I’ve had a very terminal/command-line based week as I’ve been hacking away at the Zune/Mac interface with the help of the brilliant and patient Richard Low. This morning, when I called up cal rather than waiting for iCal to launch, it occurred to me to wonder how much time Mac people really do spend at the command line. When was the last time you used cal? ed? egrep? sed? What are the geekiest tools you used this week? Let me know in the comments or drop a line to erica@mindspring.com with your geek stories.

The mobile phone market doesn’t need yet another innovative device design. We’re well-served by RAZRs and Treos and Dash’s (oh my!). But it desperately needs innovation in the smartphone OS area.

Cross-listed from the OnJava blog, go to the original post.

The short story is that I bought a house and, with it, a new wireless router (the D-Link DGL-4300, quite nice) to penetrate the walls my previous apartment never had. With a strong wireless network on the second floor connecting to my entertainment on the first, I’ve my game consoles and laptop satisfied, but would like to focus on video streaming. In short: I want to wirelessly stream movies (of MPEG, DivX, and XviD persuasion) to my TV.

My current workflow is to burn digital movie files onto DVD-Rs and then play them through my Philips DVP-62, which is a cheapie throw-away player that supports all the formats I care about. This has slowly become costly and inefficient: with over 100 DVD-Rs now burnt, it’s a pain to find the right movie on the right disc (and heaven-forbid I’d like to watch a marathon spanning multiple discs), much less pay the cost for media (which is roughly the same amount as the player itself).

Recently, an update to the Xbox 360 promised the ability to stream video from sources other than Windows Media Center machines and, while possible on OS X (with the help of shareware Connect 360), you need to convert your files to WMV/WMA, a feat that only Flip4Mac can currently accomplish. VLC can apparently do it on Windows, but doesn’t support WMA encoding on OS X in my tests.

With over 100 DVD-Rs containing six or seven movies a piece, and Flip4Mac encoding times taking roughly the duration of the file itself, this isn’t entirely ideal either. I’ve yet to find a live transcoding solution (i.e., convert at time of play request) for OS X, though a few exist on Windows (TVersity’s latest version has specific support for this, but doesn’t run on OS X).

Yes, I do have Parallels on my MacBook Pro. Yes, I have BootCamp too. Do I want to run my laptop for 15+ hours to support a movie marathon? Do I REALLY want to pipe video through my Xbox 360, or use a non-Mac solution? No. Could I save myself a lot of effort if I just settle for second best? Absolutely, but it’ll take me a few more weeks to resolve myself to that.

So, of late, I’ve been looking around for “digital media receivers”, which are boxes that specifically support what I’m looking for (again: wireless streaming video of MPEG, DivX, or XviD from my Mac upstairs to my television downstairs). Unfortunately, I haven’t found a lot of satisfying results that’d fill me with such confidence that I’m ready to plunk down “definitely” as opposed to “experimental” money.

• The KiSS DP-600 plays all the formats I’m looking for, has a clean interface, and specifically supports OS X with its (ugh, brushed-metal) MacLink application. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be available in the US, and I’m not entirely willing to make this my first (non-PayPal, more than $100) overseas transaction. It is also a DVD player which seems to (though I’ve yet to get perfect confirmation on this) do the same thing as my current Philips box - play files stored on a DVD-R. Unfortunately, the site isn’t entirely “robust” and hasn’t reported any news since late 2005 (though new firmware has recently been released). Has anyone used this? If it’s a DVD player, what region is it encoded for? Are there any American distributors that I’ve missed?
• TwonkyMedia is a general purpose UPnP server for videos, photos, and music. The software is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows and they list a number of supported systems, such as the D-Link DSM-520 and the Zensonic Z500, which both have their pros and cons. The Z500 is an unsexy DVD player (which I don’t really need) and has a horrific interface, while the DSM-520 (the better of the two, IMO) has had various reviews saying its interface was slow (though some have suggested this is due to their shipped Windows-only media server, which I wouldn’t be using) or that the newest firmware has broken some types of XviD and DivX playback. Both come in around the “experimental” $200 mark.
• Apple’s planned iTV is a non-starter - without S-Video or composite video, I can do nothing with it (unless I buy a new TV, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon), and iTunes cheerfully ignored any of the DivX and XviD files I dropped over it (and yes, these same files playback fine in QuickTime). Whilst I’m sure enterprising hackers will either add extra formats to iTunes or otherwise route around those particular requirements, I still don’t plan to replace my TV when other potentially cheaper alternatives may exist.

