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Whether you missed the news, don’t have a video-recorder or just would like to have that one certain video about a person you know, the media center of a TV-channel is a great source. But how to get those videos, especially since they’re most likely embedded with Flash?

For Mac it’s a straightforward process (at least for the following channels: ARD, ZDF, 3sat, NDR, SWR and WDR — German TV-channels)

1) Download the program ‘Mediathek’

2) Use the Unarchiver or any other unpacker of your choice and open the unpacked file

3) Search for the video you’d like to download, click Laden to download the file

4) Since it saves the file in the *.flv format, I suggest using Evom to convert the video

Finally having the official release of the new iOS running on my iPhone 3GS, I decided to find out more about the possibility of reading ebooks on my iPhone.

Generally, I think the screen is too small for this. It may be a different experience for owners of the new iPhone 4, but to me it’s simply to small to read a 400 pages ebook. No question though, that it will be a nice option for those long waiting times at airports for example.

But what if you really just intend to read once in a while and don’t want to spend your money on ebooks available in the iTunes store? Well, besides Winnie the Pooh, which is for free as of now, the iBooks app can read all ebooks saved in the epub format. This is great as you can add ebooks to your iTunes library and sync them with your iPhone, iPod touch and/or iPad.

One option is the Gutenberg Project, which offers a variety of ebooks in the necessary epub format for free. I just tried it and it’s working well, although files are claimed to be in an experimental status.

So simply go to the above page, download a book to your computer, add it to iTunes and sync it with your device. Enjoy reading!

In this post I explained how to set a schedule for the Time Machine’s backup function. While that worked great, I still experienced a noisy Time Capsule. The reason for that was that the hard-disk never went to sleep. Instead, it was running constantly as if I was making backups nonstop.

Searching the web I found a few tips on how to prevent that and how to speed up the backup process.

Time Capsule’s hard-disk is running constantly:

- Rename the TC’s hard-disk into something simple. One word, no special characters. As weird as that may sound, it has worked for many. (And either this or the whole package here helped me as well – thus far.)

Speed up the backup process:

- For the initial backup, connect your MAC and TC with a LAN cable. This speeds up the first backup drastically.

- Disable Spotlight indexing by adding the backup hard-disk to the Privacy settings: Applications -> System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy.

(I also added my external hard-disks, as I don’t use the search function, hoping they would have less ‘stress’, too.)

- For some it may be helpful to connect your TC directly to your router via LAN cable to prevent interferences, when many other networks are around you.

As I mentioned two days ago, it was time to redesign my blog. I wanted a cleaner, more stylish design and I hope I succeeded creating this.

While the whole shabang isn’t quite finished yet and might underlay more changes, I hope that it’s easier to find your way around and more pleasant to spend time on my blog.

Some features I added are:

- easier translation of single posts

- quick sharing options with various networks

- Flickr integration for my Project 365

- Twitter integration into the mobile version

There are a lot more minor changes I don’t want to mention explicitly, but I’m nevertheless proud of every single one of them.

I appreciate suggestions regarding the new layout, so leave me a comment.

When I first got the iPhone into my hands, I ‘collected’ everything that remotely looked interesting. That did change a lot and now I only install apps if I really think they’re worth the effort.

My last app is called Angry Birds and is a game that you can play for hours without noticing how much time you spent playing it. The game-play is as simple as it can get but the level increase in difficulty and make it even more fun. But see for yourself:

WordPress 3 is available and I directly upgraded to see what it’s like. It does look a little smoother but I can’t say much more yet.

I just celebrated my first year with this blog and decided to change it a bit. The topics will stay, but I’d like to change the layout and give my blog a cleaner look.

These changes won’t happen overnight, so I hope you bare with me during the constructions. The weather this weekend is supposedly bad. This means that I’m aiming to finish everything by Sunday. I welcome all comments on ideas and opinions regarding the new design.

I’ve had my Time Capsule a while now and I didn’t once regret buying this quite expensive device. (A Wifi router and a hard-disk would have been slightly cheaper, but this way it’s cleaner on my table and I do like that a lot.)

One thing I really don’t like are the hourly backups. The choices given by Apple are switching the Time Machine on and backing up automatically every hour or doing it manually. Being honest, who backs up the system manually? And even if, what would be the right amount of time in between backups?

TimeMachineEditor is a nice little app, that allows you to set the Time Machine’s schedule. This may be important for example if you’re working with Lightroom. Apparently, LR really doesn’t like backups running in the background. Besides, why would I want my Mac to be slower, when it’s running while I’m asleep anyway.

Just switch off automatic backups in the Time Machine Preferences, download and install the app, set your schedule and you’re ready to go.

My blog is one year old. So:

Party on, dudes! ;D

Thanks to all readers and subscribers for reading my blog, which does vary greatly in the choice of topics. This is mostly due to my hobbies and whatever I refer to as interesting enough to spend time writing about. However, my main focus was, is and will remain centered around the topics computer – mobile phones – and life. The last topic is mostly used for my new found hobby; photography. I’m sure though, that soon enough I’ll find another thing to spend time and money on and I sure will write about that, too.

I would also like to thank @ischack (www.ischack.net) who helped me so many times not only with my blog, but also with topics I simply had no answers for.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank my girlfriend for correcting my language, as I’m not a native English speaker. I continuously manage to make mistakes that simply shouldn’t happen anymore, but she has her way of nicely poking me and teaching me ‘new’ rules.

I couldn’t think of a better topic for my 100th post, than something that kept me awake until I found a solution. Updating from OS3 to iOS (4), I ‘forgot’ to create a proper backup of my files. I didn’t really forget it, as I knew I don’t care about save-games and have all my contacts etc. synced. Still, I forgot something: my photos.

Once in a while, when I don’t want to take my camera with me, or simply don’t have it close by, I take photos with my iPhone camera in order to fill my Project 365 with life. When updating my phone earlier, everything was deleted, which unfortunately, also included the photos I took. Luckily enough, I’m surrounded by backups: iTunes makes backups from my iPhone. These backups again are backed up with my TimeCapsule. This again is partly backed up with Backblaze. (I guess losing my photos I took during two months of traveling through New Zealand and the USA left a mental scar.) Anyhow, here is the solution to my problem (and hopefully yours, too) and other problems that may occur if you just need certain files from a previously made iTunes backup without the need to restore the whole iPhone:

1) Download the iPhone / iPod touch backup extractor (Windows user have a similar app, which is available here).

2) Click ‘read backups’ and choose the newest one, or the one that you think is right. (Mac version – for Windows version please follow the instructions from the link above.)

3) Select the content you’d like to have (for photos it’s iPhone OS files) and click ‘extract’.

4) Once you decided where it should extract these files to, your photos are available in the folder Media -> DCIM -> 100APPLE once the extraction process finished.

I hope this helps you as much as it helped me!

Update: @ischack mentioned in the comments that it appears as if the program crashes, but he adds that the ‘beachball’ rather is an indicator for the extracting process working. Thanks

Week 21 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.