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Behold. Apple TV using a composite monitor. Thanks to KFM82, who suggested that connecting a standard RCA cable between a TV and one of the three component jacks would produce a monochrome image on a regular composite TV. It did. Not great for TV watching, but excellent for testing out an Apple TV box during modding.
I’m running out for the weekend, so I have to make this short. Sorry! Earlier, I crashed my Apple TV. (You know, blue screen of death, but Apple style, so there’s a nice Apple logo to look at).
When this happens, you need to run Finder to reboot and restart properly. But I’d swapped Finder out with QuickTime. So I had to take my hard drive back to my mini, switch Finder back to itself, put the drive back into AppleTV and then go through the whole “Select Language”, “Can you see the Apple Logo 720 p” routine. Once this was done, I was able to ssh over to my baby, kill ripstop, dekext Watchdog, and put QuickTime back as my Finder.
Summary: Apple didn’t kill my Apple TV. I’m guessing I did it myself with my relentless testing of software and plug-ins. If you mess up, make sure Finder is available for your reboot. Hopefully soon, someone will come up with a USB flash drive fix that doesn’t require anyone to move hard drives around physically.
Unfortunately, last week Napster changed its download system making it International-unfriendly. So no more International Friday Freebies for the time being.
Apple has just released the 1.2 public beta version of Boot Camp, which will now support booting up into Windows Vista. The new version also includes updated drivers for trackpads, graphics, audio, and iSight cameras, and a new Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp info.
I’ve heard some mixed reports about how well Vista runs under Boot Camp. If you are using Boot Camp 1.2 with Vista, I’d love to hear about your experience so far. Is Vista humming or crawling?
Drop a line in the comments section and let us know how it’s working for you.
CLIX
The text command line is usually under-appreciated. Even Microsoft recognized it and introduced PowerShell for Windows XP and Vista. However, unless you spent the last decade or more on a UNIX or Linux box (lots of fun, btw), you may not feel comfortable opening Terminal on a Mac to make use of all the power of the command line. Rixstep has a free tool to help you reduce your anxiety and start using the command line with…
CLIX
PhotoInfoEditor
MMI Software’s PhotoInfoEditor is a Mac OS X freeware metadata editor that can edit meta-data (latitude and longitude, location, description, and notes) of photo (JPEG/RAW/Tiff) files. FYI: MMI Software has a regularly updated blog where you can pick up useful information about PhotoInfoEditor as well as their other products.
YALE: IDE for Machine Learning and Data Mining
YALE (Yet Another Learning Environment) is a multi-platform Open Source application that provides a graphical interface for machine learning and data mining. Its feature description page should give you a better idea of what it is capable of.
Ruby 1.8.6
The latest version of the great Ruby scripting language was released on March 12…
Ruby 1.8.6
Ruby is probably best known for being the language used to develop Ruby on Rails. However, the Ruby language itself shouldn’t be ignored even if you are already comfortable and productive with other dynamic languages such as Perl or Python.
Music isn’t the most important thing on my Mac. I don’t store my entire collection on it, nor do I depend on computers for playing music at home. Consequently, I’ve never really devoted much time to checking out the various helper apps available for iTunes.
Which might have been a mistake, because some of them are very helpful indeed. When, for the third time in one morning, iTunes started playing a song whose name I couldn’t remember, I decided I needed something to display basic song information for me, in an unobtrusive manner.
Did it. Finally. This is a screen shot of a live stream from my EyeTV tuner playing back on Apple TV. I’m working on the write-up for Bruce and Mac Devcenter. For the curious, the screen shot was taken as such: /usr/sbin/screencapture -tjpeg ~/sponge.jpg from a ssh session at the Apple TV command line.
Here’s my new favorite thing: Gmail Browser.
It supports Gmail’s built-in shortcuts - well, mostly - I’ve found that in some instances, keyboard input appears to stop working and I have to resort to clicking. But that’s happened in other browsers too.
Gmail might have been suffering some downtime problems in the last week or so, which makes me hesitant to return to it full-time. But I still check a couple of Gmail accounts about once a week, and Gmail Browser makes the job that little bit more pleasant.
One thing that doesn’t work in Gmail Browser is Google Documents & Spreadsheets, but not because of any fault of its own. It’s just that Docs & Spreads does not fully support WebKit yet. Google’s little explanatory note about this is entertaining:
If you are working to fix problems with a specific browser and would like to bypass this check, just add
&browserok=trueto the end of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets URL. Please note that it is a violation of intergalactic law to use this parameter under false pretences, so don’t let us catch you at it. And, it won’t work very well — really.