Any readers have any of their own experience or thoughts to report?

DataPlot is a new graph plotting tool for OS X. Here’s a very positive review by a beta tester. According to developer David Adalsteinsson, it handles hundreds of thousands of rows without complaint, and has hooks into the command line and Automator.

Special discounts day for UK customers on December 1.

Here’s a GTD idea that’s new to me, and looks very neat: a TextMate bundle for Backpack. Via Hawkwings (which has more screenshots).

Our Fraser’s been busy again, making kid-friendly web browsers.

Today’s Security Update announcement includes fixes for holes in WebKit, Finder, Airport, PHP and others.

Safari downloads are actually bundles. They’re named with a .download extension and hide both the partial download plus an information file that describes the download itself.

To open your download (while in progress, or when stopped), right-click/control click the .download icon and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual pop-up menu.

Inside you’ll find the download itself and an Info.plist file. To view the property list file, just drag it onto TextEdit to open. Properties include the URL source of the file, the date and time of the download, and the progress to date.

I recently download the libmtp library source from Source Forge. This software implements Microsoft’s Media Transfer Protocol, which has allowed me to peek at the Zune USB protocol, and which I post about copiously on the Digital Media Blog. (Hint: You’ll need to also download and install libusb and libnjb as well.)

For anyone who might be interested in following in my example, a word of warning. I wasted an hour until I realized that you have to add -liconv to the libraries used in the Makefiles created by the configure program. This only affects libmtp. The libusb and libnjb files compiled and installed without any problem using the standard sequence of configure, make, and sudo make install.

After being out all week (my parents’ 50th anniversary), I finally got around to writing up this week’s iTunes Freebies post over at TUAW. It should go live later this evening or tomorrow morning.

Sorry about the delay.

Want to see your Zune from your Mac? You can.

Okay. Reality check here. The Zune uses Microsoft’s Media Transfer Protocol. So you can use WentNet’s open-source free XNJB utility to peek at the contents of a Zune attached to your Macintosh.

But that’s about as far as you’re going to get. So far.

The Zune will not allow non-host computers to download data off the unit. Yes, I’ve followed the Zune Boards hack and have been able to transfer data onto (and off of) my Zune. You trick the Zune into lowering its non-transfer security gates during a sync and then access the Zune as an external disk during the sync. (Hint: transfer a TV episode in MPEG-4 format. It takes a good long while for the video to convert to native WMV and then copy to the Zune.)

But that won’t work with the Mac, because the Zune treats all computers other than the original host as hostile entities and will not allow access to the Zune data without a total reformat/rehost.

Clearly, the trick will lie in telling the Zune that it’s attached to a host and then pretending to “sync”. For now, XNJB allows you to see the contents of the Zune but all transfer attempts fail.

So Twitter is suddenly the hot web meme of the moment, and I’m a Twitterin’ with the best of them. And it’s fun.

But I don’t like keeping a browser window open just for browsing and posting Twitters; and I don’t tend to have a compatible IM app open very often either. I’ve been on the hunt for something that’ll do the same job, but unobtrusively.

I won’t deny that I was a little miffed a couple of weeks ago, when the esteemed writers at both TUAW and Gizmodo scooped me on the story I’d been following up just a week or so previously; that of Peter Green, talented Mac modder.

I went to see Peter at his home, about 40 minutes drive from mine, at the end of October. A month before that, in late September, I’d stumbled upon his Mk II modded Mac mini and emailed him about it; he replied saying:

I can do better than that! I’ve just completed the MMP MkIII - tablet edition!! I’ve only finished it the last few days, so I’d be looking to getting out into the world soon anyway - so your timing is pretty good here :-)

Well, I couldn’t resist. The result of our all-too-brief tour of Peter’s den/studio/office/workshop is now live on Mac Devcenter: Peter Green’s Modded Macs.

Anyway, I hope you find the article interesting and the video snippets worth watching. If you’re really lucky, I’ll post the out-takes here one day…

There was a fun thread at Ask Metafilter last week, prompted by a post from user aberrant who wanted to know: “How can I better enjoy my new Mac?”

