There’s been a lot of interest in running Windows XP natively on the Intel-based Macs. I use Microsoft Windows, Linux (various distros), and Mac OS X every day, 7 days a week for various tasks. Although there is a cost in speed, I prefer a virtualization solution to a dual-boot (requiring reboots to switch) solution. VMware released their GSX product as freeware (Workstation and ESX are still for-fee), XEN is Open Source and free and will be integrated in the next versions of SUSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (though it will not support Windows as a Guest OS until the AMD and Intel hardware virtualization CPUs are supported), and the rumor is that Microsoft will drop their already lowered price for Virtual Server 2005 R2 to free (information from Virtualization.info) soon. So, if anyone has a lead on Apple’s virtualization strategy for Mac OS X on the desktop/notebook, let us know what it is.

How much do you know about Apple? The BBC is running a fun little quiz about all things Apple and Mac and Jobs, to celebrate tomorrow’s 30th anniversary of Apple’s founding; go have a play and see how well you can do.

I got 8/10: “You live and breathe Apple, eagerly waiting for the latest shiny gadget to come out of California,” which isn’t exactly the case but, given my profession, is not very surprising.

Meanwhile, Apple itself is spending another day in court in London, defending itself against litigation brought by Apple Corps, The Beatles’ record label. Yesterday, Apple’s lawyer Anthony Grabiner QC told the court: “Data transmission is within our field of use, that’s what the 1991 deal says and it is inescapable.”

Let me show you something I just noticed as I was downloading the latest episode of Lost. This screenshot says it all:

Now how cool is that? You could potentially save more than $10 on the whole season. Unfortunately, I won’t be buying a season pass since it’s cheaper for me to continue purchasing the next 6 episodes or so individually for the rest of this season…but does this marketing pitch give me incentive to buy into other television shows? Yea, to my own detriment, it does — especially since I don’t own a television (on purpose…yes, really. My productivity would go through the floor if I owned one. And besides, I only watch a few select shows, and I can’t stand commercials.)

But take note of one thing: seasons passes are only being marketed on shows that are currently in season, and that approach makes good sense…at least from the supplier’s perspective. Why discount entire seasons of shows that people are willing to pay full price for? Selling in advance always seems to be the way to go, and I bet it’s especially profitable in the digital media market.

And on a related, but different note: I just noticed that they added South Park to iTMS too. And just when I thought I’d broken that bad habit…

So what do you think of the whole season pass idea? (Or the Weight Gainer 2000 episode of South Park?)

Z3Lab’s Philipp von Weitershausen picked up and configured an Intel-based Mac mini to take over to his parents. Before, he did, however, he installed Zope 3 on the mini and ran the Zope test suite on it and a Powerbook G4. The end result: The Python-based Zope 3 runs about twice as fast on a Mac mini compared to a Powerbook G4.

In recent times, I’ve had to ban my kids from using iPods with headphones because they play with the volume controls and blast their ears. Expensive headphones with volume limiters didn’t work because they quickly figured out how to adjust the volume control on the headphones. For the last few months, I’ve had them use an external speaker (Radio-Shack 277-1008C) but it wasn’t only awkward, it used batteries and was only a make-shift solution.

Enter today’s 1.1.1 software update for the nano and 5G iPods. In the Settings, you’ll find a new Volume Limit option. It lets you set the maximum playback volume for your iPod, regardless of how the kids adjust the scroll wheel.

What’s more you can “lock” it with a custom combination so your tech-savvy kids can’t bypass it easily. (They’d have to restore the iPod to get past the lock).

Step-by-step instructions here.

Thank you, Apple!

Thirty years ago this weekend, when Apple began life as a business, it was Steve Jobs who chose a name for the brand-new company. He named it Apple, the same name used by The Beatles’ record company.

Steve probably didn’t think that would ever be a problem. After all, a British music business and a (then very new, very small) Californian computer company - no-one would have expected the two to have any conflict.

But Apple Computer did better than anyone expected, and was soon a global brand. The executives in charge of Apple Corps started to take notice.

And that’s why the two companies came to a trademark agreement in 1991. Apple Corps said Apple Computer could continue using the Apple name, on one condition - that it never go into the music business.

Ooops.

Owen Linzmayer doesn’t like the way Login Items cannot be temporarily disabled or skipped in OS X; either you load all of the ones you have set up in the Accounts Prefs, or hold down shift during login and don’t load any of them. This can be troublesome if you’re out on the road and don’t want to load up all the stuff needed to operate peripherals that aren’t connected.

Well, Owen has a point there, but as soon as I read his complaint a simple solution popped into my head.

With the news that OpenBSD, which maintains and develops OpenSSH, is struggling with financial problems, it has become clear that Free Software needs more than just the support of users and developers. Free Software needs the financial contribution of corporations such as Apple that use Free Software and software licensed under the GPL.

• The Hit Man by Create & Devestate
  Sorry, I don’t get rap. It may be your style, it’s not mine.
• Grace by Phil Wickham
  Christian contemporary. Soppy.
• The Best of Ghost Hunters, season 2
  44 minute show: “Jason, Grant and the whole TAPS team re-live the best, scariest hauntings from season 1.” Meh.
• Ricky Gervais Show
  Free Season 2 Preview.

Do you like these weekly iTMS freebie lists? Are they useful? Let me know in the comments.

iChat. Tabs. Cool. (via Digg)

My earlier blog Stream Music over WiFi from your Home Server to your Sony PSP generated a number of requests for the source code. I finally got around to cleaning up the code to make it a bit more readable and move the configuration settings to a separate file.

Recently, Chuck Goolsbee had an experience with Apple Support that had him steamed. He sums it up thusly:

1996 PowerBook Repair Time & Effort:
* 5 minutes of my time
* 2 days of Apple’s time

2006 PowerBook Repair Time & Effort:
* 4+ hours of my time (largely spent being actively ignored while in close proximity to Apple Store staff)
* 14 days of Apple’s time

The system surely is infuriating for anyone who has a broken mac that needs fixing. Show up to the Genius Bar, even just to drop off a repair, and you’re often looking at a wait of more than an hour, or in some of Chuck’s experience, upwards of 2. Worse, though, is the letter from Sam Crutsinger that he reprints as part of the same entry:

At first I thought it was cute. It was like they were trying to make computer repair seem like a shi-shi experience. Now it’s gotten out of hand. Today the system is so NOT cute that I very nearly made a very loud scene in the middle of the Apple Store about it. The only thing that kept me from going off was the fact that before things reached “absurd,” I’d already put in my name and email address to see when the next available reservation slot was open. If I could have gotten out of there anonymously I would have made a speech to the masses.

