We’ve had numerous issues with our Final Cut Pro 6.02 project. Playback which simply repeats the same frames, media won’t stay connected, edits that magically undo themselves. Some of these are likely bugs while others are related to the six-year old project file and media.

In the hopes of righting whatever is wrong, we dumped (via XML export) our main sequence to a new project file. All was well until I began cutting it into separate reels and sequences respectively. Upon using the “Export to QuickTime Movie” option and the auto-render which takes place, I was greeted with a dialog box of General Error (48). This occurred 60% into the render.

This is actually an OS X (not FCP) error and according to this Apple Support topic error 48 is described as “Duplicate filename (rename); File found instead of folder.”

There are not many Internet references to error 48 but some suggest deleting SWF files and/or trashing Preferences. Neither of these worked for me.

I found a solution but, unfortunately, but the details are foggy in my head. Until the answer reveals itself I suggest a few places to look:

• Ensure you have enough free disk space on the render and autosave volumes
• Ensure you have sufficient file permissions to all FCP folders
• View project XML in a text editor and ensure file paths are correct

A few weeks ago I built a computer for my son. The parts were salvaged from an old PC my father passed along and after the long, arduous, process of locking down Windows I installed some kiddie software.

There is No Simple Menu Software for Windows

Children learn quickly but asking a three-year old to navigate the Start menu is a far stretch. Surely there was a kid-friendly “program launcher” reminiscent of Power Menu for DOS. I imagined a menu whose items included an image thumbnail and user-defined text adjacent to it.

After 20 minutes of Googling I found nothing.

Enter Kiosk Mode

Considering alternatives, I devised a simple HTML page with large images and text links. The page, rather menu, needed to automatically run at login and not easily exited from. This got me thinking about “kiosk mode” and web browsers. Internet Explorer does kiosk mode quite well, presenting a full-screen experience without any on-screen navigation controls (although [Alt-F4] can be used to exit).

It’s easy to do, don’t bother with registry tweaks, just use this command-line in your shortcut:

iexplore -k path-to-html.htm

You Can’t Get There from Here

Big usability problem though. IE won’t let you open a local executable from any web page, instead assuming you are being attacked by the Internet. This is sound logic but considering how user-customizable Windows is supposed to be, I could not find any way of overriding this for my local and trusted HTML file.

Regardless of my security settings I was always prompted “are you sure you want this HTML page to open a program?” Fortunately you only have to answer this question once per session at the computer.

Considering how far technology has come since DOS it’s astonishing that a simple (I said simple) program launcher does not exist for Windows. Interestingly enough, some distributions of Linux have such a menu. Typical.

Digital Heaven’s VideoSpace widget, a disk storage calculator for video footage, has a new home on the ‘net: http://www.videospaceonline.com/. Use it anywhere your browser and iPhone can reach.

Although I make a habit of avoiding Windows it’s unavoidable. A typical installation of Windows is devoid of many useful tools such as ISO creation and burning, a tabbed text editor, a useful file archiver…the list goes on.

I’ve built a list of core software, all free, which fills many of these gaps in Windows including:

• Unzipping
• Text editing
• Media codecs
• Remote control
• Secure file deletion
• ISO manipulation

Check out the complete list here.

Lately I’ve been using some old PCs. Pentium 3 and 4 based machines with 256 MB of RAM running Windows XP. They’re not as slow as you’d think: Word and Excel run fine. Even PowerPoint is snappy enough.

What really, really, hobbles these boxes isn’t bloatware like Office, it’s Web 2.0 applications. Using Firefox or Internet Explorer, sites like Gmail and MobileMe grind the computer to a halt. That’s not all…any site utilizing JavaScript makes surfing the web a slow, painful process.

Years ago the IT industry was touting the Internet Appliance which was a low-powered computer using a web browser as the conduit to running web-based software. Those devices in their desktop format didn’t take off and I’m not sure they would have survived based on my observations of the WWW on a Pentium 3 and 4 computer.

Over the years we have blamed Microsoft Office for driving up the speed and memory requirements of a personal computer. When Office 2003 runs acceptably on a 600 MHz Pentium 3 and Gmail does not, it’s time to start questioning the computing resources required to surf the web.

JavaScript may be the culprit and there’s no getting away from it with today’s web.