Aside from the usual list of tips that you’d expect to see in a thread for Mac newbies (learn to use Apple+Q; there is no Registry, and you don’t need to defrag; Quicksilver rocks; etc), I spotted a few choice snippets of advice and opinion that I thought deserved a wider audience…

I love that I no longer even have to THINK about IE except when I’m developing web applications … I like TextMate. I absolutely adore not having to worry that the next patch tuesday is going to bork some system driver, and avoiding driver version hell is nice. — SpecialK

After using a Mac for awhile, going back to work on a Windows machine is pure, RSI-inducing hell, because you end up comfortably using your thumb to invoke the Command key on the Mac, whereas on Windows, the most frequently used keyboard shortcuts are invoked with totally un-naturally located Control key. — melorama

Take your time. the situation was good for me cause i had a windows box i used when i needed to get things done, and a Mac to play on. and after i certain amount of time i realized the Mac was where stuff got done. — [@I][:+:][@I]

What’s the one thing you always say to Mac newbies, or wannabe newbies?

Terminal is a great application for the occasional user of the Mac’s command line; it’s clean, fast, and always there. But many system administrators, developers, and others who work with the command line daily find that Terminal isn’t really what they’re used to, mainly because it’s missing features commonly found in Linux terminal emulators, like tabbed session windows and advanced profile support. IT pros looking for these timesaving features on the Mac, then, have come to rely on iTerm, the open source (GPL) terminal emulator that has recently received several much-anticipated updates

In fact, there was some concern about the state of the iTerm project as updates were slow in coming over the last couple of years. Still technically in beta, iTerm has had its share of bugs and stability issues. The thought that these might not be fixed concerned many loyal users, some of whom are able to use the Mac to do their work only because of iTerm. However, the days of sporadic releases appear to be over. In the last two months alone, iTerm’s hardworking developers released three updates (the latest being version 0.9.3), each with significant feature additions, bug fixes, and UI improvements.

For example, one common complaint of iTerm has been its text redraw speed, especially when compared to Terminal. The new releases address this, providing a “Display Refreshing Rate” slider that allows fine tuning of redraw speed against CPU usage. With this set at its default speed (in the middle), iTerm appears just as fast as Terminal at paging through a document in vi, for example, and consumes roughly the same amount of CPU. With this setting cranked up, iTerm zooms through the pages, and handily beats Terminal. And even at the “fastest” setting, the CPU hit has not been much of a problem for me, rarely surpassing 30% on my Core Duo MacBook Pro (iTerm is Universal Binary).

Other recent enhancements to iTerm include terminfo support, an Execute field in the toolbar, macro support in profile connection strings, and Growl support. Check the version history for full details, but it looks like iTerm is back, and it’s better than ever.

What do all the following dates have in common?

16 Nov 2006, 31 Oct 2006, 29 Sep 2006, 21 Sep 2006, 12 Sep 2006, 17 Aug 2006, 09 Aug 2006, 01 Aug 2006, 29 June 2006, 27 June 2006, 23 May 2006, 11 May 2006, 17 Apr 2006, 03 Apr 2006, 13 Mar 2006, 01 Mar 2006, 14 Feb 2006, 10 Jan 2006, 3 Jan 2006

Answer after the jump.

I have felt since the announcement of Apple’s switch to Intel that they chose the wrong chip. Perhaps the Intel architecture, that is to say the x86 architecture, was the right choice, but the supplier was the wrong choice. Apple should have chosen AMD.

How Suw fixed her iBook.

Jim Roepcke on resolution independent UI: Most people will use that to increase the resolution of the UI, but I’ve used it to decrease the resolution… at a 0.75 factor, I can comfortably fit 4 windows on the screen. In fact, at 0.5, I can fit nine poker table windows on the screen simultaneously with no significant overlap. Awesome!

Mira brings Front Row-like functionality to older Macs, using an Apple Remote and a USB receiver.

Eastgate has posted some very informative Tinderbox screencasts. I learned more from watching these than from several trial sessions with Tinderbox over recent years.

Jonathan Sanderson on Apple’s customer service: Listening to the customer and addressing the problem will beat lying and not fixing things, every time.