Have you had a lousy repair experience at an Apple Store? Tell us about it in the comments.

The single handiest modification I’ve made to my Mac UI lately: moving the Dock to the top of the screen. “Heretic!” I hear you exclaim. Ah, but give me but a moment to explain….

There’s been much celebration around the web, now that Mac OS X is five years old. I wanted to join the celebratory atmosphere, but rather than take you through the history of the OS (which other people have already done, much better than I could, elsewhere), I wanted to take some time to reflect on my personal experiences of OS X.

Now, the thought of using any other OS for my day-to-day work makes me shudder. The occasions when I have to use a Windows machine (usually while working for a client on-site) always leave me reeling at how much hard work Windows is after you’ve got out of the habit of coping with it. But when OS X was first released, things were somewhat different.

Reader Merlyn reminds me after reading my article today on Quartz Composer, you can use Quartz Composer compositions as screen savers. Just place them into ~/Library/Screen Savers and select with the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences pane. You may want to skip the gradient background and just use a simple black background for screen savers. Use a “Clear” patch and set the clear color to black.

John Siracusa has a great little piece up about today’s significance in Apple history. Five years ago today, Mac OS X 10.0 hit shelves and took off running. What a long, strange trip it’s been. I think it’s safe to say we’re all looking forward to what’s ahead. Especially as Apple’s own birthday is a little more than a week away.

Happy birthday, Mac OS X, and many more! Now, let’s see what kind of cool products Apple’s going to announce for its 30th anniversary. What are you hoping to see?

For those who have been lovingly (and longingly) holding onto their old YoYo telephone device from the defunct Big Island Software, Parliant’s offer of a competitive upgrade might just pry it from your hands.

The YoYo was a great telephone interface for the Mac and PC and almost everyone who had one mourns its departure. For quite a while old units would get top dollar on eBay, but those times have passed, based on some recent sales.

I use PhoneValet, and I like its stability and quality, but it is missing some key YoYo features, unfortunately. On the other hand, it is a modern program, is updated frequently, and you can get support for it. Maybe it is time to let go of the past, eh?
Oh, and if you have one of several other telephony system you can get in on the upgrade rebate too.

Recently working on setting up a server, I investigated mod_rewrite to prevent easy hot-linking of a specific element and stumbled on a Safari/Firefox idiosyncrasy. It still has me worried I am nothing but a big dodo, though…

When WebDesktop arrived a couple of year ago I thought it was a cute idea. (I think it was also one of the first apps to take advantage of WebKit in an interesting way.) Now there’s a new version, and it’s still cute, but I’m quickly finding it useful for getting things done.

I use WebDesktop 2.5 to place my Tasks Jr.-based To Do list on the Desktop of my second monitor. This works out very well because you can’t accidentally close the window, which is too easy to do when using a regular web browser for both task management and surfing, and the To Do list remains visible all the time where it can silently nag you. (Or maybe mock you, depending on your perspective.) When you need to mark a task as completed, or add a new item, just Command-Tab to WebDesktop (or click its icon in the Dock) and the WebDesktop window becomes fully interactive. Switch to another app, and the task list is instantly back on your Desktop in full view, but again inactive. The new version of WebDesktop has only been out a short time, but so far this technique is working out very well for me.

• The Real Housewives of Orange County
  Bravo offers the first episode for free. Most reviews gave this one a thumbs down.
• Guillemots’ Trains to Brazil
  Single of the Week. Daughter Emma gave this a thumbs-sideways.
• Onion Radio News
  It’s the Onion. It’s explicit. It’s funny. Free daily broadcasts. Def thumbs up.
• WGBH Free Public Lectures
  In partnership with Boston’s leading cultural and academic institutions. Thumbs up.

OK, now I’ve heard everything. President Bush responded to an audience question (asked by Gayle Taylor at a speech in West Virginia yesterday) on how to get the media to do more reporting about the good news in Iraq.

His response? There’s blogs. There’s Internet. There’s all kinds of ways to communicate… As far as we can tell, this is the first time President Bush has used the “B” word. Pretty good for a guy who doesn’t even use email.

Mac mini Core duo running Microsoft Windows XP

A friend brought over a dual-booting Mac mini Pro Duo with 2GB RAM to show me. An Intel-based Mac running Microsoft Windows XP is not quite the sensation it might have been a couple of weeks ago. But, this was still the first time I saw a Mac mini Core Duo dual booting Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows XP and I have to admit I was impressed at the boot speed for both Mac OS X and Windows XP.

PVR software Myth now works with Macteltoshes: “Application successfully compiles. MythTV menu system displays, communicates with backend, and displays video. HD MPEG2 video can be played on a Core Duo 1.66GHz Mac Mini.”

You may have noticed that a week or so ago, Google announced yet another purchase - that of online word processor Writely. Then it promptly closed the service to new users, which was a bit of a disappointment if you wanted to find out what all the fuss was about.

Luckily for me, I had an existing Writely account, which means I could still log in and enjoy the service. So here’s a guided tour (biased somewhat in favor of Mac users because, well, that’s what I use).

Dropped by Costco on my way home tonight and noticed someone cabling a Mac mini to a shelf. If you want to get a Mac mini classic (G4) bundle, head to Costco. $700 gets you a mini, keyboard/mouse (wireless I think), and 3 year AppleCare.

The French Parliament has voted into law a requirement that online music services must limit DRM restrictions and allow customers some choice.

Under the new law, Apple would be forced to allow iTunes Music Store customers the right to play their songs on devices other than iPods and computers.

Apple’s choice would appear to be either abide by the law, and change its DRM in France; or close the French iTMS.

And that’s not all. The law includes all manner of new regulations for fair use of media, P2P file sharing, and much more. BoingBoing has detailed commentary.

Anyway, French law might be the least of Apple’s worries if Google starts a music store too.

Samsung announced a 1.8″ 32GB flash drive. The rumor is Apple will announce the Intel based iBook (or Macbook amateur :-) sometime around April 1 (their 30th anniversary). Although unlikely, it sure would be nice if the new iBook came in at 2 pounds (or less) with the 32GB flash drive and a 12 hour battery life.

A few days back, I offered to explain how I was using sockets to connect to Amazon’s S3 service. A few people expressed interest in the comments and via email. In order to simplify the example (since the S3 service involves a lot of authentication), I decided to start with an iTunes Music Store query. This has the advantage of a very simple header where you just substitute in a search phrase as needed. And of course, you can do it by hand without programming to start with.

More details, how-to, mumbling and source code over at engeek.

