2006 February

According to the OS X hacker Maxxuss, the last version of OS X (10.4.4) has been hacked and can be installed on any x86 computer. Apple would not be happy with this, because of the fact that it used some advanced security features to make sure that the new OS X would only run with [...]

iTunes is probably one of the best music managers available but it could stand for some improvement. One such advancement would the be the inclusion of half-stars. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wrestled with rating a song that just isn’t quite a four star but really isn’t as bad as [...]

If you’re looking to save a little bit, or in this case a lot, then you may want to head over to Amazon. It’s giving you a $150 mail-in rebate on the MacBook Pro if you purchase it before February 28th. With the new units shipping sometime this week, you can expect to have [...]

The MacBook Pros are shipping this week.  What a sweet Valentines present indeed.  To make the already amazing little laptop wonder sweeter, Apple is boosting the CPU speed for free!  Instead of the originally announced 1.83 GHz $2,499 model, high-end buyers will instead enjoy a 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo in their hot new book of [...]

There’s nothing more that I love than history.  I’m not a particular genre person, just history in general.  I love looking at pictures of San Jose before it was the heart of Silicon Valley and seeing the miles and miles of plum orchards where the house that I grew up in stands.  I also dig [...]

Now SvenOnTech is hearing that some think Intel iBooks will be sprung on us at Apple’s 30th anniversary this April 1st. That, along with the iPod video and some media center release. Really, that much? You know, it’s possible - I mean, that would tie into the 3 in 30, right? But is this media [...]

What Firefox did for web browsers Songbird hopes to do for music media managers.  Taking the control out of the hands of a large corporate entity and putting it into the hands of the people, Songbird brings all the goodies of Firefox into this blackened iTunes-looking interface with such features as cross-platform extensions.  Unlike iTunes, Songbird’s [...]

Today I wrote a little script that can help out when you’re on multiple networks. I work on about three different networks, and every time I log in I have to deal with another DHCP server and another scope of IP addresses. Sometimes I find it very handy to know what the IP of the [...]

Apple is facing a suit again, and this time it’s about the company’s lack of warning about the damaging effect loading music can have on your ears. This is what the complaint actually says:
Millions of consumers have had their hearing put at risk by Apple’s conduct…

Backups - few things about working with computers come close to being as important as backups. If you are lucky, you learn your lesson (painful as it may be) about Backups the first time you watch hours / days / weeks / months or even year worth of work, fun, family memories, etc disappear into the ether when your hard drive fails.

Here’s a product that I’ve been looking for ever since FireFox started spending more time as my browser of choice.

As we could expect, the iMac 17″ PowerPC has been removed from the Apple store. I personally think that this move went very fast; I expected that this would happen sometime next month - I mean, are they out of stock already?
It seems that the main source for exhausting this iMac 17″ stock was [...]

Showtime and Apple have announced today that fans of Sleeper Cell and Weeds now can start purchasing episodes of them at $1.99 each. Don’t worry Kirstie Alley fans, Fat Actress is here all the way back to when Kirstie was, well, fat.

Connected Home posses an interesting question: why isn’t there an iLife for Windows?  Paul Thurrott rightfully points out how excellent of a suite iLife ’06 is with all it’s wonderful and robust features.  But what Thurrott doesn’t understand is why doesn’t Microsoft have anything that comes close to iLife.  The reason is simple, Microsoft [...]

So, after picking up one of the new Core Duo iMacs, it became apparent that the amount of RAM that ships with the system is virtually unacceptable for the day to day usage of someone who works heavily with multimedia. Having attempted RAM installation on my last iMac, I knew this one would be a [...]

Apple is dropping prices on the PowerMac G5 and the PowerBooks G4.
So here is a renewed pricelist:

Remember when Apple told us not to believe the MHz myth? It went even as far to make a commercial with a Pentium on a snail. Remember that? So here we are now hearing from Steve that the new iMacs really are faster than the PowerPC version. Huh? What about the myth, Steve?

Looks like the new iMac’s with its Intel CPUs pop out just fine and readily accept a new and faster CPU. A Japanese magazine, MacFan, went out and tore its new 1.83GHz iMac apart and stuffed in an Intel Core Duo 2GHz T2500 CPU. A kind reader of xlr8yourmac.com translates the details in [...]

The great thing about OS X is it runs on UNIX. Because of that, lots of UNIX programs can be found and tweaked for the most beautiful adaption of UNIX. I stumbled over a list of OS X must have applications which consists of a lot of open source and cousins [...]

I’ve tried pen tablets twice before, both times left me wondering why anyone other then the most hardcore artists use it, but Wacom’s new Graphire4 got it right this time. The Graphire is the low priced product line for Wacom, but I think it’s perfect for most computer users out there. I say computer instead of Mac because it works with both the PC and Mac. Let’s look at some of the reasons I’ve switched over to the Graphire4 permanently.