I spent a torturous day yesterday installing Bootcamp on my new dual core mini. Some lessons that I learned along the way:

• Reformat your partition. Although the bootcamp utility creates a FAT partition for Windows before you begin the XP install process, you must reformat that partition during Windows setup or you will get Bad Disk errors. I personally went with FAT for the reformat.
• Pick the right partition. It’s so easy to gloss over Apple’s instructions that you might miss the part about having to search for C: on the partition list. Fortunately, I caught myself right before I almost reformatted my OS X partition.
• Check your sounds. On my Intel core duo, the Realtek drivers would not install. I ended up spending hours trying to figure out why the “Microsoft Bus Driver” wasn’t working. In the end, I had to update my PCI devices as follows: Right-click My Computer. Choose Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> System Devices. There was an incorrectly installed PCI Device (with a yellow caution symbol next to it). Double-clicking that let me re-install that driver. (At this point, Windows complained that I had overwritten original Win XP SP2 files, but I cancelled its complaint and kept the ones that had been installed on the Mac drivers CD.) The Realtek driver can be found on your C: (local disk) drive, in Program Files : Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP 1.1.2 : realtek. Double-click Setup.exe to install.

It’s been a couple of months now since I transitioned to Google’s web-based services. So far life has been pretty great. I can do everything I want with my calendar online, I’ve been using Picasa for sharing photos, Google Notifier keeps me in tune with my mail and calendar when I’m working on my PowerBook, and the best part is….only 7 spam messages have crept through and managed to land themselves into my inbox. I’m especially happy about this since hundreds were creeping through each month before I made the switch. And speaking of “hundreds,” I’m going to be saving myself a hundred bucks here in another month or so.

I know that GMail won’t be the solution for everyone, but if you’re really getting sick of spam, consider giving it a try. The last article I put together for MacDevCenter provides you with a fairly detailed step-by-step plan. One thing I didn’t mention, however, is that you might consider using GMail as a spam filter even if you choose to keep your .Mac account. Google for GMail as a spam filter. Lots of success stories with step-by-step instructions are out there.

And for the record: I will definitely be blogging and giving Apple kudos when/if they finally do decide that effective server-side spam filtering is important to .Mac members. Hopefully, that day will come sooner rather than later. Of course, your feedback to .Mac can only help.

It’s official, Skype for Mac allows for the sending of SMS - the beta version at least. The system is cheap, convenient, seems relatively reliable and, if I had not my doubts about that whole Skype thing overall, I would say it appears to be a clear winner. The best part? AppleScript integration!

Our friends over at Makezine found an interesting article by Ryan Faas on using a Mac today as a media center. Building a Mac Home Media Center, Part 1: How To Get iTV Capabilities Today, For Less, has some good information for anyone considering using their Mac in this fashion. We also recently published an article by Matthew Russell on how to turn your Mac into a TV/PVR using Miglia’s TV Micro USB tuner and EyeTV software, Miglia TVMicro and EyeTV: Easy TV on Your Mac.

While iTV is on the horizon, Ryan points out that there’s an awful lot you can do right now if you don’t mind fiddling with things a bit. I own an older Powerbook with a damaged screen and have been thinking about doing something along these lines with it, so this article is very timely for me. I’m especially looking forward to the second installment where he covers using a Mac as a PVR, but this first article also had some helpful tips that I wasn’t aware of, like this information on completely controlling an infrared-capable Mac with the remote control:

Use the Apple Remote to sleep/wake a Mac in your entertainment center. If you install a Mac mini (or other Mac model) as a unit in your home entertainment center, you might want to operate it completely from the remote (as a piece of home theater equipment instead of a computer). Not only can you invoke and navigate Front Row all from the Apple remote but you can also put the computer to sleep or wake it from sleep by holding the play/pause button on the remote for three seconds. Pressing any button on the remote wakes the computer. This approach can also be helpful if you want to use a TV (or external display) with a MacBook or MacBook Pro while keeping the computer closed because you can connect the TV or display, sleep the computer by closing the lid and wake it with the remote.

Are others out there happily using Macs as their media centers and PVRs? I’d be real interested in hearing your success stories. And your not so successful ones, too.

Allan Odgaard made it plain in a recent post that TextMate 2.0 will require Leopard.