I’ve been playing with a MacBook Pro for a few days now (Apple have sent me one on loan for review purposes). So far, there are some things I like about it and some things that I really dislike. I thought I’d share both lists with you now. I’ll produce a more rounded review in a week or two.

Good stuff

Screen The MacBook Pro screen is lovely. Everything’s very bright, sharply defined and there’s no sign of any flaws. In some lighting, I think I can just make out a 1cm-high strip along the bottom that might be a little brighter than everything else, but to be honest my eyes don’t detect it most of the time.

Rosetta, concept and reality I recall people being very dismissive of Rosetta when it was first announced, saying real-time translation would never work, at least not in a productive way. In reality, Rosetta does a superb job of making PowerPC software usable, and its best feature is that it is completely invisible to the user. There’s no “environment” you are forced to work in, no hoops to jump through to get your software running. You just launch apps and they run, as simple as that. Sure, there are some apps that won’t work at all and some that are uncomfortably slow, but Rosetta as a whole is a masterstroke on Apple’s part, and is a key factor in making the architecture switch as smooth as possible.

Universal Binaries Rosetta aside, the surge of Universal Binaries being released by developers is nothing short of amazing. The speed with with which the development community has latched on to Universal Binaries, and with which developers have got them compiled and released, says it all. The majority of the apps I use day-to-day are already UB, if not they soon will be.

So, now you can put Windows XP on your Mac. But - do you really need to?

As our esteemed colleagues at TUAW point out: “it’s about games, plain and simple.”

If you really want to play Windows games on your Mac, I guess there might be some benefit from dual-booting the machine, but you should be aware that there might be hazards to deal with, such as self-cooking computers, not to mention blowing your warranty away.

I think the Joy of Tech strip sums everything up with this cartoon; is the time, effort and sweat involved in getting Windows working on your Mac actually worth it? Will you be able to do anything except celebrate, then wonder what to do next?

For those people for whom a working local version of Windows is vital, there’s always Q, a free Cocoa port of QEMU, the open source x86 emulator. Here’s an excellent how-to for emulator newbies. And if Q doesn’t appeal, hold on tight for future releases of Virtual PC. Running on processors it’s familiar with, Windows under a VPC Universal Binary ought to fly. Maybe even fast enough to play games on.

In OS X Tiger, when a picture file doesn’t have a proper Desktop thumbnail, I rename it. This makes the Finder update the file and add the thumbnail. Then I undo. The picture keeps the thumbnail but reverts to its original name.

If your Aperture library has become larger than what your hard drive can handle, I have two possible solutions. The first is to employ this mobile drive solution in combination with tapping the power of the Projects feature in Aperture.

The second possibility is to try Ben Long’s Aperture Library Spanner that allows you to span an Aperture library across multiple volumes.

Regardless of which method you try, always backup (or vault) your entire Aperture library on an independent drive first. You can’t be too careful with your pictures.

One teeny little thing that bugs me about BBEdit is the way that all new document windows open on the far left of the screen. While BBEdit’s preferences do allow a certain amount of control over the window size, there’s no built-in way to customize its position.

Off I went a-searching, and some digging around in the BBEdit-Talk mailing list archives unearthed the tip I needed.

Maarten Sneep wrote a script that re-sizes all new BBEdit windows to your chosen size and screen position. I like mine to be almost square and very nearly in the center of the screen, so the crucial co-ordinates line in my version reads as:

 set bounds of text window 1 to {273, 44, 891, 618} 

But as Maarten’s tip points out, you can use the Record function in Script Editor while re-sizing a BBEdit window to your taste, then simply use the co-ordinates that show up in the recorded script.

AOL’s In2TV launched this week. It’s a free classic TV video-on-demand service monetized by in-video advertising. Shows include Wonder Woman, Welcome Back Kotter, F-Troop and La Femme Nikita among others. Unsuprisingly, it does not do Mac. In2TV requires Windows-XP and Windows Media Player 10.

In2TV provides advertisers with compelling video inventory for instream broadband advertising as well as opportunities for sponsorships and accompanying banner ads. Video ads, 15-second and 30-second spots, will be limited to a total of 1-2 minutes within each 30-minute episode as compared to 8 minutes of advertising on broadcast television.

Is it me or does this model sound incredibly backward looking? Why not skip the DRM, skip the 15- and 30-second spots, skip the banner ads and release the shows direct to Bittorrent? Why not use video bugs (translucent on-screen watermarks) to promote the advertisers’ brands? AOL could reach a broader audience, build a greater and more positive brand awareness, and generate a huge amount of goodwill.

AOL would win. Their advertisers would win. The viewer would win. And Mac users would not be left out in the cold. Could someone explain what am I missing here?

Today, the US Patent Office launched a new electronic patent-filing system. Wonder of wonders, it supports, even encourages, Mac OS X use according to Yahoo News. This is a big step forward for the US Government which usually restricts online support to Windows.

“The great news for Apple is that USPTO listened to its customers and integrated Mac OS X and Safari support into its new e-filing system,” Susan Prescott Apple’s vice president of Pro Markets, told Macworld. “Innovators around the world use Macs.”

• /usr/bin/say Speak the arguments out loud, e.g. % say hello world
• /sbin/md5 Calculates a message digest checksum for a file, e.g. % md5 foo.gif
• /usr/bin/cpan Grab and install CPAN module. e.g. % sudo -H cpan -i LWP::Protocol
• /usr/bin/xmllint. Test XML file integrity, pretty print and more. e.g. % xmllint –format foo.xml

Hot on the heels of an update to Phlink, the other Mac-based telephone control software releases its next major version. Parliant’s PhoneValet 4 adds several new features including automatic call recording and archive, with a web-interface to your archives for easily location and playback of any call, and other updates, including Universal Binary format.

If you haven’t purchased PhoneValet yet, you’ll be pleased to know that price has now dropped to $170. PhoneValet 3 owners can upgrade for free, earlier versions can be upgraded for $30 per line.

You’ve probably heard about S3. It’s Amazon’s new storage service that debuted just a couple of days ago. Developers can store data of any kind, up to 5GB per chunk, and retrieve it at will. (The 5GB limit is just for a single file. You can store as much data as you want.) The idea is to provide flexible and reliable data storage using the same scalable model already seen with other Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as the Simple Queue Service, Mechanical Turk and Alexa Web Search. Amazon, in short, is building the backbone for a new kind of Web.

Andy Budd has a nice article about smart iTunes playlists that hit Digg this morning. I enjoyed reading it as well as the comments, and thought I’d share.

Following up on a post I made here last year (Open Source Mac Gaming), I wanted to spotlight a couple of other titles — ones that hearken back to the earliest days of video gaming. Back when we paid the arcade owner with salt pork and chickens instead of quarters, and you had to hand-crank the machines like a Mutoscope movie.

