OMG! Someone who actually understands!
Apple doesn’t waste money creating amazing products that will never see the light of day, they create amazing products they intend to manufacture and be used.

Now I just wish they’d also support sync’ing with iCal. Check their help file for a how-to.

You may have recently read news about how the Chinese reneged on lifting their censorship of the internet in China for the Olympics. The degree to which the Chinese are censored is quite amazing, vastly beyond what I had imagined. Not only are references to Tibet censored, but words which have any relation at all to politics and sex are censored too. Check out the entire list to see just how crazy it is.

From the SMH:

Some youngsters are spending hours at night on email with their friends. One fad is “the 30 minute rule,” in which a child who doesn’t respond to email within half an hour gets targeted and picked on by other schoolmates.

In Japan, people don’t use computers like we do, they do all their chatting on their mobiles via complex email messages. So where the computer has replaced the TV as the family addiction in other countries, it’s the mobile phone in Japan.

Just when you thought they couldn’t get any thinner…

You can also get a waterproof phone. Apparently this was a significant customer request.

Click on the images for the full article.

Computery types who use the terminal a lot to do their work on Mac OS X, Linux or *BSD will appreciate these handy bash shell tips from Debian Administration. I wish I’d know there was an easy way to quickly re-run commands, search through the shell history or repeat the second last directory change years ago. Would have saved me a lot of time recently.

Now that Youtube has the option for showing higher quality videos, enterprising users have discovered that you can, with one click, view those videos in mp4 format using Quicktime.  Two variations exist, one is a bookmark that pops up an extra link to a downloadable mp4 version .  The other loads the mp4 in Quicktime instead of the regular flash version.

I remember as a child, an old tube-powered radio with four black knobs on the front that sat downstairs in a corner.  I used to play around with it, but the reception was pretty poor.  I knew that vacuum tubes were pretty old technology and not present in my father’s expensive Luxman amplifier.  Amazing now to think that old tubes are prized by audiophiles for the beautiful way in which they amplify sound.

I’m listening now to the Jeff Buckley Grace EP collection through around $1000 of “head-fi” - that is, headphone hi-fi gear.  It would be $2000 but for the headphones being second-hand and the amp, a high quality dual mono unit being made in, (gasp!) China.  Is nothing sacred, an audiophile might wonder?  What head-fi, and probably more specifically, the head-fi.org forums have opened people up to is the hi-fi experience, without the serious damage to one’s wallet that must be done to reproduce the feeling of live music in one’s living room.  Head-fi’ers, like myself, often listen to music while working in front of their computers or in bed.  They live in apartments where the neighbours won’t tolerate loud noises, own iPods and the idea of, even more amazing, their hi-fi is often capable of being fully portable without a sacrifice in sound quality.  

From the head-fi.org forums, the set-up of HiFlight77: An “iMod” iPod, internal capacitors bypassed, connected to two amplifiers via a special dock containing high-quality audio-grade capacitors. The tiny amp on the left is a “Pico” and the silver amplifier is a “Lisa III”. The cabling is all purpose made high quality copper/silver.

What’s more, the forums a thriving community, supported a number of manufacturers, raging from large headphone manufacturers down to one-man shops that do everything from build headphone amplifiers to re-cable headphones for better sound.  Their customers buy and sell gear between each other almost constantly, with individual items often having a history of people on the forums through who’s hands they have passed.  This experimentation allows members to try out a lot of gear without a lot of expense until they find their ideal set-up, as well as allowing them to offer advice to others from experience.

Like cars and computers, there’s much tweaking and experimenting possible. Owners of tube amps do what is known as “tube rolling” - that is, swapping sets of tubes from different manufacturers to experiment with the sound. Sufficient quality equipment will show up the difference not just between tubes, but even interconnect cables and, much to the surprise of many, even the power cables used.