I thought his list of “costs” for maintaining backwards-compatible code was very interesting:

According to a recent Apple support article, some Intel Macs may experience sync problems when you plug devices into or remove them from the line out jack while using line in to record or monitor input. The computer’s audio goes out of sync with the actual input source. If this happens to you, stop and then restart input playback. If this doesn’t work, quit out of your audio monitoring/recording application and relaunch it to fix the sync.

Today’s freebies roundup is hosted over at TUAW.

For about $66, Apple will replace your iPod’s battery. Fill out a service request and hand over the money. Or you can google up a battery replacement kit, usually for a lot less money, and install it yourself. MacSales, an online 3rd party vendor, offers a suite of do-it-yourself installation videos on its website. The cheapest batteries I have found are at Hong Kong-based Fifth Unit, starting around $6 plus reasonable shipping. I’ve shopped there several times without incident.

Apple recommendations for extending battery life? Shorten your backlight duration–or turn it off alltogether. Pause your iPod when not in use and use your hold button liberally. Keep your iPod at room temperature. Turn off the Equalizer and play back compressed songs with file sizes less than 9MB each.

A reader writes, “I have a 30GB iPod with video. I have eight televisions in my vehicle. I was wondering is there a way I can link my iPod up with my TVs so the movies on the iPod would play through the screens.”

Seems to me he’ll just need a video distribution amp, though he may need to cascade a few to get that many outputs. Any recommendations?

Around our office, everything happens in BBEdit: from invoicing to site design, if it has to be done, it goes through BBEdit and AppleScript at some point or another. Our clients are usually set up with a shiny TextWrangler installation or given pointers as to why TextEdit is Not That Bad. Today however, I undertook the ultimate challenge: learning Vim.

Over the weekend I had some time to mess about with the new version of Yojimbo. It’s an excellent update, and the new tagging feature is particularly appealing for one important reason.

The new version upgrades your Yojimbo database

The concept of tags in OS X isn’t new. But in some apps, simply adding tags, or applying them to data, is hard work in itself. Situations where tags appear in a palette or a drawer, and tagging data is done by drag-and-drop or by checking checkboxes, are all too common. And much too slow. That’s why I’ve not keyworded much of my iPhoto library (or at least I hadn’t until I got my hands on Keyword Assistant).

I prefer tags to be something I type into a single field, comma-separated, freeform, faster. I like del.icio.us style tags.

Tagging in the Quick Input Panel

Call me slow, but I’ve only recently come to understand what the Xserve RAID really is, and it’s not just a RAID.

Before my revelation, I had figured that, out of the box, the Xserve RAID was strictly a DAS RAID device, connecting via Fibre Channel to a single Xserve, much like the SCSI RAID boxes we already have connected to servers of several stripes in our server room. Yes, the Xserve RAID can work this way, but as I found, it’s not the only way. I also confess that though I was aware of Apple’s Xsan software, I thought that only with it could you turn the Xserve RAID into a true multi-hosted SAN.

It’s not that Apple doesn’t clarify this on their site, but I never looked into the details until it was time for us to purchase a SAN solution. Now that I have looked, I would suggest calling the Xserve RAID the “Xserve SAN” or even the “Apple SAN”, since out of the box that’s what it is, whether you run it with Xsan or not.

So, not only will the Xserve RAID work as a DAS, but you can also plug one into a Fibre Channel switch, and its volumes will be available as local storage to the servers on that switch (none of which have to be Xserves), making it a true SAN device.

Sounds like a good cause: World Usability Day by the Usability Professionals Association. Pointing out and complaining about usability problems and the lack of focus on usability in most industries is fine but I sure hope they can also provide good examples and most of all: solutions.

I’ve got a relatively new MacBook Pro, and like many others I’m pretty amazed at how hot this laptop can get. I’ve been using Mac laptops for a long time, and I’m used to their warmth. Heck on a cold evening I’ve been known to practically cuddle up to mine on the couch.

But this one seems hotter than the others. I work from a variety of places (including my couch) and actually do fairly regularly use my laptop when it’s actually on my lap. And with the MacBook Pro I always need additional protection. (Does anyone else keep an especially flat pillow on hand in the living room for a personal laptop heat sink?)

So I was pretty interested to hear how people have taken the MBP fan controls into their own hands to combat the extreme heat problem. After reading an overview of the available fan control programs and installing a copy of CoreDuoTemp to easily monitor my system’s temperature, I was ready to start playing with my fan settings.