Just a quick update here. I’m going insane playing with and hacking the Apple TV. I’m trying to write things up in a clear and coherent way–but please let me know which topics are the ones you want to see first (either by e-mail or leave a comment here). Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.
I’ve gotten VLC up and running and am trying to learn all the command-line nuances because using the interface is just a wee bit iffy and I want to be able to automate displaying shows without having to return to a desktop machine. Fortunately, VLC works perfectly with the Apple Remote so you can control playback (and playback volume!) directly from the Living Room/Apple TV side of things. I’m hoping to get live streaming of recording and recorded eyeTV shows up and running later today. Joost is running well (with just a few hesitations) on my 802.11g network, so I’m confident that the eyeTV streaming (for standard, not high def) TV will be able to work with VLC. Having bricked one Apple TV, I don’t have the cash to purchase an Airport Extreme (and I’m not even sure my Intel Mini is “n” capable–any hints on how to find out?), so High Def streaming is going to have to wait a bit.
Finally, proof of gaming on Apple TV. Yes, I’m controlling it over VNC. So it’s kind of a lame gaming example, but there you have it.
One of my interests is electronic notebooks, and how different kinds of note-taking and note-storing software products appeal to different kinds of users. Scientists, in particular, need something to keep track of, and possibly annotate, all the papers they need to read in the course of their work.
Flip Phillips made two posts to Apple’s Scitech mailing list today, outlining his views on a variety of note-management apps that fellow scientists might put to use.
Part 1 looks at Yep, Papers (itself the subject of intense scrutiny recently), and DEVONthink; Part 2 deals with WorkLife, BibDesk, and EndNote.
If you’re looking at note apps, especially for use in academia, Flip’s brief views are well worth a read.
Update: changed from TIFF to JPEG. Thanks for the tip!
Dan over at UneasySilence has hacked the raw floating photos Quartz Composer screen saver. Check it out.
Perhaps the most famous key combination in computing is the notorious "three-finger-salute" that lets you break out of crashed programs. On the Mac, you press Command-Option-Escape; in DOS and Windows, the three keys are Ctrl-Alt-Del.
A few years ago, someone tracked down David Bradley, the IBM engineer who devised the Ctrl-Alt-Del combo, and asked him why he had picked those specific keys. He said that he’d wanted keys that were far enough apart that they couldn’t be pressed accidentally.
Of course, he didn’t realize how often that ejector seat would be used. In later years, Bradley started joking that although he had invented the combination, it was Microsoft that made it popular. (Here’s a funny video of Bill Gates’s reaction.)
I thought about that today after reading about the FlipStart, a new palmtop PC with a tiny keyboard designed to be operated with your thumbs. It was so awkward to press Ctrl-Alt-Del on prototypes that the company combined the three keys into a single button—sorta defeating the purpose.
The FlipStart merges three keys into one Ctrl-Alt-Del button. Reviewers called it an ergonomic nightmare.
Coincidentally, we just published an unusual article about user interface design over at O’Reilly Digital Media. It’s called “Singing With Your Thumbs.”
What are some of your favorite three-finger salutes?
My brother recently switched back to Mac after about 15 years, and left a frustrated voicemail asking for help getting set up. Good thing I called back via Skype: the return call lasted about 90 minutes. After getting nowhere trying to transfer his Windows documents via Ethernet, he had bought some kind of kit listed on the Apple site that does the shuttling over USB.
Three days later (!) his photos, iTunes library, and Microsoft Office documents were on the Mac, but he couldn’t figure out how to open them. I walked him through the “Import to Library” process in iTunes, and he immediately grasped that the importation process worked similarly in iPhoto. He then felt confident enough to set up Address Book and Mail on his own.
With that out of the way, I started thinking it would be great to set up videoconferencing in Skype or iChat. My brother’s new iMac has a webcam built in, but my G5 tower didn’t come with one. Any recommendations? I’d prefer a FireWire cam (maybe a used iSight?) because I have some free FireWire ports, but the USB Ecamm iMage and some Logitech models look interesting.
I’m often looking for ways to improve my home automation system. A few days ago, a post at Hackszine drew my attention to Jesse David Hollington’s article on Bluetooth Proximity Detection on Mac OS X. And more recently, Bruce Stewart wondered how else proximity detection might be used, with Jeff Harrell’s comment about the problematic range of Bluetooth, approximately 40 feet, echoing the problems I’ve had in trying to incorporate Bluetooth into my home automation system.
