Occasionally though their sales are useful. Like this one – if you’re running your own mail server or a website with a dedicated IP, you can get an SSL Certificate for just $6 per year. They’re normally around $50/year, so this is a bit of a bargain – something like 88% off the normal price:

Audioengine D1 DAC. It’s a pretty simple and minimal DAC with good sound quality.

Product Details

It’s got a USB input on the rear, which also supplies data and power to the unit. There’s also an optical input as well as a pair of gold-plated stereo RCA plugs for output. If you’re using the optical input, then you need a USB power adapter to provide power to the unit, however if you’re using USB to connect to your computer, then it uses the power supplied over the USB bus. It doesn’t need drivers on OS X (confirmed) or Windows (not tested by me) – immediately after plugging it in, a new audio output source is available called Audioengine D1.

On the front of the unit is a rotary volume dial (with smooth rotation, no clicks or indentations), the power button with a white LED power indicator and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

With no headphones plugged in, audio is output to the stereo RCAs on the rear. Plugging in headphones mutes the RCA output and directs the audio to the headphones.

How does it sound?

It seems that it will be able to drive difficult headphones with no problems – my Sennheiser Momentums (which are a low-impedance headphone) only need a small amount of volume on the dial to achieve a comfortable listening volume. Sending the RCA output to my Audioengine A2‘s delivers clear sound and, at least through these speakers, I can’t hear anything negative about the sound it delivers.

Sound quality is very good – I’m of the opinion that a well-made amplifier should be a straight wire with gain, and this amp seems to do the job. There are no bass or treble controls, the sound seems to be a nice flat frequency response and the DAC adds no colouration to the sound.

The D1 comes with a nice microfibre bag for transporting the unit as well as short, a gold-plated USB cable (for what it’s worth). The cable wasn’t long enough for me to have the DAC where I wanted it to live, so I’m running it through a cable that came with a printer or a hard drive a while back. If you’re of the type who claims they can hear a difference between different USB cables, then this DAC is nowhere near expensive enough for your self-satisfaction.

Whilst I think my Mac Pro has a good DAC in it, the D1 definitely can play louder and will handle higher impedance headphones a lot better than the onboard sound. This DAC can possibly handle higher sample rates as well, I think the onboard DAC “only” does up to 96kHz whereas this one can do 192kHz. The D1 can also handle 16-bit and 24-bit audio which I believe the Mac Pro can do natively too.

The alternatives I was looking at before settling on this one were the Schitt Magni/Modi combo gear as well as an O2+ODAC combo. In the end, this one was good because it’s all in one compact box, and with the Massdrop discount, I got it for $150 including shipping to Australia.

TL;DR version. Good DAC. Sounds clean. Easy to use. Plays loud.

You will often see this happen if you send an email and cc or bcc a larger number of recipients when you’re using gmail, or sometimes if one of the addresses are invalid.

You will see the button for the Outbox at the bottom of your messages, it will show there is 1 email in the outbox, but when you click on it to view the outbox, there are no emails there. Or, in the case I saw, it said there were three emails in the outbox, but only two visible.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix, thanks to AppleScript:

Launch AppleScript Editor, type in the following snippet and hit the Run button. Boom, stuck emails begone!

tell application “Microsoft Outlook”

        delete every message of outbox

end tell

Most TVs will generally come from the factory with an overly sharp, too contrasty and highly saturated image as the default setting. If your TV offers different profiles or modes, then setting it to Movie mode often goes a long way to setting things to a sensible default, however there’s always room for improvement.

Some Blu-ray discs, and even some DVDs have specialised calibration patterns that you can use to tweak your set, however that required buying the disc in question, which may be hard to come by.

An easier solution, if you’ve got either an Apple TV or an iPod/iPhone/iPad to Digital AV adapter and HDMI cable, then this app is going to sort you out.

The THX tune-up app can either mirror the iOS device to the AppleTV via AirPlay Mirroring, or directly via the adapter and HDMI cable (which is the preferred option) and will take you through a number of test patterns to help you adjust the picture (and if you’re using a direct HDMI connection, the sound as well).

To replace the functionality of the coloured filters for adjusting colour, tint and contrast, it uses the camera on the iOS device instead to view the TV screen and see if the settings are adjusted correctly.

As at the time of writing, the app is free, but I’m told it’s going to go up to two bucks at some time in the future, so head on over and grab it while you can.

It’s a very comprehensive tool that can take a starting colour and then make a number of different colour schemes based on it using 6 different methods to generate a range of colours for your to use. From a mono colour scheme where all the colours are shades based on the base colour through complimentary, triad and tetrad colour schemes with contrasting, but matching, colours thrown into the mix. Check it out.

This allows them to play on mobile devices, as well as removes the need for Flash on desktop computers. Or does it?

A few years back, YouTube introduced their HTML5 Video Player trial. This allowed people using modern to opt-in to viewing videos in h.264 instead of Flash. It was good.

Recently, I got a new MacBook Pro which shipped with Mountain Lion and, of course, no Flash preinstalled. Making the conscious choice to see how life is with no Flash, I have not installed it and so far everything is good… Except YouTube.

When I view embedded YouTube videos on other sites, they view fine. When I click on the YouTube logo on the video however, it takes me to YouTube where the video now proudly says: The Adobe Flash Player is required for video playback and helpfully gives me a link to go and download it.

WTF?!?

Now, I know that this isn’t the case as I can view this video on the website that was embedding it. I can view the video on my iPad, or iPhone and, if I go into the super-secret Develop menu in Safari and change the User Agent to an iPad one, I can view it on my desktop. What’s going on?

One word.

Advertising.

YouTube are now showing more and more ads than ever before when viewing videos directly on their website. I’m guessing that these ads are still in Flash format, so as it’s unable to show me the ad, it won’t then go ahead and show me the video either. Thanks, YouTube.

(Yes, at this point, I realise I’m not paying for the service, so I’m probably the product, not the customer, so I should shut up and stop complaining)

Fortunately, there is a solution.

Some dude called Connor, over at the Vertical Forest, has made a great plugin for Safari called YouTube5.

What this plugin does is gets YouTube to load the HTML5 version of the video and as a side-effect, you don’t get the annoying ads. Does it get any better than that? Why, yes it does. YouTube5 also allows you to set default preferences for what size of video you prefer for YouTube, Vimeo and FaceBook. I’ve not had problems with any videos on Vimeo (I think they’re great, far better than YouTube!) but I have had problems viewing videos on FaceBook now that I think about it. As another bonus, it also allows you to right-click on a YouTube or FaceBook video (but not Vimeo) and download it.

This menu is handled by Launch Services which maintains a database of which applications are installed, and what file types they can open. Fortunately, it’s easy to rebuild this database.

You can either go into the Terminal and run the following command, or download a simple application to Rebuild the Launch Services Database.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework
/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

The linked application is simply an AppleScript saved as an application that runs the above command and alerts you when it’s done, or if there is an error.

Quirky is a site where you can submit ideas, they get voted on by a community and the best ideas can end up being made. I would love to see this idea get off the ground, if not just to make my life easier in messy network cabinets…

The command below uses grep to find the software update catalog url from the Software Update frameworks, passes this to curl to download and then greps the result for Safari.

You can then use curl again to download the .pkg installer for Safari.

curl $(strings  /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SoftwareUpdate.framework/SoftwareUpdate |
 grep http://swscan) | 
grep Safari6