Current highlights include:

• Top Chef
  The entire first episode from the new Bravo Series. Seems like a snoozer after the excitement of the whole Project Runway/Santino drama it replaces.
• I Can’t Love You Anymore by Gary Nichols
  Country influenced. My daughter Emma gives it 4 stars out of 5.
• Munich by Editors
  Definately a thumbs down (1 out of 5 stars) from Emma. I thought it was okay, but not something I’m going to listen to much.
• You bet Your Life
  Shhhh! The secret word is Air. Original Groucho Marx recording.
• NCAA 2006 Final Four
  Watch the March Madness Preview Show and get ready for the NCAA Tournament.

Scientists and academics who use Mac OS X are being asked to take part in a short survey of their opinions about the transition to Intel processors.

The team at Macresearch.org want to gather together opinions about the Intel switch from the Mac-using science community, prior to a forthcoming meeting with “some top Apple engineers” in Cupertino, during which they will have the chance to pass on thoughts, concerns and questions from real users.

So they have created a short survey which asks, among other things, which apps users think ought to be ported to the new architecture, whether 64-bit support matters, and so on.

Asked where Macs are commonly found, most people would probably say “Publishing, audio/visual work, and schools.” But Macs have been widely used in science for a long time now, and usage has only increased since the switch to Unix-based OS X. Just spend five minutes looking around and you can find dozens of online resources for Mac-using scienctists: OS X for Oceanographers and Atmospheric scientists, OS X for physicists, and Scientific computing using OS X. These days, there’s also an impressive collection of science widgets available.

Yesterday, I posted about the first iTunes Music Store full-length video, priced at a very reasonable $1.99. By yesterday evening, the video was gone. The item was no longer for sale in the US iTunes Music Store. By this morning it was back, this time priced at $9.99.

Pricing mistake? Probably was. But the new price point seems steep, particularly for a free-to-cable show that’s going to air again on March 23rd. I think somewhere in the $3.99-$5.99 range might have been more reasonable, particularly if you go with a “one hour of TV equals about $1.99″ formula. Ten bucks is about what I’d expect to pay for this at Walmart discounted from, say, $14.99 for a much higher-quality DVD version. For a low-resolution iPod-specific edition? I think they set the price a little high.

What do you think? Is ten bucks the right price point for TV feature movies? What about for more traditional Hollywood fare? How much would you pay for The Incredibles? Or Crash?

Windows XP supposedly booting on a Macinteltosh. What do you think? Real deal or hoax?

Scott Morrison has released version 1.2 of his ingenious MailTags add-on for Apple Mail.

The most exciting new feature is one that allows you to create items for your iCal To Do list from inside Mail. Any changes you make to them later in iCal will automatically be reflected inside MailTags too. You can even use the iCal links to create new Smart Folder criteria, so you could create a Smart Folder of messages that have a To Do item which has not yet been done. This is smart stuff.

The app is now a Universal Binary, too. There’s a host of bug fixes and code tweaks. Sadly there’s still no support for IMAP accounts, but Scott is working on that for the next release.

Considering the amount of work he’s put into it to date, MailTags and it’s companion, Mail Act-On, are remarkable examples of free software, though Scott welcomes donations from people who want to support future efforts.

Just in case you were thinking that perhaps Google ought to stop spending so much money, it has purchased @Last Software, makers of everyone’s favorite 3D design application, SketchUp.

It seems a little odd, coming only a few days after the purchase of Writely, which itself made a lot of sense as part of Google’s unannounced-but-everyone-thinks-they-know-about-it plan for a browser-based productivity suite to compete directly with MS Office.

Odd because SketchUp is not the kind of app you could remodel to work in a browser. So if it’s not a part of the Google Office suite, why else is Google so keen to own it?

Microsoft released an Office 2004 for Mac update today: Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.2.3 Update. The key changes are: Spotlight support for Entourage 2004, Sync Services integration for Entourage 2004, and enhanced Smart Card support for Entourage 2004.

At the January Macworld Expo, Ovolab was demonstrating the forthcoming version of their telephone automation product, Phlink. The new update is now shipping and is available for previous owners for $40. This version adds call recording and EyeTV control and more. Read my previous post here, and visit the Ovolab website.

Disney’s High School Musical is perhaps best known for how well its soundtrack sold and where many of the sales came from–the iTunes Music Store. Quoting IndyStar:

Since its Jan. 20 premiere on the Disney Channel, the movie and its four reruns have attracted more than 24 million viewers, Disney said, and the soundtrack, on Walt Disney Records, has raised eyebrows in the music industry for an unusual double play: reaching the Top 10 on the Billboard album chart with virtually no radio support, and making a remarkable 45 percent of its sales online, through Apple’s iTunes Music Store…”Surprised? No,” said Gary Marsh, the president for entertainment of Disney Channel Worldwide. “Thrilled? Absolutely.”

So it’s equally unsurprising that High School Musical has become the store’s first full-length video for sale. Priced at just $1.99, Apple and Disney may see it more as a long TV show than a movie feature. Its release was cheered a lot of teens and tweens. One wrote:

“i stayed up till 12 am to finally buy it !!!!!!!!! YAY!!! imma watch it right now, it is now 12:04!!!!!!!!”

(I may have skipped a few exclamation points while transcribing this. Please forgive me if the counts are not quite accurate.) Sites like ThinkSecret report that Apple has been wooing Movie Industry partners to offer movies-on-demand.

The comments on Derrick’s “What are your MacBook Pro impressions” post from a few days ago have been broadly positive, but there are one or mentions of the “whine” some units are emitting.

Elsewhere, such as Macintouch and MacFixIt, there are a great many reports of strange hissing and whining sounds from the MacBook Pro. The cause has been hard to pin down - some say changing the screen brightness makes a difference, others that running a processor-intensive app like Photobooth makes a difference.

This last tip got Daniel Jalkut thinking. If the problem was cured by running Photobooth, maybe the whine was caused by one of the Core Duo processors getting bored with nothing to do?

So he wrote a short script to put spare processing power to work doing some meaningless mathematics when no real applications are using it. With a certain amount of experimenting, he worked out that he needed to use up 8% of CPU to get rid of the annoying whine.

Are you troubled by MacBook whining? If you’ve tried out Daniel’s script, or cooked up a solution of your own, do post a comment about your experience.

It’s been a long evening.

A few days ago, the trackpad on my PowerBook started going crazy. When I touched it to move the pointer around, nothing happened. When I took my fingers off and left it alone, the pointer jumped around the screen like an over-excited flea.

