Wesley's Tool-Box

Well, no more jumping through the hoops now. Hot on the heels of the release of Flip4Mac WMV component 2.1, the first official universal binary version, the latest VLC Player nightly build for both PPC and Intel Macs have the ability to decode WMV3 video codec (a.k.a. Windows Media Video 9). Click on the picture above for the full look.

Apple Store / Experience Center in Samseong-dong, Seoul had just stocked boxes of Hangul Word Processor (HWP) 2006 for Mac today, which was announced a week ago. HWP is one of the most popular word processor in Korea (it used to be THE most popular, but Microsoft Word has made headways), and many companies and most government agencies / education institutes use it as the standard document format. But Mac users have largely been left out cold since the last HWP version came out in 1997. Since that version, OS X came out, and then there was a CPU platform shift from PPC to Intel. In other words, Macs haven't been able to 'natively' run the application for half a decade.

Here it is... Korea's first imported Mac mini based on Intel's Core Duo processor! Of course, its older brother, the one with Freescale G4, was also the first to land on Korean soil. My earlier experiment with running the website on a Pentium M system with Windows didn't go so well, so it's back to Mac mini's job again. I'll probably try Linux next time.

While those of you who don't use a Mac or have large collection of video it may have gone unnoticed, there has been a weird and annoying hole in video playback compatibility in Mac platform. Specifically, AVI videos that use Windows Media Video 9 (a.k.a. WMV9 and also called WMV3) codec could not be played, let alone viewed with subtitles. Due to the availability of the 'WMV9 VCM' for Windows it has been possible to use that video codec in AVI container instead of the WMV container originally intended. However, in Macs playing this sort of file (and preferably with accompanying subtitle file) had following roadblocks until early this year.

The new wearable computing project has now seen the first fruit of labour. The main system module, a completely functioning system that only needs power source, input device, and monitor, is now in working order with its own casing. As you can see, it is only as big as a novel, but houses a Pentium M 1.6GHz, 1GB of memory, 100GB hard disk, and a power supply that accepts 8V to 13.6V DC voltage.