zerolight

SABNZBD+ is the ultimate nzb file downloader. It’s particularly useful in conjunction with SABNZBDX, an OSX GUI for interacting with the SABNZBD+ server. Unlike other nzb downloaders, SAB runs as a server on your Mac. It’s surprisingly easy to set up. I’d procrastinated for weeks over using it, fearing that setup would be compex.

You place nzb files in a folder of your choosing and the SAB server will automatically download, par, unrar, and organize the them for you. It even cleans up after itself. As my ISP uses traffic shaping between 10am and 9pm I was pleased to see that you can schedule SAB to pause and resume at times of your choosing. You can optionally have it poll your newzbin bookmarks, downloading anything it finds. If that’s not enough, it has powerful post processing scripting options should the basic functionality not do what you need. I’ve been using it for a few days now and am very impressed. Check it out.

Apple launched the latest revision of it’s excellent OS X operating system last night. Does it live up to the hype? Yes. And No. The problem is that OS X Tiger was an almost perfect operating system, so much so that even Microsoft’s Windows Vista did little to close the gap. Whilst Leopard pushes further ahead of the Windows platform with some useful new features, and a lot of polished eye-candy, it still feels very much business as usual if you’re already using Tiger. Almost anticlimactically so.

Yet beneath all the familiarity, there’s still a lot of great new features. Time Machine is probably it’s crowning achievement, providing a fantastic piece of technology to ensure your data is safely backed up to an external HDD. Most of the new features concentrate on perfecting the user interface and improving your work flow. You can read up on them all here, and check out some screenshots in my flickr set.

I got my iMac back from the Apple store on Friday. I’m very impressed with the service. I’d been having a few issues with the iMac as it approached the end of its warranty. First up was the LCD screen – shadowing was appearing in the top right corner, it looked like someone with very grubby fingers had been thumbing the screen. The other problem was the HDD which appeared to be failing – the iMac was getting very slow and was reporting disk errors which could only be repaired by booting off the install CD.

I dropped it at the Apple store on Monday afternoon and the screen and HDD had been replaced by Friday morning. All under warranty. The screen is better than ever, the Color Profile bug that plagues some Macs is now gone, and the iMac is as fast as the day I bought it, and much quieter than it’s been in a long time – guess I was right about that HDD. Speaking of Color Profiles, I can highly recommend calibrating the color profile (and setting the gamma and white balance to native) as it’s done wonders for the colours on my screen – the default iMac and Generic profiles were a bit washed out.

One clever feature in OSX is Smart Folders. This little nugget hidden away in the Finder is something I’ve overlooked this past year, but it’s actually very useful. Think of them as automated Spotlight searches displayed within a Finder window. I’m currently using this one to parse through my downloads folder and pull out a single PAR file for each download, saving me trawling through folders hunting for, and double clicking on, one per download in order on repair and un-rar files. I have this one which displays a list of all unrared media in my downloads folder which makes locating and organising said downloads easier. Very handy if you’ve got loads of downloads to work through.

At long last an update. I’ve not posted in what seems like ages. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Eid Mubarak to all.