It turns out I’m not the first to see this behavior. A quick trawl around Macintouch reveals a lengthy page of similar experiences, with several possible explanations for the cause.

One is a build-up of static electricity, which has got me wondering. Just this week we completed a major building project in our home, which included a lot of electrical work. The house is now better earthed than it has been for years, and we have a fresh layer of statically-charged laminate flooring too. Consequently I’ve been getting little static shocks from all sorts of surfaces, including the kitchen sink.

Aside from suggesting that perhaps I should consult my electrician, it’s also got me wondering about the dodgy trackpad. Did it get over-staticked, and go into crazy mode? Hard to say. My long evening was spent cloning the PowerBook to my Mac mini test machine, wiping and re-installing OS X on the PowerBook, then restoring all my data from the Mac mini again. So far, things seem to be slightly improved - the jumping pointer has only made one brief appearance since the reinstall. I’m now downloading the 10.4.5 update and I shall have to wait and see if that makes any difference, good or bad.

Les Français announced today they were working on a law to open the iTunes music store to non-iPod players. Parliament member Christian Vanneste[1] wants to legalize DRM-defeating measures to enable content conversion between formats.

Late last week, Mac DevCenter Blog’s feeds went a little screwy. Mea culpa. I used an uppercase closing tag to match a lowercase opening tag.

Some feeds (in particular Atom 1.0) depend on valid xhtml so news readers will parse them correctly. Unfortunately MT does have any kind of HTML fixer/checker. So I ask our readers will the OS X command line xmllint –html work properly and consistently as a validator to help this problem?

In my recent iTunes Music Store post, I wrote that “I can record shows off my TiVo and transfer them onto my iPod”. Reader Randal L. Schwartz responded, “Yeah sure, brag won’t ya. That requires either a series 1 TiVo that has been hacked (I have a series 2), or a windows box (which I’ll never own).”

Actually Randal, all it requires is a digital camcorder like the kind you use with iMovie or an Analog/Digital video bridge such as the Canopus ADVC or Miglia’s Directors Cut. Many digital camcorders allow you to connect to an external video source and connect that video signal via Firewire to a computer. It’s called digital pass-through. If you can hook up your video signal across an analog-digital converter, you can record your shows to an iPod-compatible format in real time using QuickTime Pro. You don’t need an hacked TiVo and you don’t need a Windows box.

I wrote up a quick how-to over at my engeek website.

iWeb, like any new Apple app these days, is generating lots of conversation. I’ve been following the comments in Giles Turnbull’s article, Mac OS X Website Builder Face-Off, and have read things such as, “iWeb=puke” and “iWeb is a joke.”

I decided to do my own testing of Apple’s consumer web tool. One of my websites was in dire need of a facelift. Why not use iWeb to build a real site, post it on the Web, and let people decide for themselves? So that’s what I did. Here are the details.

If you ever find yourself wondering what kind of person it was that, back in the 1970s, thought it would be incredibly cool to create a home computer - one that ordinary people could use, not just megacorporations and academics - then you should take 90 minutes out to watch An Evening with Steve Wozniak, now available over at Google Video.

One of the most popular projects in Smart Home Hacks, judging from my email, is Hack #41 Control Your Heat Remotely. It describes how to replace your existing HVAC thermostat with one that can be controlled via X10 either locally, or by calling in and issuing touch-tone commands. The latter approach is quite useful if you have a vacation home; you can turn on the heat (or air conditioning) from your cell phone before you arrive so it’s nice and cozy when you get there.

About two months ago, when I realized that the thermostat in my home needed to be replaced, I was tempted to buy one of the thermostats that’s used in that hack. It’s seemingly right up my alley, but I decided to take a different approach. I went with a modern, but non-automatable thermostat. I know, I was surprised by my decision too.

I hope they don’t throw me out of the Home Automation Geek Society for this, but here’s the deal. An automated thermostat wasn’t right for me. Here’s why:

My scheduling needs are simple. Somebody is usually at home (both my wife and work at home) so changing the temperature to an “unoccupied” setting doesn’t happen too often. Too bad, that’s a great way to save money and easily handled by a home automation system, but I don’t need that capability.

My home automation setup is volatile. I frequently try out new devices and home automation software so my system is in a lot of flux, and sometimes not working at all. I was nervous about maintaining reliable HVAC control in this kind of environment and didn’t want to put my system’s S.A.F. rating at risk. (That’s Spousal Approval Factor; a key element for success.)

I didn’t have time. While the winter thus far in Chicago has been mild (at least for Chicago), it has revealed a bad flaw in our home’s HVAC system. And I needed a replacement that I could install quickly. We’re at home a lot, remember, and cold fingers makes for slow typing.

What was wrong with our old thermostat, you ask? It actually worked fine but was installed in a horribly inefficient location. It took me months to figure this out, but I think there were a couple of factors that hid the problem.

We moved in last Spring, and a lack of cooling is much harder to identify than a lack of proper heating. When our air conditioning ran constantly we were willing to chalk it up to those infamous hot-n-humid midwestern summers. Also, since we live in what used to be an old factory, we expected some air circulation issues. So, we assumed, that while we might have an underpowered air conditioner, it was more likely just the way things were.

But two things happened in the intervening months that caused me to suspect that there was something wrong. First, the weather got cold and our discomfort was more frequent, and more importantly, we renovated our kitchen and added an eat-in dining area. This meant we were spending significantly more time in that part of the house. And whenever we had the kitchen lights on, it got cold.

The kitchen? The lights on?! What in the world? Well, it turns out that the thermostat is mounted directly above the dimmer switch for the kitchen lights. Dimmers work by constricting the flow of current to the lights and the excess energy is released as heat. Which is a problem when the thermostat is just an inch above the switch. The heat from the dimmer rises and makes the thermostat think the room is 10 or 12 degree warmer than it really is. Yikes!

Here’s a picture of the old thermostat. If you put your fingers on the wall just above the switch you could actually feel the heat. If you look closely, you’ll see the thermostat reads 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Actual room temperature at the time was 68F.

So, to jump to the happy ending, I decided to replace the old-school thermostat with a Totaline Wireless Thermostat System. The primary reason for selecting this model is that the wall-mounted portion is only a signal transceiver, the thermometer is in a battery-powered remote control that you can move from room to room. Now the hot wall doesn’t interfere at all, and we’ve gained the advantage of taking the remote unit with us as we move about the house. This means that the HVAC system is responding to the temperature of the room where we are, not some fixed point in the house. A very nice solution for open-loft living. It’s especially nice at night when the temperature in the bedroom is the only area we care about. Also nice is the ability to turn up the heat a bit just after waking up, and before leaving the comfort of bed.

