under Administrators, you’ll see that there are 2 administrator accounts listed. Yours and a hidden one.

The only way to remove this hidden account is by using MySQL Query Browser or phpMyAdmin by logging into your servers cPanel or Plesk interface.

Once you have either MySQL Query Browser open or phpMyAdmin you’ll want to follow the steps below to remove the user account.

1. Browse the wp_users table in your MySQL Database and sort by ID to see the latest registered users.
2. You’re looking for a user that does not have an e-mail address.
3. Note the userid, you’ll need it for the next table, then delete the row for that user.
4. Browse the wp_usersmeta table and again sort by userid
5. Look for the userid you noted from the wp_users table
6. Delete all of the rows with that userid, there’ll be more then just 1 row

If you’ve followed the procedure above, your permalinks should be working again and the malicious user should be removed. To prevent further attacks you may want to consider disabling the registration of user accounts on your blog. At the time my blog was attacked I was running version 2.8.4, which is the latest version and didn’t prevent the hack. So maybe we’ll see a newer version of Wordpress soon.

I strongly recommend always running the latest version of Wordpress, as the newer versions are not just for feature enhancements but provide important security updates.

In this screen cast tutorial I cover how to change a persons eye color using Photoshop CS4. The tutorial was creating using Photoshop CS4 for Mac but you should be able to follow along on a Windows version of Photoshop as well, without issues.

Below is the before and after of what we will be doing in Photoshop

 

For your reference I also have the original image I was working with below, all you have to do is right click and save the image to your desktop, if you want to follow along with the tutorial using the same image.

 

Now for the tutorial, I have uploaded this tutorial to youtube and linked to it here. Please let me know if you have any questions in regards to the tutorial. I’d also like to add that if anyone has any particular requests for tutorials, just leave a comment with your suggestion. Feedback is always appreciated

So up until now, I’ve posted tutorials about how to mod your wii and how to mod your XBOX 360 and how to burn and backup games but now, I’m going to share with you where to get games from. Not only will you be able to download games but you’ll also be able to download movies, tv shows, applications, ebooks, etc…

Let me throw this important bit of information in, this is not a FREE way to get games, movies, tv shows, etc… If you want free then you should just stick with torrents, spyware and slow download speeds. What I’m about to share with you is a method that I’ve been using for well over 3 years without any problems whatsoever.

As far as cost is concerned, all you’ll ever pay is $15.00 / month at the very most. The price is for 2 separate services. The 1st service is a news server and the 2nd one is an NZB indexing service. More about the terminology later on. I’ll include links to some of the services I’ve been using for the past 3 years at the end of the post.

One more thing I’d like to say before I go into all the details is that this tutorial is written for Mac users but does not limit the ability to apply most information in a Windows environment. The only difference for Windows users will be the software required. I might list a few links for that though, since I’m a nice guy and all.

What are NZB files and what is an NZB indexing service ? Read my other post to find out more information. What are NZB Files ?

What is a News Server and why do I need one ? In a previous post I covered some information in regards to why you would need a news server. You can read more about it here What is a News Server and why do I need one ?

Required Software:

Mac Users:

• Panic Unison
• MacPar

*Tip – Download the evaluation version of Panic Unison from their website and once you’ve got everything setup with your news server and indexing service you can download the full version of Unison from a news server.

Windows Users: 

• Newsleecher
• Quick Par

*Tip – The same as the above applies to Newsleecher, download the trial and then download the full version from a news server.

 

Required Services:

NZB Indexing Service:

Free VS. Premium

I prefer newzbin.com, their indexing and search capabilities are far superior to that of any of the free nzb indexing services found online. If you absolutely must go with a free service then I recommend nzbnation.com. You have to register for an account but its free. The reason for my preference of premium vs. free is because of the way you can search and filter results as well as rest assured that what you’re downloading is the right thing.

