Merry Christ­mas new Mac own­ers! And a spe­cial extra treat for any of you that are switch­ing from Win­dows to your first Mac. Don McAl­lis­ter at Screen­cast­sOn­line has made a free episode of his pop­u­lar video pod­cast avail­able specif­i­cally for switch­ers. Click here to check it out.

And if you find it inter­est­ing and help­ful, I’d highly rec­om­mend you look into becom­ing a full fledged mem­ber of Don’s com­mu­nity. Lots of great tuto­ri­als and infor­ma­tion to help you on your way to becom­ing a Mac genius!

MacZot.com is a site that fea­tures daily deals related to Mac soft­ware. Today they’ve got a deal going on what looks to be a great lit­tle tutorial/manual for switch­ing from Win­dows to a Mac: mac­ZOT » “It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac.”

It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac®” is the most inno­v­a­tive learn­ing tool ever cre­ated for “switch­ers.” It’s all about teach­ing you the Mac by con­nect­ing the dots to Win­dows equiv­a­lents. When the instruc­tor, Saied, teaches you one of the more than 30 lessons on the Mac, you can then instantly try it on the vir­tual Mac that’s built into the learn­ing tool–an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence unique to “It’s About Time.”

It’s com­pat­i­ble with Mac and Win­dows so you can check it out even if you’re just think­ing about switch­ing to a Mac.

Direct link

Alexa writes:

I down­loaded some videos from youtube and they are cur­rently in flv for­mat. I’d like to put them into a pow­er­point, and I think I need to con­vert them to mpeg, or some­thing. But I don’t know how to do that or what pro­gram to use.
Thanks!

I get asked this ques­tion all the time. YouTube is an amaz­ing resource until you need to use one if its videos offline or in a presentation.

And that’s where vixy.net saves the day.

Vixy con­verts flash videos to a few dif­fer­ent for­mats, includ­ing .avi and .mov. It’s super straight for­ward to use:

1. Copy the URL (web address) of the page where the orig­i­nal video is
2. Paste the URL into the appro­pri­ate field, pick a for­mat, then hit start.
When Vixy is fin­ished con­vert­ing the file, it will allow you to down­load the video!
A few quick tips:
–I rec­om­mend using .avi if you’re a Win­dows user and .mov if you’re a Mac user.
–Don’t expect per­fec­tion; YouTube’s videos aren’t that high of qual­ity to start with, and you will lose more qual­ity when you con­vert the video to a down­load­able form.
–This works with any flash site that uses stream­ing flash videos, like Daily Motion, Meta­Cafe, etc.
–Depend­ing on the length of your video and how busy Vixy is, con­ver­sion and down­loads may take a while.
–This won’t work if you copy the address of a page where the video is embed­ded. You have to go straight from the source!
–Vixy can get a lit­tle glitchy; if at first you don’t suc­ceed, try, try again.