Installing the new system was easy, it was a wire-for-wire replacement with my old unit. (The only stumbling block was the funky wiring terminals; if you get one of these remember that you connect the wires to the side of the terminals, not the tops.) I sometimes wish that the remote unit were more fashionably designed, it’s a square box about the size of a dish sponge, but on the other hand it is easy to find when you want to adjust the settings.

So, I’m a happy (and warmer) camper, and it’s not a very fancy solution, so perhaps there is a lesson for me in all this. However, that won’t stop me from coveting this thermostat, with a built-in web server, I just can’t help myself. Maybe next time.

Yeah sure, I can record shows off my TiVo and transfer them onto my iPod but it’s a pain, frankly. Converting the files to mp4. Loading them into iTunes. Synchronizing. That’s why my intentions are so much better than my follow-through. So I was thrilled this evening to discover that the iTunes Music Store started stocking episodes of Dora the Explorer.

Are you familiar with the show? I am. It’s an interminably dull program with a saccharine sweet star and an especially annoying resident villain whose main villainy seems to involve theft-by-taking and saying “Oh man” a lot.

My three-year-old son adores this show.

“Dora,” he begs, “Dora, Dora, Dora”.

Until now in three-year-old terms, my iPod has hosted Maisy the Mouse and the Wiggles. I just haven’t had the time or energy to indulge his new Dora passion. I’ve meant to. Just haven’t gotten around to it.

So instead, I plunked a couple of episodes into my cart and bought them. An hour’s worth of kid TV for four bucks.

I figure that in the end time-wise and money-wise I’m the winner. I got some new content to distract him when I need to do adult things on the go and I spent the download/convert/load time playing bouncy ball with him instead.

I think it’s a bargain.

When working on documents, I sometimes need to print many revisions and pass them around for team members to see. Only I often don’t want my clients to see these documents that may contain typos, inaccuracies or editorial comments. Now, I trust my team so leaking is not something I need to guard against at this level — at least reasonably. Human errors are what I’m most concerned about. Here is how I solved the problem.

Today Saturday is a good day to relax, switch from enriched sodas to caffeine-free Soba-Cha and, generally speaking, chase these week days daemons away. What if it also were a time to brush up on computer environment ergonomics?

Those of you who have been following my blog for any time at all have probably noticed that I tend to write mainly about programming languages, with a recent concentration on Lisp. I love programming languages, I think that goes without saying–although, I’ve just said it anyway–and I tend to like dynamic (or agile) languages that allow me to concentrate on the problem I want to solve rather than the intricacies of things like variable typing and memory management. For these reasons I have tended to use Python for most of my non-work-related work (or hobbyist type work and school) and I have recently been learning, using, and enjoying Lisp as an alternative. In fact, many times I have found myself falling back on Lisp when I’ve run into a problem using Python rather than the other way around. It is this new found love for Lisp that has got me wondering what other functional programming languages are out there. In my searches I have come across two candidates for the language I am hoping to learn next–OCaml and Haskell.

I first started playing around with Haskell, mainly because it is the only truly pure functional language that I know of and I really liked some of its features, such as pattern matching and curried functions, but after trying to wrap my brain around it (so far, not completely successfully), I am finding that it’s hard to do everything I want to do with Haskell. Plus, it has been slow in a few areas (probably mostly due to my ineptitude, but still, I’ve been holding out for that holy grail of a language that lets me use recursion significantly in my code with almost no performance hits). All of this led me to look into OCaml. OCaml seems to me like a gentle introduction to Haskell. It has some of the same features, but also includes support for more familiar programming paradigms (i.e., imperative and OO). Also, OCaml seems to knock the socks off of just about any other language outside of C when it comes to performance comparisons–a very good thing since much of my school work/research makes use of some extremely time consuming code.

All in all, both languages seem to have several advantages/disadvantages that make me look at each for a few days and then go running back to the other looking for solace. I prefer Haskell’s syntax to OCaml’s and I love that Haskell is purely functional, but I am finding that the purely functional aspects are making it tough to do certain things (e.g., quite a few of the algorithms in my Bioinformatics class use Dynamic Programming. I have no idea how this would be done in Haskell and I’ve tried the recursive way of doing things and it is just way too slow). I also hate that I can’t declare a function in Hugs or GHC’s interactive shell without doing some really kludgy tricks.

As for OCaml, I do like that I can use imperative features, this would make OCaml a better candidate for everyday use since I could more easily use it for scripting and quick tasks. It seems to have a larger set of libraries as well. All of this would seem to point to OCaml as the better choice for a language I could use for more than just academic tasks. However, I still have gripes with OCaml as well–namely, syntax. I much prefer the syntax of Haskell to OCaml. I like Haskell’s pattern matching syntax more than OCaml’s, I absolutely hate the double semi-colon (;;) that is used as an end-of-line marker, and I don’t particularly like that I have to explicitly state that a function is recursive in OCaml.

All of that said, we get to real point of this post. Basically, I really want to learn another language that moves me even more into the functional programming paradigm. I’ve enjoyed what Lisp has to offer and it has made me much more appreciative of the power of the functional paradigm, but, frankly, I find myself wanting even more. Because of this desire, I am asking you–my readers, wanderers, visitor’s–regardless of how it is you have happened by this blog post, I am leaving it up to you to point out to me the benefits and deficiencies of each of these languages. I am hoping that after reading each of your comments that I will have a clearer picture of the purpose of each of these two languages and I can go about making my choice for the next programming language I am going to learn. So, please, if you have had any experience in either language–good or bad–make a comment below and give me the insight I need to make the best choice for my next language.

Thank you all very much in advance for your comments–they are, as always, very much appreciated.

There are days when my PowerBook feels more like an email terminal than a full-fledged computer. I can’t believe how much email I have to deal with. I’ve been looking at backup solutions to help relieve some pressure from Mail.app, and my latest candidate is MailSteward.

This SQLite database isn’t the prettiest Mac app I’ve ever used, but it does tackle the challenge of storing all of my mail and attachments. It works with all locally-stored POP, .Mac, and IMAP email accounts.

I haven’t purchased the $30 app yet — still trying it in demo mode. Some of the things I like about it are its ability to sort and organize mail by various criteria, then printing, saving, deleting, or exporting these results.

I’m using an external LaCie mobile drive to store my database. Again no real problems so far. But ultimately, what I would like to do is move data out of my Mail.app and into a backup database such as MailSteward. Is anyone doing this now, and if so, what are your experiences?

According to tech news site Inquirer.net, Microsoft won’t support EFI booting for Windows Vista. No EFI booting means no dual-boot OS X/Vista Macteltoshes.