Premium NZB Indexing Services:

• newzbin.com
• ngindex.com

Free NZB Indexing Services:

• nzbclub.com
• nzbnation.com

News Servers:

I haven’t come across any free usenet servers so unfortunately I’ll not be listing any free servers here. However I will be listing relatively inexpensive usenet servers that you can register with and when I say inexpensive I mean somewhere around $10.00 / month with unlimited bandwidth. Take your $10.00 / month for unlimited bandwidth and download speeds of about 800K / second depending on your internet connection and imagine how much you can download over just a 24 hour period. Makes you just want to smile

Usenet Servers:

• Astraweb Usenet Server – $11/mo
• Newshosting® Free Trial!
• UseNetServer Special – $10 per month!

Ok, you should have plenty of services to choose from. I suggest that you download the required software and at the very least sign up for a news server account from one of the servers mentioned above before continuing with the tutorial.

Configuring Panic Unison:

Assuming that you’ve already downloaded and installed Unison you can follow the steps below to configure Unison with the usenet server you’ve registered with.

First you’ll want to launch Unison and then on the top left corner click Unison -> Preferences

After you click on preferences a dialog box similar to the following will pop-up. You’ll want to click on Edit Servers

After clicking on Edit Servers, another dialog box will pop-up similar to the one below. This is the only thing we’ll need to configure in Unison. This is where all of your server information will go. You’ll need to fill in your server URL, username and password.

After you’ve entered in all of your information, go ahead and click on the OK button and then close the rest of the screens. If you type everything in correctly then you shouldn’t get any warnings. However if there is some sort of issue Unison will let you know. If everything checks out fine, you can go ahead and close Unison. Next we’ll cover downloading an NZB file of the game, movie, tv show, etc… that we want to download and how it will use Unison to download all of the files.

 

Downloading An NZB:

Now that we have Unison all setup with our usenet server we can go ahead and download an NZB of the game, movie, etc… that we want to download. So for this tutorial I’m going to use one of the free NZB Indexing services since I’m sure that’s what most of you will be using to start with. I’ll be using nzbclub.com

Start out by pointing your browser to http://www.nzbclub.com and you’ll see a page similar to the one below

You’ll notice that directly underneath the search bar are Tabs, go ahead and click on the one that reads XBox 360. You should be presented with some links in the window below the tabs of some XBox 360 NZB files. Go ahead and click on one of the links there. You’ll be directed to another page which has a list of similar filenames. You’ll also see more detailed information such as the files size, age of the report, etc…

Go ahead and click on NZB on the right hand side. Your browser should have downloaded the NZB file and if you’ll look at the file, you’ll see that its associated with the Unison Application. All you have to do now is double click on the NZB file and Unison should open and begin downloading all the parts of the file.

The files that are being downloaded are usually in rar or zip format, included with those files are PAR files, short for parity. These files are included to repair broken archives which is occurs every now and then. In this next part I’ll be covering what to do after your files have finished downloading.

Now here’s the nice part of using a premium NZB indexing service like newzbin for instance. Newzbin has additional information on the NZB file you are downloading, such as region specific information, etc…

 

Using MacPar To Extract Downloaded Files:

Since most of the files downloaded through Unison will be in rar or zip format and should always include PAR files, and may or may not need to be repaired, I find it easier to just go ahead and use MacPar to extract the files, that way if it finds a problem with any of the archived files it will fix them automatically.

Assuming that you’ve already downloaded and installed MacPar, all you have to do is go into the folder where Unison downloaded the archived files and double click on one of the included PAR files, usually close to the bottom of the folder.

MacPar will load up all of the PAR files and verify each of the archived files and if all checks out OK, MacPar will proceed to extract all of the files and if you’ve downloaded a game, you should end up with an ISO image that you can burn following one of my other tutorials on how to backup and burn Wii and XBox 360 games.

 

Well that should just about cover it. I know its a lengthy tutorial and its a lot of information to take in but after a while the whole procedure will become like second nature. This method sure beats any torrent, P2P, IRC, etc… download. I’ve not been able to find a faster more reliable way to download online content and am happy to share this information with the rest of the online community.

I was going to do a video tutorial on this at first but after checking out Wordpress 2.8 and discovering how easy it is to add themes now, I decided to just write up a quick how to.