I quickly learned that using Bluetooth to determine if I am at home (as inferred by the presence of my cell phone) was simply not going work to my satisfaction. The problem was that if I wandered too far from my home office, yet still within my home, the Bluetooth connection would drop and my automation system would decide that I’d left. That’s not such a big deal if all this does is activate your password-protected screen saver; it’s a different story when it causes your home to completely switch operating modes.
Perhaps I should back up a little. One of the cornerstones of my home’s automation is that it behaves differently depending upon who is at home. For example, if someone is home at sunset, inside lights are turned on for them. If the house is empty at sunset, a different set of lights, and the porch light, are turned on instead.
During the middle of the night, if the system detects that someone is walking in the upstairs hallway, the lights in the kitchen are turned on very low, if that’s the direction they’re heading. However, if nobody is at home, and there’s motion upstairs, the house goes into full “intruder alert” mode!
This sort of thing isn’t hard to set up, and it starts to put the smart in “Smart Home,” but it only works correctly if the information about who is currently at home is trustworthy. Yes, it’s “garbage in, garbage out” all over again. I concluded that Bluetooth proximity detection, used for this purpose, would mostly result in “garbage in.”
But after finding out about the intriguing Home Zone application, I was willing to try it again, and this time I had a new idea. Instead of using Bluetooth to figure out if I have departed, I would use it only for determining that I have arrived.
I guess it seems obvious in retrospect, but this realization made all the difference for me. I’ve been playing with the idea for a few days now, and I’m quite pleased so far.
When I leave the house I press a button, located near the front door, that tells the automation system that I’m departing. This is similar to turning on an alarm system and is an easy habit to get into. (In fact, if I’m the last person to leave, it does turn on the alarm system. For full details on how all this works, see “Hack #70-Know Who’s Home” in Smart Home Hacks.)
Normally, when I arrive home I press the button again so the system knows I’m back. Now, I can eliminate that step by using Home Zone (or Salling Clicker , or Proximity, et al). This is accomplished by having the monitoring software execute the following AppleScript when my phone’s Bluetooth signal is detected.
tell application "XTension"if (status of "Gordon Home") is false then
turnon "Gordon Home"
end if
end tell
This script works by asking XTension, one of the home automation software programs I use, if it believes that I am currently at home. (Represented by the variable “Gordon Home.”) If XTension already knows that I am home, the Bluetooth detection event has offered no new information, so it is ignored.
However, if XTension believes that I am gone, the detection of my phone’s Bluetooth signal is significant, so the variable that tracks my presence is changed. (Which causes other things to happen, depending upon the time of day and other conditions.) When I first got this working it was an almost magical moment; shortly after walking in the front door I heard my computer announce that I had missed four telephone calls while I was gone, and the lights in the entryway turned on by themselves.
For me, the key to successfully using Bluetooth to detect presence, for home automation purposes, is to track only the first appearance of a device, and even then, only in specific contexts. Inferring meaning from the lack of a Bluetooth signal is difficult; there are many reasons why a signal could vanish. But, the arrival of a new Bluetooth device is unlikely to be spurious, and it gives you concrete, actionable information that is easily incorporated into home automation routines.
There are three partitions. One, disk2s2 (400 MB) cannot be mounted. OSBoot is 900MB and contains a mini-OS X installation. Media (35.8GB) contains the AppleTV data and looks almost identical to the file system on an iPod.
Here’s my weekly summary of Freeware, Open Source, and free web services mentioned in my personal blog last week.
Minuteur 4.7.2 Egg Timer and Stopwatch
This Mac OS X freeware may seem a bit light hearted at first…
Minuteur 4.7.2 Egg Timer and Stopwatch
But, I’ve found this kind of little single function utilities useful in the past (haven’t tried this one though). This version was released on Oct. 10, 2006.
TalkShoe (Beta): Web Voice Talk Show Service
I first learned of…
TalkShoe
…when Leo LaPorte and Amber MacArthur switched the format and name of their Inside the Net from a Podcast to a live net talk show called net@nite that is later released as a Podcast. TalkShoe (currently in Beta release like pretty much every other web based service) provides the ability to host similar net talk shows that lets multiple people call in to talk to you during your show.
