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So my Macbook Pro is set to turn off the screen after 10 minutes of activity, but then if I play a movie the screen switches off after 10 minutes unless I hit a key or touch the mousepad. I don’t want to do that. Yes, I know I can change the setting before I put the movie on but wouldn’t it make sense to let QuickTime (or whatever) override that setting when something ‘hands off’ is happening?

For reasons that matter not, I had to capture some Hi8 video this week using my Macbook Pro, rather than the PC that I have dedicated to such things. I hooked the Hi8 cam to my digital converter box (the excellent Datavideo DAC-100) and then firewire’d it to the Mac. The plan was to capture using iMovie and then create a DVD image in iDVD, neither of which I had used before.

When the DAC-100 can’t convert the analog signal (due to noise or whatever) it doesn’t send anything to the computer which is usually no big deal but iMovie absolutely did not like this: it seems that periods of silence on the wire are taken to mean the camera has disconnected. So it would keep stopping, and occasionally tell me that the camera wasn’t even connected any more. I tried different things for a couple of days and was about to give up when I discovered….. Vidi.

Not only is Vidi free, but it totally works like a capture program should. Silence on the wire? Ok, nothing gets put in the DV file. Need to chunk the output in 2Gb files? No problem! Some tapes that iMovie just wouldn’t capture for more than a few minutes were an absolute breeze using Vidi. I hit record on the Mac, play on the cam and 2 hrs later I had 26Gb of gorgeous converted video. I encourage you to check it out.

Well, almost. So I had emailed Amazon to ask why my Leopard shipment hadn’t been picked up by UPS. They responded saying that they didn’t know why the tracker was wrong because UPS had picked it up and it was on it’s way, and they promised to follow up.

Tuesday night, the tracker still shows the order waiting to be picked up but Teri confirmed that a package from Amazon had actually arrived so all was good. However, last night I got an email from Amazon saying that they regretted that the package appeared to be lost and they want to know if I want an immediate refund or a rush re-shipment of my order.

So…… morally bankrupt Paul says ooh, get a refund and enjoy a free copy, but I will of course do the right thing and tell them I did get my stuff after all.

This weekend both my Macs, and my Macbook from work, will be crazy busy making DVDs for da side biz so I probably won’t get around to doing any installs until next week.

If you’re an Apple fan boy (Josh) then no doubt you’re wetting yourself today with, at last, the official announcement of a shipping date for the new version of OS X, Leopard. It sure does look sweet and I’ll admit that I’ll be in the queue at some point to get my own copy. $129 ain’t bad, but if you can find four friends, you can have it for just $40 a head.