Speaking at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Microsoft development manager, Andrew Ritz said that the same will apply for those wanting to support for booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit processors…[The] main reason dumping the EFI booting was because there was it wanted to drive a move to 64-bit computing, Ritz said.

Of the various several portable devices that I regularly hook up to my TV using a standard 1/8th-inch to RCA cable, only the iPod uses a non-standard output configuration. It produces a video signal through what is normally the right audio channel. A few months ago on MacDevCenter, I wrote about connecting Video iPods to a television set by swapping around the RCA connectors. While this works perfectly well, it’s a pain to reach behind the set and switch connectors every time I want to watch iPod video on the TV. So I built a converter cable instead.

This article describes the parts I used and the steps I took to put together this cable. From beginning to end, the project took about twenty minutes to construct and test. It cost about $4. It’s slightly more if you count in the shipping and handling from parts supplier Mouser, even divided as it was among several projects. It’s less if you’ve got a spare USB cable lying around the house.

Want to build this yourself? Make sure you’re reasonably confident at wire-stripping and soldering. Those are really the only two skills involved.

Now that a steady flow of MacBook Pros are hitting the streets, I’m curious about what users’ first impressions are. I’m sure there are many like me who are wildly interesting in investing in one, but who aren’t sure yet how Apple’s latest laptop plays out in everyday use.

So far, I’ve heard comments such as, “Boots faster than any Mac I’ve every had,” “UB applications do run faster, noticeably,” “It’s very quiet,” and “The new power adapter is really cool.” This is encouraging news. But I’m also wondering about the lack of a traditional PCMCIA slot, battery life, WiFi sensitivity, case heat, etc.

Since many other forum posts run contrary to my own experiences (and comments to my blog seem more inline), I’d like to hear from MacBook Pro owners in the Mac DevCenter community. Tell me… what do you think?

Reader Mike Dred posted a link to an article he wrote about why your iPod video cable might not work. iPod skins topped his list, preventing cables from seating properly in their jacks:

By removing the iSkin from the proximity of the iPod Headphone jack the demons were gone and I was watching great quality podcasts and movies on a giant screen from my iPod with good audio.

Other problems include using defective cables, forgetting to set TV Out to On, using the wrong system for your TV (NTSC for North America, PAL for Europe and Australia), and mis-setting the Widescreen option. Follow the link and read it all.

Proof that iPods are indispensible safety equipment:

[She] was wearing only jogging clothes and went unidentified in the hospital for hours until investigators checked out the iPod she was carrying. Using the serial number, traced who it was registered to…Detective Tony Depalma, U.S. Park Police: “First time, I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about iPod’s but we know more about them now and it was actually very useful.”

Via Digg.

My recent blog entry regarding BBEdit and TextMate was the cause of much correspondence with users of both applications. While I had posted this little piece in a desire to appease a “battle of the editors” that seemed to me of little interest, I have been most surprised to find both my personal inbox and the blog’s comments filled with replies, both positive and negative. In fact, I expected so little reaction from this article that I posted it at the end of a day in France, unlike some that I know need to be written early so as to “get ready” for the comments - yes, I still do make it a point to read everything and, if at all possible, reply to everything my esteemed readers send me.

iPhoto 6.0.1 (correction: 6.0.2) has refined its ability to publish images in your library via RSS. And it works great — in some ways almost too well. You need to be aware of the resolution you’re sending out to control bandwidth requirements and how your images can be used.

When you enable an album for photocasting (highlight the album >Share > Photocast), you have the option of setting the image resolution you’re sending out: small, medium, large, and original size. I tested these settings with a pictures I captured with a Canon Digital Rebel XT DSLR (8.2 MP) and a Casio EX P505 digicam (5MP). The original resolution for the Canon was 3456×2304 and 2560×1920 for the Casio. When I chose the “small” option, the image iPhoto served was 639×426 (Casio 640×480). “Medium” sent out 1279×853 (Casio 1280×960), “large” syndicated 1920×1280 (Casio 1920×1440), and “original” was as expected, 3456×2304 and 2560×1920 respectively. The output differences between the Digital Rebel and the Casio are because the Rebel captures images that are more rectangular than typical compact cameras.

If the goal of your syndication is for online viewing only, I recommend that you keep the image resolution at “small.” Your recipients will need less bandwidth, and you don’t have to worry about folks making high quality prints from your work. If you do want to enable printing, however, the “medium” output setting enables folks to make a photo-quality 5×7 print, and “large” can produce a very nice 8×10 print. The “original” output is of course dependent on the resolution of your camera.

I think for friends and family sharing, the “medium” setting is all most folks would need. This is a nice compromise between reasonable bandwidth requirements (200-500kb per image) and decent printing resolution. If you want to speed things up however, the “small” output is a svelte 70-150kb per shot.

(Compare and contrast with Learning to live with Thunderbird.)

When I actually stopped to think carefully about it, I couldn’t remember what good reason I had to stop using Eudora in the first place.

I think it was the attraction of Mail in Tiger, and the thought that I might be able to make use of Spotlight searching and Smart Folders. So I left Eudora behind and switched to Mail, but that was really the beginning of months of problems. Mail has so many nice features but slowed me down too much. Then I tried Thunderbird, which lacks some of the same slickness but was more dependable.

But even Thunderbird kept slowing down. When it slowed down once too often for me, I went and downloaded the most recent version of Eudora, installed it and set it up, and was back inside its familiar interface within 30 minutes. And I found that I should never have left it behind.

Idol season is surely upon us. And I have received many letters begging me to reveal how to make copies of YouTube videos. Ace and Taylor, whoever you are, you are greatly admired by a large segment of female America. For these folks and for anyone else who’s wondered how to archive YouTube video, here’s the answer. Follow this quick step-by-step process for retrieving YouTube content to display on your Mac or iPod.

Lots of Digg interest about the iPod AV over the weekend: a MacShrine article (taken down after “Apple Legal sent a DCMA to our hosts who then suspended us for most of the morning”) and a Gizmodo video purporting to show the next entry into the iPod market. In a nutshell, these show a rectangular 4-ish-inch screen with a virtual scroll wheel, and a standard docking port on one of the short edges.

Assuming these leaks are not faked, I’m not sure how much I like (or dislike) the idea of on-screen virtual scrollwheel manipulation, especially given how easily my 5G scratches and picks up fingerprints. Also I think I’d miss the wonderful tactile response of the real scrollwheel.

If you want to take a look, you’ll find mirror links to the original pictures at Digg.

There was an interesting thread over on the Macintel mailing list last week, in which members discussed the presence, or lack of, a word processor on the latest line of Mac computers.