SilverKeeper 1.1.4: Freeware Mac OS X Backup Software
LaCie (the manufacturer probably best known for their external hard drives) provides a freeware Mac OS X backup application called…
SilverKeeper 1.1.4
SilverKeeper is a freeware application from LaCie that automates backups to external storage devices like hard drives, and other removable storage devices that have IDE, ATA/ATAPI, SCSI, USB, or FireWire interfaces.
Details and picures can be found here at the Make Blog. Reader “Dave” wins the “guess the time of warranty violation” sweepstakes and earns eternal bragging rights via this update post. For the curious I cracked the case about 5 hours after receiving it.
More details and experimentation after the jump…
Hey all you guys in reader land, I could use a hand. I need a 2.5″ disk drive and USB-2 enclosure and I need to get them both quickly and at a reasonable price (i.e. fast, reliable shipping). I need at least 80G for the drive and the enclosure has to be very Macintosh friendly. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
(And yes, this is for the Apple TV. And yes, I do not know why I was convinced it was going to have a 3.5″ drive–which I did have all ready but now can’t use.)
Update: I ended up going to CompUSA, paying far too much, and getting a rotten enclosure. I’m having a lot of trouble with my disk duplication and I think it may be the enclosure–or Apple TV may be using some strange error correction. Dunno. Thanks to everyone for the tips!
According to FedEx, my AppleTV is on FedEx vehicle for delivery, even though the estimated delivery is tomorrow by 10:30 AM. I’m now taking bets as to how soon I’ll be voiding my warranty. Closest guess to the actual warranty violation will win bragging rights and eternal fame. (I’ll update this post with the closest guess.)
This is a work in-progress. I will continue to update it.
Apple TV User’s Guide [PDF, 1.1MB]
Apple TV Safety and Regulatory Compliance Information Manual [PDF, 573 KB]
Where do I find the Media Access Control address? On the Apple TV, select Settings -> About. You can also find the Wireless and Ethernet network IDs on the UPC label on the Apple TV case.
How do I set the name of my computer for AppleTV? In iTunes, open Preferences, click General, enter the computer name in the “Shared Name” field, and then click OK.
How do I check to see if the AppleTV is properly connected to my network? On the Apple TV, select Settings->Network and make sure that you see an IP address listed for your unit.
What ports are used by AppleTV? TCP 3689 communicates with iTunes. UDP port 5353 finds networked computers via Bonjour. TCP ports 80 and 443 communicate securely with the iTunes Store over the internet.
Can I stream using 802.11b? No. You need 802.11g/n to stream.
Can I sync using 802.11b? Yes. You can sync with 802.11b/g/n and over a wired Ethernet connection.
How do I connect AppleTV to my network? Select the network from Network -> Configure Wireless or Network -> Configure TCP/IP. If you’re not using DHCP for your TCP/IP network, you may have to manually enter your IP address, subnet mask, router and DNS addresses.
More FAQs after the jump…
Apple is failing in Open Source and Free Software. It fails to understand the movement, its principles, and how to leverage it to make money. This would not be such an issue if Apple had not based their operating system OS X on Free Software in the form of NeXT/FreeBSD. Since OS X has taken its place amongst the other flavors of UNIX it is expected to behave as a responsible citizen in this community. Apple has failed to do so and its behavior is getting worse resulting in loss of goodwill from the community. If you think loss of goodwill is negligible, as apparently Apple does, you should consider its implications, many of which are already being realized in the ecosystem that Apple lives in. Not least of these is security and that is no trivial issue. Apple’s reputation has already been damaged by the Month of Apple Bugs and in its attempt to whitewash security issues that were published last summer. Fixing these problems was what the last, huge, processor-eating “security update” was all about. Now security researchers are wary of Apple and zero-day exploits may be published before fixes are ready, potentially exposing Apple’s customers to remote exploits and loss of data.
Panic are up to something, and they need your help.
Daniel Jalkut has released crossword helper Black Ink 1.0.
BlogMate is “the missing blogging palette in TextMate, kinda”, and comes with some warnings:
If you are looking for something more full-featured, I highly recommend Red Sweater Software’s excellent MarsEdit application. MarsEdit is mature, polished, full-featured, and well-supported. Four things that BlogMate is not. Yet.
We’ve been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it’s a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.
How to stop the eject button delay that was introduced in 10.4.9 affecting your use of the Control+Eject shortcut for bringing up the Shutdown dialog.
The English county of Somerset is not noted for its high crime rate, but if you’re ever using your Mac in public there, be careful.
