Solving the Loading Bar Disappearance While Playing .wmv Files in Snow Leopard

Many would have noticed after you upgrade your Mac OS to Snow Leopard, whenever you play .wmv files, the pre-loading bar disappeared and the movie start playing immediately. May sound good for some people, but to most people they will have trouble forwarding the movie if they want to skip certain sections. This is because the movie is not loaded and it takes a very long time to load the whole movie.

Here is a way to solve this problem and bring back the pre-loading bar.

1. Upgrade your Flip4Mac to the latest version, at the time of writing it is 2.3.0.14.

2. Go to System Preferences.

3. Select the Flip4Mac icon.

4. Select the Player tab, then select Advance.

5. A small window will appear to ask you to add applications. In this window, add Quicktime X or Quicktime 7.

6. Problem solved, now you can sit back and watch .wmv file like the way it was before.

Top 10 Common Features in All TVB Dramas

1. The leading male actors always exchange girlfriends with another leading/supporting male actor.

2. In recent TVB shows, everyone live in a big condominium, regardless of what job they do.

3. They always have their meal in some high class restaurants and they always order expensive food.

4. They always use Sony-Ericson cellphone and always have the same ring tone.

5. They characters in the show always have a lot of money to lend, often in the 6 - 7 digits.

6. Intuition is always right, especially the bad one.

7. The leading female actor usually never get married until the end of the show. The supporting female actor usually get married somewhere in the middle of the show.

8. Those who lost their memory, always tend to recover fully.

9. When someone lands in the hospital, there is always a scene outside the operating room, and everyone will be waiting right outside the operating room.

10. In those ancient era dramas, whenever someone is severely ill or hurt, they always vomit blood.

I personally found these similar characteristic hilarious. If you have some to share as well, feel free to post it.

Useful Learning Japanese Sites

I have been learning Japanese for a few years. I have went through a lot of materials, both helpful and those that are not so helpful. In this post, I am going to share those materials that I think might help you to learn Japanese.

1. Japanesepod101 - This is actually where I learned my Japanese. It is a teaching Japanese language podcast that started in late 2005. I started listening to them around 2006 and have been listening to most of their lessons. Without attending any Japanese class, I have achieved an intermediate level, I am still listening to it now. If you are a serious Japanese learner, I highly recommend you to subscribe to them and follow through their lessons.

2. Tae Kim Japanese Grammar Guide - I use this site as a complement material to my Jpod101 course, this is a very useful guide that help you to understand basic to intermediate level grammar.

3. An Introduction to Japanese Grammar - This is a PDF guide that can be downloaded online free, it is written Michiel Kamermans, according to him, he compiled his Japanese notes to make this PDF. I found it very comprehensive, it explains a lot of grammar points that are not even explained in most textbooks. Very useful to carry this PDF around, especially in your computer or PDA. You can refer to the grammars if you have no internet access, very handy.

4. Jim Breen's Japanese-English Online Dictionary - This is probably the best online dictionary for Japanese learners, it also has audio for the pronunciation of words. If you are learning Japanese, this is must to bookmark.

5. Visualizing Japanese Grammar - An online video grammar course produced by George Washington University, since it comes with video, it is extremely useful. One of the Japanese learning materials that you can just sit back, relax and watch.

6. Surasura - An Text for Intermediate Japanese - One of the best intermediate materials online, learning Japanese is easy in the beginning, but it is tough as you progress, not only because of the nature of the language, more importantly there is a lack of materials that bridge you from intermediate to advanced level.

7. Japanese Dramas with Japanese Subtitles - When you reach intermediate level, one of the best way to improve your Japanese is actually watching Japanese shows, however Japanese shows can be tough for an intermediate, therefore having Japanese subtitles really helps out a lot. It help you to understand those phrases that are spoken too fast, you can also pause the show and check your grammar book or dictionary. D-addicts provides a lot of Japanese subtitles, you can download most of the dramas from that site too.

I will continue to update this post if I discovered more useful Japanese learning materials. If you know of any, please feel free to let me know.

Joining files in Snow Leopard

Step1: Launch Terminal.app

Step2: type cd ~/downloads (or whatever the name of the folder your files are)

Step3: type ls (this is to show all the files in that folder)

Step4: type cat filename.avi.001 filename.avi.002 filename.avi.003 filename.avi.004 > filename.avi

Then wait for it to join the files, when it is finished, the cursor in the terminal will start to blink again like the way when you start it.