Best keyboard shortcut ever!

While browsing through the comments on this 43 Folders post about a bare-bones no-distractions text editor, I discovered a keyboard shortcut in Mac OS X that inverts all of the colors on your screen! Just hit control-option-command-8. Mostly white screens really suck in dark rooms, so I’m digging the ability to turn everything mostly black at night. And having everything look like a photographic negative is pretty awesome as well 🙂 Unfortunately, taking a screenshot doesn’t capture the effect, although I suppose I could just take a normal screenshot and invert the colors in a graphics editor so that you could see it 🙂

Apparently there’s a similar shortcut for Windows XP, “left-shift, left-alt, print screen”, which allows you to switch into a high-contrast mode (also accessible and configurable via the control panel)? I wouldn’t know, I don’t have Windows XP, but if you do you could try that.

Why I can’t upgrade to Tiger

I’ve been meaning to upgrade my Mac to OS X v10.4, a.k.a. Tiger, for a while now. The DVD is sitting by my computer. I have updated all of my applications so that they will operate on Tiger after the upgrade. However, there is still one thing missing… Ogg support in iTunes.

My music collection currently consists of a mixture of mp3s and Ogg Vorbis files, with a few FLAC files thrown in for good measure (I used to be a free software absolutist, and I attempted to convert my entire music collection to open formats). ITunes does not natively support Ogg files, but there is a Quicktime plugin which allows me to play Oggs in iTunes, burn them to CDs, basically anything that I can do with an mp3 file. Unfortunately, the plugin stopped working with the release of Quicktime 7.0, iTunes 4.8, and OS X 10.4 (and the project appears to be abandoned, so I don’t anticipate an update). Therefore I have not upgraded any of that software, so that I can continue to play Oggs and use them to burn CDs.

This is the last thing holding me back from upgrading to Tiger (and the new Quicktime and iTunes). I need something which will play mp3s and Oggs, and burn CDs with both mp3s and Oggs. Any ideas? (Damn you Apple, for not building in Ogg support.)