And finally for today, another great British widget:
Mike Bremford’s Tube scrapes information from the official site of London’s Underground system, providing not-far-off real-time information about delays and line closures.
Red Sweater Software continues its resuscitation of dormant applications (most recently, MarsEdit) with today’s announcement that they are taking over development of Advenio’s MacXword.
Called Black Ink, this crossword downloading and solving program should be an excellent addition to Red Sweater’s stable of apps.
New licenses are $24.95, but they have provided a special upgrade price for existing MacXword owners.
Like I said before, I’m really glad to see an independent developer keeping great programs going.
Now if only I could get someone to make Ancient Art of War Tiger-compatible. ;)
I just read Louis Gray’s post How Smart Are Your Playlists? over on the The Apple Blog, where he describes the Smart Playlists he uses in iTunes. I have a large music library in iTunes and have recently been playing around with Smart Playlists myself, and find they can really enhance one’s listening experience. I especially liked Louis’s idea of creating a “neglected” Smart Playlist to help him hear music that he would otherwise be missing.
In “The Neglected”, I feature songs where “Last played is not in the last 6 months”, with Live updating checked. Sometimes, this playlist can fill to the point where I have 12 hours or more to go through before it is empty. But if I make “The Neglected” my starting point, I’m sure not to be repeating songs I heard recently.
I’m going to go create a playlist of my own neglected tunes, which sounds like a much more effective way of getting to listen to all of the music I add to iTunes than my previous method (which was to try and regularly visit my “Added in the last 3 months” Smart Playlist.) I should probably also consider implementing something like Louis’s “Bad ROI” playlist, which tracks tunes with a low number of play counts for possible weeding out.
What are your favorite Smart Playlists?
One of the brilliant things about a TiVo is that it watches all that TV for me that I intended to watch but never got around to sitting down to view. (Some people call this the “TiNo” phenomenon.) It’s very comforting to know that my PVR took the time to record those shows because it demonstrates what excellent intentions I had as a person. I have a season pass to Friday Night Lights that I consistently fail to watch–but my TiVo does. Somehow this makes me feel like a better, more cultured person.
And when my TiVo runs out of space, it kindly deletes all those back episodes for me and I have the satisfaction that the shows aren’t cluttering up my unit’s hard drive forever.
iTunes is another matter entirely. I’ve downloaded all sorts of crap shows–from that Danny Bonaduce one to “My Bare Lady” (thought it would be a giggle) to “Learn with Sesame”–thinking that I or my husband or my kids would eventually get around to watching them. And we don’t. We live in a BSG-Heroes-Spongebob-Mythbusters world, and there never really seems to be any time to catch up with the “maybe I’ll try out an episode” shows that iTunes offers for free every Tuesday.
So on Sunday, I was backing up my computer and I really took note of all those gigabytes of iTunes unwatched freebies, as well as several shows that I downloaded and paid for because I’d missed them on TV and wanted to catch up on, but didn’t really feel like watching again.
I have no problem tossing magazines. If I pick up a magazine to read at lunch or on an Airplane or while waiting at a Doctor’s office, I don’t mind throwing away the $2.00 or $3.50 I’ve invested after finishing reading it. Sometimes I let it age on the coffee table or in the bathroom for a few weeks, but it still gets tossed or occasionally bundled up and donated to the local pediatrician’s office.
So why did I feel like a murderer on Sunday when I trashed that episode of Bones where Brennan gets blown up after dancing in Bones’ apartment? And all those free, unwatched garbage shows that I deleted? (And yes, I’m looking at you, Real Housewives of Orange County.) Why did I feel I was doing something wrong and irrevocable.
Somehow it seems to be an iTunes thing. When I buy music at the Zune store, I know that my license extends to 3 or 4 more downloads of the same item. I don’t need to keep copies on my computer unless I want to. But Apple’s somewhat draconian “download it once and then it’s all your responsibility” approach to digital purchases makes me want to hang onto certain items with more vigor than they’re really worth.
Sure, Apple will replace your entire library in the event of a catastrophic loss. Once. And should such a day happen, my Housewives of Orange County, and my Danny Bonaduce, and my “My Bare Ladies” will be there, ready to come back to life in the worst zombie fashion, ready for me to stake them through the heart once again. But are these items and even more worthy items like “Bones” worth keeping around on recordable DVDs or hard drive storage? Probably not.