There are several programs to choose from, but a couple of positive reviews steered me toward FanControl 1.1, and there will be no turning back for me now. I like that it’s a System Preference pane — this seems like the logical place for this kind of program — and it offers the ability to set both upper and lower temperature thresholds. I’ll admit to initially being a little concerned about going down this road, as I’m pretty sensitive to system and fan noises and realized that I was likely looking at a tradeoff between heat and noise. But as soon as I started tweaking the settings and significantly cooling down my Mac, I realized just how hot and bothersome it had been. My laptop’s CPU temperature is now hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 30-40 degrees cooler than it was running before I took over the control of my fans.

I’m still playing around trying to find my ideal setting, and I do hear my MacBook Pro’s fans kick in a little more than I used to, but I’m finding the tradeoff well worth it. I’m going to get rid of that old flat pillow, and start cuddling up to my wife again for warmth.

.

Tom Yager put an Xserve through the paces and came away very impressed. In his InfoWorld article, Apple Xserve: The final review, Yager praises just about everything he can about Xserve, including the high-quality engineering, ease of deployment, accessible standards-based components, and new lights-out management support. But he was especially impressed with Mac OS X Server Tiger 10.4.8 and its overall cost, noting appreciatively (and repeatedly) how OS X Server comes pre-loaded with full versions of most commonly needed server software.

Apple is going to sell complete server platforms that buyers purchase, operate themselves and actually own. Seriously. The customer pays the advertised price for an Xserve (starting at $2,999) and gets a server loaded and pre-configured with a server software suite that alone meets the needs of the majority of Intel x86 rack server buyers. There are no subscriptions, no priority update service fees, and no client, device, mailbox or CPU licenses. None of the services is grayed out pending your purchase of an unlock key. Xserve has no try-and-buy, no time bombs and no trip wires telling you that you need to upgrade from Express this or that to Professional this or that. Xserve never phones home to beg for Apple’s permission to use the server software already loaded on your system.

This must be the best bug ever.

Back in 1999, we were hosting the Focus Online crew (one of Germany’s largest Online News sites) to stream the total eclipse happening over souther Germany. We are just starting to stream the video, when the webmaster’s mobile phone suddenly starts to get a flood of SMS messages. One after the other, their servers are collapsing from the enourmous traffic and hits they get. The webmaster looks at his mobile phone, smiles and says: “A job well done.”

No, I did not turn into Babe Balmer over night…

It is a topic that is close to my heart since we are looking for a talented Cocoa Developer ourselves: the opening of the CocoaDev Job Board. It is good to see this kind of thing happen.

Barebones has sent out an announcement that Yojimbo 1.3 is out now, and the big new feature is tags.

Tags can be added via the Quick Input Panel, the Inspector, or a new Item Details bar that replaces the Encryption bar in previous versions.

I’d show you a screenshot, but at the moment barebones.com seems to be somewhat clogged up with people downloading the update and I can’t reach it at all. More details and opinions later on, once I’ve had a chance to get my hands on it.

Application File Management Explains how Cocoa applications can use, manipulate, and “own” files.

XCode 2.4.1 Available Download and update today.

Adding folders to packages How to add to the package contents of executable code.

Secrets of the GPT How the new Intel-based partition map format works.

The new Core 2 Duo based Apple MacBooks are available now. I’m still making good use of the original model I bought this past Spring. But, the new models not only have a faster CPU, Apple also gave the 2GHz models new standard configurations. The white 2GHz model now sports an 80GB hard drive and 1GB RAM in its standard configuration (vs. 60GB and 512MB). The black model bumps the standard hard drive size to 120GB. And, the prices remain at US$1299 and $1499 respectively.

The outstanding Hawk Wings blog on all things Apple Mail has a story about a sobering experience with Apple’s .Mac support. In a nutshell, a lawyer lost all of his Address Book entries after syncing with his .Mac account. He turned to .Mac support for help with restoring his data as, in his own words, “this is a very, very serious problem, with heavy consequences for me.” When the reply email from Apple pointed out that the data cannot be restored on the .Mac servers and that, generally, he should make back ups of his data, he threatened to sue Apple: “Should this happen again, not only would I lose any confidence in Apple’s .Mac service — I would also proba