Archive for July, 2007
Apple TV Gets Access to Big USB Hard Drives
Finally the news a lot of potential Apple TV owners have been waiting for, Gizmodo are reporting today that there is now a hack that allows you to connect external USB hard drives to the Apple TV. This is potentially the killer feature that would have seen the Apple TV really take off had it been included in the original design, especially here in the UK where we don’t have access to iTunes Movies. Only time will tell whether Apple will recognise this omissions and include native support for USB drives in future firmware releases, but at least for now if you want to and are prepared to roll up your sleeves and do a bit of hardware hacking the scripts are out there to make it possible.
Apple Inconsistencies Part One – The Delete Key
Ok, so Apple is all about consistent experience, or so we’re led to believe. So why is it then that pressing the Delete key whilst highlighting a file in iTunes prompts you to delete the track from your music library, but if I want to delete a highlighted file in Finder I have to press Command-Del ?
There is probably an answer to this question and I am sure there is a Mac-head out there who is itching to set me straight ?
BritishMac Podcast
I’m a big fan of podcasts and have a number of regular downloads on iTunes that I sync to my Nano to listen to in the car on the way to and from work. Unfortunately for us Brits most of the Mac oriented podcasts are very American-centric… Apart from that is the BritishMac Podcast !
BritishMac is a UK Mac Podcast put together by a fellow resident of Shropshire called Will Green. He has been going for over 50 episodes now and has a fairly substantial following by all accounts. Will has a pretty distinctive style to podcasting which is immediately endearing. He is a big fan of Tony Hancox and this shows through in his podcast which never takes itself seriously and has a nice quirky humour to the whole affair. Each episode is broken into a number of sections including such BritishMac News, Ye Old Mac and Mouse, The British Mac Labour Exchange, FrankenWidget, British Icon and more.
If you are looking for a podcast with a touch of Britishness to it, look no further, head over to iTunes and subscribe to Will’s take on Uk Mac…
How to buy a New MacBook for under £500 !
What would you say to a brand new Macbook for £479 ? Interested ? Thought you might be… Read the rest of this article to find out how !
PCWorld and Currys are both running a deal at present with Orange Broadband ( UK ). The arrangement is that when you sign up for a 2 year Orange Broadband contract at £14.99 a month you get either a free laptop ( from a limited range of selected models ), or you can take £300 off your choice of laptop, your choice of course being a shiny new MacBook.
Only 2 slight catches to this deal that I can see, first of all Currys and PC World generally don’t have stock of Apple MacBooks and secondly you have to commit to two years contract with one of the UK’s less popular ISP’s.
ZEITGEIST The Movie
Not strictly Mac related this one, but last night I stumbled on a link to a documentary called Zeitgeist The Movie. This is a two hour long expose of the reality of the current War on Terroism amongst other things and is absolutely guaranteed to change your outlook on lots of things. It is certainly thought provoking and if the content is to believed, and there is some pretty compelling evidence provided, it could seriously change your religious and politcal beliefs. Watch it and see what you think…
Daily Review : Eavesdrop Network Sniffer for OSX
Eavesdrop is a neat little network monitoring/packet capture utility written by Eric Shore Baur. As far as these sorts of apps go it is fairly basic being limited to only capturing TCP packets, but where it scores is in extreme ease of use.
If you are interested to see what is going on in the background on your network then this application can make for a fun little diversion and may possibly enlighten you in the process. When you launch the app the first thing you will see is a blank window with a number of buttons along the top. Clicking on the Start Capture button will in most cases prompt you for an admin username and password ( unless of course you are already logged in as an admin in which case it will prompt for your password ). After that you will probably not see anything happen immediately. If you now go to your browser and open a web page you will see a burst of activity and the window will begin to display information about the conversation going on between your PC and the Internet. Each row of data displayed shows a communication between a source and a destination.
How To Earn A Six Figure Sum Blogging In 2 Easy Steps
Posted by Scott in Blogs, Miscellaneous on July 9, 2007
InternetDuctTape.com has a clever take on how to make a six figure sum while blogging. Check it out….
Skitch Invites Available
Skitch is the latest cool app from Plasq.com, the company who bought you Comic Life. Skitch is a brilliant replacement for Grab that can capture images from your desktop or iSight webcam. You can then annotate, resize, crop, overlay labels, upload to Flickr, FTP sites, .Mac, email or transfer by Bluetooth and much more.
At present the application is in Beta and available for download by invitation only. I have a limited number of invites if you are interested let me know here.
[tags]skitch,plasq.com,invites, beta[/tags]
More Pownce Invites Available
I have more Pownce invites today if anyone wants one ? Drop a comment here and I will send you one by return.
[tags]pownce, invites[/tags]
Mozy – Offsite Backups now for OS X
Mozy is an Online Backup service that allows you to backup copies of your important documents and files to a secure off site location. Previously available for Windows clients there is now a beta version for OS X ( Both Intel and Power PC ). There is a free service which provides up to 2Gb of storage and an unlimited option for $4.95 per month. File transfers are encrypted for security and are block level, which means that if a background backup is going on at the time that you shut down your Mac the current transfer will not be lost and will resume from where it got to the next time your machine is on.
If you value your documents at all you should be doing multiple backups including some form off off-site backup ( imagine if your house was burgled and ALL your equipment was stolen, how would you recover your data ). I personally recommend at least one external USB/Firwire drive copy ( I have 3 ) in addition to off site copy to a site such as Mozy. External drives are now amazingly cheap, 250Gb drives are readily available at less than �50 from sites such as eBuyer. While you are ordering one, get TWO…
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