My problem is that I have to start thinking about these digital assets like like my TiVo. My TiVo knows when to trash those old episodes of Friday Night Lights. It doesn’t hang onto them saying, “I’ll get around to watching them eventually because the show is really, really well made.” I’ve got to learn that lesson. Certain digital assets–family photos, movies, recordings over the baby monitor of my kids singing their ABCs in bed–are forever. The pilot of that awful Vampire series “Blade” is not.
Michael Amorose has assembled a list of Fun Unix commands. Don’t miss his Refurb-on-tron either.
MacASCIIinvaders is nice, but if I’m honest, Desktop Tower Defense is nicer and much more fun.
Forgedit is a new, free programmer’s editor for OS X. Nice tabbed interface, and customizable keyboard shortcuts for every menu command too. It’s small and lightweight and might come in handy for some of you. Let me know if you find it useful.
Andrew Grygus writes passionately about the failings he sees in Windows Vista, but concludes with this curious statement:
I find it hard to recommend Apple - applications are limited and it’s a closed proprietary environment run by a person of proven greed. It seems like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
My Apple TV is currently sitting in Shenzhen, China, where the package was apparently received after the FedEx cutoff. Weighing in at 7.1 kgs, the package is “In Transit”.
Click image to open at full resolution.
Our friends at Make just noticed this write-up of how to use a nifty little OS X app that detects Bluetooth proximity (not surprisingly, called Proximity) to create custom Applescipt-based actions based on when a user with a Bluetooth-enabled device comes in or out of range of a Mac’s bluetooth sensor.
Jesse David Hollington’s post describes how he uses Proximity to secure his Powerbook when he’s away from the machine, as well as how to keep his OS X Address Book connected and to iSync his phone whenever it comes back within proximity of his Mac.
Activating the screen saver and performing an iSync are both tasks that are trivial to perform via Applescript. Reconnecting the Address Book and enabling and disabling the screen saver password protection is considerably more complicated, however, as I quickly discovered.
I should point out that most of what I am documenting here has been gleaned from various corners of the web, and therefore most of the ideas are not specifically my own. However, I decided to try and document some of this in one place in order to hopefully save others the several hours of searching that it took me to put it all together.
If you would like to implement the screen-saver security feature based on Bluetooth proximity, go check out Jesse’s post, he presents all of the code and details needed to pull that off.
This reminds me of some telecom hacks I’ve seen recently using Asterisk and Bluetooth proximity detection. With the latest version of Asterisk, you can configure it so that your office phone detects the presence of your cell phone’s Bluetooth signal, so you can achieve things like having your office number automatically forward its calls to your cell phone when you leave the office, or turn off the forwarding when it detects you are back.
Neat stuff. What kind of Bluetooth proximity hacks would you like to see?
Tracking numbers and order status information have been e-mailed to customers. So far, no units have been sighted at any Apple Stores. I’ve called around to the local retailers, who haven’t received any. They’re expecting theirs “by the end of the week”.
The list of WWDC sessions is up, and here are some of the ones that caught my eye:
Discovering Wiki and Group Services in Leopard Server
Leopard Server delivers powerful collaboration and group communication tools to help you define, create, and administer groups in your organization–whether you are a new business just launching, or a workgroup in a large enterprise. The new Wiki in Leopard Server lets you gather, tag, and coordinate resources, people, and assets.
Before Christmas, my mind was very nearly made up. Shortly after the Macworld Expo, I would buy myself a new Mac, my first Intel machine.
I haven’t bought it, though. And the longer I wait, the more I think I’ve made the right decision. Because some really meaty Mac news is long overdue from Apple, and I won’t want to be in the position of buying the an “old” machine just before a newer one is announced. And I’m certain that I’m not the only one feeling this way.
My inclination is towards a MacBook Pro, as recommended by many friends. But I have a feeling that an update for this machine is coming soon, perhaps something radical like a new case design.
So I’m holding on for a bit longer before I buy. And besides, this old G4 PowerBook has a lot of life in it yet…
Nine Inch Nails has made available the multitrack session for the song Survivalism as a GarageBand file download (March 13 Current Entry). The track comes in a 104MB Zip archive file.
I first unpacked it on my first generation Mac mini. Sure, this was not a great idea. But, I wondered what would happen. The answer? Not much. I got the too many tracks message after a few seconds into the song. So, next stop, my 2GHz MacBook. Ah, much better.
The nin.com website says that you will be able to upload your mixes back up to the site soon. So, rev up GarageBand, and remix Survivalism.
