Apple

I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.

NetFlix Freak (nee Fanatic)

by

netflixfreak101.png

There used to be a handy little application for managing your NetFlix queue called Netflix Fanatic. Unfortunately, it stopped being available a while ago, apparently after the author’s employer claimed that the app had been developed on company time and equipment.

However, now comes NetFlix Freak — all the goodness of NetFlix Fanatic, and then some.

  • Drag and drop to rearrange movies in your queue
  • Select two movies in your queue and swap their positions
  • Shuffle your rental queue
  • Fast searching of the Netflix DVD catalog
  • Add multiple movies to your queue in one action
  • Add new movies at the beginning of your queue, the end, or shuffle your queue automatically after new movies are added
  • Keep track of who rented which movie in your household
  • Import your entire rental history (not just the last 90 days)

…and much more.

My G5 is an insomniac

by

I’m having some odd issues with my G5 that I’m having trouble pinning down. I’ve just tossed a plea for help out in an Apple Discussions thread, but I wanted to put it up here also in case anyone else out there has seen similar behavior.

I’ve been having an odd issue (actually, two, but they may be related) with my G5 (Dual 2.0Ghz) that I haven’t seen anyone else mention, so I thought I’d toss it out here. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble narrowing down exactly what’s going on, so this may be a tad vague.

Issue 1: My G5 appears to be an insomniac. If I leave the computer alone, it never seems to go to sleep. The screensaver will kick in, but after a while at some (apparently) random time, the screensaver kicks off as if I’d just bumped the mouse. Because of this, the machine will only go into Sleep mode if I tell it to via the Apple menu.

Issue 2 (this is the one I’m having more problems diagnosing): At some point, I lose the ability to choose some of the commands in the Apple menu: ‘About This Mac’, ‘Force Quit…’, ‘Restart…’, ‘Shut Down…’, and ‘Log Out [username]…’ are all non-responsive. All other commands in the Apple Menu work fine. Most of the time this isn’t a major issue, but when a time comes when I do need to restart the computer (for instance, after installing a Software Update), the only way I can do it is to execute a ‘sudo shutdown -r now’ through the Terminal.

I’ve tried choosing ‘Log Out…’ occasionally after a restart to pin down when the menu commands stop responding, but am having difficulties determining just what the cause is. So far, it hasn’t seemed to be related to any particular application or sequence of events.

I have noticed that it appears to happen sometime after letting the computer go through its bout of insomnia for a while. In other words, if after restarting the machine I manually tell it to Sleep, then when I wake the computer up again, I can still access all Apple Menu commands without a problem. However, if I leave the computer alone and it fails to sleep automatically as it should, at some point after that I lose the Apple Menu functionality.

Unfortunately, at this point, I can’t get any more specific than that.

Has anyone else out there seen behavior like this, or am I alone with this particular glitch?

The fitty-cen' project

by

1 (one) 40 GB Apple iPod: Approximately \$500.

\$500 divided by 50¢ apiece: 1000 people.

Attempting to get 1000 people to PayPal me 50¢ apiece:

Priceless.

Of course, the real question is whether gangsta rappers are going to chip in…

Update: Just to clarify, this isn’t my project — at the moment, I’m quite happy with my 10Gb iPod — rather, this is Phil’s.

iPod Rocks!

by

I promise not to pierce myself.

Looks like Apple’s gearing up for the holiday season with a new teen-focused website at ipodrocks.

It’s rather cleverly done, if a little uneven. Lots of short little flash-style animations (apparently it’s Flash wrapped inside Quicktime — odd), some short demos of the iPod and how it works, and various “hints and tips” on how to convince your parents to get you an iPod. Some of the iCards that can be sent through the site gave me a laugh — the one I’ve got pictured here was my favorite of the bunch. There are also “help around the home” coupons, a points-for-grades suggestion, and even a small screensaver featuring the dancing silhouettes from the recent iPod ads listed as “subliminal advertising”.

I’ve already noticed iPod ads on quite a few of the buses around the Seattle area. Looks like we’re going to be seeing a lot of those bright iPod ads over the coming months.

(via MacRumors)

iTMS = IotY

by

Apple’s iTunes Music Store has been named “Invention of the Year” by Time Magazine!

Other inventions this year may have more altruistic intentions (like Dean Kamen’s water purifier) or be more visible on street corners (like those ubiquitous camera cell phones). But for finally finding a middle ground between the foot-dragging record labels and the free-for-all digital pirates and for creating a bandwagon onto which its competitors immediately jumped, Apple’s iTunes Music Store is Time’s Coolest Invention of 2003.

'Big Mac' details

by

Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, the head of Virginia Tech‘s recent construction of a 1,100-node Power Mac G5-based supercomputer (currently tentatively ranked as the 3rd fastest supercomputer in the word) gave a presentation at the O’Reilly Mac OS X conference this week. Lots of interesting little technical tidbits in the article, detailing just how they were able to get the project up and running.

If you’ve ever sat with a TiBook in your lap, you understand that there is a further significant issue. As hot as a G4 runs, a G5 runs hotter. With a traditional air-conditioning setup, the calculations showed that instead of emptying out the air three times an hour as would be typical, they would need to empty the air three times per minute. Computers tend to each cool front to back. So the plan was to arrange the computers in rows back to back and pull the hot air out of the hot aisle. This would have required wind velocity under the floor of more than 60 miles per hour and still would have resulted in some hot spots. They decided instead to use a refrigerator-like system. Chillers cool water to 40 degrees to 50 degrees, which is then used to chill refrigerant, which is piped into a matrix of copper pipes. Effectively, you have a distributed refrigerator.

Automatic defrag in Panther

by

I have no idea whether or not this is a standard feature in other Unix systems, but it appears that there’s a very handy little “under-the-radar” feature in Mac OS X 10.3/Panther — automatic file defragmentation.

Everytime an application opens a file for reading, HFS+ checks if the file is fragmented and is less than 20MB in size. If so, it copies the file’s contents to a continuous region on the disk and frees up the previously allocated blocks.

What a wonderfully convenient feature. Even nicer, when someone asked if there were any official confirmation from Apple about the feature, someone else posted the source code from the Darwin (command-line only open source) version of the core system.

(via MacSlash)

Panther goodies

by

Lots of interesting tips and tricks for Panther are showing up on the web now that it’s been out a few days. Some of the niftier ones I’ve run across so far:

  • The Exposé blob (an on-screen trigger for the Exposé effect).
  • SIPS (Scriptable Image Processing System — Panther-specific command line image processing similar to ImageMagick or NetPBM).
  • System-wide inline text autocompletion.
  • When you hit command-tab to bring up the application list, you can choose which application to switch to with the mouse as well as with the keyboard.
  • Exposè is usable during a drag (start to drag a file from a visible window, invoke Exposè to find the target window, then drop the file into the target window).
  • Easily find special characters (accents, math functions, currency symbols, etc.) by choosing Edit > Special Characters… in any application.
  • Choosing your desktop picture now ties directly into your iPhoto library.
  • Lots of high-powered upgrades to the text services engine, giving us professional level typography options by default.