K’s Weblog

Another week has come, and with it episode #58 of the Global Geek Podcast was released this morning. Here’s a recap of this week’s Mac Lab Rat segment.

First up this week is another fix for the somewhat troublesome 10.4.10 update for OS X. Users of MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Minis may be experiencing some problems with their AirPort Express network adapters. The problems range from unstable connections, to in some cases, kernel panics.

I was definitely having problems with my WiFi connection which I’d unfairly attributed to my DD-WRT patched Linksys Router. Since the update has gone in, all my network issues have automagically disappeared.

This is starting to bring back memories of some past Windows Service Pack releases…

Link to the patch on Apple.com

Second on the block this week is a Flickr-based desktop changer called DeskLickr. Aaron Wallis‘ the application provides a way to “flickrize” your desktop by allowing you to select from your photos, or anyone elses and pull up images from a set, an entire photoset, or from a “tag” search.

One thing I did notice, is that it doesn’t do any scaling of the images and just chopped off the extremities of the photo. This has the unfortunate consequence of chopping off the extremities of people in the pictures as well. That said, it works very well for images of scenery or scaled backgrounds.

http://desklickr.isnot.tv/

The final download for this week is a couple of Applescripts from Apple itself which allows you to convert text to AIFF files. These scripts are quick and easy to use. One script can be used to arbitrarily convert any text string. This is good for short clips, or words. The other will convert the text in the top-most TextEdit window to audio. This is great for converting eBooks or readme files to an audio format. The next time you just need to get some text converted to an audio file, use one of these scripts and then convert it to MP3 using iTunes!

http://www.apple.com/applescript/macosx/text2audio.html

If you haven’t done so already, head over to the Global Geek Podcast website and give this week’s show a listen. Better yet use these links to subscribe to the podcast with iTunes, or your preferred PodCatcher [rss].

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