“But wait!” I hear you ask, “What about the sound?” Oh, it’s fantastic! I’ve gone and re-ripped my CD collection in a lossless format (no mp3’s for me any more!) and have been rediscovering just how good some music really is. Really, the question should be “What about the music?” as what it comes down to is the enjoyment of listening. Quite admittedly, many people feel satisfied with just their iPod and basic earphones or their car stereo and hi-fi listening can be an acquired taste. I read at least one tale of a head-fi addict who brought his friends over to listen to his latest rig and they were not impressed at all, declaring their basic iPod headphones as sounding better. Each to their own I suppose. Most music these days is mastered these days with equalisation settings most suited for CDs, radio or iPods which isn’t necessarily suitable for hi-fidelity playback. One of the downsides of using hi-fi to play music is you start not just pondering the bad aspects of bits of your gear, but start to dislike bad recordings of even music you previously loved.

So do I regret spending on head-fi gear? Not at all. My father introduced me to good hi-fi and I’ve wanted a great set-up ever since. Now, instead of having to wait for many years of saving, I can have great sound for a fraction of the cost, and even take it with me when I travel. For everyone else, even if they they are just interested in spending a few dollars on something better than their iPod headphones, that’s ok too. Someone will be around who’s listened.

For the origins of this of this, see here.

derdew writes…
but always be on the safe side by making sure your firewall is on. an outbound firewall like little snitch is also a good idea, to check for any suspicious connections.

Pray tell me how a firewall, which blocks incoming connections, can help prevent browser exploits? More useful is that Leopard tracks where programs originated - if it be the internet, it asks your permission before they are run - so that if bastard hacks Whirlpool to make it send sinep-enlarger.app to everyone who views the forums, you’ll only end up with yourself to blame if your computer gets owned. (Mac OS X 10.4/Tiger, incidentally, did the tracking, but not the asking.)

Having the firewall on, even if your Mac was connected directly via a modem (non-routing/non-NAT) to the internet, exposing all the ports to the outside world, is useless, unless your passwords are easy and someone is bored. There are no known externally exploitable vulnerabilities in Mac OS X. What I’m saying is, you’re as good as telling people that putting a cover over the toilet seat when they take a piss in the pub will help prevent them getting AIDS.

The biggest risk at present is from malicious web pages. A recent trojan appeared on a site directed at all of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, depending on what connected. On a Mac, however, this required that the user agree to install the malicious software. The recent quicktime update addressed a vulnerability that could be exploited by a malicious web site using Flash. Kind of Adobe to tell people. There’s a lesson in that about third-party software there. The first thing you want to ensure is that your software is always up-to-date, not just Apple’s software, but anything else such as Firefox, if you use it, which sometimes is found to have security issues.

The second thing, probably the most clever, if you wanted to cover yourself is, get one of those system maintenance programs (Xupport, Mac Pilot or whatever) and switch on the debug menu in Safari. Then, tell Safari through that menu to fake being, say, Internet Explorer. Then if you do hit a (almost certainly a porn) site with a browser exploit, it will think you’re IE and send you something which is harmless to Safari (though might not have been to a Windows machine). I came up with this idea just now. Lateral thinking for the win.

What will help the most overall is, education, learning, and more putting true bits of fact into the mass of grey behind your eyes. Everyone’s heard the story of the mates mum or dad who, no matter how much anti-virus and anti-everything is installed freshly on Windblows, they still click on shit that says “Click me because you’re computer is vulnerable” whereupon something is installed making it vulnerable to sending me more v1agr@ emails than I don’t already not need. This is what I’m talking about. Don’t be like that, it only makes pain for you and good business for anti-virus companies.

To the OP: Enjoy your Mac. You can take the condom off your network cable now.

About 10 years ago, someone linked me to Poetic Tech, the makers of what must be close to the ultimate computer workstations. Details such as auto-rotation to account for ambient light along with a filtered air system, not, of course, forgetting the modularised system including a air-cusioned chair are beyond anything I’ve seen before or since. Though their site has changed little since I first saw it 10 years ago (the bar-coded cabling system wasn’t there when I last looked a while ago) and the monitors in the pictures are the same CRTs that were there before, the stations still look incredible.