So back on Wordpress 2.7 we used to have to download a zip file with all of the theme files archived and then extract the zip file, upload it to the themes folder and then go to wordpress and enable the theme, that’s the short version.

Now on Worpdress 2.8 it is much simpler to add / change your themes. Let’s take a quick look at how simple it is to install a theme.

 

1. Begin by logging into your Wordpress Admin Area
2. Once logged in, find the appearance panel on the left hand side.  
    
3. Click on Add New Themes and you should be presented with a screen similar to the one below  
    
4. From here you can choose to either upload your own theme or search for one on Wordpress. I’ve tried out this new search feature and I have to say, I like it. So lets go ahead and search for a theme on Wordpress. I’m going to put a check mark in 3-column since I want a 3 column theme and then click on Find Themes
5. When the search result display’s you’ll have 3 different links you can click on, Preview, Details, and Install
6. When you find the one you like simply click on Install
7. You’ll get another pop up window, click on Install Now
8. If you haven’t entered the information in already, Wordpress will ask you for your FTP account information. Go ahead and fill this out and click on proceed.
9. Now you have 3 options, Preview, Activate, or Return to Theme Installer, if you’d like to see what your blog will look like with the new theme, then go ahead and click on preview, otherwise click Activate to activate the new theme.
10. Your new theme is now Activated

I think that the Wordpress team has done a wonderful job adding this feature into the admin area. It really does make for a seamless theme installation and leaves no room for error. I am still exploring the new version of Wordpress, but so far I think this is the coolest new feature for Wordpress.

Just a quick note, if you’ve downloaded a theme somewhere else and you’d like to install it on your Wordpress 2.8 blog then all you have to do is follow the same steps as above but click on Upload Theme instead and browse to the zip file you’ve downloaded.

In this tutorial we will cover the process for installing Wordpress 2.8 on Plesk. There is a 2 part screen cast as well as some text you’ll need to read in order to accomplish this. So lets go ahead and get started. Read more

Here’s a quick Photoshop Tutorial on how to make a gradient from A to Z, screen cast style

Hope you guys enjoy it, its my very first screen cast. I’m hoping to make a lot of these little tutorials, what I would like is for all the readers to submit requests for tutorials and once a week I’ll pick a suggestion and we’ll call it the tutorial of the week. What do you guys think ? Read more

This was giving me a problem some days ago so I thought I’d write up a quick tutorial on how to shrink dmg files on a mac. Why would you want to do this ? Well lets say you are creating an application and you want to package it in a DMG so you open up Disk Utility and create a blank image. Well you can only choose certain sizes. Most of us would choose a 40MB image so we have plenty of initial space to work with.

As far as I know there are 2 methods for shrinking the dmg down to the size of its contents, they are listed below.

Method – 1:

• Right Click on the DMG
• Click Compress

This will generate a zip file down to the actual size of the content of the DMG since free space has 100% compression ratio.

Method – 2:

This method involves the use of the Terminal App which can be found under Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal

• Launch Terminal
• Type the following hdiutil resize -size 10M /Path/To/DMG/DMG_Name.dmg

Code Breakdown:

• hdiutil – A utility that comes preinstalled with Mac OS X, that manipulates disk images, etc…
• -size – An argument passed to hdiutil, indicating that you want to change the size of an image.
• 10M – means I am changing the dmg size to 10 Megabytes, insert your own value here.
• The rest should be self explanitory

So there you have it, 2 methods to resize your dmg in Mac OS X. Thanks for reading.

If anyone would benefit from having a little GUI App that resizes DMG’s let me know, if I receive enough requests, I might make one and post it here.

Requirements:
- Mac OS X 10.4 or later
- Intel Processor
- Dual Layer DVD Burner 

Installation:

So today I have decided to release the an Alpha Version of ISOx360. You can download it from my projects page.

ISOx360 makes burning XBOX 360 games on your Mac just about as simple as it can get. Simply download ISOx360 and extract the .dmg then open the .dmg and drag ISOx360 to your Applications folder to install. Once installed you can launch ISOx360 and you should be presented with a screen similar to the illustration to the left. 

Download ISOx360 on my Projects Page: http://chris-fletcher.com/projects/ Read more