The point was made that other than TextEdit, there’s no supplied word processor on a new Intel Mac. You do get trial versions of Office:mac and iWork, but if you want to keep them, you need to pay more. Appleworks, while still available for download if you want to pay the money for it, is no longer one of the bundled applications.

So the question was: should Apple be doing this? Is TextEdit enough? I’m inclined to think that it is, but I’m interested to hear what Mac Devcenter readers think.

TextEdit is very basic as far as word processors go, but for the majority of simple tasks done by the majority of consumer-level users, it is sufficient. With TextEdit you can write letters, novels, school papers, ReadMe files, lists; most stuff that most people need, most of the time. And thanks to the OS X smarts, exporting to PDF is a neat little feature that even owners of Word on Windows have to pay extra for.

As we have seen with recent product releases from Apple, its policy these days is to provide decent basics and charge for the extras. Just as modems have become an optional extra now, so has a full-feature word processor. Apple’s basic offering is TextEdit and for most people, it will do the job just fine. If you want something with more oomph, you can pay for iWork and use Pages.

Right now, NeoOffice does not run on Intel Macs, but it seems there are recent builds of OpenOffice.org that do that do. I’m not sure of the current status of AbiWord, it’s been a long time since I used it. Nisus Writer Express is now a Universal Binary, and apparently Mellel’s next release will be one too.

I am often asked which application, of TextMate and BBEdit is “best”. My heart incontestably goes to BBEdit but, truth is, both are good. Here is why we should stop fighting over it.

I just finished reading Who’s Paying for Podcasts and thought this would be a good time to share a few thoughts from my podcast experiences. I’ve posted more than 20 shows on The Digital Story, and have 11 reviews on iTMS. Listener feedback through comments on the site, email, and reviews has made this a worthwhile endeavor. But it also takes discipline. Here are a few things I’ve learned as a podcaster.

British geek, broadcaster and Mac user Jonathan Sanderson makes a very good point: why is https://www.apple.com/macintosh a 404?

When Steve Jobs announced the MacBook Pro, he said that Apple was “done with Power” and wanted its computers to have the word “Mac” in their name.

Granted, it’s been a long time since any of Apple’s machines were called “Macintosh,” and most regular Mac users will know that. But the vast majority of non-users (ie, potential customers) don’t. I’ve been asked many times why I use a “Macintosh” - the branding from the mid-1980s was so strong that it still has a hold on people’s minds today.

All of which makes me think that the very least Apple’s webdudes could do is point apple.com/macintosh to, say, apple.com/hardware…

A few days ago, all my disk images, including my backups stopped mounting… flat. Once double-clicked, hdiutil complained about an authentication error and refused to go any further. Had I been bitten by the ghost of the FileVault bug? Nope, luckily!

The great leveler when traveling is the moment we all have to reveal our laptops while going through airport security. Over the years, I’ve been using this annoying ritual as anecdotal research for the types of computers business travelers are really using.

Sometimes the data is skewed, such as when traveling to a Mac conference. Seems likely that I would see more PowerBooks than usual in that situation. But my recent trip to Orlando for PMA was a fair test. This show is for retailers, marketers, photographers, enthusiasts, and guys in suits (who I have no idea what they do). In other words, this is a very diverse crowd.

What I noticed going out and returning home is a higher proportion of sleek Apple laptops in those dull gray plastic trays at security checkpoints. It used to be all black Dells, Toshibas, HPs, IBMs, and various other Windows machines. The trend is changing. Seems as though I’m seeing a much higher ration of aluminum laptops scooting through X-ray machines these days.

Oh, and by the way, my order of putting things through the machine: shoes first, carry on bag second, laptop last. I don’t go through the metal detector until my laptop goes into the X-ray machine, and I’m usually on the other side as it makes it way out behind my other items.

Just a few more thoughts this morning about the new MacBook Pro:

The first major gaping hole in my day to day workflow was exposed when it was revealed that Apple Remote Desktop Admin doesn’t work on the new MacBook Pro. The app launches, then fails. Supposedly a 2.2.1 is coming that will be Intel compatible, but until it does, I’m short a serious part of my server admin workflow. If ARD is a requirement for your computing life (and there are a few of you out there, many of you early adopters), please consider waiting until detailed plans are announced. I was pleasantly surprised to see that all of the Server Tools have made Universal Binary, though.

Battery life appears to be 3.25 working hours after a full charge. I began to “unplugged” around 9:40 this morning and two and a half hours later, my battery charge is 23%, just barely into the red, or 45 minutes.

I continue to be impressed and amazed by stupid little things like restart time. Elapsed time from selecting Restart, with six applications open, to rebooted, with those same six apps open was approximately 3 minutes, 3 seconds, or roughly half of what it was on my old PowerBook G4 (5 minutes, 30 seconds).

What are you finding out about your MacBook?

I’ve pulled together a smattering of various posts about the PMA show in Orlando, FL. One of the more recent explorations was a first look at the $79 huey screen calibration tool by gretagmacbeth. I’m going to take one more tour of the trade show floor today. Will let you know if I find anything cool and interesting.

It came up in the discussion of this previous post that the new Intel Mac mini is not exactly perfect as a personal video recording device (PVR). It lacks any “Just Works” PVR software, and doesn’t sport enough hard disk space to store much video.

Given the muted response to yesterday’s announcements, perhaps the most interesting news from the event is actually the new features in Front Row. Now it supports shared media from other Macs on the network via Bonjour, it doesn’t matter where your video, music and other files are. As long as they’re shared, the mini plugged into your TV can find them and display them.

Here’s my theory: that PVR software you’re missing? It’s Front Row. Or at least, that’s what Front Row is evolving towards.

Here’s a nice one for anyone with a Backpack account and a Mac. PackRat is an offline data viewer that syncs with your Backpack account using the API.

It makes a pretty good job of displaying all your Backpack data just the way Backpack does, so your information looks the same when you’re offline as it does when you’re online.

I have a feeling that we’re going to see many more applications like this in coming months, as webapps get more popular and gain more users. Most of the smartest webapps (like Gmail, and everything 37signals is working on) are fantastic tools but being offline kind of puts a spanner in the works.

What these webapps need are simple-functionality desktop equivalents that allow you to at least view your data, better still edit it too, and then automagically sync themselves with the online version the next time you’re connected. I’d be astounded if Google wasn’t working on something like this for Gmail users.

In the meantime, Backpack users can get ahead of the curve by trying out PackRat. A licence costs $25, not much more than one month’s Backpacking. If you’re increasingly getting frustrated with offline time, it might just be the solution you’ve been looking for.